Billy Muller – aka “Buzzy White,”
was wrapping up a shooting round with his M1 on Range Road, out of bullets but still in shooting position,
when he was approached by three guys he recognized from the base band. The two
white guys from Tennessee and black dude from Louisiana came up to him and one
of them says, “We heard youse from Atlantic City.”
“Yea, - I’m the Barrack’s concierge,”
Billy laughs, as he gets up from the prone position and dusts off his uniform
pants. "What do ya wanna know?"
“Well where the hell is McKee City?”
“Why? What’s in McKee City you want?"
“We want to see B.B. King, Booker T,
Johnny Winter and Little Richard,” they each say a different name.
“Get out!” Billy said, as he took a
poster out of the hand of one of the guys and looks at it closely. “Holy Shit!
This is fucking amazing,” he says in barrack talk.
Although he didn’t know their names
yet, he knew them from the base band, led by drill sergeant Leroy Brown, who enlisted
Billy in the band when he saw his Les Paul guitar in his locker. Billy didn’t
volunteer for the Army and didn’t volunteer for the base band, but he played,
played for each of the units as they were preparing to leave for deployment
overseas, mainly to Vietnam, and then they played for those who came back from
Vietnam, as they got off the plane. He knew these guys were from the south by
the way they talked, and the only thing they had in common with Billy was their mutual love of
music, especially the blues.
Later that day, early in the
evening, after a shower and change of uniform back at the barracks, the four
soldiers sat down at the bar of the Satellite Lounge in Wrightstown, just
outside the base. As little lights fluttered above their heads like twinkling
stars, Billy cuts a deal before the band started playing and its too loud to talk.
“What’s so secret about McKee City?”
the black guy asks, “we can’t find it on the map.”
“It’s a small town just across the
bay from Atlantic City, and down the Pike a bit,” Billy explains, “and it’s home
of the Atlantic City Race Track, where they race horses, and where the festival
will be at.”
At, is one of the local diction, it
isn’t where it is – it’s where it’s AT, as they say in South Jersey.
“I’ll tell you what,” Billy says. “If
you borrow Sergeant Brown’s car for the weekend, I’ll drive us down there and
bring us back Sunday night.”
“We got three day leaves, and
tickets,” says one of the white guys, “and you got nothing.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Billy says, “we
won’t need no tickets as we’re going in the back door, and when we get back, I’ll
get three days in the brig for going AWOL and then they’ll ship us all to
Vietnam, and this will be out last hurrah until we come home again.
They agreed, and when Sgt. Brown
handed Billy the keys, he didn’t realized Billy was going AWOL and didn’t have
a pass like the other guys, but he knew Billy liked going to Kentucky Avenue in
Atlantic City as they had talked about it before, and so he asked Billy to stop
by the Club Harlem and say hello to Chris Columbo, which Billy agreed to do.
They all piled into the old
Plymouth, chipped in for gas, and Billy drove through the back roads of the
Jersey Pine barrens, and stoped at Bond’s Halfway House on Route 70 for a cold one, before proceeding across the two lane
blacktop past the Hedger House and Buzby’s General Store in Chatsworth to New
Gretna and then down Route 9 to the Black Horse Pike.
Instead of following the lines of
cars entering the main gate to the Race Track and Clubhouse, Billy turns down a
small road that ran along the Race Track fence until he got to a small open
gate that led to the barns and horse corrals and pulled up to a small trailer.
He gets out and the other three watch him as he knocks on the trailer door and
turns around a smiles as if he is up to something.
A teenage girl in tight jeans opens
the door with a smile and gives Billy a hug and a kiss as he talks to her
softly.
“Sure,” she says, “park right there,
and your friends can sleep in the barn and you just jump that fence and walk
across the track to get to the stage.”
Just as Billy imagined it would happen.
The three soldiers put their
sleeping bags and back packs in the barn, where they stake out spaces from
themselves among some of the empty horse stalls, and then jump the fences and
head for the stage as Billy and the girl retreat into the trailer.
The Atlantic City Pop Festival – Day
One has begun.
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