The Blues & Billie Armstrong 44
A BIGGER LIFE
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
There were new plans in her green eyes, maps and highways and calendars, and she seemed to be nodding in rhythm to an inner voice. The crowd oohed and aahed, and I took a hit from the joint and drank root beer Southern Comfort from the waxy cup. Not bad.
Sonny drove us home in the Fairlane, and at first I wondered why because the streets were choked with cars and pedestrians leaving the park and the carnival.
We could’ve walked home more quickly. But he pulled up in front of our house, parked at the curb, got out of the car and handed Billie the keys in exchange for her promise not to drive anywhere that night.
“I promise, I promise,” she said and nearly knocked him over with a big long hug and even a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks… for everything.”
Sonny started to walk away, stopped, turned and pointed at me. “Hey, don’t be in such a hurry to grow up, kid. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Same with being a kid,” I said.
First, we raided the fridge, pulled out some leftover chocolate cake.
That was Darlene’s other specialty. Anything with hamburger—no, everything with hamburger. Or cake. Layer cake made from a box with frosting out of a can. My real mother made it from scratch, beat the frosting in a big metal bowl and let me lick the spoon. Darlene’s cakes always came out dry, but we had the marijuana munchies and didn’t care. We ate big hunks of cake at the kitchen table with our bare hands and laughed about how bad it was.
Still stoned and tipsy and tired, with over-full stomachs, we headed off to our separate bedrooms. I’d just walked in when Billie slid open the window and poked her head into my room. It was what she did late at night when I wanted to sleep and she wanted to talk. I sat cross-legged on the floor and she dragged the vanity stool over by the window sill. She’d let her red hair loose after work and now it jumbled around her face. On the radio, low in the background, the KSAN DJ promised to play the new Beatles’ Let It Be album in its entirety and segued into the first track.
“She tries though, you know, man?” Billie said. “She’s trying so hard with your dad. I mean, even her cake is desperate to please, right? But I see now it’s just cuz she’s worried things won’t work out… after all, they never have, with her other guys that is, and I guess I only made it harder all these years, me being me, you know. And maybe she just wants to feel okay where she is for once, like the bottom isn’t about to fall out at any moment. I don’t even think it matters to her if she’s not super happy, she’s just sick and tired of starting over.”
I nodded, not really knowing what to say. I admit I’d never thought too hard about how the world looked through Darlene’s eyes. I’d resented her as an intruder and usurper. I’d dismissed her as a hapless weakling and even pitied her the way she was caught between the rock of my father and the hard place of Billie Armstrong. But I’d never really empathized with her, and I’d never before heard this kind of understanding coming from Billie either.
“Hey, I almost forgot…” she held up a wait-a-second finger, stepped out of the frame of the window for a moment and returned with her leather-fringe purse. “Look what I brought home!” She reached in and pulled out the Southern Comfort bottle, still about a quarter full. She unscrewed the cap, took a sip and passed it through the window with a smile and a wink. That mess of red hair lit by lamplight, the pink and white waitress uniform, the rose-tinted sunglasses, John and Paul singing Two of Us on the radio.
She stood up, hands outstretched in front of her, palms up, trying to grab the right words out of the air. “My mom doesn’t want me to make the same mistakes she did, which I get, but she has this 1950s postcard in her head and it’s two kids and a station wagon, PTA meetings, cocktails and fondue, the neighbors for dinner and a man who can hold a job, and I mean like the same mind-numbing soul-killing job for forty fucking years. I don’t give two shits about any of that, man. My life ain’t gonna be her do-over.”
She was drunk-stoned rambling, but there was something more—a swelling energy, a rallying to self, a reclamation of power. She paced back and forth behind the stool, still in my view through the window frame, her voice rising, arms churning the air in swoops and circles, turns and tumbles.
“I don’t want normal. I want more. If I wanted normal I’d stay here—this town will normal you to death. I want weird. I want daring. I want art and music and books and dreams and joy and struggle and winning and losing. And love. And that’s the whole problem, right? I want more and some people are afraid of that. Because what would that say about their little cardboard cutout lives? My mother, your grandmother, or that puffed up soldier boy. I know you think he’s some big role model like everyone else does—”
“I never said that.”
“—well I’m telling you he’s not and people in this town have no idea, someone needs to take him down a peg or two and maybe I’ll do that myself before I leave—you know, eventually, whenever. And when I do leave the parents will probably say I’m throwing my life away. But I don’t care. I won’t let anybody shrink me.”
Her hands came to rest at her side and she sat back down on the stool, took a breath of satisfaction and a slug of Southern Comfort.
“You’re bigger than all of them,” I said.
She broke into a teasing frown. “Are you saying I’m fat?” She shook her finger at me. “You better take that back.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, thanks.” she said. “You’re one of the good guys, Archer. You’re one of the few I’ll miss.”
“I’ll miss you too. Turns out most of my other friends are assholes.”
She laughed, handed me the bottle, and I took another drink. John Lennon sang Across the Universe on the radio.
“I suppose you were right when you said that’s what my mother wanted too,” I said. “A bigger life, something more than normal.”
“But for her it was already too late,” Billie said.
The Blues & Billie Armstrong is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
© All Rights Reserved