James Philip
Aftermath
To the reader: firstly, thank you for reading this book; and secondly, please remember that this is a work of fiction. I made it up in my own head. None of the fictional characters in ‘Aftermath — Book 1 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series’ — is based on real people I know of, or have ever met. Nor do the specific events described in Aftermath — Book 1 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series’ — have, to my knowledge, any basis in real events I know to have taken place. Any resemblance to real life people or events is, therefore, unintended and entirely coincidental.
The ‘Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series’ is an alternative history of the modern world and because of this real historical characters are referenced and in some cases their words and actions form significant parts of the narrative. I have no way of knowing if these real, historical figures, would have spoken thus, or acted in the ways I depict them acting. Any word I place in the mouth of a real historical figure, and any action which I attribute to them on or after 27th October 1962 never actually happened. As I always say in my Author’s Notes to my readers, I made it up in my own head.
Timeline 10/27/62 — USA is set in the same alternative world as the books of the ‘Main’ series but it tells different stories of different people from very different perspectives. Where it touches base with events in the ‘Main’ series this is to maintain the coherence of the background narrative and to place events in the USA storyline in the context of the Timeline 10/27/62 World.
The books of the Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series are written as episodes; they are instalments in a contiguous narrative arc. The individual ‘episodes’ each explore a number of plot branches, and develop themes continuously from book to book. Inevitably, in any series some exposition and extemporization is unavoidable but I try — honestly, I do — to keep this to a minimum as it tends to slow down the flow of the stories I am telling.
In writing each successive addition to the Timeline 10/27/62 ‘verse’ it is my implicit assumption that my readers will have read the previous books in the series, and that my readers do not want their reading experience to be overly impacted by excessive re-hashing of the events in those previous books.
“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. Men no longer debate whether armaments are a symptom or a cause of tension. The mere existence of modern weapons — ten million times more powerful than any that the world has ever seen, and only minutes away from any target on earth — is a source of horror, and discord and distrust. Men no longer maintain that disarmament must await the settlement of all disputes — for disarmament must be a part of any permanent settlement. And men may no longer pretend that the quest for disarmament is a sign of weakness — for in a spiralling arms race, a nation's security may well be shrinking even as its arms increase.”
Chapter 1
If things had gone to plan Sam Brenckmann would have been back in San Francisco sometime early next week. If things had gone to plan, by then he would have been paid the balance of his tour ‘fee’. If things had gone according to plan in a day or two he would have been on his way back south, looking forward to meeting up again with friends, smoking a little dope, and basically chilling. He had planned to stop over a few days in the Bay Area before he returned to Los Angeles, and hopefully paper things over with Miranda Sullivan. Okay, they had had a fight, she had got him hooked up with a bunch of talentless no-hopers and he had not got the joke at the time. That was past history, he was not the sort of guy who brooded about that shit; if Miranda wanted to bury the hatchet that was fine by him. If not; well, it was not like they were ever going to get married or anything. Se la vie, and all that. He did not plan to hang out more than a week, tops, in San Francisco however the reunion with Miranda went because he had people he needed to touch base with in LA. The way he saw it hanging out in Laurel Canyon, catching up with what was happening on the Sunset Strip, busking around the clubs along Santa Monica Boulevard was the best possible way of washing the bitterly sour taste of ‘touring’ the great American North West out of his system.
The last time he was in LA he had met a club owner called Doug Weston. Doug ran a club called The Troubadour at 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood; he was a funny guy, six foot six inches tall, intensely energized with a forthright quirky take on the music business that set most old-time agents teeth on edge. Doug had put three fingers of bourbon on the table in front of Sam and they had talked about the scene; who was on the up and who was on the way down, and who had already slipped out of sight. After a while Sam had got out his guitar, sung a couple of other people’s songs before playing the club owner a bluesy version of Brothers Across the River. Everybody thought Brothers Across the River was some kind of epic ballad but actually, it recollected the overcast day he had driven down to Norfolk with Ma to welcome his big brother Walter back from his first cruise on the USS Scorpion. He had headed West shortly after that so it had, in hindsight, marked a minor personal rite of passage, bookending a stage in his life when he was coming to terms with the knowledge that his future no longer lay in attempting to be something he was never going to be — a regular guy like his Pa and his two elder brothers — and that he had had to get away from New England before it sucked the life out of him. That night in The Troubadour Sam had got the impression Doug would have offered him a gig, or even a residency at a club — which would have been a huge break because The Troubadour was a three or four hundred seat venue — if he had not already been signed up to Johnny Seiffert’s blood-sucking agency in San Francisco. Notwithstanding, he had sent a demo disc to the club owner before he went on the road with the Limonville Brothers Family Strummers.
PLANS!
Truth be told, things had not been ‘going to plan’ for Mr and Mrs Brenckmann’s twenty-four year old — going on twenty-five in less than a month — contrary third son for a while and the fact that he had ended up messily divorced from his latest band, the aforementioned Limonville Brothers Family Strummers broke, broke as in down to his last five bucks in change, in a town so far out in the boondocks that it was pretty well as far out as a guy could go in the good old United States of America without actually being in a foreign country, was probably God’s unsubtle way of telling him to man up and get a proper job. Not that he believed for a single millisecond that he would hold down anything like a ‘proper job’ for more than ten minutes; because that just was not who or what he was.