COVID Blues

By Howard Weiner

YOU'RE MAKING IT COME ALIVE!

Jolted from deep sleep by fireworks, Eli Koufax looks out the window and believes he sees this phrase on the Beacon Theatre marquee, across the street from his apartment where he recovered from a bout with COVID-19. This is the confirmation Eli needs as he's about to put together a supergroup of almost famous musicians for a tour in the thick of a global pandemic.

After months of New York City confinement, Eli enthusiastically embraces a road trip with his best friend, Larry, the lead guitarist of the new band. They are on a mission to spread healing vibes to music-starved fans in outdoor venues, and to raise funds for unemployed musicians who've been sidelined by COVID. However, Eli never could have imagined that this journey would give him a chance to rekindle a romance with a woman he was once engaged to. Suddenly, Eli is balancing managing a band storming toward fame and pursuing the love of his life. No matter how many COVID detours or roadblocks materialize, Eli's determined to fulfill his marquee prophecy: YOU'RE MAKING IT COME ALIVE!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Howard Weiner
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201271398

Book preview

COVID

BLUES

By

HOWARD F. WEINER

© 2022 Howard F. Weiner

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Kyle Bateman

Pencil Hill Publishing New York, New York

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to my friends at McGillicuddy’s, where I wrote most of this novel, and the town of New Paltz, New York, my shelter from the storm of COVID-19.

The musicians—how shall one begin to describe them? All this time they have been there, playing in a mad frenzy—all of this scene must be read, or said, or sung, to music. It is the music which makes it what it is; it is the music which changes the place from the rear room of a saloon in back of the yards to a fairy place, a wonderland, a little corner of the high mansions of the sky.

~ Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)

CONTENTS

ONE: ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

TWO: THE NEW KID IN TOWN

THREE: KNOCKING ON BOOZER’S DOOR

FOUR: PROS AND CONS OF A ROAD TRIP DURING

A PANDEMIC

FIVE: THE RED SHED SESSIONS

SIX: CHAMPAGNE DREAMS AND LLOYD DUPREE

SEVEN: CLAMS, JAMS, AND TWISTED FATE

EIGHT: VISIONS OF JULES

NINE: RESTLESS RETURN TO MANHATTAN

TEN: BAND ON THE RUN

ELEVEN: BAD MOON RISING

TWELVE: STUCK IN MEMPHIS WITH THE COVID BLUES

THIRTEEN: DIZZY WITH POSSIBILITIES

FOURTEEN: FORECAST CALLS FOR PAIN

FIFTEEN: DREAMS I’VE NEVER SEEN

SIXTEEN: IN THE LION’S DEN

SEVENTEEN: MAKING IT COME ALIVE

EIGHTEEN: I SHALL BE RELEASED

ONE

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

Walking through streets that are dead…A murder most foul…Groundhog Day blues…Sausage and asparagus…Just blame it on COVID…Larry Marcel’s vision and the birth of a musical crusade…

Since I moved to New York City at the dawn of the millennium, three tragedies have indelibly impacted my beloved metropolis in a seemingly congruent cycle—one disaster about every ten years, each decade defiled early on. On September 11, 2001, I was a few blocks away from the World Trade Center when United Airlines flight 175 accelerated into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Eleven years later, Hurricane Sandy pummeled New York City—scaffolding dangled from skyscrapers—storm surge flooded subways—electrical transformers exploded, knocking out power in Manhattan. The floodwaters came within one block of my Upper East Side basement apartment. These catastrophic events should have readied us for anything. But New Yorkers weren’t prepared to be at the epicenter of a global pandemic due to a coronavirus from Wuhan, China.

The first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the United States was reported in Seattle on January 20, 2020—too many twenties—an ominous omen. By March, the coronavirus blitzed New York City. My immune system had no answers for this unknown assailant. I was fifty years old, and this unmerciful virus preyed on the fifty-plus age demographic. On day five of my illness, I had intense body aches, as if Mike Tyson had been digging left hooks into my kidneys the night before. However, my lungs refused to cave in to COVID. I never suffered a hacking cough or shortness of breath. After enduring two weeks of fever, I won the battle—ill to healthy as if I flicked a switch.

Hospitals and morgues were stretched beyond capacity. In-person commerce and entertainment ceased to exist in The City That Never Sleeps. If you weren’t unemployed, you were working from home and the focus of your business and social interactions probably revolved around Zoom. I was the manager of a popular Grateful Dead cover band and a part-time insurance broker coasting on a customer base that I’d worked hard to obtain years earlier.

My name is Eli Koufax. I recently scored a spacious, one-bedroom loft across the street from the Beacon Theatre, where I enjoyed bachelor life until COVID-19 came to town. After I recovered from the coronavirus, my days were lonely yet glorious thanks to music, sweet music. I absorbed at least twelve hours of tunes a day. Most of my listening was through Koss Bluetooth headphones as I walked through streets that were dead. Terror reigned. Those brave enough to leave their apartments were obsessed with hand sanitizing and strict social distancing. With crazy hospitalization rates and death tolls on the rise, who could blame them? I had no fear because I had beaten the beast and believed I had the antibodies, at least to this strain of the virus.

I walked twelve miles a day in addition to working abs and chest with crunches and pushups. I cut back on booze and quit my modest weed habit. I lived on a diet of healthy salads, fruits, fish, and vitamins A through zinc. I found a way to enjoy this bizarre lockdown madness as I pranced around in my surgical mask listening to the Beatles, Dylan, Miles, Sly, Marley, Van, and of course, the Grateful Dead. However, a year after scoring my dream apartment across from a Manhattan musical shrine, the Beacon Theatre was silenced indefinitely, and the promise of coming attractions was absent from the iconic marquee.

Another essential joy absent from my life was sex. Once upon a time I was engaged, but like most of my affairs with women, I opted out. It always seemed to come down to two things; I was drawn to the promise of the next woman, and I didn’t want anyone or anything coming between me and my true love, music. I broke up with my latest girlfriend in February. And then COVID-19 swamped Manhattan. I wouldn’t be dating or socializing for the foreseeable future. I had to rethink my relationships with women. And soon enough, due to a heinous crime, all Americans would have to reexamine how they coexisted with each other.

On March 28, 2020, while I was still reeling from COVID fever, Bob Dylan released Murder Most Foul, an epic, seventeen-minute song reflecting on the assassination of JFK. It was a surprise to all, even Dylanologists who attempt to track and trace his every breath. Murder Most Foul is a moving composition, a timeless swirl of images, quotes, and song references emanating from various eras. Dylan seemed to be connecting the pieces to a larger puzzle, yet the assassination remains mysterious, and therefore, eternally compelling.

Most of Dylan’s new music since 2000 has arrived as if it were scheduled to help his fans make sense of inexplicable tragedy. His first album of the millennium, Love and Theft, was released on September 11, 2001. His 2012 album, Tempest, which was also released on September 11, arrived a month before Hurricane Sandy. Dylan delivered Murder Most Foul in the thick of a pandemic, and it became his first #1 hit (Like a Rolling Stone reached #2 in 1965). Unfortunately, the title would foretell a tragedy that would shock America as if it were that dark day in Dallas, November ’63, all over again.

George Floyd was murdered in a manner most foul by Minneapolis police on May 28, 2020. This cruel execution led to riots that started in Minneapolis and spread like wildfire, as contagious as COVID-19. The week the riots commenced, I watched CNN in disbelief as Philadelphians swarmed into a department store without regard for shattered glass all over the place on a splendid and sunny Sunday afternoon. They hauled away everything that wasn’t—and was—nailed down. It reminded me of that scene in Black Hawk Down when the citizens of Mogadishu surged towards the downed American helicopter. For a few days there were angry protests, but no riots in New York City. We had the best municipal police force in the world. Surely, they would protect businesses, especially in Manhattan. Or would they?

That Sunday night, it happened; the looting began in Midtown and Soho. New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio handcuffed the police instead of the looters. After a night of rioting, one would think that the NYPD would be prepared to shut this insanity down. But the next night was worse. Quarantined America looked on live as looters ransacked the flagship Macy’s store in Herald Square and the Best Buy on Fifth Avenue in the heart of Manhattan. I’d dated a lady who used to manage that Best Buy.

While condemning the riots, the mayor invited peaceful demonstrators to come down and exercise their right to protest in the thick of a pandemic. This defied logic when everything else was shut down. While I empathized with the outrage of the protesters, the riots in Manhattan were almost as disturbing as the deadly virus that brought the city to its knees.

Heartbroken after I watched enraged souls terrorize parts of Manhattan that I thought were untouchable, I called one of my oldest friends, Larry Marcel, the lead guitarist of the band I managed, Wall of Sound. Larry said he had an interesting project he needed to discuss with me and invited me to his house in Orangeburg, a thirty-minute drive from Manhattan. Since his wife and kids were at their Jersey Shore beach house, we could get together and barbeque.

The following day, as I opened the door of my Uber ride, I realized I was embarking on multiple firsts. Aside from this being my first prearranged, face-to-face social interaction in four months, it was my first escape from Manhattan, and the first time I’d been in a moving vehicle since the start of the pandemic. My parents were quarantining in their ranch home in Saugerties, New York, about two miles from the pink house where Bob Dylan and The Band recorded the music that eventually was released as the Basement Tapes. I spoke to one of my parents almost every day, but seeing them wasn’t an option. My only sibling, Ross, who was three years my junior, was laying low with his wife and four daughters in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Most of my friends and acquaintances in Manhattan were married or involved in relationships. Outside of acknowledging a few neighbors with nods, winks, fist bumps, or sparse conversation, all my social interactions were virtual. Thanks to music, loneliness that would drive most people crazy didn’t bother me too much. However, I felt like a prisoner retiring to my apartment every night by 8:00 p.m. After a glass of wine and two beers, I’d awaken to the same day all over again, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. This trip to see Larry was an absurdly thrilling development—although I could never have imagined that it would launch the wildest escapade of my life.

***

Eli! My little COVID Boy! You look healthy and fit. You must have dropped twenty pounds, said Larry.

Great to see you, I replied. I may have dropped ten pounds or so. But let’s talk about you. You’ve made the transition from Chef Ramsey to Jesus Christ. What’s with the shrubbery sprouting from your face? Toilet paper’s tough to find, but I’m sure you could score grooming products on Amazon. We laughed as we bumped clenched fists. I thrust my forearm towards his and we held that contact for an entire two seconds—anything but the dreaded handshake or hug.

Trudy’s digging my new look, said Larry. I stopped shaving for a month. My wife encouraged this facial shrubbery. Let me get you a chilled Sam Adams summer ale. I’m slow-cooking sausages on the grill, and I’m gonna sauté asparagus in olive oil and season it with a touch of black pepper. You like asparagus?

"I dig asparagus, but not the strange smell of my piss after eating it. And any fruit, nut, or vegetable that starts with the letter A is usually a healthy and tasty treat: apricots, apples, almonds, artichokes, avocados, asparagus. In appearance, that’s quite a phallic combination, sausage and asparagus. The words share similar letters, and they sound like they belong together. Sausage and asparagus. It reminds me of a song from the ’60s: This is the dawning of the age of sausage and asparagus…asparagus…aspar-a-gussss!"

My little COVID Boy! roared Larry. Always finding the musical ring in every little thing.

Lar, this is sweet, socializing without a mask on. And thanks for checking in on me as often as you did when I was ill. Luckily, my breathing was good, and I rode out the fever. There’s no way I was going anywhere near a hospital overflowing with patients on ventilators.

Scary, sighed Larry. His eyes shut as he channeled the pain he was feeling through his fingers as if he were bending guitar strings. Trudy’s sister had a rough battle with the coronavirus, still recovering. And in our neighborhood, we know of three parents who died. Thank God everyone in the Wall of Sound family is healthy.

Thank God. I’ve been in touch with them as well.

Larry popped up to maneuver food in the pan and on the grill. A few minutes later, he returned with fresh summer ales and a plate of sausage and asparagus. There was a knife stuck in the middle of the steaming, horseshoe-shaped sausage.

I shook my head in admiration and proclaimed, Beautiful plating, chef. We devoured the succulent entree and gazed out into the cloudy Orangeburg sky as twilight faded. A Miles Davis mix streamed through a Bose speaker resting on the porch fence. It was hot and humid, but after three months of nighttime isolation, this was paradise.

A sharp lightning strike was followed by a rumbling in the sky. As if this was the cue Larry was waiting for, he said, Eli, I’ve been pondering and thinking about my musical future. I can’t carry on playing the role of pre-1975 Jerry Garcia anymore. I love the music of the Grateful Dead, but I need a change. The pupils of his blue eyes seemed to double as he waited for my response.

That’s what you wanted to discuss? I said. All right. Do you want to expand the band’s repertoire? Perhaps add some of the Dead’s latter-day anthems, like ‘Shakedown Street,’ ‘Terrapin Station,’ and ‘Franklin’s Tower’? We could rework the structure of the shows.

Eli, my guy, it runs deeper than that, said Larry as he tugged on his beard like a new age philosopher. "I felt as if I was going through the motions on our last run through Pennsylvania and Upstate New York last summer. It’s all too predictable. The crowd is the same every night, supportive and overenthusiastic. They look the same and they smell the same—aging hippies in love with live shows and passing their culture on. I once thrived on being in the moment and recreating the Grateful Dead experience. But now I can feel the trap of unconditional love from the audience. I can do no wrong in their eyes. Everybody’s looking at me and I’m giving them what they want. It’s not what I want."

Wow! I howled. You were ripping on that last tour, better than ever. You fooled me. But what does this mean for Wall of Sound? You just want to walk away? We’ve built a slam dunk moneymaker. Do the guys know?

I’ve only discussed this with Trudy, but I’m done with Wall of Sound, said Larry as he rose out of his rocking chair and stretched his sinewy, six-foot-two-inch frame. His face may have looked like Hell’s Kitchen TV star Chef Gordon Ramsey, but the rest of his being screamed aging hippie matinee idol.

This is heavy, Lar. Are you serious? We had a great thing going until COVID wrecked the spring tour and put plans on eternal pause. What are you thinking? What’s your next move?

I have a vision, said Larry as he reassured me with a knowing smile. We’ll rise to glory through this gloom. I need you to help me put together a band that speaks to the times through our past musical heritage. Let’s find some like-minded cats who love music more than life itself. Inspired singers and skilled players who will mesh.

Do you plan on asking any of the Wall of Sound guys to join this project?

No way, said Larry. I need to hear fresh phrasing and develop new musical conversations without the built-in familiarity of Wall of Sound. I love those guys, and I’m sure you can find them another devotee of the Garcia school of jamming to replace me.

I’ll help, Lar, but how do we break this to them?

To quote Otis Redding, I’ll ‘try a little tenderness.’ Larry chuckled and continued, I know it’ll be a shock. I’ll assure them it has nothing in any way to do with them. I just need to move on.

I replied, So you’re going to give them the old ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ routine made famous by George Costanza?

You’re damn right it’s me! howled Larry. And I’m sure they’ll also understand how COVID-19 has changed everything.

I nodded my head. ‘Blame it on COVID’ will become the number one excuse in America, replacing the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ routine. Any business running behind on an order or delivery can blame it on COVID and get away with it. It’s a failproof excuse. Your package is late because of a COVID shutdown in the factory… We no longer provide those services due to coronavirus concerns… I can’t make it into work today because I’m a COVID long-hauler with reoccurring symptoms.

Ah, my little COVID Boy, that’s why we have to get this project going, said Larry as he reached for a joint, fired it up, and inhaled deeply. He offered me the joint. I threw my hands in the air and said, No weed for me anymore—COVID.

Laughing and coughing through a plume of slowly spreading smoke, Larry said, "That’s a shame, this is primo happy/mellow bud. It wipes away troubles and woes, and in a more holistic way, that’s what I want this new band to be about. An escape to simpler times,