Damon Damon gave me a tiny wink and then Woody said, “I’ll tell you one thing, folks, Boys Next Door don’t grow on trees. A good clean-cut kid who projects wholesome freshness and still doesn’t fall over his feet in front of a microphone is almost a freak these days. I’ve been working with this boy for three years now, and I can tell you he’s for real, the genuine article. Straight as a die, honest as the day is long.”
“Frankly,” Mr. Fenderbase said in his soft, distinguished voice, “I prefer a boy with a little larceny in his soul. It’s hard to cheat an honest Boy Next Door.”
That was supposed to be a joke, so everybody began roaring with laughter, slapping the table with their hands, and half passing out in their chairs. Woody roared right along with the rest of them. Finally, the uproar calmed down and Woody said, “But I don’t want to give you the idea that this is some half-baked innocent who’s going to have a hot flash every time somebody speaks to him. He’s been in show business for six years already—in the chorus of the Westport Watch Hour when he was eight, one of the beavers on Captain Windy’s Laughboat for two seasons until his voice broke, a couple of television specials—there aren’t many kids around with that kind of background, folks.”
It was all lies, except for that one television special I was on once for six seconds. I hadn’t any background in the music business, folks. I was just an ordinary kid who’d studied singing a little and guitar a little, who happened by luck to be on television for six seconds or whatever it was. As for not stumbling over my feet or getting hot flashes when I got in front of a microphone, why I was just as likely to stumble over my feet or get a hot flash as anybody else. Everything Woody had said was just plain lies, and it made me disgusted with him. But being my agent, he figured it was his job to tell lies. It seemed right to him. An agent was supposed to make his client look good and since the other agents were lying about their clients, Woody figured he had to lie about his, too.
But I didn’t like it. It made me feel uncomfortable. In the first place I didn’t like being talked about like a poodle in a dog show. They could at least admit that I could understand English and knew what they were saying. In the second place, suppose Mr. Fenderbase or Superman got to asking me a lot of questions about the Westport Watch Hour or the Laughboat? I wouldn’t have the right answers and in about a minute they’d know it was all made up and either I’d have to tell them that Woody was a liar, which I wouldn’t want to do, or take the blame myself, which I wouldn’t want to do, either.
But what I didn’t like about it most of all was being a phony. I’ll admit, I’m not against lying on principle. I mean I guess I lie to Pop almost every day—you know, little stuff like did I finish my homework before I went over to Stanky’s or did I sweep under my bed. That kind of lying isn’t phony: it’s just to keep your parents from running your life all the time. A kid who didn’t lie to his parents sometimes wouldn’t be normal.
But all this stuff—Woody’s lies about my marvelous background and Superman’s whole long thing about the mothers of America falling in love with me, and all those girls spending their baby-sitting money on my records—well, it was just plain phony, that’s all there was to it.
And then the question was: Would I give up a chance to be rich and famous just to avoid being phony? Would anybody? Would that be stupid? I didn’t know; but I didn’t have any chance to decide right then, because all of a sudden Mr. Fenderbase said, “Superman, have the boy bop a little.” So Superman turned and said, “Woody, have George bop a little for Mr. Fenderbase.” And Woody said, “George, bop a little for Mr. Fenderbase.”
There they were treating me like a poodle again. I knew I was supposed to come on with something like, “Gee, Mr. Fenderbase, I’m just an ordinary kid and what a big thrill it must be for me to be in the same room with somebody who is a close relative of God’s.” And I tried to say it. But try as I might, I just couldn’t get the words out through my teeth. The right words were going around in my head; all I had to do was open my mouth and say them. But I just couldn’t get my mouth open. I couldn’t sit there staring around, though; I had to say something. So I blurted out, “I don’t want to make a big deal out of it, Mr. Fenderbase, but since I’m right here in the room with you, why don’t you ask me your questions instead of asking Woody or Superman or somebody else?”
They all stared at me. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Damon Damon give me another wink. That encouraged me, and I decided the heck with it, if they wanted to make somebody else The Boy Next Door, that was okay, I’d just as soon go back to Sinclair State Pen as be a complete phony all the time. So I said, “I realize that you all know a lot more about the music business than I do, but since it’s my life that’s going to be messed up, I think I ought to have some say in it.”
Then I stopped and sat there. They stared at me some more, waiting to hear what Mr. Fenderbase said before they opened their mouths. He put his hands behind his distinguished gray hair and stared at the ceiling for awhile. Then he began to whistle. Finally he said, “That’s straightforward enough, George. I’m glad to discover that you’re not just a stuffed doll.” He tore his eyes away from the ceiling and looked around the room at everybody, drumming on the table. Then he said, “All right, Superman, let’s get on with it.”
He stood and everybody else stood and there was a hubbub all around the room. Woody put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. Damon Damon the Button King winked at me, and finally, when Fenderbase had got himself hubbubed out of the room, Superman himself came over on his crutches and patted my shoulder, which made me sore. “Woody, get him up to publicity and see what kind of a concept the boys can work up.” Then he said, “George, come on down to the office with me. I want to talk to you for a minute.”
He turned and began to swing himself out of the room on his crutches, and I followed along behind him. The truth is, I didn’t like him. I guess it wasn’t fair not to like him, him being a cripple and all, but there was something about him that struck me wrong—that completely bald head and those popped out blue eyes without any eyebrows. I just didn’t want to have very much to do with him.
We got to his office and he swung down into the chair behind his desk. He didn’t ask me to sit down. I stood in front of the desk. Out the window behind him I could see a tiny airplane coming in to land at LaGuardia Airport.
He lit a cigar and blew smoke all over me, staring at me out of those blue eyes. I waited. He took the cigar out of his mouth and rolled it a bit in his fingers. Then he said, “George, do you use drugs?”
It stopped me, coming out bluntly with it like that. “Well,” I said.
“Better tell me the truth now.”
I couldn’t figure out why I should, with all the lying everybody else had been doing. But he scared me and I was afraid to lie. “I smoke a little sometimes.”
“Just pot? Nothing else?”
“Well, I tried some downers a couple of times. But not for awhile.” That was true. When you live around Greenwich Village you’re always seeing addicts on the nod on park benches or in doorways. Usually they’re pretty dirty, or maybe snot running out of their noses. It doesn’t turn you on about drugs too much when you see people like that—especially some woman nodding out on a bench with her bare feet all filthy and her hair messed up. He rolled the cigar around some more. “No hard stuff?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“I think we’d better get this straight, George. If The Boy Next Door gets busted for drugs, he isn’t The Boy Next Door anymore. The Moms of America aren’t going to buy a Boy Next Door who’s stoned half the time, right?”
“Right.”
“Now get this in your head. Camelot Records is about to sink a quarter of a million dollars into George Stable, and that’s just to get the balloon off the ground. We aren’t going to blow that kind of money just because you want to turn on some Saturday night. From now on, you’re the cleanest-living kid in America. Righ
t?”
I didn’t like being bossed around like that, but he scared me. He was tough, that was for sure, and I was afraid to cross him. “Right.” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “There’s honey money in this for you as well as us, George. Keep it in mind. You can end up a millionaire if you handle yourself right. Got it? You start working with Damon Damon on Monday. I want to cut the demo record within a week. And if that goes, we’re off and running.” I started to turn to go, and then he said, “Oh yeah, I haven’t forgotten about getting you up to my place for a chat one of these days. We’ll have to schedule that soon.”
Chapter
Of course the meeting only took an hour, and there I was, with about three hours to kill. I wished I’d told Uncle Ned that the hours for the tutoring school were earlier, but if I’d done that the meeting would have gone on all day, and Uncle Ned would have wanted to have known why I was late for dinner. Not that I was in any rush to get back to sit around admiring Sinclair’s perfectness; but in New York I didn’t have any place to be, I just had to hang around. I went over to Sam Goody’s on Third Avenue, which isn’t too far from Grand Central, and looked at records for awhile, and then I decided to go down to the Village again, to see if I could get into a game on the West Fourth Street courts. But nobody I knew was playing, so I watched for awhile, and then I just sort of stood there, trying to decide what to do next. And I was standing there, when I saw the woman who was subletting our apartment come down West Fourth Street onto Sixth Avenue, and go into the liquor store.
I was kind of sore at her. I knew it was unfair, she couldn’t help it if she sublet our apartment, and I guess if she was paying for it she was entitled to mess it up if she wanted. The thing that bothered me most was my little teddy bear key chain. I had a funny feeling about that, her just sort of taking it over the way she had. I mean it didn’t bother me she was using our towels or our plates and forks and stuff, but that teddy bear key chain was my special thing, it was mine, and I didn’t want anybody else having it for their thing, even though it didn’t really hurt me anyway. I’ll admit it, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it when I was home. I didn’t carry it around, or put my own house keys on it, because it was too big to have in my pocket all the time. But even if I ignored it a lot, it was still mine, and I didn’t like her messing with it.
And all of a sudden I realized that I could easily go upstairs and get it. I had my keys with me. It wouldn’t be any problem at all. Of course there was no telling how long she’d be gone. She might be gone for the rest of the day, or she might be coming right back from the liquor store. But it would only take me about two minutes to get up to the fourth floor, and another minute to grab the key chain and get out again. Even if I met her when I was coming back down the stairs she wouldn’t think anything of it. I was supposed to be George Scampi, I belonged in the building.
She still hadn’t come out of the liquor store. I crossed Sixth Avenue and trotted up West Fourth to our apartment, and looked around again. She wasn’t in sight.
Quickly I opened the front door, and began to run up the stairs. I’d done that often enough. When I reached our door I unlocked it, and dashed into the room. I didn’t bother to shut the door, because I was going right out again.
But I didn’t go right out again, because the teddy bear key chain wasn’t hanging on Pop’s lamp anymore. It was gone. I stood there, thinking. Maybe she’d put it back in the bedroom. I ran in there and looked, but it wasn’t on the bureau. I pulled open a couple of drawers, but it wasn’t there either. I went into the kitchen to see if she’d put it there. And suddenly from behind me came her voice saying, “Okay kid, don’t move.”
I turned slowly around. She was standing there holding Pop’s pallet knife out toward me. “Hey,” I said.
“I mean it,” she said. “If you move, I’ll run you through.”
I began to sweat and get red. “Listen, I can explain.”
“I guess you’d better,” she said. “You might begin by explaining what you were doing around here yesterday.”
“Honest, there was a leak—”
“The heck there was. I went down to the Scampis last night to see if everything was okay and they told me there wasn’t any leak, and there wasn’t any George Scampi, either.”
“Oh,” I said. I really felt like a complete fool. “Well, I can explain anyway. I’m George Stable. This is our apartment.”
She blinked. “George Stable? Sam Stable’s son?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Why should I believe that? I think I’d better just call the cops.”
“No, no.” I said.
“So tell me the truth, then.”
“It’s the truth. I’m George Stable. See, look, here’s my subway pass.” I took out my wallet and showed her my pass.
“How do I know you didn’t steal this?”
“There are some pictures of me in my bedroom. In the bottom drawer. My friend took them. He has a hobby of photography.”
She stared at me. Then she said, “You hold it right there, kid.” She backed up, keeping her eyes on me all the time, and backed into my bedroom. In a minute she returned with a pile of pictures that Stanky had taken of me. She looked at them and then she looked at me, and finally she said, “Well, it’s you all right. So you’re Sam Stable’s son. What are you doing, haunting the place?”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d told so many people so many different stories I hardly knew what the truth was anymore. “I’ll be honest,” I said. “I got sort of homesick to see the old place.”
“Homesick? You’ve only been away from here two weeks.”
“Well, I know,” I said. “I guess I was sort of curious to know who was living here.”
“Well, you found that out before. What did you come back for today?”
I got red and hot. “Well, I wanted my key chain.”
“Key chain?”
“With the teddy bear on it.” It seems kind of silly to go to all that trouble for a key chain.
She took it out of her pocket. It had her keys on it. “You mean this?”
“It’s sort of a good luck charm for me.”
She laughed. “You mean you were willing to risk a breaking and entering charge just to get this?”
“I didn’t think of it that way.” I said. “It’s our apartment, you can’t get arrested for breaking into your own apartment, can you?”
“You sure can, kid, when I’m subletting it. Don’t forget it.” She took her keys off it and handed it to me. “Here,” she said. “And don’t break in any more.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I knew Sam Stable had a kid, but I didn’t think you’d be as screwy as he is.”
“Do you know Pop?”
“Sure. I’m doing some work for Smash Comics. That’s how we met. I used to be a great fan of Garbage Man when I was a kid. I thought it was terrific when mild mannered advertising executive Rick Martin turned into a garbage man and burned holes in things with his smell.”
She seemed pretty nice after all. “Do you draw a comic strip?”
“I’m doing some coloring.” I knew about that: the main artist usually draws the pictures in pen and ink and then they have some lesser ones to put in the colors. “I thought it was terrific the first time I got to color Garbage Man.”
“How come you decided to sublet our apartment?”
“The lease on my old place ran out, and I took this to give me time to find another place. It’s pretty tough finding places—your Pop will be back in two more weeks and I still haven’t got anything.”
“Maybe you can live with us for awhile.”
“I don’t think Denise would like it.”
“I guess not,” I said. Although I couldn’t think why not.
“Listen, George,” she said, “I’ve got some work to do. But if you feel homesick again, stop by if you like.”
“Thanks,” I said. And I left.
Uncle Ned didn’t say any
thing to me about school that night. It was beginning to worry me. I’d been up at Sinclair’s for about two weeks, and it had already been ten days since he’d written Pop a letter about me. It seemed to me that the letter should be coming back any day now, and then what would I do? My big hope was to sweat it out for two more weeks. I didn’t figure that Pop would come out to Pawling to get me—he’d just call up and ask how things were and tell me to come home on the train. And hopefully Uncle Ned wouldn’t bring up anything about the tutoring school. But maybe he would; there were a lot of worries in the whole thing, but all I could do was tell myself not to worry about them.
Anyway, I didn’t have much time for worrying. George Stable, The Boy Next Door, was on fire at Camelot. We were getting ready to cut the test records, and there were meetings and conferences going on all the time. A lot of it was just a big waste of time. Woody would tell me to be somewhere at ten and I’d get there a quarter of ten just to be on the safe side, and then Woody would show up at ten-fifteen. We’d sit around until nearly eleven and by that time somebody would have changed his plans and we were supposed to come back after lunch. After awhile I got the idea and brought along a S-F book to read. And a couple of times I went down to our old apartment and talked to the woman who was subletting it. Her name was Barbara Feinberg. She was pretty nice; she didn’t seem to mind it when I came down and talked to her.
But even when the meetings got going, a lot of times they didn’t seem to be about anything: people would say things like, “We haven’t got a clean concept here,” and, “I’d like to know what the distribs feel about it, let’s get a slant from Smithers at Retail Outlets,” none of which I could understand. Finally they’d all decide to “give it a mull” and “keep on truckin” and the meeting would break up.
Even when the meetings were actually about something, they hardly ever had anything to do with music. Most of the time they had to do with publicity and my image and what kind of a haircut a Boy Next Door should have. Take for example the meeting with the publicity guys. There were two of them—a tall, skinny guy who looked as if he were going to cry, and a short, round one who seemed happier. They didn’t even bother covering up that they were being phony. They just made stuff up left and right as if it was a perfectly normal thing to do. “Where ya’ from, George?” the short, round one said.
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