"Hey, Juliette's trying to get your attention." Pete Hayden touched Chad Silver's forearm and Chad turned his gaze to the door into the smoke-filled room and picked out of the haze the middle-aged, hefty woman with the red-and-blue streaked long hair who was poured into a red, frilly, rack-emphasizing blouse and a black skirt. The two men, blond Chad, nineteen, and the taller, heavier, darker, and slightly older hirsute Pete, were sitting on a platform on adjoining wooden stools, strumming guitars. Chad's tenor was soaring over Pete's bass in a Simon and Garfunkel song.
Chad managed an insincere smile as Juliette shuffled forward, stepped up on the platform, leaned down with a purposeful jiggle of her breasts against Chad's arm, and said, "You know how I invited you to do the improv thing with Sean and Inez at the CD Friday night?"
"Yeah, Juliette," Chad answered, then he raised his voice above the din of the crowd at the Cellar Door in Georgetown on an M and 34th Street corner just on the D.C. side of Key Bridge over into Rosslyn, Virginia. Not that much of anyone could hear him on a Tuesday night in May in 1965. This wasn't much of a music night at the Cellar Door during the week, even though the club was a well-known folk venue in the nation's capital. For most of these folks it was a source of beer at a younger age than you could buy it across the bridge in Virginia or even in Maryland on the other side of D.C. And they came here to ream out the establishment in high-flying words they were just learning in school.
Chad, a student of government, with a music minor, at the nearby George Washington University, by day could drink beer in D.C., but not in Virginia or Maryland until he was twenty-one. But he didn't come to the Cellar Door for the beer. He and a few of his "whatever makes you happy" friends were into the folk music scene. The Cellar Door was a venue for first-class folk groups on the weekends like Sonny and Cher, Ian and Sylvia, and Sean and Inez, and Chad came to rub shoulders with them and, sometimes, with a few of his friends from GWU, he sang backup for them.
He sang there with Pete too, who wasn't part of the college crowd. Pete was a bodybuilder high school dropout who worked as a waiter at the Orleans House restaurant across Key Bridge in Rosslyn, Virginia. The two had been brought together by the harmony match in their voices, and they now were roommates as well.
Juliette, the club manager with an apartment upstairs, put on a special act three or four times a year when she thought the crowd had turned over. In this act whatever professional talent that was on stage—more a platform at the end of a medium-sized room—asked if anyone wanted to come up and sing a few songs with them. Chad was among those trained musicians salted around in the room—other GWU students, like Chad—who would come up and do a slick job as backup for the artists. Occasionally, a tone-deaf drunk would also come up, but his or her isolated antics would be entertaining as well.
Chad, movie-star handsome, blond, and well-built, had become a favorite of forty-year-old Juliette, who was described by some as buxom and by others as hefty. To keep him on a leash, she let Chad in on this act if he was available. It was more than his clear tenor that prompted her to do this, though.
"You know that I invited you to do the act behind Sean and Inez Friday night. If you're interested, you could run transport for them as well. I know you have a car. They'd have to be picked up and taken back to the Iowa Jima Motel across the bridge by the Marine memorial. Maybe you'd like to do that for them. It would give you more time—private time—with them. They're cutting a record, you know. They may need backup instrumentalists for that. Pretty soon they'll be too big in the business for the likes of the CD."
"You know I'd kill to be able to drive them around," Chad said. "But why do I sense that there's an 'if' condition here?"
"No condition, of course," Juliette said, but by the way she leaned into him and put her hand on his hip, slipping her fingers up under the hem of his T-shirt, he knew better. "If you're finished with your set now for a while, maybe you'd like to come up to the apartment and smoke some shit with me before you have to go on again."
"I guess I could do that," Chad answered. And he guessed he knew what he had to do to get the driving assignment. He really did want to get close to Sean and Inez. They already had two records out. He'd worn the records out, playing them. If getting close to them meant letting Juliette wear him out . . .
Juliette, forty and hefty, not ugly but not so pretty either, an Amazon of a woman, insatiable and zaftig, with big tits and broad hips and puffy labia, wore the nineteen-year-old college sophomore out in her upstairs apartment.
They sat on a worn sofa in Juliette's small living room, Chad more or less reclining into a corner and Juliette sitting cross-legged, nearly hovering over him at the other end. The blond-wood, modern-style coffee table was pulled up close enough for her to reach the ashtray with the joint in it and the two beers, both of which she periodically took up, took a drag from, and passed to Chad for him to use as well.
They'd paused inside the door out to the landing, standing against each other long enough for Juliette to offer her lips for a kiss and for Chad to purposely miss and kiss her on the cheek. Her hands were busy during this awkward interlude, though, and she unbuttoned her blouse and let her pendulous breasts swing free. She took one of Chad's hands and moved it to her right breast, and, in feeling this up and pressing her nipple with his thumb, he did show some interest. Chad was an all-American boy; he couldn't resist big tits.
"It's hot in here. Let's get comfortable," she said, seemingly belatedly because she'd already freed her doggies. But she was referring to him and had pulled his T-shirt over his head before he was fully aware she was doing it. Her fingers went to his chest, and the two stood there on the stair landing, breathing heavily as they worked each other's nipples with their fingers.
Chad had fucked her before, so this wasn't exactly new ground they were covering. She wasn't pulling him into anything they hadn't done before. But, like before, she was the one doing the initiating. The impression that he was hot and bothered for this wasn't there. Juliette's hand slid down to his crotch, and that caused him to turn and walk over to the window, where there was a record player.
"You'd said downstairs that you'd received a new Sean and Inez recording from their manager—to listen to before they come on Friday," he said.
"Yes, it's there by the record player. You want to listen to it?"
