TIL MORNING

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

Johnnie

            Friday, broad daylight, and I was still pondering my exchange with Dorothy Kilgallen last Sunday. A few fans buying early tickets for tonight’s show spotted me. That’s all it took, and a bunch more followed in hot pursuit. I sprinted from the stage door to Morrie Blaine’s Cadillac.

I dove into the sedan’s backseat. “Hit it, Morrie.”

Fists pelted the Caddy’s roof. Faces splotched against its windows. Tires crunched ice.

Checking to see if I was in one piece, I allowed my mind to wander back a decade to those low, roving hills back home, and I saw myself hanging onto our Holstein cow Dinah’s tail. My feet rested up on her flanks. She clomped along behind Rover, my shepherd mix. Back then, I never doubted that life would always remain that complete and full of freedom.

Place a blade of grass between my teeth, and I was exactly the Norman Rockwell portrait my manager, Morrie Blaine, wanted me to be.

“Hit it, Morrie,” I yelled again at the back of his balding head.

“I’m flying this ship fast as she’ll go, Johnnie,” he said.

My devoted fans, mostly kids, dropped from the moving car like bees drop from a hive jostled with a long stick. I turned to see their figures in the gray afternoon then concentrated on Morrie.

“You look like an owl with those specs of yours,” I said. “Stay in the right lane, man.”

Morrie spun the wheel like a great sea captain lost in a storm. “Call me owl again, you fucking radical, and I spill you out and let ’em cut you to ribbons.”

I jerked my topcoat around so I could examine it. “Shit, next thing you know they’ll be using razors. I’m lucky they didn’t take a kidney.”

Morrie found a groove in the traffic. “Where’s his majesty going?” He shot me a glance. “And what’s in the sack you’re carrying,” he asked. “Dope?”

The bag carrying some of my record albums had been slashed, but the discs seemed to be intact.

“Records I snatched from backstage,” I said. “Got me a birthday party gig, East Sixty-Eighth and Park.”

Morrie’s percentage of my earnings had put fifty pounds on him, and he bounced like a beach ball in the driver’s seat. “You’re crazy,”he said. “I ain’t staying to chaperone you in some posh penthouse for Chrissake.”

I spotted a tavern I knew and decided that I’d better line my stomach. Besides, I was a little antsy. The Voice of Broadway had ended our first meeting by calling me a son of a bitch. But then she’d also phoned my record company to request the platters for her daughter’s sweet sixteen party. Maybe I just liked being sworn at by classy women, or maybe I was correct in assuming that Kilgallen kind of dug me. Either way, I realized what I needed right now. “No chaperone required,” I said. “Stop up at this corner.” 

Morrie’s head bobbed, and he tried to catch me in the rearview. “It’s past noon, Johnnie.” Playing the concerned manager now, the old song-plugger went on. “We got a matinee in four hours.”

“Four and a half hours,” I corrected him. “And I still need my breakfast.”

“Booze is more like it. You should be arrested for your choices.”

 I had to laugh at the guy. I loved him was the sad truth. “They serve cold beer and hard-boiled eggs, don’t they?”

I heard the shriek of brakes, and after a long second, I was thrown damn near up in front with Morrie. Then came the bam! And I realized that Morrie’s car had climbed the back end of  the little Studebaker ahead of us.