“Come on, already,” Nelson whispered. “Who won the damn thing?”
“Now, to reiterate,” Mr. Jaegers said into the microphone, “and before our judges read off the results, there were five bands playing tonight, and they played for you in this order, first was Sound, Incorporated, second was Phase Nine, third was The Morse Code, fourth was The Four Dukes, and last, the band you just heard, was Dawn Patrol. Now, if Mr. Coopersmith will come to the stand, I’m sure we’re all anxious to know who the winners arc. Mr. Coopersmith?”
I waited patiently while Leon Coopersmith, who lived in madge and who was a radio executive in New York, his desk job there presumably making him an expert on rock and roll, what with rubbing elbows with Cousin Brucie and Dandy Dan Daniel and the like all day long; waited while Leon Coopersmith, whom I had seen drunk on many an occasion at parties in our own living room, waddled to the stage weighing two hundred and ten pounds bone-dry, clasped the microphone in a pair of meaty hands, backed away from the sudden feedback, big radio executive that he was, removed one hand from the mike to consult the slip of paper in his hands, cleared his throat, and said, “Okay, kids, want to quiet down for just a few seconds?”
A hush fell over the gymnasium. Out on the floor, I could see Scott Dundee putting his arms around Cass from behind. I watched, hoping she’d move away from him, but she didn’t move, she just let him circle her waist from behind, and then she folded her own arms over his, very cozy, I thought, while I played my brains out and my fingers to the bone.
“Taking third prize of twenty-five dollars,” Mr. Coopersmith who was in broadcasting said in his whiskey-snarled voice, “is The Morse Code, will a member of that group please come up to the stage to accept the check?”
“So far, so good,” Connie whispered.
There was applause from the kids, but not too much applause because The Morse Code was John Yancy’s group, and he lived over in Wilton and didn’t even go to Talmadge High. Yancy came up wearing a scrub beard and a bright red vest — all the guys in his group wore red vests, in fact, like Guy Lombardo or one of those big bands of the forties, though Kenton wasn’t too bad, I’d heard my father playing some of his Kenton collection on the hi-fi just the other night; pretty far out, I guessed, compared to the other stuff they were playing in those days. Anyway, I shouldn’t have been knocking my father’s taste, I supposed, since it was he who’d suggested the name “Dawn Patrol” when we were first starting the group. He’d initially come up with some names that were supposed to be comical, like The Sound and The Fury or The Intolerable Boils or The Noisemakers, horsing around when all the guys were seriously considering names for the group, making a pest of himself until he finally suggested Dawn Patrol, which none of the guys except Connie realized was a reference to a movie about World War I (Connie being a movie bull and also an avid watcher of old-time crap on television), but which all of us liked, anyway. “You mean I actually gave you an idea?” my father said. “Will miracles never?”
So Dawn Patrol it had been, and Dawn Patrol it still was, though many of the other groups changed their names constantly, like The Four Dukes, affectionately known far and wide as The Four Ducks. They once used to be called The Four Barons, nobly elevating themselves only after they’d been around for three months, and putting a sign up on their very next job, the sign reading THE FOUR DUKES, FORMALLY THE FOUR BARONS, which gave everybody but the illiterate Ducks a great big laugh.
Yancy was nodding and offering profuse thanks to everyone for the dubious honor of having placed third with his inept group. Mr. Coopersmith shook his hand with genuine enthusiasm, as though congratulating John Lennon, and Yancy finally sidled off the stage, all grins and embarrassment. Mr. Coopersmith gripped the mike again, leaned into it, and said, “In second place, winning a prize of fifty dollars...” He hesitated here, and I held my breath, figuring if we didn’t take second, we were sure to take first, and Mr. Coopersmith said, “In second place... Phase Nine!”
Nelson gave a short nod as the crowd burst into applause, confirming my surmise: we were sure to take first now. Only Rog looked his usual sallow gloomy self, chewing on his fingernails as Peter Drew come up to the stage to accept the fifty-dollar check for Phase Nine. There was more applause, and a few catcalls (“You got robbed, Pete!”) and Mr. Coopersmith clutched Drew’s hand in both his own meaty hands and grinned approval from that great big world of radio broadcasting, and then Drew looked at the check, and nodded, and folded it. and put it into his wallet, and walked off the stage to where Donna Fields was waiting for him. She gave him a big hug, and I automatically glanced out over the gym floor to see how Cass was doing with Dundee’s arms still around her, and Mr. Coopersmith held up one of his hands for silence again, and then said, “Now... before I announce the winner of the first prize. I’d like to tell you that the winning band’ll be playing for an additional half-hour, and I hope you’ll all stay around to listen and dance. So... in first place... for a prize of one hundred dollars...”
Again, Mr. Coopersmith paused. He grinned out at the audience. I glanced at Rog, who was busily chewing his fingernails.
“In first place,” Mr. Coopersmith said, “Sound, Incorporated!”
“Sound, In—” Nelson started, and then turned to me with an enraged look on his face, gripping my arm fiercely just below the elbow, and then turning to gape at Mr. Coopersmith, as though certain he had made some terrible mistake. Rog, expecting disaster all along, merely nodded his head knowingly. Connie sat abruptly in one of the folding chairs and slapped his hand to his forehead. The response from the teen-age audience was mixed, some of them cheering and applauding, some of them booing and shouting at the stage. Mr. Coopersmith, unperturbed in his broadcasting tower, waited blandly for Gerry Haig to come up onto the stage for Sound, Incorporated, and collect the group’s ill-gotten hundred bucks.
“That’s the last time,” I said. “I swear to God, that’s the last time we play a battle!”
“Sound, Incorporated!” Nelson exploded. “They’re the worst group here!”
“It figures,” Rog said gloomily.
“Let’s pack up,” Connie said.
“You want to congratulate the winners?”
“The winners suck,” Nelson said.
Angrily, convinced that there was no justice in the world, we began unplugging our leads, winding them up, covering the amps, taking our mike stands apart, unscrewing the organ legs, packing the guitars and drums. Danny Boll, who had been one of the judges, and who prior to this January had been the rhythm guitarist of the best group in the area, The Butterfly Push, most of whom were now away at college or in the Army, came up onto the stage while we were still packing. “If it’s any consolation,” he said, “I voted for you guys.”
“Thanks, Danny,” I said.
“You guys are really coming along fine,” Boll said. “I can remember when you first started, and there’s been a tremendous development.”
“Thanks,” Nelson said. “Thanks, Danny.”
“I mean it.”
“Thanks,” I said.
But we were still angry and bitter, especially me, because I had a few other choice items bugging me besides. My father, for example, had refused me permission to drive the station wagon that night, his point being that there’d be a lot of heavy equipment in it, and it was dangerous to be lugging two tons of amplifiers and instruments on a Friday night, when half the population of Connecticut would be drunk and zigzagging all over the roads. I personally could not see the difference between driving heavy equipment around during the day or driving it around at night, and I’d informed my father that I’d shuttled the loaded car all the way to Stamford just last weekend, with six kids packed into the damn thing besides, and I was a very careful driver, and what dire thing did my father expect to happen, would he mind telling me? (This isn’t a locker room, my father had said, watch your language.) I’d lost the battle with my father, and I’d lost the band battle, and now it looked as if I were losing the battle of Cass Hagstrom as well, to no less a hood than Scott Dundee, who ran around with a bunch of boozers, the dumbest asses in the school. How could you expect to ask- a girl if you could take her home when you knew your father would be waiting in the parking lot? What was the sense of taking Driver s Ed a whole damn six months, what was the sense of having night lights if your father never let you drive the damn car at night?