“Who are you writing to, babe?” Sam asked, stifling a yawn as he shuffled sleepily into the big room at the back of Gretsky’s. His dark hair fell to his shoulders. He had shaved off his beard a week ago, but not shaved since and he was barefoot in faded jeans and a gaudy unbuttoned shirt. He leaned over Judy and they kissed in that intimately lazy, unselfconscious way lover’s do, regardless of witnesses. He rested his hand on Judy’s belly.
“I’m writing your Ma a letter,” she informed the man.
Sam sank onto the old sofa beside Judy.
“I’ll send it when the baby comes.”
“Oh, right.” Sam rubbed his eyes. It was nearly two months since Judy had persuaded him to write to his parents in Boston and ‘come clean’ about her. He ought to have told his folks about Judy and the fact that she was ‘the one’ before but somehow, so much had happened in the last year that the only way he could really tell the story was in verse and songs. The business of writing it down chronologically or of coherently attempting to communicate it all was a constant struggle. But he had written to his folks, done the deed, felt good about it afterwards and hoped his Ma and Pa would forgive him for not writing to them sooner, other than to say that he was still alive and where he could be mailed. All things considered things were going so well he did not want to do anything to risk breaking the spell.
Sam did not know how to interpret ‘I’ll send it when the baby comes,’ and his eyes briefly clouded with concern.
“I’m perfectly fine,” Judy scolded him gently. “But it will be nice to be able to tell your Ma what her grandson or granddaughter’s name is, don’t you think?”
Sam yawned, reassured.
“Doug wants me to meet some guys from Columbia Records this afternoon,” he explained, trying to make it sound like a throwaway remark and failing dismally.
Doug Weston was the immensely tall, irrepressible and sometimes manic owner of The Troubadour at 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard. Doug had opened the club first as a sixty seat coffee house on La Cienega Boulevard, and moved into the current venue — which could hold as many as four hundred people — in 1961. Doug thought he was bigger deal than he actually was but he knew what he liked and he was not subtle about how he went about getting it. He and Sam had hit it off from day one back in the old pre-war World; and when Sam had walked back through the door of the Troubadour in March he had been welcomed like the prodigal returned. In his absence — trying to stay alive and then to get out of the American North-West — 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 brother Walter before he headed west, to all and sundry. In Doug Weston, Sam had acquired a self-appointed and somewhat possessive ‘promoter’ in Los Angeles. That was the problem with Doug, once he discovered you he thought he owned you. But Sam could live with that. The money from his residency at The Troubadour was never going to make him a rich man but he had responsibilities now and a foot on the ladder was priceless. A lot of people had heard him at The Troubadour, word of mouth mattered and other gigs at other clubs kept him circulating and more than paying his and Judy’s way at Gretsky’s. The weirdest thing was that since the October War, people had acquired a real appetite for his stuff. It was as if even here in LA, on the surface thriving and untouched by the war, people were deeply, indelibly scarred just under the skin and badly needed to if not empathise, then at least know what it was like for the people and places farther north that were blighted forever.
“I sang The Ladies of the Canyon for the first time last night,” Sam confessed. He had honestly believed it was a coy little song, a little cheesy, a lullaby. “Weirdest thing,” he added enigmatically.
“How so?”
“There were women crying,” he confessed, a little perplexed.
Judy said nothing.
Often when she was alone she would hum and sing snatches of the songs she had listened to her lover developing and crafting, endlessly practicing; always, she came back to The Ladies of the Canyon. Sam readily confessed that the song was about her, and about Sabrina and the other women he had known before the war, a song about discovering what love really was. Sam claimed he was misunderstood, that his lyrics were exactly what they seemed to be, that there were no deep insights, meanings or passions buried in the rhymes. He always said a thing ‘was what it was’ for people to make of it whatever they would.
Miranda dreams of kinder days…
Sabrina walks on down to Catalina…
Sisters lost in other years…
Paint a picture gold and silver…
Judy’s eyes in the morning light…
The Ladies of the Canyon ever bright…
Every verse seemed to have a line that stuck in one’s head the very first time one heard a song like The Ladies of the Canyon.
Sabrina had finally told Judy all about Miranda Sullivan. Chapter and verse, basically. Judy also knew that Sabrina and Sam had been casual lovers up to a few months before the war and while she was curious — only a little — about the other women in Sam’s songs; she was not so curious that she ever wanted to talk to him about it. Sam was a kind, gentle smart, handsome guy and everywhere he went he carried a guitar. What was there not to like? He could get laid pretty much when he wanted and she did not own him. She had met Sam at a peculiar time — in hindsight her own state of mind had been unsettled as if she had sensed the impending disaster — and they had got to know each other during the worst of times, and built the sort of bonds that were not about to get broken any time soon. Sam had killed for her; and she would have killed for him if it had come to it.
“Meeting guys from Columbia Records has to be good?” Judy asked, breaking from her introspection.
“Maybe,” Sam grinned. “Record company guys are sharks. The ones who work for the big companies are twenty times worse than little pricks like Johnny Seiffert.”
Judy hoped this was an exaggeration.
Johnny’s Parties was the ‘joke song’ in Sam’s normal set. In it the eponymous Mr Seiffert — the meanest of mean ‘music hall shysters’ — was pilloried with a cruel and damming irony that she had never previously suspected her lover capable.
“These dudes are bad news,” Sam sighed. “Doug’s a tool if you cross him but the stiffs in suits are something else!”
“You and Doug are like brothers,” she reminded him wryly.
“Don’t get me wrong, babe,” Sam rowed back. “It’s just the way the business is. Doug thinks I might make it someday so he wants as big a piece of the action as he can get. The only difference between him and Johnny Seiffert is that Doug is a great guy to be around most of the time.”