Chapter 9
The weirdest thing was that when the cops had eventually turned up outside 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard — in time to watch the burning Troubadour club illuminate the unnatural darkness of the blacked out surrounding city streets — they had known exactly what had happened and who they were looking for. They had not been in the least interested in either of the two bikers bleeding on the ground in the parking lot, or in trying to discover what had actually transpired in the long minutes before their arrival.
Sam Brenckmann looked and felt like a character out of an old black and white horror movie. Except that the blood on his hands and liberally spattered over his shirt and pants was very much in Technicolor even in the blinding beams of the cops’ torches. Doug Weston did not look so good either; one of the cops had punched him in the solar plexus and kicked him as he rolled in the dirt trying to get his wind. That was just before the cops had pulled Sam off the big guy on the ground despite his protests — somewhat muted but no less impassioned notwithstanding the knees in his back and the sole of the boot crushing his face to the dusty tarmac of the parking lot — that somebody ought to be maintaining pressure on the wound in the whimpering biker’s guts before the ungrateful scumbag bled out.
‘What the fuck are you doing helping that bastard?’ Doug had demanded angrily after he had reloaded the twenty gauge double barrelled shotgun and discovered that Sam was obstructing his field of fire.
‘If you want to kill people, Doug,’ he had complained angrily, ‘join the fucking Army! These guys aren’t about to hurt anybody any time soon. Put that fucking gun down!’
The backlight of the flames of The Troubadour had lit had lit their faces with its infernal red-orange glow, and menace and despair etched in the shadows. The two men had met in the months before the October War and become unlikely friends for all that they had always known that their partnership would probably end messily. Sam had been a regular turn at The Ash Grove at 8162 Melrose Avenue long before he fell into Doug Weston’s eccentric orbit. The Ash Grove was the creation of Ed Pearl and reflected his tastes and temperament in exactly the same way The Troubadour mirrored those of its creator. Ed Pearl’s bag was eclectic but blues-based; Doug Weston’s ears were open for anything new, anything with ‘promise’. Ed Pearl was never worried about getting a piece of an artist, or of his or her ‘action’; Doug was terrified of missing out. Ed Pearl was a regular guy, a musician at heart who understood other musicians; Doug Weston was a would-be promoter, a different kind of character, very nearly a throwback to another age. If Doug had ever met an old-time showman and barnstormer like Phineas Taylor ‘P. T.’ Barnum — of the Barnum and Baily Circus fame — he would have encountered a true soul mate. ‘I am a showman by profession,’ Barnum once claimed, who defined his guiding light as ‘to put money in my own coffers’. Not that Doug Weston was any kind of evil Machiavelli. He was just a one off. Immensely tall, an irrepressible eccentric he had opened The Troubadour first as a sixty seat coffee house on La Cienaga Boulevard, and moved into the current venue — which could hold as many as four hundred people — in 1961. Until tonight Sam had regarded Doug, for all his faults and foibles, as one of the ‘good guys’ in ‘the business’ even though he was convinced he was a much bigger deal than he actually was.
Man to man he and Doug had hit it off from day one back in the old pre-war World; and when Sam, newly returned to LA from his and Judy’s nightmarish escape from Bellingham, the disease-ridden refugee camps of wintery British Columbia and the Hell-hole displaced persons cages in southern Washington State, had walked back through the door of The Troubadour in March he had been welcomed like the prodigal returned.
Sam discovered that in his six month absence from ‘the scene’ that Doug had been playing the demo of his song Brothers Across the Water, a rites of passage ballad about the last time he saw his eldest brother Walter before he headed west, to all and sundry. While he had been ‘away’ Sam had acquired, in Doug Weston a self-appointed, somewhat possessive ‘promoter’ in Los Angeles. A few weeks ago Doug had started talking to Columbia Records and until somebody had burned down The Troubadour, Sam’s star had briefly been ascendant.
All around the two men there had been coughing, distraught, injured and traumatised people who minutes before had been chilling out in the packed club. In the eerie firelight the survivors milled, collapsed, wept, chattered, puked and hugged each other. Smoke was billowing across the parking lot and across Santa Monica Boulevard as the cops and the ambulances started to arrive.
‘Stop waving that fucking thing around!’ Sam had yelled at Doug as he heard the sirens approaching. ‘You didn’t just shoot this guy!’
This had given his friend pause.
“You shot me too!”
‘Oh, shit! Sorry about that…’
‘Put the fucking gun down and help me put some pressure on this guy’s chest!’
Judging by where it hurt most Sam decided he probably had two or three pieces of buck shot in his right calf and foot, and maybe a couple more in his butt. Although his friend was grumpily contrite about shooting him, other than handing Sam a towel his heart was not really in stopping the wounded biker — a big fat unwashed example of the species — bleeding out. The towel was soaking, sodden wet by the time the LAPD dragged Sam and the club owner away.
The cops had all seemed very angry.
One of them had thrown a punch at Sam — a cheap shot which Mr and Mrs Brenckmann’s contrary third son had seen coming from a mile away and dodged — and bust his hand on the door post of the cruiser into which he and Doug had been unceremoniously bundled.
Without being processed at the front desk both men had been left to sweat — quite literally — in the darkened lock up at Van Nuys Police Station. Sam would have asked for first aid treatment if he had thought the cops were interested. Patently, they were not; and it was several hours before the lights came back on. After that things started to happen.
Doug Weston started yelling about ‘police brutality’ and reminding their captors that ‘there’s a fucking wounded man in here’. The other occupants of the lockup, exclusively it seemed, Latinos, had joined the complaints.
“Oh, fuck!” The first cop who came to check muttered when he discovered Sam was sitting in a small puddle of blood and presumably, looking every bit as bad as he was beginning to feel.
After that Sam’s recollections were a little hazy right up until the moment the LAPD doctor started extracting buckshot from his right buttock.
“Sorry, kid,” the greying, weary little man in the white coat apologised. “I thought you were still out. I gave you a lungful of gas a while back. The effects must be wearing off.”
The room was grubby, there were cracks in the plaster and the air stank of disinfectant and antiseptic, both taints stinging his eyes and the back of his mouth.
“What’s the time?” Sam asked, wincing.
“About five.”
The man on the table breathed a short-lived sigh of relief before the next stabbing spear of fire penetrated his nether regions. The probing around for miscellaneous pieces of lead proceeded. Only five in the morning. Judy would most likely still be asleep; and even if she had had trouble sleeping lately — the baby kicking always woke her up — it was too early for her to start worrying about his absence. He often did not get back until it was light and he had warned her he had a late-late spot at The Ash Grove after he finished at The Troubadour.