Reluctantly, he removed his nose from the side of her neck and the butterfly of her pulse. Leaning up on one elbow, he said, “I wasn’t going to ask who.”
“Not this conversation,” she agreed. “Next conversation.”
With her hair messily around her smiling face, spreading over the pillow beneath her head, she was so beautiful, he couldn’t stand it. “I don’t want there to be anything in the universe,” he said, “except you and me and this room, floating through space and time. Eternity, right here.”
She gave him a look of amused disbelief. “What did they feed you on that plane?”
“Except,” he went on, looking around the room, “one electrician, to put a dimmer on the lights.”
“I think the phrase is ‘to put the lights on a dimmer.’ ”
“I believe I’ll shower now,” Jack said, crawling backward off her and off the bed.
“Some editor,” she commented, and pulled up the top sheet. Curling shrimplike beneath it, she said, “Wake me when you’re done.”
“Maybe.”
They sat in the little chairs by the small table under the hanging lamp in front of the view of Mickey Gilley’s parking lot, and Sara said, “Okay, the approach was wrong.”
“Agreed,” Jack said.
“I shouldn’t have just sent that one page of fax.”
Jack cocked an eyebrow at her. “That’s what was wrong with the approach?”
“Now listen,” she said. “I’m not turning my back on the Galaxy.”
“Good. No one should ever turn his back on the Galaxy.”
“I’m just saying,” she just said, “there’s something in this singer, too, what he represents.”
“The proles,” Jack told her. “The mouth-breathers. The underclass.” He pointed. “Those people in those used cars out there.”
“Don’t be so condescending,” she said.
“Why not? I’m smarter than they are, faster, funnier, richer and probably better-looking.”
She reared back, the better to study him withal. “Are you being provocative?”
“That, too,” he agreed. “I’m more provocative than they are. Sara, honeybun, our readers don’t care—”
“I hate it when you call me honeybun.”
“That’s the first time I ever did.”
“And I hated it.”
Casually, he said, “Who else called you honeybun?”
She gave him a look. “All those guys that nuzzled my neck,” she said.
“Oh, those guys.”
“You were saying something about our readers.”
“I was. I was saying they don’t care about the shitkickers, is what I was saying. Our readers care about wealth and prestige. They care about power and fame. They care about success and excess. Bottom-feeders are not a matter of deep interest to the readers of Trend. That is why I am going from here to the center of journalistic misuse of money and power, the Galaxy hospitality suite.”
“Two-two-two.”
“And very very.”
“Will you do me a favor?” she asked.
“Anything.”
“After the Galaxy, go to the show. The Ray Jones show.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, honeybun—”
“That’s twice.”
Heavily, he shrugged and nodded his acceptance of the inevitable. “All right,” he said, “all right, all right, I’ll go—”
The phone rang.
“—see the Ray Jones show,” he finished, as Sara got up and went over to the bedside phone. “And you concentrate on the Galaxy.”
“Sure. Hello? Oh, hi, Cal.” Sara listened, then smiled all over her face. “That’s great! Cal, I really appreciate this. I’ll be there. Absolutely. Oh, Cal? Listen, my editor’s in town … from the magazine? Could you put him in the Elvis seat tonight? Thanks, Cal. I’ll tell him. His name is Jack Ingersoll. Right. See you tomorrow, nine A.M. Bye.”
Sara hung up and smiled at Jack. “You are looking at a genius,” she announced.
“The Elvis seat?”
“Don’t worry about it. You just present yourself at the Ray Jones Theater a little before eight tonight. Go to the guy at the door and tell him who you are. He’ll explain all about the Elvis seat. The thing is,” she went on, “Ray Jones sells out, every show, over eight hundred seats. And there’re no house comp seats.”
“I’m looking forward to this,” Jack said insincerely. “What was he calling about? Cal, was it?”
“He wanted to tell me how my neck smelled after sex.”
“Sara, you are beginning to annoy.”
“I don’t really care,” she told him, flashing her sunniest smile. “His name is Cal Denny; he’s rather sweet—”
“Unlike some.”
“He’s Ray Jones’s best friend, and they’re all going over to Forsyth tomorrow for jury selection. Ray Jones and his whole band and Cal Denny and everybody, showing solidarity.”
“And?”
“And I,” Sara said, “have been invited along.” She pirouetted in front of him, arms and hands at a graceful angle. “Just call me supergroupie,” she suggested. “I’m going on the team bus.”
12
Ray wasn’t giving any interviews these days because of the upcoming trial, but back before this latest truckload of wet manure had hit the fan, he used to give interviews all the time. The entertainment press, which lives on a modification of the Will Rogers motto—they never met a star they didn’t like—is access. Access to the public eye, the public ear, and the public brain, if there is such a thing. Access was vital, was the lifeblood of the star’s career, because, as Ray well knew—as every headliner well knew—the public brain, if there is such a thing, has an extremely short attention span. They’ll forget you in a New York minute if you give them the chance. So the stars and the wannabes and the usedtabeens all crowd the entertainment media, the magazines and the TV shows and even (if nothing else is happening) the radio. They all smile and look relaxed and easy, they meet the interviewer’s eye with a confident and friendly gaze, and they blandly ignore the interviewer while they talk right through him or her and directly into the public brain, if there is such a thing.
After a while, every headliner develops a patter, a routine, a whole arsenal of set paragraphs and stock answers to all those expected, unoriginal, unthreatening questions. Press this button, that answer pops out. Here’s what you got when you pressed Ray Jones’s various autobiography buttons:
“Well, I was born a bunch of years ago in a little town in Georgia you’ve never heard of, Lynn—I can pretty well guarantee you that. Oh, try you? [Chuckle] Sure, Lynn. It’s called Troutman, not that far from Hazlehurst, on the road toward Albany. Oh, it’s a little town, Lynn, a bump in the road. I believe a travelin preacher got a flat tire there once and that’s how the place got started. No, I mean it. By the time the poor man raised enough money for a new tire, he had a congregation. They were as dirt-poor as he was, of course, as I was, as we all were.
“I grew up there in Troutman, fishin, goin to school when I remembered, runnin with my pals. My daddy worked for the electric company, when there was work to do—outside, stringin lines mostly. Anytime a big storm come up from the Gulf, there’d be Daddy, puttin on those big boots and that yellow slicker and yellow rain hat, in the pickup, on the way to the trouble. When I was just a little one, I wished I could go along with him, nights like that, and I thought that’s what I’d do when I grew up. If it hadn’t been for the music, I suppose that’s where I’d be right now, up some power-company pole in south-central Georgia, whistlin along with the birds.
“The music? Well, Lynn, this may sound weird, but it’s the Lord’s honest truth. I first started to sing on hayrides, ’cause I was afraid of girls. No, that’s true, Lynn, in those growin-up years, I was truly afraid of girls. [Chuckle] I don’t suppose I ever entirely got over it.
“But that was the singin side. On the musical instrument side, that came earlier. I was introduced
to the guitar when I was, I dunno, six or seven, over to school. Nobody in my family was musical, unless you count beatin time along with the jukebox on the bar, but when I started goin to school, there was this guitar. We were in a real poor school district, and that guitar was the entire music department, some beat-up old box hadn’t been in tune since the rebs come home. Well, I fell on it; I took to it; I wrestled with that guitar from when it was bigger than I was. I figured out how to tune it, too, and that’s how I found out I had this natural ear. By the time I finished grammar school, I was pretty good at that old guitar. Didn’t know anything else, but I sure did know the guitar.
“And you know, Lynn, I was so grateful to that school for lettin me at that musical instrument and for givin me time to learn it and get to know it that I was really proud, some years back, to be able to repay those people just a little bit. I give them some musical instruments, a piano and such, and some money to help keep them up. So maybe some other little fella like me, dirt-poor and ignorant, might go in there the first day of school and find out music is his life, too. I purely wouldn’t have wanted to miss it, Lynn. Music has been very good to me.
“I admit I dropped out of high school, which I don’t recommend to any kids out there that might see this, but my excuse is, I didn’t do it until I had a place to go. Me and my best friend, Cal Denny, and I’m proud to say he’s still my best friend to this day, we put together a tape—you know, the old reel-to-reel tape; I’m talkin years ago here—we put together a tape of me on guitar and Cal on drums, except we didn’t have drums, just had Cal with some sticks, hittin everything in sight, and the two of us singin, and we did our own versions of Eddy Arnold songs and Hank Williams songs and sent the tape off to a record company in Florida, and they wrote us and said if we’d come down sometime they’d audition us, no promises. So we quit school right then and there, the both of us, and hitchhiked on down to Tallahassee, and that was how it all got started.
“Of course, I still got kin in and around Troutman, and I get back there as often as I can, which isn’t often enough, but when I can. Because, you know, Lynn, the one thing for sure for all of us in this business, in this show business, is, you got to remember where you come from. You got to remember who you are, or you’ll go nuts. You got to keep in touch with your roots.”
A lot of that bushwah was true, more or less, but it wasn’t anywhere near what you could call the whole truth. What it left out, mostly, was Ray Jones himself and how he learned to deal with the world.
Ray started as the runt of the litter, fourth of nine kids, not late enough to be the baby, not cute enough to be the pet, not big enough or strong enough to fight his own battles. A scrawny, undernourished little weed, he learned early on that his choice in life was a simple one: Be smart or be tromped. He was never going to get what he wanted just by reaching for it, like the big guys, so he had to find some other way to satisfy himself. Or else stop wanting things.
Never. Born hungry, Ray was hungry his entire life, but he’d never let the hunger show. He was hungry for food, for love, for success, for ease, for safety, for money, for women. He was born hungry for everything. Fortunately, he’d also been born smart.
Indirection. Guile. Use your brains. Use the other guy’s strength. Get what you want without anybody noticing you wanted it, or they’ll take it away from you.
He perfected his survival techniques in that grammar school with the famous old guitar, which really did exist, in a janitor’s closet, though nobody connected with the school gave a damn about it or him or ever encouraged him toward music or any other damn thing except to show up every day and keep his mouth shut unless asked a direct question. He’d borrow that guitar when nobody was looking, practice where nobody could hear, and slip it back when nobody was around. He was his own encouragement.
The main thing Ray learned in school was how to use his brains as an asset rather than a liability. If he did homework for the big dumb guys, they’d be on his side in case of trouble. At the same time, his own homework was sloppy and uncaring, and usually got a lower mark than the same assignment he’d done for somebody else. That way, he never got a reputation as a brain, which in a poor hick school is the worst thing that can happen. Only the big dumb guys he was helping could have known he was actually sharp as a winter wind; but the whole point about them was that they couldn’t put two and two together, wasn’t it?
Later, in the consolidated central high school, there was always somebody else he could convince to lead the way, whenever there was a chance somebody might get burnt. Most people like to lead, or to think they’re leading, and Ray was happy to encourage this leadership belief in those he was putting into danger. Sometimes it was Cal Denny who opened the door or stole the bottle or whatever it might be, but usually somebody else; from early on, Ray had a warm spot for Cal, who was big and dumb without being mean, and so Ray wouldn’t use him as a foil or a battering ram unless there just wasn’t anybody else available.
Ray’s leaving school and hitching to Florida in search of a music career did have some truth in it, though not much. He and Cal actually did make the tape he talked about, on a tape recorder Cal had stolen—while Ray stood watch from a safe distance—from the high school music department, a section of the school devoted exclusively to the marching band. (Ray wasn’t a member of the marching band, they having no use for a guitar and he having no use for them.)
But music wasn’t the main reason Ray left town all of a sudden in the middle of his sixteenth year, dragging Cal along for protection. The main reason was a girl, the first great love of his life. He doesn’t mention her now, partly because it ended badly but also because he can no longer remember her name; not that he tries hard.
This girl had a regular boyfriend, one of the few rich kids in town, son of the drugstore owner. He it was who took her to the movies, bought her sodas, necked with her in his father’s car. But it was Ray who got her pregnant.
Whoops. It wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t lied to him, another lesson he carried with him from his high school years. She’d lied because she wanted to get away from her home, and the only way she could think of to do that was get married. She wanted to marry Ray because she thought he’d be more fun than the drugstore boy, so she lied, and then she pretended she was surprised and scared and helpless.
At that time, Ray’d had the letter from the record company for about four months but hadn’t done anything about it because he found their manner tepid, not even offering him bus fare for the audition. But now he pulled out this letter, showed it to the girl while holding his thumb over the date, and said, “I’m not gonna marry you. See this letter? These music people want me. I’m goin to Florida and I’m not comin back. My advice is, get into the backseat of that drugstore car and get yourself knocked up all over again.”
Which is what she did, being smarter than he’d thought. And that’s why Ray went off to Florida to find the life that was waiting for him, originally as a sideman on extremely minor-league session dates, playing other people’s music in other people’s groups, but learning, every single day.
The following year—they were in Nashville by then—somebody told Cal the baby’d been born, so Ray’s got a kid out there someplace, grown up now—boy or girl, he never did ask. Be funny if the kid was in the audience some night, neither of them knowing. A song in that? Nah.
Actually, the birth of the baby had led to Ray’s first set of original lyrics. Some impulse had driven him to buy one of those comic Nashville postcards and send it to the girl c/o the drugstore, writing on it: “I’ll remember you, always, and think of you real often with a smile. I hope you’ll be forever happy and learn to live without me after a while.”
13
Binx Radwell sat hunched on the folding chair in the rental house, elbows on the folding rental table, frightened eyes blinking at the maps taped and stapled and nailed to the paneled wall, and tried to ignore the cold sweat pouring from his body like condensation on a porcela
in toilet, tried to ignore the volcanolike rumblings in his intestine, and listened to the words buzzing up along the phone lines from Galaxy headquarters in Florida. This was the voice of one of Binx’s many lords and masters, new lords and masters since the change of ownership of the newspaper had bared Binx’s vulnerable flesh to colder winds than even he had heretofore known possible.
It was at field headquarters that Binx was undergoing this latest episode in the perpetual slow flaying that was the story of his life. Whenever the Weekly Galaxy went out into the world on a major story—celebrity scandal, child in well, celebrity death, religious fruitcake sex or religious fruitcake violence scandal—the first thing it did was rent a house in the local area, rent a lot of office furniture and office machinery to fill that house, bung in a bunch of phone lines, staff the place with reporters and photographers and editors from the main headquarters down in Florida, plus whatever local stringers they might have available, and start boppin. In long-con terms—and the Weekly Galaxy is nothing if it’s not a long con—this is the store, and its purpose is the same as it was for Yellow Kid Weil and the other long-con experts of yore: to pretend to be what it isn’t.
For instance: Let us say you are Cherry Chisolm of the Weekly Galaxy and you wish to interview Ray Jones’s ex-wife, who is being paid handsomely by Ray Jones to keep her flappin trap shut. If you call Ray Jones’ ex-wife—also named Cherry, interestingly—and say, “Hi, I’m Cherry Chisolm of the Weekly Galaxy and I’d—” that’s as far as you’ll get before she hangs up. But if you call and say, “Good afternoon, I am Laura Carrington, calling on behalf of the Countess Sylvia Bonofrio. Mademoiselle has asked the countess if she will chat with you for publication. Now, as you know, Countess Sylvia rarely gives interviews herself, but feeling the empathy toward you that she does, and I’m sure you remember the absolute hell the countess went through seven years ago when Alfredo—Well, I’m sure she’d rather I didn’t go over all that again.” And so on.
Baby, Would I Lie? Page 6