WLT (22 page)

Slim did his best with the Blue Moons and Dad Benson went to bat for him, Slim being his neighbor. Dad told Roy Jr., “They're a little lowdown, sure, but they're not
mean
anyway. They're all young fellas, they don't know what's what. Besides, Slim has another little boy, he's three. Cute little bugger. Give him a year and he'll be right up there where Buddy was.”

So Slim got the 7:30 a.m. slot, right after the Shepherd Boys Gospel Quartet on
The Rise and Shine Show
, sponsored by Sunrise Waffles. Slim's sponsor was Prestige Tire & Muffler so he renamed his band The Blue Movers.

They replaced Wingo Beals and The Shoe Shine Boys, a fine band—twin fiddles, electric guitar, doghouse bass, and Wingo playing piano, a country swing band doing hot versions of old tunes, but after four years they were lighting no fires, and so the Artists Bureau sent them on a four-week tour.

That was how WLT killed off the lame and the halt: the Bureau put you on the road, in an old schoolbus, rattling from one end of the five-state area to the other playing $15 dates at high school assemblies and insane asylums and sleeping in your clothes on couches and eating slabs of grease and enduring the shame and the squalor until one day your mind snapped and they found you in your underwear crawling down a corn row in Kandiyohi County with an empty in your hand whereupon they shovelled you back to Minneapolis and put you in a Home for the Wretched and that was it, you were done. And that was how they got rid of Wingo Beals.

Roy Jr. called him in and said, “Sunrise isn't happy, the audience seems a mite low for that time slot, so I think we need to get you out where the public can see you.”

“Please don't do that,” pleaded Wingo. His old brown eyes glistened, his old hairy hand trembled as he gripped Roy Jr.'s desk and looked the young executive in his steely blue eyes.

“Folks need to see you, meet you, get acquainted with the boys. That's how we build up a public following.”

“Please. I'm begging you. Don't send us on tour.”

“I know it's hard work but you're all young and you have your health—you see if touring doesn't make a
big
difference.”

So the Bureau worked up a sixteen-page itinerary, and when Wingo looked at it, he saw it was their death sentence. Four weeks on the road, four shows a day, sometimes five, some of them a hundred or more miles apart. All told, he'd play a couple hundred different pianos, all of them out of tune and with missing keys, some so badly beat up they sounded like somebody banging on bedsprings. Wingo knew the road, he'd gone out with Courteous Carl Harper and the Pierce Sisters and four times a day had to hear the Sisters render “A Big Brass Bed, a Rocker, and a Range” and Carl sing slightly flatter than Ernest Tubb:

The friends and neighbors looked up, spellbound, and swooned at this garbage, meanwhile you sat on stage exhausted, wrinkled, stiff, crusted, dirty, a little drunk, pissed-off at the drummer, and though you felt awful you had to
play music
, a wounded bird made to dance, and you had to endure the humiliation of grinning and playing in front of an
audience
. If one could use such a fancy word to describe this gang of lost souls who filled the seats (and some more than filled them). The poor emcee stood up front in his cheap suit and cried out, “Oh it's good to see you wonderful people,” but from the stage, they looked like deceased walleyes, mouths agape, eyes glazed, gasping. And those were the better audiences—even worse was the 8 a.m. junior high crowd where hideous gap-toothed children wriggled and jeered at the feeble jokes of the poor dying artists on stage, or the old-folks home where rows of the senile and deranged sat rocking back and forth, chins on their chests, licking their lips, pools of urine at their feet, or the Kiwanis and Jaycee luncheons with the tables of big boomers and boosters hunkering over the hot beef sandwiches, or the ladies' luncheons, or the church socials, or the county fairs—they all melted into one massive wall of flesh, dreadful, immovable. After months of grace and ease playing in a quiet room at the radio station, it was hideous to think of facing The Folks of Radioland—pale, damp, rancid, quivering. Dead fish.

“Oh God, save me from this;” Wingo cried, but he went out with The Shoe Shine Boys and soldiered on and almost made it through four weeks of pianos to the end. He came darn close. He did the next-to-last show, in Paynesville, and only a breakfast show in nearby Willmar remained, a cinch, but then Wingo made his fatal mistake and called the Bureau. “We're coming home,” he whispered, his big hand shaking like a leaf, and the girl said, “We've added two shows. Osseo and Braham. Both on your way home.” Wingo wept. “It'll only take a few hours,” she said. He asked to speak to Roy Jr. or Ray. They weren't in. So Wingo tried to go to Osseo. He got as far as the bed, and lay in it, and lost track of time. The Boys pounded on his door to rouse him but it was the wrong door. Wingo lay in bed for a day, hallucinating that he was riding in the box of a coal truck. Meanwhile The Shoe Shine Boys sped south to Osseo to the gig and the bus missed a curve on the West River Road and overturned in a shallow ravine and the Boys were killed, their necks broken by fifty-seven cartons of unsold record albums, and Wingo went to work at the post office, in parcel post. When he heard music on the radio, it made him flinch. Wingo preferred absolute silence.

Slim Graves and The Blue Movers dedicated their first show to Wingo. Like Wingo's shows, theirs consisted of the weather and livestock reports, fan mail and requests and dedications, and about four songs, of which one should be a hymn. The Movers had plenty of songs about losing women, drinking, losing their jobs, shooting people, riding freight trains, finding other kinds of women .and then losing them too, but not many songs about Jesus, so Slim brought in a singer named Billie Ann Herschel, who had performed with the Shepherd Boys, to do the hymn segment. She was twenty-four. She stood at the microphone while Slim stood behind her, playing guitar and looking at her slim hips under the cotton dress. While singing hymns, she liked to shift her weight from side to side, and he found it hard to keep his mind off her, not that he tried to—her rear end was prettier than most people's faces.

Slim opened the show, whistling a few bars of “Only a Pal,” then Swanny the announcer said, “Morning, friends and neighbors, it's time for Slim Graves and The Blue Movers for Sunrise Wafnes—gosh! they're good—with more of that good old lonesome blues music, so pour yourself a cup of coffee and enjoy the show, there's DAYLIGHT IN THE SWAMPS!” and the band swung into “Locomotive Daddy.” The next tune was a vocal, and then Slim said, “Well, what say we take a look in the ole mailbag here.” The letters from listeners were written by Slim himself. (“Loved the way Ernie picked apart that Dill Pickle Rag. Man, it's hard to believe that's one person. ”Sure enjoy all those two-steps, stomps, and shuffles. You boys are the best and I sincerely mean it. Please play Under the Double Eagle.” “You are my favorite band and I look forward to hearing your show every morning. Keep up the good work. Especially love Billie Ann and her duets with Slim. P.S. This is the first fan letter I ever wrote.”)

Billie Ann, though she was brought in for hymns, stayed around and sang more and more with Slim. Their voices were a natural blend. At first, they did songs like “Polly Wolly Doodle” and “Froggy Went A-Courtin',” but then they did a couple cheating songs and hit a groove and settled in. Cheating seemed to bring out their best vocal qualities.

Nobody had ever done cheating songs that early in the morning before, but for The Blue Movers, seven-thirty was a continuation of midnight: they were night owls, the show was their last stop before they hit the sack. Slim and Billie did famous old cheating songs like “On Top of Old Smoky” and “Foggy Foggy Dew” and “Black Jack Davy” and then they wrote their own. They wrote “A-D-U-L-T-E-R-Y (That's a Word That Makes Me Cry)” with Billie as the young wife with two little children (the truth) who is attracted toward the old cowboy who comes to town with his band—“What is that word that begins with A that Daddy said to you?” “It's a word, LaVerne, that big folks say, that means I've been untrue”—and “She Gets Pleasure from Seeing Me Cry” with Slim as the husband with three children (the truth) whose wife is cold and enjoys seeing him miserable—and “Why Must the Show Go On?” in which Slim and Billie are singers in the same band and fall in love—

You couldn't make it much clearer than that.

Billie Ann's husband, Tom Herschel, was a WLT engineer and worked the afternoon shift, but he certainly knew what was up between his wife and Slim, and so did the early-morning engineer, Harlan. Engineers were a tight brotherhood, united by a shining contempt for performers, and Harlan made trouble for Slim every way he could. When Slim needed to clear his throat and gave Harlan the “Cut” sign, Harlan left the microphone wide open, and Slim, after a long night of it, had a lot of phlegm to account for and had to honk and hawk pretty hard to bring it up, none of which endeared him to the listener at home who maybe had a headful himself and didn't care to hear Slim's sinuses so close up. Harlan also figured out ways to make Slim's voice sound thin and warbly and to give it a sibilant nelly-like texture. He could even bend the pitch, and on Slim's high note, his money note, the big note at the climax of the song, Harlan could bring Slim in a quarter-step high, with a flutter, a tone that made your front teeth hurt. Slim did “Down the Chisholm Trail” and on the long yodelling part, Harlan played with him like a puppet on a string, it sounded like the cowboy's horse was running away with him and he was bouncing on the high pommel.

This did not discourage the two lovebirds, however, and they carried on without an ounce of shame, grabbing each other, smooching during the waffle commercials, kissing during songs, and Slim sometimes liked, during Billie Ann's hymn, to run his hand inside the back of her dress and twitch her underwear. “I love her,” he told The Blue Movers, “she's the most excitement I've had in twenty years, and boys, there is no substitute for excitement. No sir.” The Movers, rascals though they were and quick to snatch up any cupcake loose on the great table of life, nevertheless were concerned about Slim's doing it on the job, in full view, with the husband nearby. “Don't jim the gig for us, boss,” said Smiley the steel-guitarist. “Do your two-timin' in the tall grass like everybody else. Keep it under a bushel. Don't go wavin' it around like this.”

But Slim didn't care. The Little Buddy years had taken a toll on him, all those mawkish ballads about children. “You boys have forgot how important love is,” he said.

He and Billie sang “They're Only Two Dogs in Our Manger of Love”—“Her and him, they're only in the past / And what we have is better and will last. / There's nothing they can do, / They can't stop me and you. / You're mine and I am yours / And loyalty don't open many doors. / Though marriage is made in heaven above, / They're Only Two Dogs in Our Manger of Love,” and Billie said, in the recitation part, “I didn't tell him about you because I didn't need to. He knows. He knows when he touches me that my heart doesn't jump like it used to. It can't because my heart is far away, with you,”—and a mile away, on Blaisdell Avenue, Francis heard it, waking up early and getting dressed to do his paper route.

He sat in the dark kitchen, his feet up on the green linoleum table, drinking coffee, waiting for the big bundle of
Tribunes
to hit the front porch, the little white radio turned down low so as not to wake Clare. Francis had liked Wingo okay but Slim and Billie Ann were really something. It was thrilling, so early in the morning, instead of farm reports and hymns, to get somebody singing about exactly what was on his mind, sex and misery. He had let Slim down, and a hundred times since, on his paper route, Francis had sung “Red River Valley” and gotten it to sound sweet (he thought), but now that Slim was in decline, drinking hard, stinking up the Green Room with his beer breath while he slept off a hangover, putting the bite on his WLT pals, a moocher and a four-flusher and a louse to his wife and kids, he became a better and better singer, Francis thought: the only really astonishing singer at WLT, the only one who sang so true and naked that you shivered to hear him. Sex and misery.