AT 29 Read online

  By the end of the third week he could feel his body responding. He upped his runs to five miles. The sit-ups and pushups increased to twice a day. He was getting stronger and combined with his better diet, the fat that once encircled his waist, melted away. Apart from a few calls from Ellis, he had not spoken with another human being. He didn’t mind. The solitude allowed him to cope with his shame. He understood that parting with Cindy was in her best interest. His, too, as he accepted the truth that he’d used her. Because she loved him she ignored and even made excuses for his bad behavior. Because he disliked facing consequences, he kept her close and led her on. She was right. It was never love.

  He decided to add swimming to his routine. This meant returning to Liston, something he had carefully avoided since high school. He dreaded returning to the city with its unhappy memories, but he was on a quest to heal his spirit as well as his body. As he turned the Saab onto Liston Turnpike he debated whether to follow it to the end. If so, he would come out at Kendall Academy.

  Jimmy Buckman’s destiny changed with high school. He always expected to go to Chillingham High where the teams had won championships in football and basketball for four years running. He and his friends dreamt of continuing the school’s winning ways and reaping the glories it would bring. The dream was shattered when his mother announced that he must take the entrance exam for Kendall Academy in Liston. Until that moment Jimmy had never heard of Kendall Academy. He flatly refused. He knew he could not win, but he protested vigorously day after day until the morning of the exam when his father drove him to the school. Sitting together in the Kendall parking lot with the car ignition turned off, Jimmy made it clear that he would flunk the exam on purpose. This resulted in the only act of violence his father had ever shown. With a sharp whack to the back of Jimmy’s head the reply came quickly and firmly, “Do that and you’ll wish you hadn’t!” Jimmy passed.

  Disappointment proved severe that first day when he entered the aged confines of the school. To the unaware the name Kendall Academy might have summoned pictures of ivy-covered buildings in a tree-lined campus. Reality was precisely the opposite. The school was housed in a single, unattractive three-story building with turrets forming all four corners. The turrets were a reminder that the forbidding nineteenth century block-long edifice originally served as the city jail. On one side was a drab factory, spewing smoke and cinders from tall stacks that jutted into the skyline. At the rear, beyond a short parking area, was a long, high brick wall that secured the old jail’s perimeter from the Boston & Maine railroad tracks on the other side. Worst of all for Jimmy, was the school’s lone playing field to the left of the building. It was nothing more than a vacant lot with patches of weeds growing like islands in the midst of dusty, brown dirt. Rusting goal posts stood at either end.

  Inside was more depressing with dim corridors and dark stairs leading to classrooms on the upper floors. The dreary main hall was arrayed with yellowed class pictures dating as far back as 1910. It opened into a bandbox gymnasium that served as lunchroom, assembly hall and basketball court. On the second floor was the headmaster’s office and at the ends of each corridor were small circular rooms housed in the four corner turrets that once contained the sharpshooters who watched over the jail’s grounds. Jimmy felt like a prisoner that first day and for all the remaining days he spent at the school.

  Kendall Academy was a down on its luck Catholic school run by a religious order that had not seen a novitiate in ten years. The order was fast running out of manpower and money. The Aponius Brothers were a tiny teaching order that specialized in educating young men in need of discipline. Unlike prestigious private and military schools that catered to wealthy families, Kendall drew its young men from Liston’s five middle class neighborhoods and a few surrounding towns. At one time, early in the school’s history, boarding students were accepted, but that practice had long since ended. Rumors circulated among the students that a scandal involving a group of later to be defrocked Brothers, had been the cause, something hushed and unspeakable. The truth of these rumors would never be confirmed, but new students soon learned that there were some Brothers to be avoided. Exiting at Kendall Street and slowly driving by the school, one name, Bucinski, entered Jimmy’s thoughts, as he knew it must the moment he made the decision to return to Liston.

  The building was no longer a school and had been turned into apartments for the elderly. Now, it was called Kendall Manor. As he wound the car around to the back he was surprised to find the driveway freshly paved. He parked, turned off the motor and got out to look at the old field. It was landscaped with pathways winding among shrubs and small trees. Jimmy smiled, remembering that it was hard to believe he had practiced football on that field, often bruising and scraping his limbs on the hard ground festooned with hidden rocks. No sense walking into the gardens, he would not recognize anything from his school days. He looked over to where the locker room once stood, just off the field in a bunker-like building dug halfway below ground level. Like the main building, it was refurbished, almost attractive, but it was still a bunker. Not much can be done with a building originally designed to house prison armament.

  The bunker was also George’s home. His mind’s eye summoned a picture of Kendall’s lone custodian, short of stature and hunched from decades of manual labor. He lived alone in the bowels of the small building, but he spent little time there except late at night to sleep. Otherwise, he roamed the school, doing his best to keep things clean and in working order with the meager resources the Aponians provided. George paid no rent and took his meals with the Brothers. In return, he received a tiny cash payment whenever the Aponians could afford to pay him. No taxes taken, no Social Security, just a little money every few weeks. As the seasons faded one to another George watched every practice and attended every game of the four sports the school could afford to offer; football, basketball, track and baseball. A few students guessed that there was more to George than a good heart. They sensed wisdom that belied his circumstances. Jimmy was one.

  He stood beside the car, drinking in the memories. He wanted them to be different, to conjure up a flash of insight followed by peace. Isn’t that how bad memories are channeled? Bucinski cursed him anew. The rage remained.

  Eight

  Independents, like Blossom Records, pushed the envelope with new sounds. When its founder, Daisy Overton, left to get married for the first time, now on her fourth, her deep-pocketed father pulled his cash. After that nobody thought the label had a chance.

  - Alice Limoges

  Blossom Records was located in Millburn, New Jersey, one of several north central New Jersey communities that challenged the state’s reputation for grime, corruption and sprawl. Millburn was home to all manner of wealth, emanating from the thousands of New York City commuters who called the town home. Investment bankers, corporate moguls, actors, musicians, professional athletes and not a few idle rich could be found wandering the luxurious downtown shops that dotted Main Street. That a recording company could be found nestled among hundred year-old trees in a campus setting, nevertheless, surprised Miles McCabe.

  He had researched Blossom’s history, wanting to know why it was situated in Millburn, who founded it, and how it came to be in its sorry financial condition. He learned that it had been established ten years earlier by a wealthy father who doted on his only daughter. Thomas Overton had been married seven times, producing only one offspring from his third marriage to a violinist devoid of interest in anything other than his money and her concert career. She left him not long after their daughter, Daisy, was born. The subsequent divorce gave her five million and Thomas the sole possession of Daisy. He did his best to raise his daughter within the constraints of his real interest, making money.

  Thomas hired all the help he felt necessary to ensure that Daisy was given everything he could not personally provide, either as a man ill-prepared for the responsibility of a little girl, or an impossibly busy financier. Daisy grew up under the tutelage
of housekeepers, cooks, personal secretaries, private schools and the occasional interference of Thomas’ next four wives. By the time she was eighteen and had graduated from an exclusive New Hampshire school for underachieving girls, Daisy was skilled at two things, riding horses and riding men.

  Hefty contributions from Thomas gained Daisy admission to a succession of colleges from which she managed to quickly flunk out. When she was twenty-one she told him, “no more school” and settled in at the Millburn horse farm he had purchased originally for wife number six as a wedding present. Wives six and seven were long gone, but Daisy learned how to ride on the farm and she prevailed upon Thomas to keep it. She rode everyday and at night entertained rock star wannabes with her other charms.

  Thomas worried that his daughter was too young to merely idle her time away on the farm. He tried to interest her in the world of finance, first executing stock purchases under his direction and later, as his personal assistant. Both endeavors proved disastrous, and like the other seven women in his life, he soon looked for a way to put her at a distance. Daisy sensed that she had reached a limit with her father, so she made one last plea for support. Together with her latest beau, a lightly regarded singer who could handle a horse and Daisy with equal skill, she proposed a recording studio that would be the vehicle to make him a star. The studio would be built on the horse farm in Millburn. She took her plan to Thomas at his office on Wall Street and asked him to foot the bill pleading, “I’ll never ask you for anything again, Daddy!” Dubious, but hopeful, Thomas took out his checkbook and Blossom Records was born. A year later with dozens of unsuccessful recordings littering the landscape, Daisy grew tired of the singer who would never be a star and sent him packing. She had many others on the Manhattan music scene to taste.

  She spent the next year cruising the clubs, soon garnering a reputation as an easy touch for a recording contract as long as you could ride a horse and keep her warm at night. She wasn’t a complete failure at the business. A few of the singles and groups she found actually had talent. This was more luck than savvy on her part, because the first test always centered on looks. Lean, tall and handsome drew her interest, followed by some measure of musical affinity and a weekend at the farm to test horsemanship and sexual taste. Any man or boy, because there were some boys mixed in, who passed the ritual got a contract. Once signed, she turned the professional part of the relationship over to the experts her father had hired to protect his investment. She, however, made sure they understood the unwritten contract that entailed attention to her.

  In five years Blossom Records had twenty acts under contract. At any given time, between one and three of the contracts were minor moneymakers with the rest on the way out. She liked the number twenty and whenever one contract was allowed to expire, she quickly toured the clubs and found another lean, handsome replacement. Her father continued to make plenty of money and secretly needed the annual losses Daisy piled up to offset the part of his profits he couldn’t hide from the taxman offshore. He was content to let her have her way.

  However, when she was twenty-eight Daisy’s maternal clock suddenly kicked-in. All toys were replaced with an earnest search for a father to her children. Not conceived just yet, but ready to be hatched just as soon as the right horseman could be selected. She stopped going to clubs and traded her rocker’s wardrobe for a demure look. Then she hit the New York scene and its society pages like a whirlwind. Inside of six months she had her pick of men and selected the best looking horseman of the bunch. Blossom Records soon foundered, not because the business people Thomas had hired to keep it operating had failed, although it still was not profitable, rather, because he, too, lost interest. He loved his daughter and he loved his reputation in New York society equally. His time and attention were focused upon throwing the best wedding the city had seen in years. Daisy departed the farm and the company simultaneously as she turned her mind to marriage and babies. She moved into a chic apartment in the city to better supervise the wedding plans with her certain to be generous father.

  At twenty-nine Daisy was married and settled onto a sprawling estate in Bedford, New York. Thomas Overton decided upon other ways to lose money for tax purposes and by twisting a few arms, unloaded the Millburn farm and Blossom Records as a package deal to a friend’s venture capital firm, the one that Myra had joined.

  What to do with Blossom Records became the headache of Myra not long after she settled into her new office. Make it profitable then make it go away was the marching order. When she studied the financials she believed it was a lost cause, but she remembered the one subordinate who always delivered back in her corporate days. She’d kept in touch with Miles McCabe from time to time and saw how devastated he had been when she attended his wife’s funeral. Sometimes timing is perfect and she was heartened when he accepted the job. Whether he could fix things or not seemed less important than giving something challenging to a man who needed an outlet just then, a man who had always come through for her.

  After touring the facilities and meeting the employees, McCabe pored over Blossom’s financial records. As a company it wasn’t much. Certainly smaller than the last venture he had fixed and maybe a bit less complicated as well. Of the twenty contracts Daisy left behind, only one was profitable. A few others had contributed some revenue then declined, probably out of neglect. The rest had never delivered a penny. He was intrigued to discover four contracts involving non-U.S. citizens, two groups from England and two singles, a Canadian and an Australian. He separated the contracts into three groups; Jimmy Button who delivered a small amount of profit, six, including the four that intrigued him, and thirteen that merely dragged on Blossom’s cash. Then he read every contract, taking pages of notes, cataloguing names, dates, expenditures, and every other detail that might influence the decisions he intended to make.

  Over the next week, he studied his notes until they were committed to memory. He did not understand the music business so he read books and trade journals late into the night, trying simultaneously to get familiar with the industry while passing the lonely night hours without longing for his wife.

  When he felt he knew something about the industry and his own contracted performers, he stayed away from the office, remaining home for another week to listen to every recording that Blossom ever made. The vast majority had never been released. For each one he added more notes to his catalogue, charting sales figures with graphs to help him visualize. He played the songs over and over many times. After he’d heard enough he turned on his newly purchased stereo and tuned into all the AM and FM stations he could find. He listened carefully for music genres comparable to the styles of Blossom’s stable. He expected to hear some of Blossom’s songs played from time to time, but despite hour upon hour, he heard only one of his artists. Six different songs by the same singer, each played only once in seven days of listening, Jimmy Button. He wrote down the titles.

  When Miles returned to his office in Millburn he called his lawyers. All thirteen non-performing contracts were summarily broken with a curt letter sent by certified mail to the artists and their agents. It was a risky action. Music people talked. He knew his draconian act might result in Blossom being blacklisted. On this point all he could do was watch and wait. Next, he set about analyzing the remaining seven artists. He decided to retain the two English groups and the Australian and Canadian singles. He had no idea if something saleable could be culled from them, but his gut feeling told him to take a chance. The Australian, whose lone tape caught his ear, had a spectacular voice. He was puzzled that no recording by him had ever been released. He also elected to keep three Americans, two brothers who had been signed separately, but now performed together on the west coast and Jimmy Button, a steady, albeit unspectacular, moneymaker. Of all the songs Miles analyzed, only those from this artist and the mysterious Australian made him sit up and pay close attention. He picked up the phone and called Blossom’s Director of Operations, Cindy Crane.

  Nine

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p; The boy Jonathan Whitehurst left behind did, indeed, find prejudice and hardship during his early life in the regions of Apollo Bay. His surrogate parents accepted him with joy and provided him with a warm, albeit, spartan home on their farm high above the picturesque bay that was an occasional stopover for ships. Still, as he grew he took on the nappy hair of the native Aborigines in spite of his otherwise pale skin. This did not sit well with the locals who came to populate the region from England and other parts of Victoria.

  Those who now ruled the continent universally despised Australia’s native population, the rightful owners of the land. They refused to understand the peculiar customs of these odd and, by some accounts, unattractive people who stole their provisions and burned their homes. There was no accommodation between the two cultures except for nefarious trade in alcohol and the occasional gun. White settlers rooted the indigenous blacks out with vengeance, often attacking their remote encampments in the dark of night, killing all with no mercy and no conscience. These were sub-human people who could not be tamed and could not be brought into the arms of God. And, the deepest hatred was reserved for those few white men who communed with the Aborigines. The settlers’ memories of the murders of their women and children allowed for no interaction with any who had congenial contact with the enemy. In the youngster who mysteriously appeared on the farm of their neighbor, they saw unmistakable aboriginal intercourse.