The Teddy Bear Habit

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The Teddy Bear Habit Page 5

by James Lincoln Collier


  “Can I go now?” I said.

  “Stanky can wait,” he said. “How’s the English going?”

  “Fine, great, maybe I’ll get an A,” I said.

  “Stop twitching like that.” He picked up the pipe and gave it a suck. No smoke came out. I nearly collapsed; but he sucked a couple of times more and it began to smoke, so he went on sucking and sucking and stirring up smoke. The centuries went past, and the sun began to go out, and the earth began to grow cold, and the ice began to creep down from the polar cap, and just about the time that the last traces of life were dying out on this planet, he got the pipe going in a way to satisfy him, and he said, “Okay, you can scram. Be home in time for supper.”

  I had pretty nearly turned to stone, but I got my legs moving and peeled into the bedroom and grabbed the teddy. Holding him down by my leg where Pop couldn’t see him, I raced out of the apartment, down the stairs, grabbed the guitar case from behind the baby carriages, and tore for the subway.

  I was all in a sweat by the time a train came in and I was headed uptown, but I still had the guitar to work over. Luckily, there weren’t too many people in the car that time of day; it was too embarrassing to get caught shoving a teddy into your guitar. By keeping the guitar case more or less propped up on the seat beside me I was pretty well concealed. Then all I had to do was loosen the strings, push the teddy down into the hole, and jam him back inside, where he wouldn’t work loose. If he had been a human being, he’d have gotten his back scraped up badly by those strings, but that’s the advantage of being a teddy bear: you don’t feel things very much.

  It was tough tuning the guitar on the subway, but I got close enough, I figured I’d have a chance to finish the job later.

  As it worked out, I wasn’t more than about ten minutes late to meet Mr. Smythe-Jones. We began walking crosstown at a good clip, the guitar bumping and banging against my leg. “Mustn’t be late, don’t chew know,” he said. “They don’t need you; you need them.” By which I took it that Mr. Smythe-Jones was as nervous as I was about the audition. Well, not quite. That wasn’t possible.

  The truth is that if I’d known what a big deal the whole thing was I’d have been a lot more nervous than I was. This wasn’t any little kid’s party. Woodward and Hayes’ offices were on Madison Avenue in one of these brand-new glass buildings on stilts, which you can walk around under. Man, was it snazzy. We went up in an automatic elevator, the kind you run yourself. It was the fanciest elevator I’d ever been in. Most elevators around my neighborhood have cigarette butts on the floor and initials scratched into the paint on the walls. This one had a rug on the floor and music playing out of the ceiling.

  There were plenty of rugs around on the floor at Woodward and Hayes, too. There were modern tables around with classy magazines lying on them, and vases of flowers, and a secretary dressed up as if she was going to a party.

  I can tell you, it had me scared, and I got even more scared when Mr. Woodward, the fellow I’d originally met down at Wiggsy’s, came out of somewhere. This time he was wearing a green tweed jacket, brown loafers, and a brown bow tie. He still had the same fake sun-tan, and when he walked toward us he whipped that same gold cigarette lighter out of midair like a magician and lit his cigarette. Man, was he cool. You could tell that he was a guy who would never get nervous at anything. I could see him in front of a firing squad flipping that cigarette lighter around and saying something cool like, “Tell the fellows to aim for my heart, Colonel, I hate to get my hair mussed.”

  It was me who was going before the firing squad, however. Mr. Woodward made the cigarette lighter disappear, shook hands with Mr. Smythe-Jones, put his arm around my shoulder, and said, “The clan is gathering in the studio, cookie. Shall we join them?” He twiddled the lit cigarette between his fingers like a drum majorette swishing the baton through her legs. “The boy reads music pretty well, Mr. Smythe-Jones?”

  Smythe-Jones nodded. “All my pupils read, Mr. Woodward. Get the fundamentals first, don’t chew know. Cahn’t build a house on sand, don’t chew know.”

  He went on about fundamentals for a while, trying to impress Mr. Woodward, and at about the fifth don’t-chew-know we reached the studio and went in.

  As I found out later, it was a regular recording studio. Woodward and Hayes were mainly in the business of taping musical backgrounds and singing commercials, which they call jingles in the advertising business. For example, you know how on a detective show the good cop is always going into a nightclub and asking the bartender where Frisco hangs out? Maybe they want to have a little band in the nightclub playing some jazz or something. The people you see on the television are usually just actors pretending to play the music. The music you hear was taped in a studio by people like Woodward and Hayes. The reason for that is real musicians don’t look like musicians: they’re usually pudgy and red-faced and look like they ought to be train conductors or butchers. People expect musicians to be thin and have long sloppy hair and look as if they had a bad cold; so on television they use actors.

  Woodward and Hayes taped background music of this kind. They made singing commercials, mostly for radio, but sometimes for television, about how great the beer and the suntan oil is. One other thing they did was to help put together musical acts. Suppose one of the big shows wanted a quartet to sing along with the star; Woodward and Hayes would choose the singers, hire somebody to write out the music, and take charge of the rehearsals. I was trying out for something like that.

  Woodward and Hayes had three or four studios, but the one Mr. Woodward took us into was the biggest of them—big as a really big living room. The walls were white and there were a lot of lights in the place, so that the room looked airy and big. Scattered around were a lot of microphones and cables, and two huge grand pianos on small wheels so they could be moved around easily. Behind a huge picture window was the engineer’s control room, full of knobs and panels and big tape-recording machines; and sitting in a row on folding chairs along the opposite wall were about fifteen kids and their mothers. They were looking nervous, and jittering around on their seats, and punching each other. Most of them had guitars, besides their mothers. Man, there’s one time when I’m glad I don’t have a mother, and that’s at an audition. The mothers never leave the kids alone. They’re always straightening their jackets and brushing their hair and telling them remember to do this, Harry, remember to do that. I couldn’t stand that. If I was Harry I’d end up slugging my own mother. Mr. Smythe-Jones was always telling me to breathe with my diaphragm and keep the pitch up, but at least he wasn’t pulling down my jacket and brushing my hair back every five minutes.

  Mr. Smythe-Jones and I sat down on the line of chairs and looked nervous like everybody else. A couple of men and a woman came in and lounged around in an official-looking way. Mr. Woodward leaned on one of the grand pianos, making his gold cigarette lighter appear and disappear, and explained to us what it was all about.

  United Broadcasting Company was planning a huge one-hour television show on popular culture. You know, fads.

  “There’ll be a bit on surfing movies, and one on monster comics, and so forth,” Mr. Woodward said. “Cool it over there, you two guys. They want to have some rock and roll, naturally, and they thought it would be cute to put together a group made up of kids your age. Cool it, you two guys in the green sweater and the red hair. With you cute monkeys I don’t know, but it’s their beeswax.” Everyone giggled nervously.

  “This would all be very groovy, except that they picked me to work with you monkeys. Cool it, with the red hair. We’re having three auditions, and we’re going to pick out six kids. Two will be understudies, but I guarantee that they’ll be used, because—cool it, Red—because one kid is bound to get the measles and another will break his leg. Somebody slam that red-headed kid. Okay. When I call your name come on up by this mike and give me something with a big beat. Don’t get nervous, just belt it out. Everybody here loves you.”

  So they began. Some kids p
layed the piano when they sang, but most of them accompanied themselves on guitars. It was the usual bunch: some were pretty good, some stunk; some looked very confident, and some looked scared to death. I sat there and watched them all.

  At a thing like this there’s usually one kid who’s really outstanding. In this case it turned out to be the redheaded kid, which explained why he’d been acting up: he didn’t have a worry in the world, and he knew it. He walked up there as confident as could be and belted out a couple of songs with a lot of style and no mistakes. When he finished, he just grinned at Mr. Woodward as if to say: Don’t bother telling me how good I am, I already know.

  There were two or three others who were pretty good, too: not as good as the redhead, but pretty good. Even so, I had a good chance, and I knew it. Some of them sang a little better than I did, and some of them played the guitar better, but I averaged out better. I had a chance. Except for my problem. Except for being a natural-born loser.

  I sat there with the guitar in my lap, my hands clenched tight around the neck so they wouldn’t shake. My stomach was full of ice water, and I felt like I needed to go to the bathroom. Oh man, did I envy that redhead. About every two minutes I took a look down into the guitar at the teddy bear. I prayed nobody would notice what I was doing. Not that it was illegal to have a teddy bear in your guitar: it was just so embarrassing.

  It’s the waiting that kills you. They were going by alphabetical order. My name beginning with an S, I was down at the bottom of the list. The worst part was that I didn’t know exactly when my turn would come. I didn’t know how many Ls and Ms and Ps there were ahead of me, so that each time one kid finished I had to sit there and shake and quiver until Mr. Woodward announced who was going to be electrocuted next.

  So I sat there waiting for death and destruction, and finally Mr. Woodward called my name. I swallowed, stood, and walked across to the mike, trying to look casual and relaxed instead of stiff as a board. I turned around to face Woodward and the other kids, and struck a warm-up chord. Then I almost fainted.

  Instead of getting a nice full, rich, chord, I had gotten a muffled clunking sound, as if the guitar were in the next room. A couple of the kids giggled.

  “What’s the matter with the guitar, cookie?” Mr. Woodward said.

  I knew exactly what was wrong with the guitar. It had a teddy bear stuffed down inside of it. Anytime you stuff something down inside a guitar it stops the wood from resonating—at least partly—and of course the sound goes dead.

  My face burned and I started to sweat. I’ve got a mute in the guitar,” I said. My voice was choked and sweaty as my face.

  “Well, take it out so we can hear you, cookie.”

  At first I thought I would keel over dead; all I could do was blink and stare at him. Finally I sort of whispered, “I can’t.”

  There was some more giggling. “Why not?”

  “I’ll have to take the strings off.” I reached down through the strings to give him the idea of what was involved, and my hand fell on a handful of teddy bear fuzz. Touching the bear brought back a little of my courage, and the fire on my face started to die out. “It’s my special sound,” I said. “It’s my trademark.”

  Mr. Woodward laughed. “Okay, cookie, go ahead.”

  Pretending I was adjusting something, I reached in to touch the teddy again for another shot of courage. I had decided to do one of the Beatles’ songs—one I’d worked over with Wiggsy a good deal. I stroked the opening chords, and then I started to sing.

  My voice was a little weak and rusty to begin, from the scare I’d had. I looked down into the guitar. At the angle I was holding it I could just make out one of his glass eyes and a bit of the threads of his worn-out mouth; and I swear I saw him wink and heard him say, “Don’t worry George, you can do it.” And just like that, I knew I could. My voice got stronger and I felt my courage, and I began to look around the room at the audience and belt it out in fine style. Whenever I felt myself growing weak or scared again, I’d just look down into the guitar; and the teddy would stare back at me with a solemn look that told me I had nothing to worry about. I can’t explain it; I know that a teddy bear can’t talk, but I heard him. I swear it.

  So I ran on through the tune, and by the time I got to the end I was feeling so good I added on a little tag Wiggsy had taught me. I struck the last chord and saw all those kids sitting there staring at me silently; and I knew I’d made it. And it was then that my knees went weak and my legs began to tremble and my hands began to shake and my brain closed down for the rest of the day.

  “You the kid who says he can read music pretty well?”

  I nodded. My throat was too clogged to speak.

  “Groovy,” he said. “Stick around.”

  I tried to say something polite, but my throat was still shut up; and besides, my brain had quit on me and I couldn’t think of any words. I just nodded my head and walked over and sat down. Mr. Smythe-Jones patted my shoulder. “Top hole, old man,” he whispered. “Absolutely top hole.”

  So we waited around for the rest of the kids to have their turns and then Mr. Woodward took Mr. Smythe-Jones and me back to his office, me still dizzy and trembling with excitement. I sat down in a huge red-leather armchair by a window. You could see barges going up the East River, and way down below the tiny taxi cabs and buses moving slowly up the avenues. To calm down, I tried to pretend I was Dave Clark or somebody arranging a big movie deal; but it didn’t work, so I gave it up and pretended that I was George Stable all in a stew.

  Mr. Woodward leaned back in his chair, put his feet up, and flipped the cigarette lighter around a few times. “Here it is, cookie,” he said. “Your voice isn’t all that groovy, but it’s good enough. You’ve got the confidence, you get around on the guitar pretty well, and the fact that you read music helps. We’re going to see some more people, but I want to use you, maybe as one of the understudies. We’ll see about that.” He slammed open a desk drawer and pulled out a form. “Have your old man sign that,” he said, slamming the drawer closed. “We’ve got to have his signature before we can use you.”

  And so we left. Mr. Smythe-Jones was so pleased with it all that he called a taxi to take us back to his studio. “You heard what he said about reading music. Fundamentals, George. Cahn’t imagine how lucky you are to have a teacher who insisted on fundamentals.”

  But my problem wasn’t fundamentals; it was the piece of paper I had in my pocket. I thought about it all the way down on the subway to West Fourth Street, and then on down through Washington Square to Wiggsy’s to return the guitar. I thought about it some more as I told Wiggsy all about the audition. Wiggsy took the guitar and shoved it down behind the counter, and I thought about it as I said good-bye and walked on home.

  I was still thinking about it when I walked into my bedroom and saw the wide-open bureau drawer. And it was then that I remembered that the teddy was still stuffed down inside the guitar, and the guitar was behind the counter at Wiggsy’ s.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  POP BELIEVES IN simple food and a lot of it. That’s another good thing about having a father for a mother: you get the kind of meals you can eat. You take an ordinary mother, she’s read in the women’s magazines that she’s got to serve varied dishes and balanced meals, and she’s always coming around with fried liver or chicken croquettes or some other stuff that’s likely to make you throw up. Pop couldn’t make chicken croquettes if his life depended on it, and as for fried liver, he doesn’t like it any better than I do. With him it’s hamburgers, hot dogs, and spaghetti, and then back to hamburgers again. For dessert it’s ice cream or jelly roll. For variety, about twice a year on some special occasion like Christmas, he fries some pork chops. That’s it. I don’t think there’s been a roast in the place for five years. It suits me fine. Besides, about twice a week we eat out at Crespino’s or Howard Johnson’s, so that if I wanted roast beef or chicken croquettes I could get them. What I usually order is the same stuff we have at home: hamburgers
, spaghetti, or hot dogs. Pop’s hot dogs are flabby and raw, and Crespino’s are burnt and hard. That’s variety enough for me.

  The night I came home from the audition I was starved. I was excited about my chance of becoming rich and famous, and worried about Wiggsy finding the teddy and generally scared just on principle. Being nervous and full of a million feelings like that has the effect of making me very hungry. Pop had cooked up a huge pot of spaghetti and meatballs. I belted away at it as hard as I could, scattering tomato sauce all over the table and pouring the milk in on top of it to wash the meatballs down. My table manners were terrible, but I didn’t care and Pop didn’t notice. He was busy talking. He likes to brainwash me during dinner, and he was giving me a long lecture on morals that I wasn’t listening to, partly because my ears were half-full of tomato sauce.

  You would have thought that eating all that spaghetti would have calmed me down, but it didn’t. I tried to read a book, and I tried to listen to the radio for a while; I even tried doing my homework, but I kept getting more and more nervous. Finally I just sort of walked around the apartment, touching things.

  Pop bore this about fifteen minutes and then he said, “I can’t stand you jittering around like that. I’m going over to Florio’s for a beer. Go to bed at ten o’clock, hear?”

  Out he went, jingling the change in his pocket, and I slumped down in a chair to think. My first idea was to sneak over to Wiggsy’s, find some excuse to borrow the guitar back, and rescue the teddy. I decided not to. At that time on a Friday night MacDougal Street would be full of beatniks and weirdos. There would be a lot of hippies in Wiggsy’s. Suppose one of the hippies discovered I had a teddy bear in my guitar. Man, it would be too embarrassing. Besides, to be honest, all those people scared me a little, especially at night.

 

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