by James Philip
Besides, he was not in a running away mood.
“How do you figure that, Johnny?” Sam inquired, thinking he ought to feel a lot more afraid than he actually did.
“You signed a contract!”
“Sue me,” Sam suggested flatly.
The two gorillas were shifting on their feet, growling, wanting to get on with their fun, sizing up the long haired, rangy musician with hungry contempt.
Oh, shit!
This is going to hurt!
“I don’t recollect you getting me any gigs lately?” Sam observed. This was not entirely fair because obviously, the little shit had probably thought he was dead. Notwithstanding, it was not unreasonable to expect the onus to be on one’s manager’s side of the deal to know if one was alive or dead. “You still owe me my fees for the North-East tour with the Limonvilles,” he added flatly.
Sam had played this reunion out in his head many times over the last year. Johnny Seiffert had turned Miranda against him, sent him off to the boondocks of the Western World with a bunch of talentless Texan rednecks and very nearly got him killed.
Belatedly recognising the violence in the younger man’s eyes Seiffert took a step back. He turned to the less vacant-looking of his associates, and opened his mouth to speak.
“I just called the West Hollywood PD,” said a new, very familiar voice from behind the three men blocking Sam Brenckmann’s view down the sidewalk.
The bikers turned to face the tall, wild-haired, beanpole figure who had silently emerged from the alley behind the Troubadour. The larger than life, notoriously eccentric club owner was hefting a double barrelled shotgun, a big piece, eighteen or twenty gauge, Sam guessed.
“You guys probably don’t want to be around when they get here,” Doug Weston grinned at the two hulking Hell’s Angels. “I already got protection, boys,” he went on, “my chapter ain’t going to take kindly to you crapping on their ground. You don’t want to hang around in this town, you dig?”
The club owner was dressed in what looked like multi-coloured pyjama bottoms and not a lot else apart from a battered Stetson. He looked surreal and the gun, which he waved here and there as he spoke, added an undeniable ‘through the looking glass’ sobriquet to the moment. People passing by were beginning to notice the ‘situation’ developing outside the Troubadour and getting under cover.
Unaccustomed to having to do their own thinking Johnny Seiffert’s muscle hesitated.
“Okay, have it your way,” Doug Weston guffawed.
Sam suspected that his friend was a little high.
“You boys lie down on the sidewalk before I blow your fucking heads off!”
Yeah, Doug was high.
The bikers must have thought so too because they prostrated themselves at Johnny Seiffert’s feet in a hurry.
“We can talk about this,” their boss said to Doug Weston as if the slowly, unpredictably gyrating muzzles of the heavy gauge shotgun were no more than Scotch mist. “I’ve got rights. You’ve got rights. We can talk about...”
“You ain’t got no rights over the kid, Johnny!”
“I’ve got a contract!”
“You never paid the kid his end of tour fee tour for the Limonville Brothers gig,” Doug Weston pronounced triumphantly. “That sounds like breach of contract to me?”
“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
Tuesday 3rd December 1963
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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.
After he and Commander Troy Simms had requisitioned the radio room of the USS Theodore Roosevelt to set up a scrambled voice link with the Commander Submarine Force, United States Pacific Fleet – COMSUBPAC – Rear Admiral Bernard Clarey, things had happened fast. By Saturday morning Walter had been on his way east to be personally ‘debriefed’ by the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Anderson.
‘I have spoken with Commander Simms by secure land line,’ the great man had told him as he came around his desk, and to Walter’s surprise and consternation, had solemnly shaken his hand. ‘Commander Simms informs me that you have conducted yourself impeccably in this affair, Lieutenant.’
‘I have done my duty to the best of my ability, sir.’
The Chief of Naval Operations – God to a junior officer in the US Navy – had ordered him to sit in a chair beside him and to tell him ‘everything that happened from the moment the Theodore Roosevelt tied up alongside the Hunley?’
This Walter had endeavoured to do over the course of the next two hours as Saturday afternoon had become dusk and then night over the Pentagon. It was a blur, in the end his voice was hoarse and his nerves stretched so taught he had to continually remind himself to take the next breath. Admiral Anderson had treated him with paternal patience, interrupted sparingly, perhaps aware of how nervous the younger man was in his august presence.
Walter’s subsequent interview – or more correctly, interrogation – by two senior Navy Special Investigation Branch officers, late on Saturday night had been less civil, positively relentless. He had been accommodated in a basement berth in the Navy Wing of the Pentagon overnight, expecting to face further ‘interviews’ in the morning. However, after an early breakfast he had been summoned to the room of a Captain in the Personnel Division and handed orders sending him on leave. Orders as to his future assignment would be cut in the coming days. He could expect to be temporarily employed in a ‘training role’ ahead of taking his place on the next ‘Command Course’ at Groton scheduled to commence in late March or early April. It was emphasized that he was not to discuss the events of the recent days – under any circumstances - with anybody until such time as Hell had frozen over.
Walter looked into Gretchen’s brown eyes. His mother had assured him that the stories about her and United States Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach were ‘all lies’; and ‘part of some horrible feud between Mr Katzenbach and the FBI!’
“It can’t be very nice reading about yourself in the papers?” He offered sympathetically.
“I thought it would be more upsetting than it actually is,” the woman replied. “Dan says in a couple of years everybody will remember my name but nobody will remember why. No publicity is bad publicity, I suppose.”
Walter viewed Gretchen with thoughtful eyes. She was reclining languidly in his father’s chair, dressed in an expensive dress that only just covered her knees, and wearing shimmering nylons advertised her trim calves and ankles. She returned his scrutiny cat-like. They were alike; each quick to form an opinion of another, wary and looking to the future because they were both people with big, ambitious plans and carefully prepared road maps to help them get to where they wanted to get to in the years to come.
“I don’t make friends easily,” he admitted. “I joined the Submarine Service to command my own boat. That’s my ambition. That is my life. There is no room in my life either for a wife, or for other attachments.”
Gretchen had not expected such a categorical rebuff.
“That’s your plan?” She asked before she could stop herself.
He nodded.
“What’s your plan? Where do you want to be in twenty years from now, Gretchen?”
She laughed involuntarily.
“I want to be the first woman to be President!”
It was said jokingly, a throw away riposte but voicing it was strangely cathartic; as if she had just discovered the thing she most wanted, an impossible dream towards which she might struggle for a lifetime. A dream that was so all-consuming, no noble that it instantly granted her existence meaning and justified any sacrifice.
Walter smiled ruefully.
“When I’m the Chief of Naval operations and you’re the President I’m sure we’ll put the World to rights, Miss Betancourt!”
Chapter 28
Wednesday 4th December 1963
State Capitol Building, Olympia, Washington
Governor Albert Rosellini was
exhausted and although he would not admit it, heartbroken. Washington lay half in ruins under martial law, and now Boeing was shutting down both its plants in Seattle. It was only a matter of time before the Hanford Works on the Columbia River followed Boeing’s example. In the short term that would be less of a blow than the aircraft manufacturer’s departure, but yet another cruel nail driven into the coffin of Washington State.
William McPherson ‘Bill’ Allen, the sixty-three year old President of the Boeing Company had come to Olympia to deliver the bad news in person. Both men had known it was only a matter of time but neither had anticipated the axe would fall so soon.
For Bill Allen the decision was a devastating personal body blow. He had been with Boeing in one capacity or another since 1930 and had been the corporation’s President since as long ago as September 1945. Born in Lolo, Montana he had graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1925, become a member of Donworth, Todd and Hughes, a prominent Seattle law firm before taking a post on the board of Boeing Air Transport in 1930, and becoming counsel to the Boeing Airplane Company in 1931. His association with Boeing had been unbroken in the intervening decades. He was ‘Mr Boeing’, the man who in the 1950s had famously ‘bet the company’ on the development and construction of the prototype Boeing 367-80 – Dash 80 – the forerunner of the Boeing 707.
“I’m sorry, Al,” the Boeing man apologised, grey with worry and age. “General LeMay went to the wall on this one but the Treasury cut us dead. The Air Force refused to back away from its requirement for the production of a small number of replacement aircraft to keep the production lines turning over but after the Treasury red-pencilled that proposal, trying to get anybody apart from the West Coast representatives in the House to support the company was pissing in the wind,” he shrugged, “if you’ll forgive my language, sir.”
