Tale 16

It's Like a Family

(Y'know)

Bill sat in the pilot's seat of his crashed plane and said not a word for once.

They had survived another crazy trip through a Waring tale and were back on something like solid ground, as it seemed, and the relative quiet gave mj a false reassurance. The urge to dig for Waring gold possessed him again. What he needed was an opening.

Bill frowned: "The thing with Fred,” he said: “I have never seen it to this scope EVER. You could almost go down that whole band from the guys that I have met personally, that I know."

Mj objected: "But their drinking hasn't caused serious problems." He had to defend Fred one more pitiful time.

"Well the reason for that –..."

"They seem to function." Mj lorenzo actually defended the whole ripsnortin’ bacchanalia.

"...if you're in a touring band," Bill continued, "a Glenn Miller band, a Fred Waring band, it gets to be so automatic that they're playin' 'Night and Day' and they don't have to look at music."

He had an explanation for everything.

"Well, alright: Tom Waring was a saucer. Lumpy Brannum, 'Mister Greenjeans' on TV, bass player? He was a saucer. The whole rhythm section was a saucer: Poley; Ray Schroeder, who's a Christian Scientist now, was a legendary drinker."

Mj’s jaw dropped. Nobody had ever told him that holy Ray Schroeder was a big boozer, and the young drug and alcohol doctor had gotten around Monroe County in different ways in two years and knew some of the Waring ‘stars’ just as he knew many local yokels down the street. This one surprised him, ripping away at his fairy tale in a new way.

"Oh he was a big, big drinker. I'm tryin' to think of the others that I have met personally. Anyway: the whole BAND. But it's only these few old-timers that have managed to stay and function with Fred. A lot have left because they couldn't function. And I don't call it functioning in reality, but a lot of them have gotten off the sauce. They've mellowed."

They were grounded for the night, apparently. It was okay to reflect on the crazy trip for a few minutes. Bill seemed to be inviting reflection for once.

"When you go on the road," mj said, trying to understand pandemic alcoholism and epidemic intoxication-to-stupor the best he could, "you live with these people. You really get to see, –..."

"Sure you do," said Betty Ann. "That's why we sit and talk like this, because you live with them twenty four hours a day."

"...you see their ins and outs," observed mj, who with Betty Ann’s help now, finally, thought he might have found a way to explain away tragic reality and excuse the thousand and one alcoholic drunks, every last one, the entire light-of-the-world, God-fearing, quasi-Calvinist nation if need be.

"It's like a family," said earth mother, "y'know." She was back on mj’s side again, he felt, defending Fred and his sauced band, just as mj had known from the beginning she would do.

Mj felt comforted. He said, "I wouldn't know these things about my people at work, just working with them at the office nine to five." The whole glorious U.S.A. nation might easily be one big rum cake, in other words, and Fred's band just a tiny insignificant slice, yet the glorious nation functioned reasonably well, didn’t it? And the fairy tale Pennsylvanians did too, didn’t they? Maybe he needn’t be so upset. That was the drug and alcohol director’s new and brilliant theory. It made the epidemic of severe, plaster-faced alcoholism among the Pennsylvanians appear less awful and unusual and it made mj feel better, so it had to be a great theory.

"Right," she said. "You don't see them when they do these things. But you ride all day on the bus, you know if they have indigestion. And talk about the men, now Carol Pierce and Patti Beems were boozers. In fact Patti Beems died because of it."

"I know it," said Bill. "I met her in Hollywood."

"Ahhhw," Betty Ann grimaced, "she –."

"She was livin' with her mother,” Bill frowned, “an' she was drunk out of her mind all the while."

"Yeh!" Betty Ann shook her head and shuddered.

They had crashed now after all. Somehow they had really reached the actual ground finally, and wreckage and rum cake bodies lay littered around, individual chunks of a vast and glorious rum cake nation, a glorious country drained of spirit and self-confidence and soused with substance abuse.

"She died because of it?" mj asked in a daze.

"Yeh! It ate away her body. Awhh," Betty Ann made an awful face.

"Terrible," said Bill.

"Horrible," she recapped for the Cultural Collapse textbooks.

"Well, mj," said Bill, "I've got a good one for ya."

A good booze story? Was there such a thing any more?

"But," protested mj weakly, almost whining: "why is it like this?"

Why were so many people NOT helping him preserve his fairy tale?  

"Well, you'll see," Bill reassured the interviewer.

His little inconsequential question had to wait, like the fairy tale. Whose downed plane was it, anyway? Not mj lorenzo’s.

Painfully sober all at once, the performers in the corner were quiet as mice at a church funeral, a final good-bye funeral to a famous and beloved mouse confrere. Consequently, mj’s Fred as wine-god regained an ounce of leadership and managed to pull from his mousey funeral choir two last decently-sober lines of a song from abolition days, a bittersweet complaint against sobriety as enforced by a powerful authority: such as Fred Waring; or even the U.S. Constitution. The men were four-part:

I'd sell my shoooooes,

                  for a bot-tle of boooooze!

Women were in pleasant warbling unison.

I'd sell my souhhhhhhhl,

                   for some al-co-hohhhhhhhl

"It's like a family," said earth mother, "y'know....

Patti Beems died because of it."

Emmanuel Church rural cemetery in the tiny farm hamlet of Tusseyville, Pennsylvania

in Fred Waring’s hometown of Tyrone, one county (35 miles) from Tusseyville,

parents raised children, including Fred, on anti-drinking songs