Call Me the Breeze Read Free Page A

thinking. ‘Out there is the precious harbour. That wondrous place where we’ll all feel safe. One day we’ll get there, Joseph.’ ‘Yes, Mona. I know we will’ you are about to say, but when you look again she’s gone and all you can hear are groans
.
    (There is a little notebook here marked BAND NOTES . With some fantastic little doodles in it by Boo Boo. Kind of like Marvel comics, or Robert Crumb. I remember him laughing whenever he’d do them, to keep himself awake on the way home from gigs. Odd bits of lyrics, too, some of them really good. I don’t think they were ever used, though.)
Psychobilly
    Looking over the cuttings brings that time back, those first few weeks of the band getting together and Boo Boo setting his plans for world domination in motion. ‘Make no mistake, this thing is going to happen. I know you don’t believe it, Joey, but we’re gonna prove you wrong. We’re gonna take the place apart and you’re in it, my friend, whether you like it or not.’ He was right — I didn’t believe him but he sure put the smirk on the other side of my face when I went down to hear them in Jackson’s Garage. Some of the songs were fucking great,no doubt about it, especially ‘My Daddy Was a Vampire’. The yowls out of Boo Boo during it were unbelievable, so much so that Jackson came round in his overalls with a face like thunder. ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ he said, but Boo Boo told him to lighten up. ‘Easy, baby,’ he said as he wound the microphone cable. Jackson knew his father, otherwise I think he’d have knocked the bollocks out of him right there on the spot. In the end, though, he just fucked off, wiping his hands with an oily rag and warning us all to ‘
Watch it
!’
    I agreed to be the roadie all right — I didn’t see why not if I could work it OK with my shifts in Austie’s.
Keith Carradine
    When there weren’t many in, I’d maybe leaf through a novel or just stand there staring way out across the town. I could see it all plainly, me arriving in this deadbeat hole where she lived with her husband, some old motherfucker of a bank clerk who’d bored her half to death since the day they got married. I’d be standing at the edge of town in my long leather duster coat, the sun lancing off my eyes as I gazed first into the sky then up and down the drab, unpainted buildings that seemed to hold each other up all along the winding street. ‘So!’ I’d say. ‘Old timer!’ Bout a room for the night, maybe, huh?’ and he’d show me to the motel where I’d wait till dark, just oiling up my Winchester pump action. Then it’d be time to go. Soon as she saw me coming she wouldn’t be able to speak. The pump I’d keep well hidden right in there beneath the duster, not thinking about producing it at all unless there was some kind of trouble. Which there wouldn’t be for the jerk bankman or doctor or whoever she’d somehow managed to get holed up with wasn’t going to be that foolish. For if he was —
    ‘How you been then, Jacy?’ I’d say, not taking her hand just yet.
    ‘I … I …’ was all she’d say. She wouldn’t be able to speak.
    It would be beautiful making love that night, running your fingers through her hair, her jeans cast away there on the floor beside the bed. ‘I love you!’ I’d say. ‘I’ve waited all this time.’
    ‘Joey,’ she’d say. ‘Joe Boy, my lovely darling,’ just the simple sound of her voice making everything you’d lived till now nowhere close to living at all.
    Nights I’d drift towards sleep with a single word on my lips. ‘Iowa,’ I’d hear myself whisper, and with its swell and ebb it would remind me of the sea, even though I knew there was no water there. I’d borrowed a book from the library, just an ordinary guide to the Midwest. Of course there was no sea there. There was in California, though, the Pacific Ocean crashing just beyond the Big Sur sands. I’d read about it in
The Family
by Ed Sanders, which