by James Philip
What with one thing and another Washington DC had seemed a long, long way away from the states west of the Rockies until a few hours ago. What was going on in Washington DC tonight looked horribly like a coup d’état, and nobody in Sacramento believed – not for a moment – that any good was going to come out of that.
If the government fell the Union would probably splinter and no one in City Hall even wanted to contemplate what happened after that...
“What’s the latest?” Pat Brown demanded as his bodyguards rushed him inside the great neoclassical California State Capitol. Footsteps rang on the marble underfoot and echoed to the hallowed vaults of the great building.
“The President is alive,” a staffer blurted. Two-and-a-half thousand miles away from Washing DC there was a feeling of profound shock and disorientation. The Republic was quaking to its foundations. “General LeMay has assumed command of the Defense of Washington.”
Pat Brown almost missed a step.
The President was alive and Curtis LeMay was leading the fight back?
The Kennedy Administration had as good as blamed ‘old iron pants’ for the October War; the Navy had always blamed him. But if LeMay was still onside; what kind of coup d’état was actually going on in DC?
“What about elsewhere?”
“There are reports of power outages in San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego and of course, all across LA,” he was informed as the entourage traversed the State Capitol. Like most buildings of its age – it had been built between 1861 and 1874 to ape the Capitol in Washington – moving from one point to another within it was rarely a thing swiftly achieved due to its large ground footprint, its multiple floors and the relative paucity of elevators. “We have also received reports of scattered shootings and civil unrest but nothing local law enforcement can’t keep the lid on, sir.”
“Is the State National Guard playing ball?”
“Yes, sir. All Federal military forces in California have been placed on alert to assist the civil authorities and representatives of the services await your convenience in the ‘ready room’, sir.”
Pat Brown strode into the ‘ready room’, the big ground floor conference hall normally reserved for California State Senate Hearings and other major ‘Inquests’, which had been hurriedly cleared for the use of the state’s ‘Emergency Management Staff’ overnight. There were armed National Guardsmen at every door and State Troopers in the lobby. The Governor smiled sternly and nodded acquaintance at familiar faces.
“Any news on the shooting in Oakland?”
“Miss Sullivan is unhurt, sir. At her request she is being driven to Sacramento to report to you personally on the affair.”
Pat Brown absorbed this. In retrospect he regretted allowing his young staffer to take the lead in the ‘Braithwaite Shooting Affair’. Unfortunately, she had been the one who took the call from the Navy about Oakland PD’s lamentable handling of the killing of Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite and his wife in Sequoyah County. Thereafter, because she was such an obviously capable young woman she had run with the ball before anybody really knew what was going on. The kid’s initiative and, well, sheer chutzpah spoke well for her but he had already had strong words with his chief of staff - Miranda Sullivan’s boss – to insure the neither the girl, she was still only twenty-three for goodness sake, nor any other young staffer ever got themselves into such an exposed situation again.
On another day he would have been appalled by the apparently senseless killing of four FBI men in Berkeley; today that palled into insignificance in the perspective of the nightmare playing out in the streets of the nation’s capital.
“Keep Miss Sullivan away from the Press.”
“Yes, sir.”
Pat Brown turned to the grey, stiff man in nondescript infantry combat fatigues who had, at Al Rosellini’s suggestion, accompanied him back to Sacramento from Portland.
‘Whatever the Hell’s going on back East,’ the Governor of Washington State had observed, ‘my people and Governor Hatfield’s people have got the security situation pretty much tied down. We don’t have any large coherent Federal forces in either of our states.’ These days he discounted the massive Navy base at Bremerton across Puget Sound from Seattle because that had become the world’s largest ship graveyard in the last year. ‘If Colin is willing, maybe he should talk to his counterparts in California. If this thing goes bad, I mean...’
Colin was Major General Colin Powell Dempsey a veteran tanker who had fought through Tunisia, Sicily, France and the Ardennes with Patton before being invalided back to the United States in early 1945. He had been Al Rosellini’s state Emergency Disaster Management and Civil Defense Commissioner since the night of the October War. For most of that time he had also been Al Rosellini’s right hand man and military supremo. In Washington State and Oregon Dempsey was already very nearly a legend in his own lifetime; he was the man who had pacified Seattle and large areas of the Cascades before personally leading the assault on Bellingham. If there was ever to be – God forbid - such a thing as a West Coast confederacy, Colin Powell Dempsey would assuredly be the unyielding military rock upon which it would be built.
Everybody in the Sacramento State Capitol Building knew exactly who the man in the anonymous – without badges identification or rank – fatigues was when he removed his battered forage cap and looked around at his surroundings.
Standing a few feet away the commander of the California State National Guard had dressed as if for the parade ground, his chest laden with medal ribbons and his uniform immaculately pressed.
Major General Roderic Hill did not salute the other military man.
Dempsey eyed him up and down and stuck out his hand, which after a moment, the Adjutant General of the California Army State National Guard shook. Al Rosellini had warned him confidentially that a few months before the October War, Hill and Governor Brown had found themselves drawn into an imbroglio about secret ‘political’ files compiled by Hill’s predecessors in a three decade long ‘anti-communist’ campaign. Information in these files had been leaked to discredit – or support, depending upon the readers’ inclination – candidates mainly but not wholly opposed to Pat Brown, and Roderic Hill had stepped in and confiscated the offending archive of files, some nine bulging cabinets of documents, and taken them into ‘secure’ custody. Whereupon, a ferocious custody battle had ensured involving the FBI and the California State Attorney General Stanley Mosk. The affair had be blown up into something of a Californian cause celebre which had only been finally put to rest by Pat Brown’s re-election as Governor in the aftermath of the October War.
“Bad business at Bellingham,” Roderic Hill declared gruffly.
“Would have been even worse without the boys you sent me, General Hill,” Dempsey growled in return. A small cadre of veteran Guardsman from California had stiffened the ranks of the green assault force at Bellingham, many of the aircraft and helicopters deployed had been based in California, and without the technical support of Hill’s mechanics and gunners from the 40th California State National Guard Division, half Dempsey’s tanks would never have made it anywhere near the battlefront.
The two men exchanged wary, respectful looks and the tension filling the air between them slowly evaporated.
Pat Brown cleared his throat.
“I requested General Dempsey’s presence in Sacramento in the event it becomes necessary for your command,” he said addressing Roderic Hill, “to co-ordinate with the forces under state control in Oregon and Washington. General Dempsey has Governor Rossellini and Governor Hatfield’s leave to speak and act on their behalf in all military matters. General Dempsey has informed me in the most unequivocally terms that you are the senior officer in this matter and that he is in California in a purely advisory capacity.”
The feelings of his senior military commander assuaged the Governor of California began to go around the room demanding the latest reports.
Chapter 9
Tuesday 10th December 1963
&n
bsp; Van Nuys Police Station, Los Angeles
The weirdest thing was that when the cops had eventually turned up outside 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard – in time to watch the burning Troubadour club illuminate the unnatural darkness of the blacked out surrounding city streets – they had known exactly what had happened and who they were looking for. They had not been in the least interested in either of the two bikers bleeding on the ground in the parking lot, or in trying to discover what had actually transpired in the long minutes before their arrival.
Sam Brenckmann looked and felt like a character out of an old black and white horror movie. Except that the blood on his hands and liberally spattered over his shirt and pants was very much in Technicolor even in the blinding beams of the cops’ torches. Doug Weston did not look so good either; one of the cops had punched him in the solar plexus and kicked him as he rolled in the dirt trying to get his wind. That was just before the cops had pulled Sam off the big guy on the ground despite his protests – somewhat muted but no less impassioned notwithstanding the knees in his back and the sole of the boot crushing his face to the dusty tarmac of the parking lot - that somebody ought to be maintaining pressure on the wound in the whimpering biker’s guts before the ungrateful scumbag bled out.
‘What the fuck are you doing helping that bastard?’ Doug had demanded angrily after he had reloaded the twenty gauge double barrelled shotgun and discovered that Sam was obstructing his field of fire.
‘If you want to kill people, Doug,’ he had complained angrily, ‘join the fucking Army! These guys aren’t about to hurt anybody any time soon. Put that fucking gun down!’
The backlight of the flames of The Troubadour had lit had lit their faces with its infernal red-orange glow, and menace and despair etched in the shadows. The two men had met in the months before the October War and become unlikely friends for all that they had always known that their partnership would probably end messily. Sam had been a regular turn at The Ash Grove at 8162 Melrose Avenue long before he fell into Doug Weston’s eccentric orbit. The Ash Grove was the creation of Ed Pearl and reflected his tastes and temperament in exactly the same way The Troubadour mirrored those of its creator. Ed Pearl’s bag was eclectic but blues-based; Doug Weston’s ears were open for anything new, anything with ‘promise’. Ed Pearl was never worried about getting a piece of an artist, or of his or her ‘action’; Doug was terrified of missing out. Ed Pearl was a regular guy, a musician at heart who understood other musicians; Doug Weston was a would-be promoter, a different kind of character, very nearly a throwback to another age. If Doug had ever met an old-time showman and barnstormer like Phineas Taylor ‘P. T.’ Barnum - of the Barnum and Baily Circus fame – he would have encountered a true soul mate. ‘I am a showman by profession,’ Barnum once claimed, who defined his guiding light as ‘to put money in my own coffers’. Not that Doug Weston was any kind of evil Machiavelli. He was just a one off. Immensely tall, an irrepressible eccentric he had opened The Troubadour first as a sixty seat coffee house on La Cienaga Boulevard, and moved into the current venue – which could hold as many as four hundred people – in 1961. Until tonight Sam had regarded Doug, for all his faults and foibles, as one of the ‘good guys’ in ‘the business’ even though he was convinced he was a much bigger deal than he actually was.
Man to man he and Doug had hit it off from day one back in the old pre-war World; and when Sam, newly returned to LA from his and Judy’s nightmarish escape from Bellingham, the disease-ridden refugee camps of wintery British Columbia and the Hell-hole displaced persons cages in southern Washington State, had walked back through the door of The Troubadour in March he had been welcomed like the prodigal returned.
Sam discovered that in his six month absence from ‘the scene’ that Doug had been playing the demo of his song Brothers Across the Water, a rites of passage ballad about the last time he saw his eldest brother Walter before he headed west, to all and sundry. While he had been ‘away’ Sam had acquired, in Doug Weston a self-appointed, somewhat possessive ‘promoter’ in Los Angeles. A few weeks ago Doug had started talking to Columbia Records and until somebody had burned down The Troubadour, Sam’s star had briefly been ascendant.
All around the two men there had been coughing, distraught, injured and traumatised people who minutes before had been chilling out in the packed club. In the eerie firelight the survivors milled, collapsed, wept, chattered, puked and hugged each other. Smoke was billowing across the parking lot and across Santa Monica Boulevard as the cops and the ambulances started to arrive.
‘Stop waving that fucking thing around!’ Sam had yelled at Doug as he heard the sirens approaching. ‘You didn’t just shoot this guy!’
This had given his friend pause.
“You shot me too!”
‘Oh, shit! Sorry about that...’
‘Put the fucking gun down and help me put some pressure on this guy’s chest!’
Judging by where it hurt most Sam decided he probably had two or three pieces of buck shot in his right calf and foot, and maybe a couple more in his butt. Although his friend was grumpily contrite about shooting him, other than handing Sam a towel his heart was not really in stopping the wounded biker – a big fat unwashed example of the species – bleeding out. The towel was soaking, sodden wet by the time the LAPD dragged Sam and the club owner away.
The cops had all seemed very angry.
One of them had thrown a punch at Sam – a cheap shot which Mr and Mrs Brenckmann’s contrary third son had seen coming from a mile away and dodged – and bust his hand on the door post of the cruiser into which he and Doug had been unceremoniously bundled.
Without being processed at the front desk both men had been left to sweat – quite literally – in the darkened lock up at Van Nuys Police Station. Sam would have asked for first aid treatment if he had thought the cops were interested. Patently, they were not; and it was several hours before the lights came back on. After that things started to happen.
Doug Weston started yelling about ‘police brutality’ and reminding their captors that ‘there’s a fucking wounded man in here’. The other occupants of the lockup, exclusively it seemed, Latinos, had joined the complaints.
“Oh, fuck!” The first cop who came to check muttered when he discovered Sam was sitting in a small puddle of blood and presumably, looking every bit as bad as he was beginning to feel.
After that Sam’s recollections were a little hazy right up until the moment the LAPD doctor started extracting buckshot from his right buttock.
“Sorry, kid,” the greying, weary little man in the white coat apologised. “I thought you were still out. I gave you a lungful of gas a while back. The effects must be wearing off.”
The room was grubby, there were cracks in the plaster and the air stank of disinfectant and antiseptic, both taints stinging his eyes and the back of his mouth.
“What’s the time?” Sam asked, wincing.
“About five.”
The man on the table breathed a short-lived sigh of relief before the next stabbing spear of fire penetrated his nether regions. The probing around for miscellaneous pieces of lead proceeded. Only five in the morning. Judy would most likely still be asleep; and even if she had had trouble sleeping lately – the baby kicking always woke her up – it was too early for her to start worrying about his absence. He often did not get back until it was light and he had warned her he had a late-late spot at The Ash Grove after he finished at The Troubadour.
Doug Weston was beginning to get a little prissy about his continuing to play The Ash Grove, which was dumb because Ed Pearl was not the sort of guy who ‘poached’ another promoter’s artist. Besides, he had told Doug that much as he was grateful for the opportunities he had given him, ‘I don’t remember signing a contract that says I have to be a Troubadour monk!’ The Troubadour was a ‘happening place’ but it did not begin to match The Ash Grove as a melting pot where half-a-dozen traditions from the blues to folk met. In the last few months he had seen Miss
issippi John Hurt and Muddy Waters, Doc Watson and Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot on the stage of The Ash Grove, and one night a month ago he had spent two hours talking guitar technique – his was self-taught, sloppy and a little lazy – with a sixteen year old kid who had put him right on more things than he could remember. What was the kid’s name? Cooper? No, Ry Cooder...
“Ow!” He cried. If he had been a real man he would have bitten his lip and suffered in silence but he was way beyond that and if the last year had taught him anything, it was that ‘real men’ had only themselves to blame if they suffered in silence.
“Sorry, son.” There was a clink of metal on metal as the latest piece of buckshot was deposited in the silver kidney bowl at the side of the table. “I reckon that was the last one. That makes seven.”
This explained the oddly numb pain down his right leg.
And why he was lying face down on the table with his legs and his butt open to the wind.
“Is this still Van Nuys?”
“Yeah.”
Sam was still wearing his blood-stained shirt and nobody had cleaned the gore off his hands and forearms.
“You can wash in the bowl over there, son.” The doctor’s green eyes were dull, distant. “And get rid of that shirt.”
There was no hot water and Sam was shivering before he finished washing the worst of the blood off himself. The room was warm, clammy and he was shivering. Shock, maybe? A pair over oversize black slacks and a creased white shirt was dumped on the now cleaned table on which he had been ‘treated’ by a scowling, perspiring LAPD trooper.
Sam belatedly found his manners and turned to the doctor who was tidying away his instruments and re-ordering the first aid kit he had broken into to clean, suture and bandage his patient’s injuries.
“Thanks, doc. I appreciate this.”
To his surprise the older man grinned paternally.
“Don’t thank me, son. Just doing my duty.”