The Teddy Bear Habit

by James Lincoln Collier

  According to Pop, that’s the way it always is in Bohemian sections. Anyplace you find artists, you find the screwballs. A lot of cities have Bohemian sections, but Greenwich Village is the most famous of them. I’m not saying that just to brag about where I live. It’s really true. Pop and I live on West Fourth Street, a few doors west of Sixth Avenue. Greenwich Village is a mixed-up place. Some of the streets are very fancy, with trees along the sidewalks and classy buildings. Other parts are slummy: bags of garbage in the streets, bums loitering around, tattered signs in the candy-store windows. Our neighborhood is in-between. The buildings are all five or six stories high and made of brick that was dirty when Washington was president and haven’t gotten any cleaner since. Some of the stores along the street sell handmade jewelry and expensive sweaters and baskets and all that junk to the tourists who come down to the Village to see the beatniks. But there are regular stores, too: a grocery and a delicatessen and a meat market and a candy store. Of course over on Sixth Avenue there’s a supermarket and a Rexall and a dime store. Pop and I usually go out on Saturday mornings to stock up for the week. We go to the supermarket for hamburger and spaghetti, which are a regular feature of our meals, and then around to the Rexall for toothpaste and Pop’s pipe tobacco, and then to the shoe store or the dime store or whatever. Then we stop at Crespino’s, a lunch counter up the street from us, and I get an egg cream while Pop has coffee and reads the paper.

  We live on the fourth floor. There’s no elevator; you walk up. Pop says don’t complain, the exercise is good for you, but I notice that when he wants a newspaper or something he sends me down for it.

  Our apartment has three rooms: a small bedroom for me, where I have a table to do my homework on, a kitchen, and a living room with a daybed for Pop to sleep on. Actually it’s not so crowded as it sounds. The living room is pretty good-sized. Pop uses about half of it for his easel and his drawing table and his taboret and the rest of the stuff he needs for his work. That half of the room is a mess most of the time. Pop is pretty sloppy in general, and he’s especially sloppy with his painting stuff. Half the caps to his tubes of paint are missing, and his brushes are just as likely to be rolling around on the floor as on the taboret.

  The other half of the room is our living room. We have a terrific hi-fi and almost two hundred records. I know, because I counted them once when I was home sick, lying on Pop’s daybed. Then there are pictures. Man, do we have pictures. They cover practically the whole walls. There are some big ones that Pop painted, and some little ones by famous artists I never heard of. There’s a charcoal drawing of my mother Pop made a long time ago. There are some copies of Old Masters, and there are one or two by friends of Pop’s hidden away in dark corners. Pop is what you call an action painter. An action painter doesn’t paint pictures of things. He paints the inside of his soul. Sometimes an action painter will lie his canvas down on the floor and drip paint on it straight out of the tube. Or he leans the canvas up against a wall and flings blobs of paint at it with his hands. I heard of one guy who put paint on the wheels of a kid’s tricycle and rode around on the canvas. Pop has a lot of different things he does, but the main way he makes his pictures is to flip paint onto the canvas with a spoon, the way you shoot peas at kids in the school cafeteria when nobody is looking.

  Except that Pop expects people to look—someday. “You might just as well face it now, Georgie, nobody gives a hoot about you until you’re dead. Look at Jackson Pollock.

  So I said, “Who wants to look at Jackson Pollock if he’s dead?”

  Which was a mistake, because Pop said, “Okay wise guy, just for that remark, you get to spend the afternoon looking at some Pollocks.” So we had to go up to the Modern Museum and look at a lot of stuff, which wasn’t any different from what we had at home. Although I got even in the end. Pop took me to the museum cafeteria, and I ordered a fancy banana split, which cost a buck.

  I hate to say it about my own pop, but frankly, I think the whole thing is a lot of baloney. Sure, a lot of the pictures are colorful, and if you squint your eyes right you can sometimes make out curse words, but the pictures don’t give me a feeling or anything. I mean what the heck, what kind of a grown man goes around snapping paint with a spoon?

  Actually, Pop is an action painter only a small part of the time. The rest of the time he’s a comic-book artist. He makes up the stories, too. He works for Smash Comics. Sometimes he has to go up to Smash Comics offices and work there, but most of the time he works at home. He has three or four different comics that he works on, but his main one is Amorpho Man. Amorpho Man is really scientist Scott Fletcher. Scott Fletcher has the ability to turn himself into “a thick, viscuous material,” sort of like molasses. The material has a special property that allows it to flow under doors, or up walls, or to seep through the ground into some caves where a lot of guys with eyes on the ends of their tentacles are plotting to destroy the planet Earth. When Amorpho Man flows over them, they get stuck in him, and he can flow them up to the National Guard or the cops or something.

  The one of Pop’s comics I like best, though, is his new one called Garbage Man. Garbage Man is really “mild-mannered Rick Martin, copywriter for an important advertising firm.” Mostly, Rick Martin goes humming around in this cool Jaguar, making out with girls and working for his advertising agency, but when trouble impends he turns into Garbage Man, and his Jaguar turns into his trusty Garbage Truck. Garbage Man’s superpower is his smell. He can beam a terrible smell in any direction he wants. It melts through walls, and it can stun people or temporarily blind them, depending on how big a shot of it Garbage Man gives them. Pop has done only a couple of issues of Garbage Man, but he thinks it might really go. I hope it does. I wouldn’t mind being rich.

  You would think that being an artist and living in Greenwich Village would make Pop very hip, but he isn’t. The truth is, he’s square, just like everybody else’s old man. In fact he’s worse, because as he says, “I’m trying to be a mother to you, too, Georgie.” You might think that having a father for a mother would be pretty cool, but it isn’t. For one thing, instead of saying, “I’m going to tell your father what you did,” he already knows and takes it off your allowance. For another, if you have a father and mother who are two different people, the father can stick up for you. You know, he can say, “Leave the boy alone, Martha, he doesn’t need to wear his raincoat,” or whatever it is. I haven’t got anyone to say “leave the boy alone, Martha.” All I get is, “Don’t forget to put on your raincoat,” and “Did you finish your report?” and “Did you pick up your room?” Can you imagine what it’s like to have your father take you to the dentist?

  There’s one more thing. Pop doesn’t really make it as a mother. Sometimes he just forgets he’s supposed to be a mother. For example, about half the mornings he gets up and scrambles me some eggs and tells me to clean under my fingernails and do I have my lunch money and all that jazz.

  The other half of the mornings he just lies in bed and shouts out that it’s late and for me to fix myself a bowl of Cocoa Puffs. Or I’ll tell him two weeks ahead that I need to have sneakers and gym pants by the 24th; and when I remind him again on the 23rd hell start bawling me out and hollering that I have to remember not to wait until the last minute to tell him these things.

  But having a father for a mother has its good parts, too. He isn’t always around bugging me about something, the way mothers do. A lot of the time he has to go up to Smash Comics, or see about some other business. Sometimes in the evenings he likes to go out to Florio’s with one of his friends and have a beer. One way or another, he has to leave me on my own a lot. I have my own key to the apartment.

  He was out when I got home from the Winnie the Pooh audition. There was a note on the kitchen table under the salt shaker, and under the note a dollar bill, just as I’d hoped. The note said, “George, back later, get some lunch at Crespino’s.”

  I was just as glad Pop wasn’t home. I was feeling pretty lousy about goofing up t
he audition, and I didn’t much feel like answering a lot of questions. It wasn’t that I minded not getting a part in the musical. That was always a long shot. I just hated thinking that I’d fallen to pieces again. I hated myself for being a loser.

  I went into my room, took the teddy out of the bag, flung it up in the air, and punched it like a handball. He bounced off the wall and landed on my bed. I felt bad that I’d hit it; so I looked around to see if anyone was looking, which of course they weren’t, and then I picked up the teddy and hugged it to make up for hitting it. That made me feel stupid. Finally, I shut the teddy in the top drawer of my bureau where I wasn’t likely to hit it or hug it either way. Then I took off my good clothes and hung them up, and put on some dungarees and my dirty sneakers.

  But I didn’t go out to Crespino’s for lunch. I needed that dollar bill for something else. It was going on toward two o’clock. It was getting late. I made myself a sandwich out of some leftover baked beans and ketchup, jammed the dollar into my hip pocket, and got out of there.

  I was already a little bit late. Not that it mattered. Wiggsy wasn’t much for being on time. Still, the truth is that he scared me a little, and I didn’t like to get him mad. I peeled across Sixth Avenue against the light and down West Fourth. It was a warm day. There were a lot of people lazing up and down the sidewalk, the men with their jackets hung over one shoulder, the girls with their sweaters open. The tops on the sports cars were down, and the motorcycle cowboys lounging around on their bikes had stripped off their leather jackets and were down to their t-shirts.

  When I got to Washington Square Park, I turned down MacDougal Street. MacDougal Street is more or less the hippest part of the Village. You practically don’t see anybody there but beatniks with beards, the motorcycle cowboys, and the weirdos and nuts. MacDougal Street is mainly bars and coffeehouses and some little theaters and a few shops selling sandals and homemade jewelry. West Third Street runs off MacDougal; just a couple of doors down there is a shop called Wiggsy’s Wig-Wam.

  Wiggsy is a fantastic guitar player, but he really doesn’t play very much anymore. His main business is running his store. He sells guitars and folk records and sheet music and picks and strings and junk like that. I was taking lessons in how to play rock and roll on the guitar.

  I wasn’t supposed to be there. Number one, Pop didn’t like me hanging around with beatniks; they were a bad influence. Number two, Pop didn’t like rock and roll. That was why I was studying voice with Mr. Smythe-Jones every Wednesday afternoon. The idea was to expose me to finer kinds of music. Pop had taken the fact that I had a good voice as an omen, because it saved him buying me an instrument. Number three, Pop didn’t like me hanging around MacDougal Street. I guess he was afraid I’d start taking dope. He was wrong, though: nobody had ever offered me any.

  Taken altogether, I could have got into a lot of trouble for taking lessons from Wiggsy, but I figured it was worth the risk. Wiggsy said that with my voice I was going to be a big star in a few years. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, he said, I was going to be on television half the time and be chased around by autograph fans the other half.

  Of course Wiggsy could just be saying that to get my two bucks every week. That was the deal: a buck a week for the lesson, and a buck a week for the secondhand guitar he was selling me. It wasn’t easy raising two bucks a week without Pop knowing it. My allowance covered part of it. Another part I saved out of my lunch money by giving up desserts. I could pretty much count on Pop leaving me a dollar a week to eat at Crespino’s sometime. If I got short, I borrowed from my buddy Stanky or sold something to one of the kids at school.

  The trouble was that I didn’t exactly trust Wiggsy. He was a good teacher and nice and all that, but he was charging me fifty dollars for the secondhand guitar he was selling me. At a dollar a week it was going to take me almost a year to pay it off. In the meantime, Wiggsy wouldn’t let me take it home.

  “Suppose you break it, babe?” he said. “Better to leave it with Wiggsy.”

  But how did I know the guitar was worth fifty dollars? How did I know the price for the guitar lessons was right? That’s the trouble with being a kid: you don’t know how to find out.

  But I thought about the chance of being rich and famous, and I didn’t ask any questions. Man, I lay awake nights thinking about it. Thinking about having a pile of loot and a Gretsch guitar and a bunch of cars scattered around hither and yon. I figured I’d have a G.T.O. uptown and a Jaguar parked in the Village, and a T-bird someplace else, so I could have a fresh car anytime I wanted. And then there’d be Life photographers hanging around all the time, asking me how I got successful, and Dave Clark calling me buddy and all that. I’d buy Pop a couple of ten-thousand-dollar Jackson Pollock paintings just to show him I wasn’t stuck up or anything, and still liked him.

  When I went in, there was another fellow there with Wiggsy. Wiggsy does most of his business at night, when the folk singers and tourists and such are around. That’s why he can give lessons in the afternoons. Wiggsy’s shop is pretty small. There are music and record racks along the walls, a few guitars hanging up, and a glass counter down at the back where Wiggsy sits on a high stool. The three of us pretty much filled the shop up.

  Wiggsy takes up a lot of room, anyway. He’s fat. The truth is, he’s very fat. He has an enormous belly and a big black beard and he dresses very cool: blue jeans and sandals and various weird kinds of shirts, and maybe a Chinese hat or an Egyptian fez or something on his head. This day he was wearing a fez and a red silk shirt with a big dragon woven into the front, which spread over most of Wiggsy’s huge belly.

  “You’re late, babe,” he said when I came in. He looked at his watch. “I ain’t got time now.”

  I could tell that it was just an excuse to get rid of me so he could talk to the man. “Gee, I’m sorry,” I said, trying to think of an explanation. I leaned back against the music racks in a casual way, and crossed my arms. “I had to audition for a Broadway show this morning and I got held up.

  Wiggsy said, “Ummm. You puttin’ me on, babe?”

  “It’s true,” I said. The music rack was beginning to dig into my back, but I’d gotten everybody’s attention, and I didn’t want to spoil my casual pose. “It’s a musical comedy about Winnie the Pooh, and they need a bunch of kids.”

  Wiggsy leaned over the glass display counter full of guitar strings and picks. He took a cigarette out of his beard, where he usually kept some and said, “How’d you make out?”

  I wasn’t about to tell the truth; on the other hand I didn’t want to tell a straight lie. “Well, it’s hard to tell if they like you or not.” The music rack felt like it had cut clear through to my backbone, but I’d got the casual pose just right and I hated to give it up. “There wasn’t much chance I’d get any of the big parts,” I said, feeling behind my back to see if I was actually bleeding. “I haven’t had too much experience. Right from the beginning Mr. Smythe-Jones said that the most I could hope for was a part as one of Rabbit’s Friends and Relations.”

  I was pleased with the way I had done it. I hadn’t exactly told the truth, but I hadn’t told a real lie, either. In the end, it left me looking successful but modest. It isn’t often that you can hit it right down the middle like that.

  Wiggsy’s pal had a little brown mustache and a Florida suntan he’d gotten from a sunlamp at the YMCA. He was wearing a tweedy gray sports jacket with leather buttons and a pair of black loafers. He looked pretty sharp. He was music biz, I was pretty sure. Between hanging around Wiggsy’s and going up to Mr. Smythe-Jones’s studio on Fifty-sixth Street behind Carnegie Hall I got so I could tell people from the music business. This guy looked like he might be a songwriter or a disc jockey or something like that.

  He gave me a look. “Exactly what experience have you had, fella?” He leaned back against Wiggsy’s glass counter in a pose that had me out-casualed. Then he dealt a gold cigarette lighter out of his pocket like a magician pulling a card out of his slee
ve. Man, was he smooth. He lit Wiggsy’s cigarette without even looking at him, and then the lighter disappeared like magic.

  “My experience?” I said.

  “Yeah. You said you hadn’t had much experience. That means you just have had some, eh fella?”

  It just goes to show that you ought to practice your lies at home before you show them off in public. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to backtrack in front of anyone who could flip a cigarette lighter around like that, but on the other hand I didn’t want to get caught in a bigger lie, either. To give me time to think of something, I stalled by undoing my belt buckle and doing it up again as if it were too tight or too loose, and then I said, “Well, you know, it isn’t much. Mostly these recitals Mr. Smythe-Jones puts on for the parents and stuff.”

  It sounded flat and not very impressive at all. I remembered that one of Mr. Smythe-Jones’ older students had once gone on a radio show called “The Young People’s Concerts.” It wasn’t hard to remember. Mr. Smythe-Jones had gone around for weeks afterward saying, “Brilliant young singer on "The Young People’s Concerts" the other day, one of my students, don’t chew know.” I tried to slip my hand in behind my back to ease the pain.

  “We used to do "The Young Peoples Concerts" sometimes,” I said. That sounded too impressive. “I mean we did it a couple of times.” Music Biz looked amused. “How many times, fella? Twice? Once?”

  I decided to tell the smallest possible lie. “Well, once,” I said.

  “I thought it was probably something like that,” he said. “What did you sing?”

  For a moment I had a strong impulse to blurt out that I was kidding, that it hadn’t happened at all; but I didn’t. “Without a Song” didn’t seem right for “The Young People’s Concert.” “The Donkey Serenade,” I said, which was another song I’d studied with Mr. Smythe-Jones.