Hey, I’m Just Killing The Blues-With Rolly Sally’s Killing The Blues In Mind

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Sam Lowell never drew a break, never drew a blessed break with his woman relationships. Not flirtations; Christ, even in elementary school he had had his heart broken by some young thing in blonde hair and sun dress who asked him to kiss her, didn’t like it and with home to tell her mother and then she his mother that he had made an unwanted advance, took a beating for his mother another time when to impress some Mayfair swell new girl from the new all the rage ranch house development up the street at a school square dance he cut up his one of only two pairs of pants and afterward she laughed at him like some silly rube, he took the beating stoically though; not one-night-stands which usually cost him at least a hang-over and a lot of dough plying young women with liquor or dope or both before he or she snuck out the door, provide for free fear of a dose and if you don’t know what means then move, or more scarily one time pregnancy when the young woman didn’t like “rubbers” and though her cycle was okay and it had been a close thing and some sweated days; not flings, although started with light-hearted intentions neither party looking for anything but shelter from the storm and he became the fall guy when she decided that that temporary shelter should be permanent or he took the fall hard; and not upswing affairs (he liked to use that word “affair” since as a boy, a Catholic boy growing in the 1950s, around the house his mother rather than using the “s” word would said that so and so was having an “affair” and he thought it was just some boy and girl kissing thing, you know chaste, until he found out better when he entered the world of, well, affairs).

Certainly not in marriage or rather marriages, two, one of which had been something like a “shot-gun” wedding when he/she thought she was pregnant so he could avoid the Army as a father in the Vietnam War days at a time when they were not drafting fathers and she turned out to not be so (he got deferred on other grounds) but dear Catholic parents on her side insisted on the virginal ceremony but that one despite two kids, good kids too although he was always like his own father rather distant from both broods of children, was not made in heaven once she took up with the lawyer she worked for and the other had been a marriage of convenience which again despite two kids, ditto on the good and distant part, dissolved into the night when he had proven to be less a good provider than her high-roller dreams could handle. Two marriages and two divorces which he was still paying for.

So somebody, somebody like Jimmy Jenkins, who had grown up with Sam in the Acre section of Carver, the tough hard knocks section married to his high school sweetheart, Betsy, going on forty something years could not understand Sam’s tangled relationships with women, could not understand why he when they met occasionally for a few beers at Henning’s Bar and Grille in downtown Carver constantly said he was just “killing the blues.” (The Acre known by one and all locally as the place where the working poor, the “boggers” who worked in season in the cranberry bogs for which the town was famous met the dregs of society in the town “projects” and a place to be avoided at all costs by polite society, at least that is what Sam’s mother told him when he asked why his friends from school would not come to his house and he had to go to theirs to play)        

Maybe Sam was just born under an unlucky star but maybe a look at his most recent “affair” which ended up once again in the dumps might shed some light on why he lived under the star of that strange expression.

Jimmy and Sam, who now lived in an apartment in Plymouth the next town over from Carver and thus close-by (previously his second wife, Laura, the big high-roller dreamer gone bust had insisted that they live in high-end Cambridge away from the “boggers” as she sneeringly called them, she a daughter of a Andover cop for Christ sake) since his last divorce about three years before, had been getting together more frequently in the recent past since that had both been anticipating their fiftieth class reunion, the Carver High Class of 1963, coming up that fall. Bart, as a member in good standing of previous reunion committees and one of the few with Betsy standing who still resided in the town, was once again on the committee and having rekindled his relationship with Sam tried to recruit him to go to the reunion. Bart and Betsy were hardly new to such organizing operations since they met in ninth grade at the Freshman Mixer committee meeting which got that class acclimated to the big school after the shelter of junior high school and had fallen in love for eternity shortly thereafter. Somehow Bart and Betsy savored providing the party favors, mugs, nostalgia paraphernalia and oldies but goodies songs such greying class reunions entailed. He had succeeded since Sam, who had never gone to any previous reunions, was curious about the old crowd and what had happened to them. Previously, alienated and estranged from his own family for many years, he refused to go “back home” in case he ran into anybody from the clan but after a final brief reconciliation shortly before his parents died after the fortieth class reunion he was as ease on that question.

The night of the reunion Sam ran into Melinda Loring, whom Sam had been after all through high school with no success. See Melinda, smart, pretty (and long and slender with well-turned legs and auburn hair as was his preference in those days) and ambitious would not give the “boggers” from the other side of town the time of day then. That turned out to be wrong, or the wrong reason that he got nowhere. As it turned out once they talked that reunion night she would not have given him the time of day since her hard-bitten Protestant parents would not allow her to date a Catholic boy, and she followed her parents’ wishes and in fact had agreed with that discussion. She knew that Sam was a Catholic having seen him coming out of the Sacred Heart church one Sunday morning on her way to her own church service. Sam back then had asked around, asked her friend John “Ducky” Drake who was her neighbor specifically, as guys and gals did back in the 1960s and maybe they still do to get “intelligence,” on the school grapevine network that was so up-to-date it would put the CIA and NSA to shame to see if she was “going steady” or had somebody’s class ring on a chain around her neck which amounted to the same thing. Ducky told him flat out that “boggers” need not apply. Final. As he was to find out shortly later that evening that reason was not true when Melinda told him the unsavory real reason, although Ducky, RIP, was not responsible for that error, in reality that “ice queen” demeanor Melinda put on in public back then was just a defense against an awful home life, worse than Sam’s in lots of ways but that hardy did him any good back then.

That night though perhaps having been through a few of life’s travails herself since then (she twice married and divorced twice with no children by her preference  that number two as Sam mentioned to Jimmy later seemed to be the fate of their generation, what he called the Generation of ’68 after the turbulent year that had a deep effect on many in their generation in the love department) Melinda and Sam struck up an interesting conversation. The pair in the process of some AARP-ten tips for meeting new plus sixties flirting while sitting at the bar, after more conversation seemingly having beside the two divorces apiece a lot in common, she an owner of a small high tech company and he owner of the town’s last remaining independent print shop (since sold to a large print imaging company once Sam realized that he could no longer keep up with the rapid changes in the industry and he was ready to retire in any case). They also had common musical interest since both had been smitten by the folk music revival minute that washed through the early 1960s after their high school days (particularly jug band music so esoteric a common interest that seemed to portent some “written in the stars” expectations) and kept their interests even after it then ebbed with the subsequent British invasion and the day of acid-etched rock, reading (historical novels), and movies (black and white film noir classics like Out Of The Past and The Big Sleep).  Both liked to travel although not too far and were emphatically not interested in getting married again (under something like the principle of “three strikes and you are out”).

So naturally based on these slender reeds they began what was a stormy if short affair. An affair that had Sam reeling behind the idea in his mind that 16 or 66 he could not do anything but sing the blues with women when the affair, or his part, began to unravel a couple of months later. Who knows how things began to turn down, to get Sam thinking he was “killing the blues” (a feeling that could work two ways, one while in the relationship when things got dicey and he was waiting for the ax to fall and the other when it was over whether of his doing or not, or of both when he would feel something like ennui).  Maybe it was when Melinda, who seemed to have been grasping for something in the relationship earlier that Sam, had their futures all mapped out unto the nth degree when they had only just began their affair (she hated that word, gave him more than his share of grief when he used it innocently to define what they had even after he had told her his sense of the term going back to ancient now abandoned Catholic mother sensibilities). She had them retiring to California, (Florida, Puerto Rico and Cancun were also in the mix as possibilities complete with well-researched brochures by here including costs about all those locations), had them living in her house until then, had them sharing expenses from the get-go, had trips in the meantime all planned out, stuff like that, woman stuff and not bad in itself but Sam was not even sure that he even liked Melinda all that much at that point, or enough to break up his own personal household such as it was. He just wanted to go slow, let things take their proper course. And maybe they would have if she had let up a bit.

All Sam knew, after the first few weeks of something like a welcome calmness in his life, when he finally came under the gun of Melinda’s “wants”’ he began getting a feeling a feeling that he had gotten before so it was not something that took him by surprise that he was “happy” whenever he left her house after a couple of days (she “refused” to stay at his apartment calling it small and dingy), but mixed in with that “happy” was the seemingly inevitable feeling that he was marking time, just killing the blues after a couple of months of calm before the storm. So as such things go at some point thereafter, after he got the “moving on” feeling he began a campaign to break up the relationship. Sent Melinda an unwise e-mail to that effect stating that he was not sure how he felt about her, about her plans and about what he wanted to do in the future. That slight questioning got him the “door.” She summarily wrote him off, wrote him out of her life. They had met at a restaurant one evening in Hingham to discuss the matter and the scene had been stormy with her walking out after he took offense at some remark that she made. As he watched from the parking lot as he headed to his own the rear lights of her car go off into the night Sam though now the “killing the blues” phase after losing her would set in. Set in for a long time since he had begun to doubt whether he had done the right thing, whether he didn’t have more feelings for her than he had expressed. 

Yeah, Jimmy thought to himself after hearing Sam’s sad tale old Sam never drew a blessed break with women.