One’s Own Private World

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Out of some sense of just trying to make things connect, make sense of her life, make the jumble of thoughts she had about leaving him, about leaving Roy, about pulling up stakes and going out and starting over Laura Perkins began to keep a diary. Sure she had like many a lonely schoolgirl, or many a budding literary figure, kept little nonsense diaries filled with longings and daydreams when she was young, when she came of age, when the welter of the world’s burdens fell on her shoulders and she, shy and reticent by nature needed some way to express the confusions that made up her life about parents, boys, sex. Mostly, as she reflected now at another turning point, what to do, or what not to do about sex. She had that figured as well as any teenager had in this mega-information age, but what to do with her life was what ailed her.

No, now she needed to keep tabs on what she was going to do about Roy Bluff and his internal, infernal, eternal needs that seemed beyond her grasp now that he had become something in the music business. Also apparently had made it his life’s ambition to drink a river of whiskey, and acre of ganja (dope, marijuana for the unknowing), and taste every women with a skirt on (or maybe better off). She had put up with a lot, a lot of late and she knew she had to draw some line in the sand ever since that night that Roy, a head full of liquor and dope (cocaine, sister, snow you know), came within an inch of hitting her, maybe less, maybe less than an inch. Hence the diary to put those ten thousand conflicting thoughts together.

Make no mistake Roy Bluff, weaknesses and all, was her man, was her man ever since that first night they met at the Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers several years before. But the grind of the road, the grind of the care and protection of one Roy Bluff rising star, the grind of his excesses had taken a toll and Laura needed to get things straight in her mind, needed to take a break from Roy-ing. As she prepared to write at length in her new found diary she began to think back to those first days when love was in full bloom, or the prospect of love was in the air. And here is the gist of what she wrote as she explained it to me one night when she was “blue,”Roy Bluff blue. She kept referring to her diary as she did so but I think I got it about right:

Laura remembered back to the night that she and Roy had had their first fight as a starting point. Their first, uh, misunderstanding he called it. She more plain spoken and forthright called it a fight. It had not been long after the night she had told Roy in no uncertain terms that he was her man and so maybe he was trying to test her that night, trying to see what hold he held over her. A typical guy thing that has been going on since Adam and Eve, maybe before. It had been a tough night before a half-empty ballroom in Butte, Montana, half empty because even those hearty brethren would not fight five feet of snow swirling outside to hear a rising star. Catch him come spring one man quipped as he left to fight his own demon snows. That night whiskey-sated (maybe a little reefer too it was hard to avoid that mix in his head sometimes, or hers too when he introduced to her to dope) he, Roy Bluff, said he could have had his pick of whatever woman caught his fancy, caught his eye, or caught his momentary fashion interest.

Reason: Roy Bluff, a guy who had scrabbled and scrambled hard for a long time finally hit his stride, finally got the big pay-off for all those lonely half-filled rooms, all those small make-shift café stages, all those dank church basements replete with intermission homemade baked goods sold to help defray coffeehouse expenses, all those play louder than the drunks at midnight, when his brand of hip-hop-infused folk-rock became a craze around the turn of this century. Got his big ass break when Dave Beck, the big recording producer for Ducca Records, happened to need a midnight drink, maybe two, and heard him at the El Segundo Café in Long Beach and gave him a shot.

That night he went on and on about how being a record contract singer anything, a concert artist anything women started giving him their keys, or whatever else they had to offer back then, in order to say they had been with the rising music star Roy Bluff for one night, maybe two at the most he bragged since Roy was moving fast, as fast as a man could to catch the rising wave. Funny Roy Bluff is not his real name, although out of some male vanity, or something he failed to tell her that until a mutual musician friend of theirs gave her the skinny on it one night when she kept on hearing him call Roy Ron. His real name is Ronald Smith, but the performance stage, musical performance, ah, concert artist stage, and maybe the whole world, was filled to the brim with Smiths just when he was starting out and so one night earlier in his career, one night after a drunken fight brought on by some loudmouth cursing his music in a Memphis bar, the Be-Bop Club over off Beale, he “christened” himself with that manly name despite losing that fight, losing it badly to a smaller wiry man, So it wasn’t that he was agile, handsome or beautiful, if a man can be beautiful in this wicked old world that drew the women to him, as much as that he had a certain serious jut-jawed look borne from out in the prairies, a kind of cowboy look, that appealed to women, lots of women. Appealed to Laura for that matter.

Roy continued on that line about the women as he stated that he had run through the alphabet with such catches, blondes, brunettes, red-heads, especially a couple of wild sisters, college students, young professionals, slender, not so slender, yeah, the whole alphabet to fill his dance card and share booze, dope and whatever was at hand, sometimes, as to be expected, getting out of hand. Hell, he liked it, loved it for the while he was on edge city. And so it went as he puffed himself up in his own mind as least. That was not a good night as he ranted on unto exhaustion.

Later full of bad booze and sorrows Roy, trying to make up, said that was his act until she came along. Until she, Laura Perkins she, whom he called her “sweet angel,” called her sweet angel when he was having one of his better moments, had gotten under his skin, gotten the best of him. And wherever the winds would take them, or not take them, she would always get under his skin, that was just the way it was almost from the first, and he said he accepted that sometimes with a sly grin and sometimes with daggers in his eyes. She merely waved him off having heard that line of defense (and contrition) before, by him and others. They did, to keep the snows at bay they agreed, Laura laughed as she said this, to make love that night.

Roy used to drive her crazy when he got into his “maybes” mood, something that had been happening a lot more of late Usually he would bring it up to settle himself right at some pre-performance moment as he prepared his play-list in his head, and he was in a sly grin mood. As he set himself up for the day’s work, actually night’s work since he was giving a concert later that evening, he would start. The maybes being a little game that he, previously nothing but a love‘em and leave ‘em guy, played with himself trying to figure out just how, and the ways, that she, one Laura Perkins, got under his skin. And so the maybes it was.

The first maybe was that Laura was not judgmental, not in a public sense anyway, and not in any way that would let him know that she was. She had given him a lot of rope, had accepted his excuses, his frailties, and his rages against the night (as she tried like hell to temper them and made a point, a strong point to me of not wanting to discuss those efforts since this was about leaving him and she wanted to interject some sunnier days into what she had to say). Roy had laughed to himself as he thought about the circumstances under which they had met and he knew deep down that, publicly or privately, that judgmental was just not the way she was built.

Christ, as Roy described to her his thoughts back on that first night, he had just got into one of the ten thousand beefs that he got into when he was drinking back then. He was working his first major tour, major in those days being working steady and working in small concert halls and large ballrooms throughout the country (no more dank basements and crowded cafes, not for Ducca recording artist Roy Bluff). Some customer at the famous Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers who didn’t like his song selections told him about it, told him loudly.

Roy, having been drinking (and smoking a little reefer) all day, responded with a brawl, getting, as usual the worst of it, when Laura walked in with a girlfriend. Laura told him later that she did not really know who Roy was but her girlfriend, Patty Lyons, dear Patty, had heard his first album and was crazy to see him in person and so she had persuaded Laura to tag along. (The truth was that Laura had heard about him from a musician friend who had heard him at the Café Algiers in the Village a few weeks before and so had not so much tagged along as was intrigue by what she had heard about him. That musician friend, a woman, a woman whom Roy had slept with at it turned out, was the one who drew her attention to that jut-jawed cowboy aura and thus the intrigue.)

She had given Roy a look, an honest look, a look that said yeah I might take ride with that cowboy (laugh, cowboy from Portland up in Maine, Maine born and bred), an instant attraction look, and Roy, bloodied and all, gave one back, ditto on the attraction look. Later, just before he started his second set he asked the waitress what Laura was drinking, he then had a drink sent to her table, and she had refused it, saying that if he wanted to buy her a drink then he had better bring it to the table himself. (Funny she said since she was a struggling student over at Pace University in Tarrytown at the time she would normally accept when a guy, almost any guy who looked like he might not be a crack head or crackpot, offered to buy her a drink, or two.)

Yeah, yeah that was the start. After Roy had finished the set he did bring that drink over. She never asked him about the fight, about the cause of it, or even about how his wounds were feeling but rather stuff about his profession and the ordinary data of a first meeting. All he knew now was as close as he had come a few times afterward that was the last time he fought anybody for any reason, fought physically anyway. He would always bring that up when they were in fight mode as some virtue that would not have occurred except for her and by implication if she left him he would fall back on his wicked ways.

Then Roy moved on to a blow by blow description of what happened after that. He would start with maybe it was that at the beginning, not the beginning beginning, not that first night when after his set was finished he brought that drink over to her table (and to be sociable one for her girlfriend too) but after he had gotten used to her, had been to bed with her and she had said one night out of the blue, that he was her man (he said she had put it more elegantly than that but that was what she meant, and she agreed, agreed she put it more elegantly than that ) and that she would pack her suitcase if she was ever untrue to him. Those were the days when he was still grabbing whatever caught his eye (including that female musician friend), and what guy who was starting to get a little positive reputation in the music business wouldn’t grab what was grab-worthy. But after that he too silently and almost unconsciously took what they later called the “suitcase”pledge although he never told her that, never took her he took the pledge, it just kind of happened.

Then he went on to something that totally befuddled him maybe it was that Laura would refuse the little trinkets that men give women, hell, she wouldn’t even accept roses on her birthday. She only wanted a quiet moment alone with him away from the helter-skelter of his public life. One night when he and she had been smoking a little dope and she was “mellow” and ready to shed a little of her private thoughts she had told him about a man, an older man (older then being twenty-five she being eighteen at the time, but more that she was unworldly or really not ready to accept the wicked old world on harsher terms and so malleable) who had lavished her with gifts, money, some jewelry (later found to be some reject stuff) only to confess one night that he was married and as part of that package had beaten her up as he walked out the door after she had called the whole thing off. She said if what she and Roy had wasn’t good enough without trinkets then they were doomed anyway and she would not want reminders of that failure around.

Then the full-court press. Maybe it was as they grew closer, as they got a sense of each other without hollering and as his star started rising in the business after his first big album hits, that she tried to protect him from the jugglers and the clowns (her words), the grafters, grifters, drifters and con men (his words) who congregate around money as long as it is around. Better, she protected him against the night crawler critics and up- town intellectuals who gathered around him as they saw him as their evocation of the new wordsmith messiah and who were constantly waiting, maybe praying too if such types prayed, for him to branch out beyond the perimeters that they, yes, they had set for his work, for his words. Waiting to say “sell-out.”

Which led to maybe it was the soothing feeling he got when after raging against the blizzard monster night of the early years, those bleak years right after the turn of the new century, on stage, in his written down words, after hours in some forsaken hotel room town, nameless, nameless except its commonality with every other hotel room, east or west, she softly spoke and made sense of all the things that he raged against, the damn wars, the damn economy, hell, even his own struggling attempts to break-out of the music business mold and bring out stuff on his own label.

Maybe too it was the tough years, the years when he was still drinking high hard sweet dreams whiskey by the gallon, still smoking way to much reefer (and whatever else was available, everybody wanted to lay stuff from their own personal stash on him, some good, some bad, very bad) when she took more than her fair share of abuse, mental not physical, although one night, a night not long before he finally crashed big time and had to be hospitalized, he almost did so out of some hubristic rage, she waved him off when he tried to explain himself. She said “let by-gones be by-gones” and that ended the discussion.

Then out of the blue one Roy Bluff a bundle of walking contradictions, all tongue-tied and timid floored her with this- and she quoted it from memory-“And maybe, just maybe, it was that out in the awestruck thundering night, out in the hurling windstorms of human existence, out in the slashing muck-filled rains, out, he, didn’t know what out in, but out, she was, she just was… “ And as the tears slowly formed as she said it she floored me with this. She thought, thought hard and fast that maybe, just maybe, she would give her walking daddy, her jut-jawed cowboy walking daddy just one more chance.

Damn.