Rich and Famous

by James Lincoln Collier

  There was only one place to go—down to our own place in Greenwich Village. I didn’t know if Barbara Feinberg would let me stay there. Probably she wouldn’t. But I had a good reason for going there, which was, if Uncle Ned called the cops, he couldn’t say I was running away from home, because I was home. So I went down there and knocked on the door and Barbara let me in. “What’s up, kid?” she said.

  I took a deep breath. “Barbara, I just ran away. I need some place to stay.”

  “Ran away?”

  “Yeah, I got into trouble with Uncle Ned. I can’t stand staying there anymore.”

  She sort of sighed. “Well, come in.” I came in and put my suitcase down. “How about a coke?” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She got me the coke and I sat down on Pop’s daybed and drank it.

  “So tell me what happened.”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I mean they got on my back about something.”

  “That’s nothing new, George. Grown-ups are always getting on kids’ backs about things.”

  “Yeah, well I can’t stand it anymore.”

  She lit a cigarette and stared at me for a moment. Then she said, “Look, it isn’t any of my business, but my advice is to go back. Just pick up your suitcase and go back. Running away from home isn’t as groovy as it sounds. I know. I did it.”

  “You’re doing okay.”

  “For a long time I wasn’t. I ran away because my parents wouldn’t send me to art school. They wanted me to go to some fancy college they’d picked out. Was that dumb. I could have studied art at the college, but now look at me, I’m working nights as a waitress at some cockroach restaurant in order to pay for art school and I’m about four years behind everybody else.”

  “Why didn’t you go home before?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, after awhile it gets to be too late for things. I was sixteen when I took off and came here. Of course I was scared to death for about a month, and then I began to meet some people, and after awhile I started living with this guy, and it all seemed pretty groovy for a couple of years. But then he got busted for drugs, and they nearly nailed me too, and I began to get another look at the thing and wonder where I was going and where I’d be in another ten years. And I started thinking about art school.”

  “Why didn’t you go home then?”

  “By this time they weren’t speaking to me, I couldn’t go home. I mean maybe I could have if I’d come crawling back and kissed their feet, but I wasn’t about to do that.”

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “Some little place in Ohio you never heard of. That’s another part of the trouble, everybody out there knew I’d run off and was living in a pad in Greenwich Village. Naturally that was a big disgrace and it made it hard for my parents to forgive me for disgracing them.”

  “You don’t even write them letters?”

  “I do now. In the past couple of years I got straight with them, more or less. My old man came to New York about a year ago and we talked about it. I call them up about once a month, or whenever somebody has a birthday or something. So let me tell you, Georgie, I know what I’m talking about.”

  “But your life is more interesting than just going to college,” I said.

  “The hell it is. Waitressing in a cockroach restaurant isn’t more interesting than anything. Take my word for it, Georgie. Go home. Tell your Uncle Ned you’ve learned your lesson and go home.”

  She lit a cigarette and I looked at her. Finally I said, “There’s a reason why I can’t go home. I’m supposed to be in New York getting rich and famous.” And I told her the whole story—about Pop and Denise going to Europe and Sinclair’s computer and Woody and Superman and Mr. Fenderbase and all the rest of it. And she stared at me and smoked and shook her head at the interesting parts. Finally when I got finished, she said, “Are you standing there telling me that you’re on the verge of being a millionaire?”

  I got kind of embarrassed. “Well, I don’t know if it would be that much.”

  “You’re serious? This whole story is true?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Wow. How’d you like to be my boyfriend, George?”

  I grinned. She was kidding, but I was glad she liked me. “Sure,” I said.

  “Well, listen, we can’t fool around with money like that. You better move in with me for a few days until we can figure out what to do.”

  So that’s what I did. And the next day I went up to Camelot to work with Damon Damon. They were going to make the test record in a couple of days. The song they had settled on was pretty silly. They had had it specially written. It was some crap about a girl who was in love with the boy next door, and at the end of the song it turned out, naturally that I was the boy next door. The melody wasn’t too bad, nothing special, but not too bad. It was the words that were awful. But Superman said it was right, and Damon Damon agreed. “Of course, the lyrics are simply beyond belief, dear boy, but it’s commercial.”

  And we were working about on this song, “The Boy Next Door,” when Woody came in with these two public relations guys, the tall, sad one and the short, round one.

  “Hold up a minute, Damon,” Woody said. “We got a little something we want to work out.” He turned to me. “Georgie, we want to go up to this hometown of yours and do a little shooting.”

  “We’ve got to get some crap organized for the fan magazines,” the round one said.

  “Right,” said the tall, skinny one who looked as if he were going to cry. “Some photographs of The Boy Next Door at his house next door. This cousin of yours—he’ll let us use his house for background, right?”

  “Sinclair?” I croaked out.

  “Sinclair?” the round one said. “That’s the name of a gas company. What does he think he is, a gas station?”

  “It’s an old family name,” I said. “From Uncle Ned’s family.”

  “Uncle Ned?” The round one slapped his thigh. “That’s beautiful, that’s real down-home time.”

  “It sings,” the skinny one said. “It couldn’t be better if I’d made it up myself.”

  I was thinking fast. “Well, gee, I think they’ve gone away. They go up to Maine fishing a lot. I mean for vacation. So I guess that won’t work out.”

  “Sure it will,” the round one said. “Better not to have them hanging around anyway. They’ll just get underfoot asking for your autograph.”

  I began to really worry. “Well, see I guess I should explain, the reason why they went up to Maine was because they had a fire there at the house. It burned the whole porch and part of the kitchen, and there are carpenters all over the place now.”

  The skinny one shrugged. “We don’t care about the house, all we need is the barn—a few shots of you pitching the horses or whatever they do.”

  “That’s what I was going to say,” I said. “The fire started in the barn.”

  “Why does this always happen to me?” the skinny one said.

  “Because you’re a high school drop-out, dummy,” the round one said. “If you’d finished high school, you could have been a big time executive like Woodward. Come on, Woody, what’s the story?”

  Woody sighed. “Now George,” he said patiently, “I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure, but this isn’t any big deal. These guys are pros, they’ll go up there with you. They’ll find the backgrounds they need. Just relax and do what they tell you. We want to do it in a couple of days.”

  “Well, gee—”

  Woody put up his hand. “Please don’t argue with me, George. We’ve got to get some stuff going for the fan magazines. You want to be in the fan magazines, don’t you? Vocal Star Magazine, Teen Hits, those ones.”

  The skinny one nodded. “Modest, unassuming George Stable, The Boy Next Door, still does his share of chores around the home, despite his new found fame. In the picture at left, he shovels the hay out of his father’s barn. At right, helping Mom wash the dishes.”

  “T
hat’s going to be a little hard to take a picture of,” I said, “seeing as she’s been dead for thirteen years.”

  “All right, Aunt whatever her name is,” the round one said. “Uncle Ned has a wife, doesn’t he?”

  “Aunt Cynthia.” The skinny one shook his head. “We’ll have to change that. Aunt Cynthia doesn’t sing. There isn’t an editor in New York who can spell Cynthia correctly. What’s the simplest name you can think of?”

  “Bob,” the round one said.

  “Aunt Bob? In this picture George Stable, The Boy Next Door helps his Aunt Bob wash the dishes. It doesn’t sing.”

  “Cut it out, you clowns,” Woody said. “George, be ready to go up there tomorrow.”

  Chapter

  What was I going to do about it? I couldn’t tell Woody the truth—he’d get upset and start having long phone conversations with Pop, and if that was going to happen I might as well commit suicide right in the beginning. Somehow, I was going to have to avoid going to Uncle Ned’s. Maybe I could pick out some other old abandoned barn along the way and say it was Uncle Ned’s. Or some house where nobody was home or something. Otherwise, all I could do was pray.

  I thought about it all day, and I was still thinking about it at five o’clock when Superman suddenly heaved himself into the studio where I was rehearsing with Damon Damon. “Hold it a minute, Damon,” he said. We stopped playing. “Georgie, I think it’s time we had our chat,” Superman said. “I’ve got a lot of things I want to go over with you. Come on by my apartment this evening— around seven o’clock.”

  “Well, gee,” I said. But I couldn’t think of anything, so I said, “Okay.” He gave me the address, which was some posh place up in the East Seventies, and left.

  “What’s that all about?” Damon asked. “Superman never struck me as the type for little chats. Is he serving tea?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “He keeps saying he wants to get to know me better.”

  “How odd,” Damon Damon said. “It hardly seems Superman’s thing, having little chats with thirteen-year-olds.”

  “Have you ever been to his place, Damon?”

  “I’ve never been asked, dear boy. I don’t think that Superman and I have much in common.”

  “I guess not,” I said. “I wonder what he wants to talk about?”

  “I wouldn’t bring up the subject of murder if I were you,” Damon said. “I presume he’s a bit sensitive about it.”

  I didn’t want to go; he scared me too much. I mean what were we going to talk about? But when I got up there I was kind of glad I’d come. He had the fanciest apartment I’d ever seen. I mean the Stankys have a pretty fancy place, in this brownstone on Eleventh Street, but it was one of these sort of old-fashioned places with a lot of antique furniture. Superman’s place was brand-new, with everything modern. There were these great big windows in the living room, so you could sit there and look down on the East River, with the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and then down further the Williamsburg Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge. You could see way out into Brooklyn and Queens, and up north to the Triboro Bridge, too. There were wall-to-wall carpets everywhere, and a fireplace, and this modern glass and aluminum furniture. Boy, was it fancy.

  Some other guy let me in. I didn’t know whether he was Superman’s butler or a friend of his or what. But he showed me into the living room where Superman was sitting in a big modern chair. He brought Superman a drink and me a coke, and then he left. I decided he was some kind of servant, because he didn’t hang around with us, but went away some place.

  There was a record player going, kind of softly. “Do you just play Camelot Records?” I asked, to be polite.

  He laughed. “Georgie, I listen to enough of that garbage all day long. I mostly listen to jazz when I’m at home. Or Baroque music. Vivaldi.”

  “My Pop likes Vivaldi,” I said. “He keeps trying to get me to like it, too, but somehow I just can’t. I mean it doesn’t turn me on or anything.”

  “Is your Pop still in Europe?”

  I didn’t like to think about Pop coming home too much. “He’s supposed to come back at the end of the week.” I said.

  “I guess you’ll be glad to see him,” he said.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  So then he began asking me a lot of questions—what grade I was in, and how I did in school, and about my friends, and my hobbies and a lot of stuff like that. It wasn’t what I’d call a chat—more of a quiz, if you want to know. But I didn’t much care. It was kind of nice sitting in that fancy apartment looking out at the East River and all those bridges, drinking a coke out of a fancy glass with ice in it, instead of right out of the can the way I usually did. And I began to decide that maybe Superman wasn’t so scary after all. He was just one of those people who seem scary.

  Finally Superman said, “Well, I guess we’ve both got things to do.”

  So I finished off my coke, put down my glass, and got up. “Well, thanks for the coke,” I said.

  “That’s okay, George,” he said. “See you tomorrow.” The servant sort of popped out from nowhere, and started to show me toward the door. But then Superman suddenly said, “Oh listen, Georgie, maybe you can do me a favor?”

  I stopped. “Emmett, hand me that package from the side board in the dining room.” The man went out and in a minute he came back with a square package wrapped up in brown paper. It was tied up with string, and there was scotch tape on it, too. “George, these are some tapes of your backup group. I want the arranger to have a listen to them. Be a good guy and drop them off. It isn’t far out of your way to Grand Central.”

  I took the package. It seemed to have five or six boxes of tape in it. There was an address on them, somewhere on East Thirty-sixth Street. “All right,” I said. I didn’t tell Superman that I wasn’t going to Grand Central, but down to Greenwich Village.

  “Be careful with them, George. They’re the only copies we’ve got.”

  I said I would be, and I left. I took the Lexington Avenue Subway down to Thirty-third Street, went over to the address on the package, and rang the bell. But nobody answered. I thought that was kind of funny: I figured Superman would have made sure that the guy was home before he’d send me over with something as valuable as the tapes. For a moment I thought about leaving them with the super, but then I decided I’d better not if they were that valuable. The only other thing to do was to take them back to Superman’s, or to take them home. I didn’t really want to see Superman anymore. The easiest thing would be to take them home. I could go up to the arranger’s house in the morning with them, and if he still wasn’t home I could take them up to Camelot and give them back to Superman.

  So I went home. Barbara Feinberg was eating some canned hash for supper. “Where’ve you been?” she asked.

  “I was up at Superman’s. He wanted to have a chat.”

  “Do you want something to eat?”

  „I’m pretty hungry, I could make myself a sandwich,” I said, hoping that she’d cook me something instead. I put the tapes down on the table.

  “There’s some more hash in the pan,” she said. “I’m not going to eat it all.” Then she pointed at the package with her fork. “What’s that?”

  “Tapes of my backup group. I was supposed to deliver them to the arranger, but he wasn’t home.”

  “What do they sound like?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I went out into the kitchen and looked into the frying pan. There didn’t seem to be an awful lot of hash in it. I guess Barbara Feinberg didn’t know how much kids eat. “Listen, how much of this hash are you going to eat?”

  “You can finish it up. I’m full.”

  I got down a plate and scooped the hash onto it. Then I got four pieces of bread out of the icebox, smeared them up with butter and peanut butter, poured out a big glass of milk, and carried it all out to the table.

  “Good Lord,” she said. “Peanut butter and hash?”

  “I don’t mind it,” I said.

>   “It’s your stomach.” She leaned back and lit a cigarette. “So what does your backup group sound like? Is it country or what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’d like to know if it’s going to be a country sound or what.”

  “Let’s play them. That tape recorder of your Pop’s works, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it works,” I said, shoving a lot of bread and peanut butter into my mouth.

  “Well, all right,” she said.

  “The thing is, I don’t know if I should open them.”

  “How would Superman know?”

  “There’s scotch tape on the paper.”

  “I can get that off,” she said, “with turpentine.”

  “So it wouldn’t show?”

  “Sure,” she said. “There’s nothing to it.”

  I took a mouthful of hash and thought about it. I was pretty curious. “Well, if you think it won’t show,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. She slid the package over in front of her, and began unknotting the twine, picking at it carefully with her fingernails until it came loose. Then she took the string off the package and set it aside. Next she went over to Pop’s taboret, and poured out some turpentine from her painting stuff into a little bowl. She took a sharp knife, dipped it into the turpentine and slowly, a bit at a time, worked the knife point under the scotch tape. Rapidly the turpentine dissolved the stickiness on the tape, and it came loose just the way a postage stamp soaks off in water. She went on carefully working the knife under the tape, dipping it back into the turpentine every few seconds, and in about two minutes she had the scotch tape peeled off. She set the piece of tape aside to dry. Then she unwrapped the brown paper. It was splotched up with turpentine. She set it aside to dry, too. “That smell will disappear after awhile,” she said.

  It was six boxes of tape. “That’s a lot of tape,” I said. “We can’t listen to it all.”

  She picked up the top box and looked it over. There was no writing on it at all. “Maybe it says something on the reel,” she said. She laid the box on the table and lifted the cover off.