Rich and Famous

by James Lincoln Collier

  Chapter

  I don’t know why it is, but nothing ever happens one at a time. You go along for weeks being bored and wishing something would happen. Finally you get up a plan to bike out to Fire Island with somebody and that turns out to be the Saturday that Mr. Stanky wants to take you out on his friend’s power cruiser; and just when you’re trying to make up your mind about that, somebody gives your father tickets to the ball game.

  That’s what was happening to me. First it was Pop and Denise going to Paris, and then me going to Cousin Sinclair’s. Then it was Woody Woodward’s new means for being rich and famous.

  I guess I ought to explain how I got into the music business, or anyway, how I was always about to be getting into the music business.

  When I was around eight Pop made me take singing lessons—not folk singing or anything, but arias and stuff like that. Later on I began to take guitar lessons from a crazy guy named Wiggsy and I ended up being on a television program for about six seconds and got to be a hero around my school for ten days.

  Well, then it got to be a big question of was I talented and should I go on to make music my career. I kept having these long discussions with Pop about it. It seemed to me that I was pretty young to decide something like that, but Mr. Smythe-Jones, my aria teacher, told Pop that you have to begin early to produce a trained voice. I didn’t know what to do; but finally this guy named Woody Woodward got into it. Woody Woodward is part of a company called Woodward and Hayes, which is in the business of organizing groups for television and radio and records and all that. It isn’t just rock groups. Say, for example, you have this television program and want some background music for the murder, why they’ll put together a group and tape up some murder music for you. Or suppose you want to put out a commercial where some phony folk singer comes on and sings about how marvelous your chewing gum is, Woodward and Hayes will arrange for that. And of course they do a lot of regular records, too—you know, they’ll get together a group to put out Golden Oldies from last year, or theme music from monster movies or stuff like that.

  Well, what happened was that after I was on that television program for those six seconds, Woody Woodward decided to sign me to a contract. It sounds like a big deal, but it wasn’t. All it meant was that he’d give me some advice and if I got rich and famous he’d take half the money. Of course Pop got all into a thing about it. He hates popular music. The only kind of music he likes is classical—Bach and Vivaldi and that stuff. He keeps it going on the radio all day long when he’s drawing Garbage Man or Frankens-Teen. He keeps trying to get me to like it, too. That would be all right with me. I’m perfectly willing to like Bach, but I just can’t seem to do it. How can you like something if you don’t like it? For example I can’t stand clams, but one day at a restaurant everybody told me I didn’t know what I was missing, so I tried one, and I almost threw up. I would like to like clams, but I don’t; it’s the same with Bach, and what can I do about it?

  Anyway, when Woody Woodward wanted to sign me up he went down to talk to Pop about it. Pop puffed around and said that the music business was a jungle; he wanted me exposed to finer music instead of that awful uproar. Finally Woody took Pop out to Fidelio’s for a drink, and talked about how much money I could make, and in the end Pop agreed, provided I would go on with Mr. Smythe-Jones, my aria teacher. Woody got me a good guitar teacher and I began to study some music theory and after awhile, between all these lessons, I got to where I wasn’t too bad.

  But to be honest, after two years it was getting to be a big pain in the butt. First there was my singing lesson with Mr. Smythe-Jones, where I had to honk away at “The Donkey Serenade” for an hour, with Smythe-Jones saying, “Intonation, George, intonation, please” every time I went flat, which was pretty often. Then there was a half hour a week on the guitar lesson, which wasn’t so bad, except that he really loaded me down on the practicing. On top of it there was my theory lesson, an hour every two weeks, where I was supposed to bring in a sixteen-bar waltz or something I’d written so we could go over it. I was terrible at that, worse than at singing in tune. The only part of the whole thing I liked at all was the guitar, because usually we’d be working on some real song. But I was supposed to practice scales and chords a half hour a day, too. At first it was kind of interesting studying all that music, but by this time I was sick of having to go to my lessons all the time and bored with practicing and fed up with getting shouted at for not practicing, which was what usually happened. And I would have quit the whole thing, except that every time I was about to get up my nerve to tell Woody Woodward that I didn’t want to be a musician, I just wanted to be an ordinary kid, he would come up with a big deal that was going to make me rich and famous. First there was some guy who was going to put together a kids’ group for some television show; but that was the year that cowboy shows were big on television and nobody wanted a kids’ group. Then there was the idea for a group imitating the Cowsills, where I was going to be part of a phony family named the Sheepmeadows, but just as that was getting started the big leader of it got busted for dope and that ended that. Then I was going to be in that murder movie for about a minute, and I practiced for six weeks on a minute’s worth of music, which believe me was pretty boring; but they never made the movie.

  Each time Woody came up with something like this I would get interested in music again, and then it would peter out and I would think about quitting again until Woody came up with the next means of getting rich and famous.

  I was over at Stanky’s, messing up his room with some peanut butter slushes we made in his blender.

  “George, what’ll you do if Woody wants you to come to New York for something?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “How far is it?”

  “Oh, it isn’t too far. I guess you can get there in a couple of hours on the train. But that isn’t the problem, the problem is that if I have to come back to New York for something, Uncle Ned probably won’t let me. I mean he’ll say it doesn’t sound sensible. That’s my Uncle Ned’s thing, saying that things don’t sound sensible. It gives him a big charge to tell people things they want to do aren’t sensible. Then he’ll write to Pop about it, and Pop will say wait until he gets back, four weeks isn’t going to hurt anybody.”

  “What’ll Woody say?”

  “He’ll be furious. He’ll go find somebody else to be The Boy Next Door.”

  “Maybe you’ll have to run away.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said. I didn’t want to make it too definite, so in case I chickened out I wouldn’t have to admit it, but could say I changed my mind for some reason I’d make up. I mean if I don’t get to be George Stable, The Boy Next Door, I might as well stay up at Cousin Sinclair’s and suffer.”

  “Probably,” he said. “Boy, are these peanut butter slushes terrible. I think we ought to go back to banana ones.”

  “Why did you have to pick this year to go to music camp?”

  “Because my parents are going to Los Angeles, that’s why.”

  “How come you don’t have any Cousin Sinclair to get shoved off with?”

  “I do. There’s my Cousin Philip. He’s almost as perfect as your Cousin Sinclair.”

  “Nobody’s as perfect as Cousin Sinclair. I’ll go nuts spending four weeks with him. It isn’t fair. Pop doesn’t spend four weeks with Uncle Ned.

  “Why should he? Your Uncle Ned is your mother’s brother, not his.”

  “If I can’t have a mother, why do I have to be stuck with having a cousin?” I said.

  “Some cousins are okay.”

  “Let’s stop talking about cousins,” I said. “I can’t stand the subject anymore. The main thing is, how am I going to get out of it?”

  “You better resign yourself, George.”

  “What about George Stable, The Boy Next Door?” I said.

  “You said these things never work out.”

  “But this one might. I have a feeling it might.” “You’ve had that feel
ing every time,” Stanky said.

  I hit him on the arm. “Sorry about that,” I said.

  But I couldn’t think of anything and Stanky couldn’t think of anything either, so I just went on home trying to figure out why it was always me who got cheated instead of somebody else.

  Pop was cooking supper. For somebody who had been cooking for thirteen years he wasn’t very good, but I didn’t mind. He made stew okay and macaroni and cheese and these weird casseroles where he’d heave everything in the icebox into a dish and mix it up with rice and tomato sauce—those casseroles were pretty interesting because you never knew what you were going to stumble on under the tomato sauce. Most of Pop’s food didn’t have the same interest: spaghetti and then burned hamburgers and then limp hot dogs and spaghetti again. There was one advantage to it, though. Pop didn’t worry much about balanced diets so I never had to force down a lot of liver or codfish or lovely green salads the way Stanky did.

  Tonight he was cooking one of his weird casseroles. “Where have you been?”

  “Shooting baskets,” I said. There wasn’t any reason to lie about being at Stanky’s, I just wanted to from being mad.

  “Good,” he said. “It’ll give you an appetite. I’m making a superb supper, a truly gourmet confection.” He was pretty cheerful because he was going to Europe in a few days.

  “Will I be able to eat it?” I said.

  “It’ll tickle your tonsils.” There were some noodles cooking on the stove. He took them over to the sink and poured off the water. About half the noodles fell into the sink, but he just picked them up with his fingers and heaved them back into the pan. Then he took the pan over to the icebox and stood there with the door open, peering around. “Aha,” he said. “Meatballs.” There were three old meatballs sitting on a saucer. He dumped them into the noodles. Then he found a dish of leftover lima beans, which he dumped in, too, and some anchovies he had left over from the week before when he and Denise had had some other comic strip artists over for cocktails. Next he found a piece of parmesan cheese and two wrinkled hot dogs and half a bologna sandwich.

  “There’s some strawberry ice cream in the freezer,” I said.

  “No, no, mustn’t overdo it,” he said.

  “What about that pot holder by the sink?”

  “George, in cooking it’s important to distinguish between the food and the utensils.”

  “I’m glad you told me that,” I said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have known.”

  “It’s a rule I always follow,” he said.

  “What about the time we found the spoon in the marble cake?”

  “Somebody must have dropped it in when I wasn’t looking.”

  “Yes, indeedy,” I said. “Probably the dog.”

  “Exactly. The dog.”

  “We don’t have a dog.”

  “I knew that all along,” he said.

  I was getting tired of this. “When will it be ready?”

  “Ten minutes. It just has to heat up.” He got a big spoon and stirred everything around in the noodles—the hot dog, the lima beans, the anchovies and all—and shoved the dish in the oven.

  “I’m going in my room to read,” I said.

  “Wait a minute, George,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”

  Here it came. “Why do I have to—”

  “Now, George. Please don’t start arguing. There isn’t any other way. I got a letter from your Uncle Ned this morning and it’s all set. School’s out next Wednesday, Denise and I are leaving on Friday, so you have to go up to Sinclair’s on Thursday morning.”

  “Damn it, it’s not fair.”

  “A lot of things in life aren’t fair,” he said.

  “Big deal.”

  “Watch your tongue,” he said. “There’s a nine o’clock train leaving from Grand Central. I’ll take you up and put you on it. It gets up there at eleven. Uncle Ned and Sinclair will meet you.”

  There wasn’t any point in arguing and I knew it. I didn’t want to hear any more about it. “I’ll be in my room reading,” I said.

  So that was that. There wasn’t any way out of it. He would put me on the train and Uncle Ned and Aunt Cynthia would capture me when I got off and keep me in prison for four weeks with Cousin Sinclair as the torturer.

  And what about George Stable, The Boy Next Door? If I missed out on making a record and getting rich and famous because of Sinclair, I’d kill somebody—probably myself. I knew that before I went I’d better call up Woody Woodward and find out if the idea was hot, which would mean that it wasn’t going to happen, or red hot, which would mean that it might happen sometime around Christmas, or so hot that it was on fire, which would mean that it might happen in a couple of months. So the next afternoon when Pop was up at Smash Comics, having his mistakes pointed out to him by Denise, I called up Woody.

  “I was just checking to see if anything was happening,” I said.

  “It’s hotter than hot, baby,” he said. “It’s fire engine time.”

  “Great,” I said. “That means they might want to get going by fall.”

  “Fall? Georgie this is moving like a jet of live steam. You aren’t going off to camp or something, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “The only thing is I might be upstate visiting my cousin for awhile.”

  “For awhile? How long is that?”

  “Oh, well. About a week I guess.”

  “A whole week?” he said.

  “A weekend, I meant to say.”

  “Well, okay, but keep in touch. I may need you all of a sudden. When Superman moves, he moves fast.”

  I hung up and began to pray that Superman didn’t decide to move for four weeks.

  So the days went by. On Wednesday school got out. I packed an old beat-up suitcase Pop had on the closet shelf with my clothes and that night I went over to say goodbye to Stanky. “You louse,” I said. “Going to music camp when I have to be tortured by Sinclair.”

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “Did you call up Woody Woodward?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s hotter than a jet of live steam.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably nothing. You never can find out what anything means in this business.”

  “What’ll you do if they want you to make a record when you’re up at Cousin Sinclair’s?”

  “Kill myself.”

  “Tell me what you want on your gravestone.”

  “I have to go,” I said, “or Pop will have a hemorrhage. Give me your address. If you’re lucky I’ll write you a letter with all the news from Sinclair’s.”

  “If I’m lucky I’ll get a post card with your name on it,” he said. But he gave me his address on a scrap of paper and I said so long and left. And the next morning Pop took me up to Grand Central to put me on the train. It made my heart sink just to see it sitting there, and for a minute I thought about running—just taking off through the crowd and disappearing some place before Pop could catch me. But I wouldn’t ever do something like that. So Pop bought me a coke and a bag of potato chips and a Heinlein book, which shows that he felt sorry for me, because he usually says that science fiction is intellectually feckless. The door clanged shut. I waved goodbye and so did he, and the train pulled out, and I was on my way to jail. I felt terrible and suddenly I realized that I’d never been away from Pop for more than a few days at a time, except that two weeks I was at camp when I was eight.

  Chapter

  After awhile I cheered up a little. We went up through the Bronx and then out into the country, and I looked out the window at the sights. When I got tired of looking out the window, I drank my coke and spread potato chips all over my shirt, and read my Heinlein book. We were only a half an hour late getting there. Uncle Ned and Sinclair were standing in the waiting room watching me get off the train; and they drove me out to their house, which is in a little town called Pawling. Their house is a kind of old-fashioned, farm-housey kind of place. It was pretty nice
if you liked that stuff. Uncle Ned was a math teacher at the high school, which partly explains why Sinclair was such a schmuck. If your father is a school teacher you have to be perfect or it reflects on him. I mean what a disappointment you’d be if you weren’t perfect.

  Well, the first day was okay because it was sort of new and that was interesting, but by the second day it was beginning to go downhill. Uncle Ned was sort of fat and bald. He had a habit of sitting behind his newspaper on the front porch and grunting. I mean every time he came across something in the newspaper that excited him, he’d give this kind of grunty “ummpphh.” Sometimes Aunt Cynthia would ask, “What’s that, Ned?” and he’d report the big news that they were breaking ground for the new supermarket on Wednesday or that there was a foot of snow on Mount Washington still. But mostly he didn’t explain the “ummpphhs.” He just pushed them out and let them hang there, and then after awhile he’d push out another one, and let that hang there, too.

  But Uncle Ned was no problem, he didn’t take much interest in me; and Aunt Cynthia was away at various church things and library meetings most of the time when she wasn’t cooking, so she wasn’t much of a problem, either. The problem was guess who. As I said, the first day wasn’t so bad because of things being new. But the next morning, around the time that Denise and Pop were going out to Kennedy Airport to fly to Paris, he began in on me about his perfectness. Actually it was my own fault. Like a dummy, just to be polite and make conversation over our scrambled eggs, I asked him when he got out of school.

  “Last week,” he said. “We haven’t got our report cards yet but I imagine I’ll get straight A’s. As usual.”