“I thought he was dead!”
“Well, now you know he’s alive I don’t see you putting a pile of greenbacks in his hands?”
“Me and you can sort this thing out.”
Doug Weston shook his head.
“Sam’s under contract to me and Columbia Records, Johnny. You want to pick a fight over contracts you talk to the legal boys at Columbia.”
Johnny Seiffert was trembling with rage, his face turning bright pink and his eyes to glittering, malice-filled outrage.
A police cruiser rumbled to a halt on Santa Monica Boulevard outside the Troubadour. With obvious regret Doug Weston laid the shotgun on the ground as two large uniformed patrolmen stepped out into the warm sunshine of the late afternoon.
“These guys tried to put the squeeze on me to buy their protection and their weed, officers,” the club owner protested.
After the LAPD had departed with the unhappy malefactors, Doug Weston took Sam’s arm.
“Arseholes like them boys don’t just go away. You need to keep a loaded forty-five or a tyre iron in that guitar case of yours, you dig?”
Sam thought carrying a loaded gun around was a bad idea on principle. The principle in question being that he did not want to accidentally shoot himself in the foot. Doug went outside and returned with an eighteen inch-long iron bar wickedly turned at each end that was so heavy that Sam almost dropped it when it was thrust into his hands.
“You’re probably okay back at Gretsky’s,” Doug declared, “but keep that baby with you when you drive anyplace.”
Thereafter, Doug Weston ensconced himself in the bar regaling whoever would listen with the tale of how he had saved the day. He abandoned his barstool only to introduce Sam to the packed club.
Sam Brenckmann had learned early on that a musician connected better, and more easily, with his audience, when he got up on his hind legs. The set up at the Troubadour was basic, bright lights in his face, a PA that had the grunt to support a big band but was mostly redundant for just voice and guitar, and the people around the stage were close enough to touch.
Tuesday night was normally an open mike show; so Sam had chilled in the bar and at the back of club most of the evening. Now the last hour was his and most of the people in the darkness beyond the lights had, it seemed, come to see and to listen to him.
That was still a truly weird feeling.
“We’ve all had a crazy last year,” he began, quirking a smile, fiddling with the tuning of his Martin. “This time last year I was in a tent camp in British Columbia with the winter coming down. If I hadn’t had artistic differences with the other guys in the band I was in I’d have been in Chilliwack when it got nuked. These are weird times, people.”
This prompted a murmur of agreement, several hands clapped.
Everybody told Sam to talk less and play more; but he hated it when performers just walked on stage, played their numbers and walked off like they were in a recording studio. The guys and girls out in the darkness had come here to see him and he owed them a piece of himself.
He began to pick strings.
“I’ll only sing my own songs tonight,” he announced, a little apologetically.
“Yeah!” Somebody called from the gloom. Others echoed the call.
Sam grinned.
The guys from Columbia Records wanted him to cut his hair, to wear a suit, and to strum away like an idiot churning out upbeat versions of the stuff their parents could hum along to. That was not going to happen. Things had already been changing before the war; the war had simply accelerated the rate of change. Kids, young people, his generation, were not going to put up with Perry Como, Bing Crosby and all that old world middle of the road crap any more. Como and Crosby’s generation had blown up the planet; what did they expect? Gratitude? Prizes? Someday Elvis would get out back on the road but Pat Boone was not going to cut it in the new World the way he had in the old. The future was not what it would have been and it was only a matter of time before the voices of younger people, the ones who were going to have to live in this new, contaminated World were heard.
“If you’ve seen me before,” he went on, “you’ll know my kid sister was in Buffalo when the bomb hit. This song is called Tabatha’s Gone…
In the bar Doug Weston stopped talking.
Everybody stopped talking as the instantly attention-grabbing, eerie chords of the introduction to the song that had instantly stilled a noisy room filtered into the crowded bar.
The club owner was drunk.
That kid is going to be a legend…
Chapter 27
Gretchen Betancourt had no illusions that diplomacy was her forte. She planned to rectify this failing one day; if only because life was an unending pursuit of self-improvement. However, presently the development of her diplomatic skills remained something of a work in progress.
Getting to be alone with Walter — or ‘Junior’ as his mother and the rest of his family called the eldest of the three surviving Brenckmann siblings — had proven to be a very nearly insuperable challenge. Junior’s mother had monopolised him ever since his unexpected return to Cambridge the previous day and when Gretchen was interested in a man, she hated competition. Now, finally she had Junior alone in the parlour of the big, relatively sparsely furnished house a stone’s throw from the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Junior’s mother, Joanne, a lovely grey-haired slim, vivacious woman in her late fifties had gone to visit friends for the morning.
‘Junior’ was reading yesterday’s Boston Globe.
“What is it I have done wrong?” Gretchen asked. Her tone was playful, a little flirty and she hoped, not too pushy.
The man looked strange casually dressed in his best civilian clothes. He might have been a clone of his father, shoes polished, necktie precisely configured, and with a woollen cardigan worn over his crisp white shirt. Last night he had worn his uniform like a second skin, today he clearly felt like he was in fancy dress, a disguise in which he could never be comfortable.
“Er, you haven’t done anything wrong, Gretchen,” Walter Brenckmann retorted, his expression quizzical.
“Why the cold shoulder?”
“We hardly know each other.”
While this was true Gretchen was not prepared to allow a little thing like that to deflect her.
“We’ve met each other several times over the years.”
“When we were kids and at one of those ‘at homes’ in Quincy,” Walter conceded. “There was a gap of several years until that ‘at home’ the summer before the war. We exchanged a few pleasantries that afternoon. I recollect that you spent most of that afternoon with Dan?”
Gretchen contemplated making a huge pass at Junior.
No, that is an unbelievably stupid idea!
She was not the sort of girl who made huge passes at men she barely knew from Adam. In fact, she had never made that sort of overt pass at anybody in her whole life and she was not entirely sure how a girl went about it. Discounting, that was, a brief and doomed teenage crush on Sofia Richmond that autumn she had been in England being ‘finished’ before completing her college education back home. She blushed involuntarily whenever she recollected that hideously embarrassing period of her adolescence.
The man put down the paper he was reading with a flicker of irritation. After a couple of months at sea he customarily devoured every word of every paper he could lay his hands on, insatiably hungry to catch up with what was going on in the World. While on patrol the USS Theodore Roosevelt picked up occasional ‘headline’ broadcasts from Alameda, otherwise the boat was out of contact, starved of news. Every patrol he took away a bag of books, mostly military histories and political lives, studied the boat’s technical manuals, whatever took his eye on the shelf of the onboard library; to keep his mind razor sharp and not to waste a single waking minute because if the October War had taught him anything it was that life might be both short and brutal. But when he was away he missed the news. The one redeeming aspect of being summarily sent on leave was the opportunity to catch up with the news; and hard though he tried, he could think of no other redeeming feature of his current situation.