The Blues & Billie Armstrong 53
KNUCKLES
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
“Contract, my ass. Get the fucking story or you’re done at this paper, Pulitzer or not. Understand?” And he blustered out of the room like he’d just dropped the mic.
The Pulitzer Prize for Commentary: “Archer King, San Francisco Sentinel, for his controversial and thought-provoking, yet colorful and down-to-earth columns on the tension between society’s professed values and the reality of human frailty.”
Translation: I get paid to call fuckup and bullshit on the highest and mightiest of individuals and institutions. Hey, it’s a living.
A tangential observation: all secrets come wrapped in shame.
I once wrote that the Golden Gate Bridge was a beautiful and sad monument to the marketing power of America’s perverse work-ethic nostalgia.
I was referring to the way the history of the thing is always sepia-tinted with glorification of the many Depression-desperate men who risked—and eleven who lost—their lives so that bucolic Marin County could be colonized by Market Street money changers, the Coastal Miwok Indians could be further displaced, and suicide dramatists would have a place to make a scene. This was not a popular assessment, and letters to the editor poured in to the Sentinel’s offices for weeks.
Controversy drives single-copy sales, but perhaps my words were a bit harsh, and perhaps colored by personal antipathy. I had not been on the Golden Gate Bridge since the day I moved to San Francisco to take the job at the Sentinel. On that day, with the City glittering across the Bay like a giant blank page, I told myself I would never go back. I’d left too many sinkholes and culdesacs of memory on that side of the bridge.
Yet now I found myself stuck on the thing, with no clue why all northbound lanes were at a standstill at 2:40 on a Monday afternoon. The minivan in front of me had an old Bush-Cheney sticker plastered on its bumper, and I had the urge to ram it with my already-dented car. Hemmed in on all sides, I couldn’t even see the ocean. A Muni bus rumbled in the lane on my left, the exhaust warping the air and the cloying smell of diesel crawling through the car vents. To my right, a tow truck pulling a rotting Winnebago that was probably some unfortunate’s home earlier that morning. In my rearview, a UPS guy checked his watch. Again.
If possible, I would’ve made a u-turn, which I’m pretty sure would be highly illegal on the bridge. I was rage-gripping the steering wheel of the Cadillac, hunched forward on this forced march toward the past, spun up like an old speedfreak, running on compulsion and defiance, jonesing to self-harm by cutting into my oldest psychic scabs.
Or was I wrong; is there nobility in this sort of surrender? Honor in the alchemy that transmutes secrets into story? Can wrongs be righted, cowardice redeemed, damages compensated, debts repaid—with truth as currency? Monihan said, man-up brother, this is the smart thing to do. Valentine said it’s the right thing to do, for Billie and your own peace of mind. Lockhart said just get it in print. Did the truth even matter?
There was a compression of the traffic, a tightening of the screws of anticipation. The minivan moved two feet. I released the brake pedal and the Cadillac glided forward, our bumpers now close enough to sever a leg between them. The UPS guy honked his horn, trying to change lanes as if he knew something. Perhaps from his higher perch he could see the edge of an opening ahead.
And when the way was clear and this artery started to pump cars again, I would be carried across the bridge and spirited backwards through my own history. I would speed north on 101, noting the exit signs for Petaluma, Santa Rosa, Cloverdale, chicken towns, cow towns and lumber towns that are now off-ramp bedroom towns with strip-mall wine bars and the mere ghosts of the pop-and-mom newspapers where I had cut and sharpened my teeth—now all swallowed up by Gannett or Westland or another media Godzilla. And further north, beyond where the freeway narrows to two winding lanes, I would turn inland to drive up and over the hills toward Lupoyoma, the wellspring of my discontent, though I could not fully explain my reasons, even to myself.
I drive the Cadillac, but what drives me?
I laced my hands and popped my bruised knuckles as the traffic inched forward. Recently I read about an experiment in which researchers MRI’d people cracking their knuckles, and tiny sparks of electricity showed up on the images—lightning bolts inside the crooks of your fingers. We are walking, talking worlds, each of us a complex system connected to the impossibly vast universe of systems. We are living, breathing planets, racked with storms we don’t understand. And we are laughably inaccurate forecasters of our own weather.
The minivan finally started moving steadily, slowly, not yet five miles an hour. The bus engine coughed and shifted into gear. Only now did I notice the murmur of talk radio babbling from the stereo. It had been on since I got in the car, but I’d been so far in my head that it receded into the sonic distance like an argument in the next-room. Now I heard some self-righteous politician who expected me to believe the U.S. invasion of Iraq had something to do with my personal freedom, and I turned off the radio.
I hit the start button on the CD player. The same mix-CD that was playing when I got arrested, the selection of old blues I hadn’t listened to in years, long stored in that closet along with the splintered guitar and the cracked laptop. The CD player whirred to life, a piano pounded out an intro, a harmonica jumped in with a ragged growl, and the snare drum hit the backbeat, Little Walter Jacobs sang, “I got the key to the highway…”
With the volume cranked I could almost see Billie Armstrong, standing by the side of the road with her thumb out. She is 17 years old, a blurry Polaroid vision of untamed red hair, that cheeky smile, those flashing green eyes, hand on hip—the feminine embodiment of candlefire.
For the moment it was forty years ago in my head, but as I reached the north end of the bridge, I checked the reality of the Cadillac’s dashboard clock.
Three-thirty, approximately three hours until the sun would set on Molly’s pier. I could still make it… if I still wanted to.
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.
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