The Teddy Bear Habit

by James Lincoln Collier

  Wiggsy was giving me a funny look. I could tell he was trying to decide whether I was lying. “When did all this happen, babe?” He took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and began sticking them one by one into his beard, where he could get them later. “I don’t remember anything about it.”

  I began to sweat. Wiggsy was going to grill me. “Before I started taking guitar with you, it was. A while ago. I forget the exact date.”

  “Yeah, babe?” Wiggsy said.

  But Music Biz saved me. “You take guitar from Wiggsy? And study voice?”

  The music rack had sawed halfway through my spinal column, and I decided I’d better give up the casual pose before I fainted from the agony. I straightened, and felt around my back for blood. I’ll be honest,” I said, which was a nice change. “My Pop wants me to study classical, but what I really like is rock and roll. I study voice with this Mr. Smythe-Jones on Wednesday, and I take guitar from Wiggsy on Saturday.” I almost made a mistake and blurted out that Pop didn’t know anything about Wiggsy or the guitar lessons, but I stopped myself just in time. I was afraid Wiggsy would make me quit if he found out. “Can you read music, fella?” Music Biz asked.

  “Sure. Some. If it’s not too hard.”

  “Is he any good, Wiggsy?”

  Turnabout was fair play. For weeks Wiggsy had been telling me what a genius I was on the guitar and how famous I was going to be, and now he was stuck with it whether he believed it or not. “I been showing him some chords,” he said. “He blows pretty good. I mean he’s no Django Reinhart, but he can bang out the easy changes pretty good.”

  Music Biz reached into his pocket and flipped out a card the same way he’d magicked up the cigarette lighter. “Listen fella,” he said, “maybe I can use you. Have your pop give me a horn on Monday.” He handed me the card and slapped Wiggsy on the shoulder. “I’ve got to split.”

  I stared at the little white card in my hand. It said:

  Thomas Woodward

  WOODWARD AND HAYES

  Television Productions

  AL5-9210

  CHAPTER THREE

  THERE WERE about twelve things wrong with the whole idea. In the first place, Pop hated television, just like he hated rock and roll, and egg creams, and ugly stickers, and anything else that I liked. In fact, he hated it so much that we didn’t even have a television set. Every once in a while I’d ask, please couldn’t we get one. He always said the same thing: television was for mental defectives, and besides, he was damned if he was going to pay good money just so the National Association of Manufacturers could brainwash his son. My opinion was that it was a free country, and I ought to be allowed to get brainwashed if I wanted, but my opinion was wrong, because if you’ve got an old man like Pop, it isn’t a free country. So that was one thing wrong with the idea.

  The second thing wrong with it was that even if Pop was willing to call up this guy, first I’d have to tell him all about Wiggsy and using my lunch money for guitar lessons and all that jazz. Man, it wouldn’t be worth it. I just wasn’t ready to be starved and tortured and have my allowance cut off for forty or fifty years. So that was another thing wrong with the idea.

  The third thing wrong with it was my problem. Of course I didn’t know exactly what kind of thing this guy Thomas Woodward had in mind, but for sure it didn’t have anything to do with teddy bears. I mean, you can’t go out to sing rock and roll on television holding a teddy bear in your arms. It wouldn’t be just the show, either. There’d be auditions and rehearsals and all that jazz, too. It would be just too embarrassing to admit that I had a teddy bear habit. I’d have to figure out some way to sneak the teddy into all of them. I mean maybe there might be some way I could hide it behind a camera. Or maybe I could pretend it was some kind of hip joke. Or pretend I’d just got it for my kid brother. No, it was too complicated. You could get away with some kind of stunt like that once or twice, but you’d never get away with it day after day.

  So there were twelve reasons against the whole thing; but still, I couldn’t get over the idea. At school on Monday, I couldn’t do anything but think about it. I could see Ed Sullivan saying, “All right kids, here’s what you’ve been waiting for, the new teenage singing sensation, Georgie Stable.” (I figured I would be thirteen by then.) And the kids in the audience screaming and fainting from the agony, and me out there in snazzy black motorcycle boots and a gold silk jacket and a Gretsch guitar. Man, it was so delicious that I shuddered right there in school, and made Miss Hornet ask sarcastically if I was coming down with a cold. Still, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. After school, I walked down Sixth Avenue, taking the card out of my pocket to look at it, and putting it back, and taking it out again. Then I went around to Crespino’s and sat there, drinking an egg cream and looking at it some more. Looking at it didn’t make anything happen. I looked up at the sign Mr. Crespino had chalked on his blackboard: TODAY STEW 50¢. That didn’t make anything happen, either. So I went home. Pop was working at his drawing table. I went into my bedroom and flung the card into my bureau drawer under the teddy. I felt itchy and cross and sore at Pop for being against television and so forth. I flopped down on the daybed in the living room and turned on some rock and roll on the hi-fi as loud as I dared, just to annoy Pop.

  Pop was staring at his drawing board, his chin in his hands. There was a cup of cold coffee on the taboret. He’d slopped about half of it on his paintbrushes, and there were about four hundred cigarette butts in his ashtray, and I knew he was having trouble getting an idea.

  “Turn that darn thing down,” he said. I’m trying to concentrate.”

  I didn’t answer him, but I turned it down.

  “I’m trying to think up a new enemy for Garbage Man. I’m tired of those same old Mars men.”

  I rolled over on my back and stared up at the ceiling.

  “Why don’t you have him captured by a couple of rock-and-roll singers? “ I said as crossly as I dared. “In the end he could smell them to death. That ought to make you happy.”

  “Hmmm,” he said. “Rock-and-roll singers. Not bad. A good angle. The contemporary touch.” He completely missed the idea that I was sore at him. He slapped his hand down on his drawing board, and then he got up and began pacing around the room the way he does when he gets an idea, talking to himself.

  “Let’s suppose the invaders from the alien world come down to knock off the planet Earth. They’re odd looking, and we suppose they see the necessity of disguising themselves as Earth men until they can conclude their nefarious plans. We suppose that they have—what?”

  “Stupid arms sticking out of their stupid stomachs,” I said in a snotty way.

  But he was concentrating on his big idea, and he didn’t notice that I was being snotty. “Hmmm. Yes,” he said, pacing around and around. “Arms sticking out of their stomachs. Hmmm. Yes. And naturally they need a way to hide the arms when they go out in public. Yes. Guitars. They go out in public disguised as rock-and-roll singers, using guitars to hide their electric arms.”

  He went back to his drawing board and flopped down in his chair. “Very good, George,” he said. “You’ve been a big help.”

  Trying to annoy him I’d done him a favor. It just shows about being a loser. I stomped off to my room.

  “What’s bugging you?” he said. I slammed the door and he went back to work. And then, because I was sore, I took the little card out of the bureau drawer, tore it into tiny pieces, and dropped them out of the window down the air shaft. As I watched them go, I got a sick feeling, sick and sorry that I’d done it. But I’m a loser, and it was too late to be sorry. So I went up to the Y and got into a basketball game. I was so mad at myself for destroying my big opportunity that I was the terror of the court—at least until I stopped being sore at myself.

  For the next few days I felt sort of lousy in a calm way. I didn’t care about doing anything especially. Because of that I got a good start on my science project, which left me pretty free all weeken
d. It just goes to show that a little good always comes out of everything. My philosophy is that there’s an advantage to everything, if you think about it. For example, there’s even something good about falling off the Empire State Building: you have a fabulous experience on the way down.

  During that week I decided to quit guitar. The good thing to come out of that was that I would get back the seventeen dollars I had paid on the guitar. There wasn’t any point in going on with guitar lessons as far as I could see. I mean between Pop hating rock and roll and me being a loser, there wasn’t much chance that I’d ever get to be a big hero. It made me despair just to think about it.

  So I thought about the seventeen dollars instead. Of course I couldn’t get back the seventeen dollars I’d paid him for lessons; that was gone. But the seventeen I’d paid toward the guitar was mine. At the beginning, Wiggsy had said, “If you decide to quit, babe, you get your money back.”

  Seventeen dollars was a pretty big chunk of money. For a long time I’d wanted a radio of my own for my room, so that Pop wouldn’t always be telling me to turn that darn thing down. I knew I could get a pretty good table model for about fifteen bucks at a discount store up on Fourteenth Street. That would leave me a couple of dollars to blow on egg creams—almost two weeks of egg creams at fifteen cents a piece. Of course, I could put the seventeen dollars in my savings account, but it wasn’t very likely that I would. I’m not that much of a loser.

  Buying an important possession like a radio is something you take a friend along on, so Saturday morning I called up my buddy, Everett Stanky.

  “I’m going to buy a radio,” I said, “but I can’t buy it until this afternoon.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll tell you later. Meet me over at the checker players at one o’clock.”

  In one corner of Washington Square Park are some little tables with checkerboards built into the tops. The men play checkers or chess there, and there are usually a bunch of people standing around watching them. It was where Stanky and I usually met.

  Stanky is about my height, but he is very skinny and weak-looking. Stanky is the type you take for a sissy. He wears glasses, and he has black hair falling over his forehead, and he throws like a girl, and his skin is so tender he could cut himself on a lollipop. On top of it, there’s his name. He doesn’t want people to call him Everett, naturally, so they end up calling him Stinky. Stinky Stanky. Except me. I call him Stanky.

  But even though he throws like a girl, Stanky is no loser. There are four things he can do. Number one, he can beat anyone in the neighborhood at Ping-Pong. Number two, he can play a whole lot of etudes and preludes and stuff on the piano. They always make him play the “Star Spangled Banner” for assemblies. Number three, he gets straight A’s. Number four, he can bottom deal a pack of cards. It’s amazing to watch him; you can’t see him do it, his hands go so fast.

  Stanky had a bag of mixed nuts he had swiped. “They went out to the theater last night. They’re not awake yet. I found it on the coffee table.”

  We walked around the park, sharing out the nuts. In New York October is sometimes as warm as summer. There were bums sleeping on the park benches. Some of them were bandaged where they’d got into fights. Some students from New York University were sitting around on the grass with their books, pretending to study but really trying to make out with the girls. Some people were walking their dogs, and over near the big fountain in the middle of the park a couple of beatniks were playing Frisbee. They were playing with one hand because they each had a can of beer in the other. The beer kept slopping all over the place when they threw the Frisbee. We just walked around looking at things, eating the nuts, and scaring up bursts of pigeons; and I told Stanky about it.

  “Pop wouldn’t let me do it in a million years, man. In the first place. In the second place, he’d give me a shot in the head if he found out about Wiggsy.”

  Stanky held out the nut bag. I reached in and got the biggest one I could grab, a huge almond. “Sorry about that,” I said.

  “What are you going to tell Wiggsy if you quit?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll tell him Pop won’t let me anymore.”

  “It would be the truth.” He dumped the last few nuts out of the bag into his hand. “Sorry about that,” he said.

  I grabbed the nuts out of his hand and tossed them into my mouth. “Sorry about that,” I said.

  He grabbed my sleeve and gave me a shot in the arm. “Sorry about that,” he said.

  I grabbed his sleeve. “Sorry about—”

  “You can’t hit me. I’m wearing glasses,” he said.

  We quit horsing around. “I don’t know what to do. “

  “Well.”

  “What do you think I ought to do, Stank?” Suddenly I realized that I hoped he would talk me out of quitting the guitar. The truth was that I didn’t want to quit. The truth was that I wanted to call this television guy, get on some program, and become a big star with a lot of autograph fans following me around everywhere I went. But I didn’t want to admit to Stanky that I’d changed my mind. I mean I had made my decision, and it would seem weak and wishy-washy of me to keep changing my mind all the time. It was a silly way to be, but it was the way I felt. Somebody had to talk me out of quitting.

  But Stanky didn’t do it. Instead he said, “Let’s walk down to Wiggsy’s and get the loot.” So we did. Wiggsy was sitting up on his stool behind the glass counter at the end of his store. He was wearing a red Egyptian fez and a purple silk shirt with yellow glass buttons, and he was drinking a can of beer. It seemed like everybody in the Village was drinking a can of beer. Wiggsy’s stomach was so fat he could use it for a table to rest his beer can on.

  “What are you two cats doing for jollies this morning?” he said, trying to put on that he was the friendly type.

  I shrugged. “Nothing. Just messing around.” I began trying to think of some way to get Wiggsy to talk me out of quitting my lessons. I was afraid he was too cool for that. On top of it, I was beginning to be worried about asking Wiggsy for my money back. “We were just up at the park chasing pigeons,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Wiggsy said.

  Nobody said anything for a minute. Wiggsy picked up a pack of cigarettes from the glass counter, shook out four or five, and began tucking them into his beard. Stanky began looking at some sheet music to pretend he didn’t know I was scared to ask for my money back. I undid my belt buckle and buckled it up again.

  “Yeah,” Wiggsy said. He had got all of the cigarettes stowed into his beard, and now he took one out, put it in his mouth, and struck a match.

  I blurted out, Wiggsy, I’m thinking about quitting the guitar.”

  He was very cool. He held the match to the cigarette and puffed out a stream of smoke. “I don’t know why you want to do that for, babe.”

  I felt better. Maybe he would talk me out of it after all. Still, I had to argue with him a little, for the show. “Well, my father doesn’t want me to take any more.”

  He kept his cool. “Well, all right babe, if that’s the way it is.”

  I got red and prickly. “I mean, maybe I could talk him out of it.”

  He sucked on his cigarette. “I don’t know, babe. If he don’t want you to maybe you’d better not.”

  I was stuck for anything to say next. Wiggsy began fooling around with some sheet music he had on the counter. I waited for him to say something like, “Why don’t you talk to him?” or something, but he just went on fooling around with the sheet music. Then I began waiting for him to say something like, “Here’s your seventeen dollars back,” and then after a while I realized he wasn’t going to say that either. I was going to have to say it.

  “I don’t need the seventeen dollars right away,” I said. I got red again.

  Wiggsy looked up and began shooting out little spurts of cigarette smoke. “Well, babe, I kind of hate to see you quit when you were coming along so groovy. I don’t say you were any Segovia, mind you, but you
were getting there, babe.”

  Now was my big chance to keep my mouth shut, but of course that wasn’t very likely. “Well, I don’t know, Wiggsy,” I said.

  He leaned his elbows on the counter, which wasn’t easy, considering how fat he was. “Say, did you call up that fella, babe? The one who was in here the other day?”

  I blushed again because of what I had done with the man’s card. “I was going to, but I lost his address,” I said.

  “Well, listen babe, I wouldn’t kid you. He called me up yesterday. He wanted to know what was with you.”

  I didn’t think that was true, but I decided to believe it anyway. “No kidding?” I said.

  “Sure babe. This is no time to quit. You got it made.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said.

  “Give him a horn. Woodward and Hayes. Look them up in the phone book.” He dumped the last of the beer down his throat, slid off the stool, put one arm around me and one around Stanky, and began pushing us toward the door. “Give him a horn, babe. Now you two cats scram. I got work to do.” And he shoved us out into the street.

  So there I was. I didn’t have the money, and I wasn’t really talked into doing anything about that show.

  Stanky waited until Wiggsy shut the door to his shop and then he nudged me and said, “Sorry about that.”

  “Well, what did you expect me to do,” I said crossly.

  “I didn’t do anything. Don’t get sore at me.”

  We walked up the street a way and then we stopped and leaned on a new Buick that was parked there. I was confused and sore, and I began twanging the car aerial to get even. “There goes seventeen bucks,” I said.

  Stanky took off his glasses and twirled them around by one of the hooks. “Well, if you ask me, you ought to call up that guy.”

  “Don’t be dumb. I can’t. My father has to call. They have to get his permission. Stop swinging your glasses. You’re making me nervous.”