WLT

With Little Buddy laid up with laryngitis, Slim was out of work. Cottage Home cancelled their show, and Slim took to living a life that he and Buddy hadn’t sung about, staying out till 3 a.m., belting the grape and breathing hard on young women, and from the pals he found jamming in smoky clubs down around the switchyard, he formed a cowboy swing band called The Blue Moon Boys, which played the WLT Barn Dance on Saturday night—one song in the Sweetheart Chewing Gum segment, for $35, seven bucks per man, pretty pitiful. Slim tried to get a show of their own, telling Roy Jr. that their music was ten times better than the Cottage Home crap he’d done before, but unfortunately the public had liked that crap and didn’t care so much for his new songs, which were about roaming around and finding women.

Come with me, my pretty little miss,
Come with me, my honey.
Come with me, my pretty little miss,
And I will do your laundry.

How old are you, my pretty little miss,
How old are you, my honey?
How old are you, my pretty little miss?
I’ll be sixteen next Sunday.
I’ll be sixteen on Sunday.

Would you forsake your husband dear
Would you forsake your baby?
Would you go for a ride with me
And be my honey maybe?

Q. Why did Little Buddy leave WLT?

A. Buddy did not “leave” WLT. The little fellow suffered a sudden injury to his vocal cords that made singing painful and doctors advised that he take a long rest to avoid permanent damage. WLT fully concurred in the necessity of this, and will welcome Buddy back anytime the doctors allow it.

Q. Where is Buddy now?

A. Buddy lives with his daddy and mother and his baby brothers, and attends public school and church and is active in Boy Scouts. He misses his radio friends, but he is very busy and happy in the normal life of a 12-year-old boy.

Q. Will he ever return to the air?

A. Buddy’s future plans remain uncertain but it can safely be said that a talent as true as his will not go untapped for long.

Art never looked him in the eye anymore. Clare only spoke to him through Art (“Tell him to put the newspaper back the way he found it! I keep finding the comics pulled out. And tell him to leave the crossword alone”). Mother and Jodie never wrote to him, except a few paltry sentences every other month. Jodie always said that everything was fine and she was enjoying school and how are you, and Mother said that she was having one of her bad days and was thinking of him, poor kid. She only wrote on bad days, it seemed, and she wrote on scraps of cereal boxes, the backs of old envelopes, candy wrappers, as if her letters didn’t deserve their own paper.

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.

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.”)

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—

We’re just a couple of people
In the show business,
Doing a radio show,
But deep in our hearts
As we stand here singing,
There’s something that you folks don’t know.
We fell in love—there,
I’m glad that I said it—
And my love for another is gone.
Why can’t I break up this act I’ve been living?
Why must the show go on?

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.”

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.

The others all warbled about Home, Home and Mother, Mother Waiting at Home, The Wandering Boy Coming Home, I Wandered Away But Now I’m Going Back, There’s No Place Like Home, but Slim sang “Frankie and Johnny” about the lovers who swore to be true to each other and Johnny went out for the evening and Frankie went down to the corner to get her a bucket of beer and the bartender told her about Miss Nellie Bly and she took her big .44 and got in the cab and got off on South Clark Street and rang the big brass bell and went upstairs and looked over the transom and there he was, on the bed making love, and the gun went Rooty-toot-toot, and they rolled him over easy and carried him to the graveyard in a rubber-tired hearse and they threw her in a dungeon cell and threw the key away. He was her man but he done her wrong. It was as simple as that. You love somebody and they break your heart and you break theirs. It was a noble song.

’Twas the ninth day of October,
The sky it looked like lead,
And Old Number 9 left Fargo.
In an hour they’d all be dead.

Once she had been a fast engine,
But her day had come and gone,
And now she was only for short runs
To Minot and Jamestown.

Benny With kissed his wife and his babies,
And they wept as their dad went away,
And now he cut loose with the whistle
To sing them to sleep where they lay.

And they gave him his orders at Fargo,
Saying, “Benny, we’re way behind time,
You must get those empties to Minot,
It’s all up to Old Number 9.”

And Benny, he was the new man
And must prove himself to the rest,
And a good run might get him promoted,
This evening would be the big test.

If he came into Minot by morning,
He’d be put on the mighty Express
And his babies grow up in a nice house
And their lives would be crowned with success.

So he jumped on the green light and fired
The engine with bales of dry grass,
And he laid on the coals and in Erie
They’d ne’er seen a train move so fast.

Through Luverne and Sutton and Barlow,
Like a rocket whistled that train,
And her lights were a blur in the darkness
As she blazed cross Dakota’s broad plain.

And he turned and said to his fireman,
“Jack, we must put on more coal,”
And the screech of her whistle in Heimdal
Was the cry of the engineer’s soul.

And in Tyler, the long stretch of railroad
Suddenly curved by the town,
And Old Number 9 could not hold the tracks
And she jumped about half the way round.

And her whistle cried out in terror,
And her wheels on the track did scream,
And the men in the cab they prayed to God
And were scalded to death in the steam.

And the rain falls black as cinders
And the sky is dark as a grave,
And the children weep in the little white house,
The home of the engineer brave.

May God watch over their suffering souls
And guide them in love and light,
But never, no never, will they forget
Their daddy who died that night.