"Howard Waldrop - Flying Saucer Rock & Roll" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

something. But this was like, you know, the sharecropper hour or
something, and all they were playing was whiny cotton-choppin' work
blues from some damn Alabama singer who had died in 1932, for God's
sake.

Disgusted, Leroy turned off the radio.

His sister and her boyfriend had quit for a while, so it was quieter in
the place. Leroy lit a cigarette and thought of getting out of here as soon
as he could.

I mean, Bobby and the Bombers had a record, a real big-hole forty-five
on WhamJam. It wasn't selling worth shit from ail Leroy heard, but that
didn't matter. It was a record, and it was real, it wasn't just singing under
some street lamp. Slim said they'd played it once on WABC, on the
Hit-or-Flop show, and it was a flop, but people heard it. Rumor was the
Bombers had gotten sixty-five dollars and a contract for the session.
They'd had a couple of gigs at dances and such, when the regular band
took a break. They sure as hell couldn't be making any money, or they
wouldn't be singing against the Kool-Tones for free kicks.

But they had a record out, and they were working.

If only the Kool-Tones got work, got a record, went on tour. Leroy was
just twelve, but he knew how hard they were working on their music.
They'd practice on street corners, on the stoop, just walking, getting the
notes down right—the moves, the facial expressions of all the groups
they'd seen in movies and on Slim's mother's TV.

There were so many places to be out there. There was a real world with
people in it who weren't punching somebody for berries, or stealing the
welfare and stuff. Just someplace open, someplace away from everything
else.

He flipped on the flashlight beside his cot, pulled it under the covers
with him, and opened his favorite book. It was Edward J. Ruppelt's Report
on Unidentified Flying Objects. His big brother John William, whom he
had never seen, sent it to him from his Army post in California as soon as
he found Leroy had run away and was living with his sister. John William
also sent his sister part of his allotment every month.

Leroy had read the book again and again. He knew it by heart already.
He couldn't get a library card under his own name because the state might
trace him that way. (They'd already been around asking his sister about
him. She lied. But she too had run away from a foster home as soon as she
was old enough, so they hadn't believed her and would be back.) So he'd
had to boost all his books. Sometimes it took days, and newsstand people
got mighty suspicious when you were black and hung around for a long
time, waiting for the chance to kipe stuff. Usually they gave you the hairy
eyeball until you went away.