No Limit-Take Two

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

He, Roy Bluff, real name, Ronald Smith, but the performance stage, and maybe the whole world, was filled to the brim with Smiths just then 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, he “christened” himself with that manly name despite losing that fight, losing it badly to a smaller wiry man, then 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 basement 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-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.

And of course 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 one night. It wasn’t that he was handsome or beautiful, if a man can be beautiful in this wicked old world, 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. So, yes, 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.

Until she came along. Until she, Laura Perkins she, to give her a name, although 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 accepted that sometimes with a sly grin and sometimes with daggers in his eyes.

Right then, right that pre-performance moment as he prepared his play-list in his head, he was in a sly grin mood and so, as he set himself up for the day’s work, actually night’s work since he was giving a concert later that evening, he was going through the maybes. 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 and his frailties, his rages against the night (although she tried like hell to temper them). Roy 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 thought back to 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 (no more dank basements and crowded cafes, not for Ducca recording artist Roy Bluff) throughout the country. 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 he responded with a brawl, getting, as usual the worst of it, when Laura walked in with a girlfriend. Laura 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.

She gave Roy a look, a look that said yeah I might take ride with that cowboy (laugh, cowboy from Portland up in Maine), 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.

Yeah, yeah that was the start. After he 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.

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 (she had put it more elegantly than that but that was what she meant) and that she would pack her suitcase if she was ever untrue to him. Funny, he was still then grabbing whatever caught his eye before she said that, 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.

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 said if what they had wasn’t good enough without trinkets then they were doomed anyway and she would not want reminders of that failure around.

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 their 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.”

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 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.

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 rains, out, he, didn’t know what out in, but out, she was, she just was…