Rich and Famous

by James Lincoln Collier

  And all of a sudden I decided to go on up and see. It made me kind of nervous. I knew that Pop wouldn’t want me bothering the people who were subletting. He’d say that they were paying good money for the privilege of living there, and we didn’t have any right to come barging in. But I decided to do it anyway, I’d say I was somebody else. I had my own key, so I let myself in the front door, climbed up the stairs to the fourth floor, and knocked on our door. I waited for a minute, and finally a woman’s voice said, “Who is it?”

  “It’s George Scampi,” I said. The Scampis lived just below us, only they didn’t have any George; their children were all grown up, Agnes Scampi used to babysit me when I was a little kid.

  “Scampi?”

  “I live downstairs.”

  She opened the door a crack and looked out. “I didn’t mean to bother you,” I said, “but there’s some water leaking down. It might be from your radiator. It happens a lot.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, come on in.” She opened the door up. She was around twenty-two or something, and she was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt which was smeared up with paint.

  I walked in. “They’re always having leaks up here,” I said. “Sometimes it’s from the radiators, sometimes it’s from the toilet or the sink. You never can tell where it’s coming from.”

  “Well, have a look around,” she said. She had some drawing paper tacked onto Pop’s drawing table, and she was doing some kind of water color sketch, but from where I was standing I couldn’t see what. She went back to the drawing table, but she didn’t work. Instead she sort of watched me. I went into my bedroom. The bed wasn’t made, and there was a lot of women’s underwear flung all over the place. It made me kind of sore to see my room all messed up—I mean I didn’t keep it so neat myself, but at least it was my mess. I fooled around in there for a minute, and then I went into the bathroom and pretended to look at the sink pipes. It was kind of funny to see a lot of lady’s pills and stuff in there instead of our toothbrushes and Pop’s razor and shaving cream and all that. So then I checked the kitchen, which had strange foods in it, too, and finally I went back into the living room.

  “Well, I can’t find anything,” I said. “I guess it must have stopped by itself.”

  “Stopped by itself?”

  “Yeah, it does that sometimes.”

  “Well, okay,” she said.

  But I didn’t want to go. I was still curious to find out if anybody else was living there. I mean maybe her husband was at work and her kid was riding his bike in Washington Square. Besides, I didn’t have anything else to do. “I guess you’re a painter,” I said.

  “After a fashion,” she said.

  She wanted me to go, I could tell that, so she could get back to her painting. “I’m kind of interested in painting,” I said. “I take art in school.” I walked over to her picture, and then suddenly I saw something out of the corner of my eye that stopped me. It was my little teddy bear key chain. It was hanging from one of the knobs on the swivel lamp Pop had over his drawing table, just sort of dangling down over the table. It made me feel kind of creepy to see it hanging there, I mean considering that it was my special thing and didn’t have anything to do with her. So I blurted out, “I see you have a teddy bear key chain.”

  “What? Oh that.”

  “The kid who lives here has one like that.”

  “It’s his, I imagine,” she said. “It’s sort of cute.”

  There wasn’t anything more I could say about it. If I’d admitted who I was in the first place maybe I’d have been able to say it was my lucky charm or something, and she’d let me take it, but it was too late for that. “Well,” I said, finally, “I guess I’d better go. Maybe I’ll see you again.”

  „Fine,” she said. “Although I usually don’t like being interrupted when I’m working.”

  So I left; there was nothing else to do. I checked out the West Fourth Street courts, but it was still drizzling too much for basketball, so I went over to Crespino’s and ate a hamburger and a milkshake, and then I killed some time up on Eighth Street in the record stores; and finally it was time to go up to Grand Central and take the train back to Pawling. What a boring day. And to make it worse, halfway up to Pawling on the train I finished my Heinlein book and had nothing to do but stare out the window at a lot of wet trees.

  Of course every time I got back to Sinclair’s I was faced with a new worry—had Uncle Ned caught onto something? He didn’t say anything when I came in, except his usual “I guess it’s time to wash up for dinner,” and he didn’t say anything about it at dinner—we just carried on a conversation about Isaac Newton’s theory and how it was different from Einstein’s theory of relativity. Uncle Ned didn’t believe in wasting the dinner time with a few jokes or some interesting story about what happened that day, the way Pop and I did, which I guess is one reason why Pop never spent much time up there. Uncle Ned’s idea was that you were committing a sin unless you launched right into some lively topic like Isaac Newton or air pollution. I wasn’t in favor of air pollution, mind you, but I didn’t see why we had to have it along with our pot roast every night. But to be honest, so long as he didn’t bring up anything about my summer school I wasn’t going to be too upset, even if the conversation wasn’t much more fun than looking at wet leaves for an hour.

  But as it turned out, he was only playing it cool. After dinner, when I was sitting out on the porch reading, so as to escape from being beaten at chess by Sinclair, which I would have to have done if I’d hung around his room, he came up and sat down next to me. “Well, tell me, George,” he said. “How’s your school going?”

  “Pretty good,” I said. “I mean it’s just at the beginning, it’s sort of confusing.”

  “I suppose so. What exactly are you taking?”

  He was trying to trap me, that was clear. “French and math. They didn’t have enough for American history or I would have taken that, too.”

  “That sounds like enough,” he said. “It isn’t sensible to try to do too much at once. I suppose they’ve really loaded you down with homework.”

  “I guess they will,” I said. “Only we haven’t got our books yet.”

  “That seems like bad management. Perhaps if you told me the name of the books I could get them for you.”

  I was beginning to sweat around my eyebrows. “Well, they said they’d have them next time.”

  “I see. You mean Wednesday—day after tomorrow.”

  “That’s what they said—but maybe something will go wrong.”

  He stood up. “Let’s hope not, George.” Then he went into the house.

  Chapter

  Riding down to New York on the train I thought about it. Why was everybody so against me being rich and famous? It just didn’t seem fair. Especially when it probably wasn’t going to work out anyway. I mean, what difference did it make to Pop if I went down to New York and fooled around Camelot Records, instead of sitting up in Uncle Ned’s barn watching Sinclair solder wires onto his computer? Or why should it matter to Uncle Ned what I did? He wasn’t my father, and besides he had a perfect son. He should have been satisfied with that instead of meddling around with me. There wasn’t any way he could make me perfect, no matter what he did. It wasn’t any use for him to try.

  But there wasn’t much point in trying to figure out why he was against me being rich and famous; because I knew perfectly well that as soon as he found out what was going on. he’d capture me away from Camelot Records and keep me locked up in Sinclair State Pen until Pop got home. And that wouldn’t be any help, either, because as soon as Pop found out that I’d been sneaking off to New York to be rich and famous he’d hit the ceiling, ground me for four or five years, and cut off my allowance for the rest of my life, too. I didn’t know how long it would take for Uncle Ned to get the idea. I was positive he’d written Pop, and the only question was how long it would be before his letter would come back marked “No Such Hotel” or however the French would say it.<
br />
  But there wasn’t anything I could do about that but pray, so I turned my attention to another trouble, which was the big conference I was going to that morning with Mr. Fenderbase, the close friend of God’s. I wondered what he was like. Even Superman was scared of him, and Superman was a pretty scary guy. I mean having been in jail and all.

  The way Woody made it sound, this conference was the biggest event of the year, bigger than the World Series or the President’s State of the Union address. Naturally, Superman would be there and Woody and a couple of guys from the publicity department and the music director and most important of all, Mr. Fenderbase, the President of Camelot Records. “This is it, baby,” Woody had told me. “They’ll decide whether it’s go or no go. You got to be sharp. When Superman says to bop a little, bop.”

  When I got up to the Camelot offices, the receptionist told me to go down to the conference room. There was a long table in the middle of it. Everybody’s place was set with a pencil, a pad of paper, a glass of water, and an ashtray, as if we were about to sit down to some kind of dinner. Woody was already there when I got there, pacing around the room and nervously smoking. “Where’ve you been, baby?” he asked.

  “What?” I said. “I’m five minutes early.”

  “Well, let’s be on time next time,” he said.

  He was too nervous to realize what he was saying, and I admit I was getting pretty nervous myself. I wanted to sit down, but I didn’t know where my place was. I began to pace around at the other end of the room from where Woody was pacing, and then the door opened and a man came in and said, “Georgie, darling, it’s marvelous to see you.”

  It took me by surprise. He was a guy named Damon Damon whom I’d known from the music business before. Damon Damon was a musical director. In the music business they like to have one guy out of every twenty or thirty who knows something about music, and Damon Damon was it. He really did know about music—chords and notes and how to breathe when you’re singing and stuff like that. He was sort of nutty, but everybody liked him because he knew what he was talking about and wasn’t full of crap like everybody else. People used to call him Damon Damon the Button King because he always had extra buttons on the cuffs of his jacket. Also he wore these amazing vests that had fancy buttons on them, too.

  “What are you doing here, Damon?” I said.

  “Didn’t anyone tell you, darling? I’m musical director of Camelot. I’m going to be in charge of your career if they decide you’re going to have one.” He unbuttoned his jacket and held it open to show me his vest, which was red with big yellow flowers on it. “What do you think of my waistcoat, sweetie? Absolutely delicious, isn’t it?”

  I must say I was glad to see Damon Damon. He was somebody I could trust, even if he was nuts. He didn’t worry about where he was supposed to sit, but plopped into a chair and then patted the one next to it. “Here, Georgie, come sit by me and tell me how much you admire my waistcoat.”

  So I sat down next to him; and just then some other people arrived and plopped down, and then finally Superman came in on his aluminum crutches with another guy, who turned out to be Mr. Fenderbase, the relative of God’s who was President of Camelot. He had a lot of distinguished gray hair and a distinguished fake suntan he’d got at his health club and he was wearing a distinguished gray suit that went well with his fake suntan. He gave me a firm handshake and looked me straight in the eye, the way people in the music business do when they’re trying to give you the impression that they’re sincere. In the music business you can always tell a liar by his firm handshake and the way he looks you straight in the eye.

  So everybody milled around for a few minutes and then Mr. Fenderbase said, “All right, Superman, where do we stand?” His voice was soft and distinguished like his gray hair and his suntan.

  “Got a good clean concept here, Mr. Fenderbase. George Stable, The Boy Next Door. A kid who’s no musical genius, just a red-cheeked, barefoot down-home kid of the kind every American mother wishes she had for a son instead of the slump-shouldered yahoo she’s got. Woody, tell George to stand up so Mr. Fenderbase can get a look at him.”

  “Stand up, George, so Mr. Fenderbase can get a look at you.”

  I stood up and stared at Mr. Fenderbase in a sincere way so he’d know I was as big a liar as he was, and then Mr. Fenderbase waved his hand and Superman said, “Woody, tell the kid he can sit down.”

  “You can sit down, George,” Woody said, and I sat down.

  Mr. Fenderbase put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. “Why are we selling records to America’s mothers, Superman?”

  “Acceptance in the home, Mr. Fenderbase. That’s the big concept today. You take your average fourteen-year-old girl, anything Mom likes, forget it. She’s rebellious, she doesn’t want to know from Mom. But now your ten-year-old, she’s still involved with Mom, she’ll go along with Mom’s ideas. And Mom is going to think that George Stable, The Boy Next Door, is a doll. She’s going to say to herself, „That’s the kind of cute little sucker I want my Mary to go around with when she’s older.’ He’s a good kid, he’s that polite newsboy who brings the paper to the door instead of heaving it into the hedge. He’s the kid at the supermarket who carries your bag out to the car just to be nice. He’s the boy Mom wants for her daughter instead of a weirdo like that friend of her son’s she keeps turning up under the newspapers when she vacuums the television room. Who needs him, with his scraggly beard and his dirty jeans? All she has to do is just think about that one laying a finger on her little Mary and she has to push home half a box of librium to stop shuddering. What we’ve got for her is George Stable, The Boy Next Door. And once we sell Mom, she’ll sell little Mary and we’re golden.”

  Mr. Fenderbase went on staring at the ceiling. “Why are we selling records to ten-year-old girls, Superman?” he said in his soft, distinguished voice.

  “The name of the game is moola, Mr. Fenderbase. M-o-o-l-a. The big dollar. There’s a honey of a buck in this and nobody’s got his fingers into the hive yet. According to market surveys, the average American ten-year-old girl has discretionary income of over one hundred dollars a year—allowance, baby-sitting money, the birthday fiver she gets because granny is too lazy to buy a present. It all adds up. There’s five million girls out there in that nine-to-eleven group, with half a billion dollars to spend every year. And they’re going to blow it all on dairy freezes and training bras if we don’t get to them first.”

  Mr. Fenderbase went on staring at the ceiling, and everybody sat there waiting for him to give out his next pronouncement. Finally, in that low distinguished voice, he said, “What about the boys?”

  “Right on target, Mr. Fenderbase,” Superman said. “They’ve got lawn-mowing jobs and they’re throwing away even more money on dairy freezes than the girls. They’ll sit there in front of the TV watching George Stable, The Boy Next Door do his number and they’ll be drooling all over their Boy Next Door T-shirts wishing it was them up there. Oh, we’re not going to get them all, of course. Some of them are going to be jealous of The Boy Next Door and go around telling everybody that George Stable is a custard-face, but the hell with those little soreheads, who needs them? In our concept, the male audience is a bonus.”

  Superman stopped talking. Everybody looked at Mr. Fenderbase again, who was still sitting with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. We all sat there waiting, and finally he got his head down from the ceiling, looked around the room, and said, “I like the concept.” Everybody breathed a sigh of relief. “But do we have the right boy?”

  I guess Superman figured he’d got over the worst of it, because he took out one of his big cigars, lit it, and began blowing smoke all over everybody except Mr. Fenderbase. “That’s what we’re here for today. Is George Stable The Boy Next Door? Let’s find out. You’re on, Woody.”