Eddie and the Cruisers

by P. F. Kluge

  I beat my students out of the high school parking lot that afternoon, and I didn’t call home until I stopped for gas at Flemington.

  Everybody knows at least one person like Doc Robbins. One’s usually all you can take. He’s the sort who breaks into your life, challenging, disrupting, changing, and as soon as you count on him, he’s gone. No explanations. Weeks can pass, or years. Then, one day, he’s back. Don’t expect an apology: he doesn’t seem to realize how long he’s been away. He makes it sound like he was with you all along, in constant touch, and it was your fault if you didn’t notice.

  “Never bullshit a bullshitter”—his slogan, coda, credo, all in one. That was Doc. He mastered every game he joined, and then, just when he might start winning, he walked away. He never found the hustle that was worth his full time. That included Eddie Wilson and the Parkway Cruisers. Oh, I’m sure we were near the top of Doc’s list that year, along with an Orange Julius franchise in the Virgin Islands and a dog track down in Florida. With Doc, there was always a list, and it changed as quickly as the Top Ten.

  That summer, he swept in and out of Vince’s Boardwalk a couple times a week. After a few hours of shouting and whispering, phone calls and handshakes, a flurry of jokes and drinks on the house, he’d be gone. Maybe Eddie had some way of reaching him in an emergency, but he seemed as surprised as anybody at Doc’s comings and goings.

  It wasn’t a bad setup, though. Doc would take care of business—sign paychecks, pay bills—and then he’d vanish. Anybody pressed us, we’d tell them they’d have to talk to Doc. Then we’d be left alone. “Get on with the music,” as Eddie would say.

  Doc was the first real “character” I’d ever met, and I spent as much time with him as I could. I rode with him, drank with him, shagged phone calls for him. Whenever he was with us on the road, we’d split a room and trade jokes and bits all night. I guess I thought there was a mystery about him and that I was the man to solve it. Maybe I was kidding myself and there was nothing to discover. Anyway, he eluded me. I never figured out whether we were something special or just another deal. I thought for sure I’d find out the morning they buried Eddie Wilson down in Vineland. Nothing doing. They said he visited the parents the night before. By morning he was gone.

  • • •

  “Barry Manilow spent a weekend in New England a while ago, and from the sound of this record, he’s been moping around ever since. Tell the folks about it, Barry.”

  He lifted the needle onto the record, switched off the studio mike, and motioned me over toward where he was sitting at the console.

  “Howdy, Wordman. Long time.”

  “Doc. How have you been?”

  “The hits just keep on coming,” he shrugged. For once, there was nothing to joke about. The radio station was desperately small-time, just a cut above the places that sell live chickens and Jesus pictures over the air. Office, transmitter, studio, and all, it sat off the highway on a weed-and-gravel lot, flanked by a drive-in movie and a finish-it-yourself furniture place.

  “You haven’t changed a hell of a lot, Wordman,” Doc said, and that surprised me. I thought I’d changed a lot. “Still a kid. And don’t bother returning the compliment.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me. Doc was a mess: overweight, pale, and wearing a toupee that even I could spot. He coughed incessantly, a nasty smoker’s hack that he discharged into Styrofoam cups full of cold carry-out coffee. When he was on the air, he somehow mustered his resources and sounded a little like the man I used to know, but even then it was just a sour echo of the old Big Bopper.

  “Okay, you near-beer fans. Remember Mock-bird-ing-bird? Charley and Inez Foxx, summer of sixty-three? Do you remember? James Taylor and Carly Simon are betting that you don’t …”

  He snapped off the mike.

  “Shit like this could get a man in trouble. Say, we got some catching up to do.”

  I guess I didn’t respond as readily as he’d hoped. I still wondered why he’d contacted me, why I needed him. He didn’t look like a man who could help anybody.

  “Okay. I’ll start off. My turn to curtsy, your turn to bow. After Eddie died. I sat on my ass in Central America for half a year. I ran a radio station in Puerto Rico. I guess I was married a little down there. Later, I handled press relations for an Arizona congressman, and I had a piece of a music magazine that never got off the ground and a bowling alley in Roselle Park, and somewhere along the way I kind of remember a small problem trafficking in drugs. There’s some episodes I forget, but you get the general idea. I’ve been in this dump for two years. Okay? Your turn, Wordman.”

  He put on something by a group he called “the Squeegees.” Then he leaned back in his chair and waited for me to begin.

  “So?”

  “Nothing quite so checkered, Doc. When Eddie died, that was it for me. I got out of music. Not that I was ever that far in. I haven’t looked back much. I finished college, put in a year of graduate school, and …”

  Doc waved his hand in front of a huge yawn, and I recognized the beginning of one of his old bits.

  “… obtained a position teaching English at a regional high school in northern New Jersey. The same place I graduated from. I’ve been there a dozen years and …”

  Now he slumped forward onto the desk, like he was nodding off on me.

  “Stop it!” I raced along while he snored. “I’m married and I have two kids, girls, and a house I own, and next year we’re going to rent a camper and drive across—oh, you asshole!”

  He’d fallen out of his chair and curled up on the floor in a fetal position.

  “I still don’t know why you wanted to see me,” I said, a little annoyed.

  “Calm down,” he said as he arose. “I’ve got your best interests at heart. Wait a second.”

  He stacked up some 45’s.

  “Back-to-back sounds coming up now. Something for the armchair traveler. From the land of cottonmouths and bayous, Linda Ronstadt down on ‘Blue Bayou,’ copying an old Roy Orbison song. From there, we take you to the land of Coors beer and condominia with a young fellow who’s high on life, Mr. John Denver, and no matter what you hear, John Denver isn’t Alfred E. Neuman in disguise.”

  He turned toward me when he was done. “This isn’t as bad as it looks. There’s a state college in town and the kids like my irreverent wit. They tell me I’m a cult figure in the dorms. Time and again they invite me out to concerts and stuff.”

  “Sure, Doc.”

  “Pay’s not bad and its a cheap place to live. Clean air. Friendly. And not all that far from New York. You can make it in a coupla hours.”

  “Do you ever go?”

  “No reason to go … but I could.”

  “I guess that’s something … just the access and knowing that if you had to go you could be there. …”

  “Oh, screw it, kid. You have eyes. Draw your own conclusions. You wouldn’t bullshit me. I can’t bullshit you. Anyway, I wanted you to realize where I’m at. The way I see it, Eddie is my ticket out. And yours.”

  “Eddie? Ticket to where?”

  “Wherever you want to go. He’s gonna be big. Bigger than ever.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Doesn’t matter. This is larger than life.”

  “A handful of records from the fifties? Sorry, Doc, I can’t see it.”

  “Just listen. Hear me out. I’m gonna put on an album. Donna Summer. They’ll be humping all over the Poconos. When the album’s done, I’ll be finished, and you can do whatever you want. It’s your decision. You don’t owe me anything. Could be, you owe yourself a little. But that’s for you to decide. You talked to the creep, so I guess you know what’s been happening with Eddie Wilson and the Parkway Cruisers lately.”

  “I don’t know why, though.”

  “I do. It’s not so hard to figure out. I’ll get to that. Anyway you know the reissued records are hot stuff and the originals are collector’s items. You’ve probably seen some newspaper articles too, and that’s
only the beginning. I’ve had half a dozen calls since the creep called. And you’ve heard about the movie, right? The Eddie Wilson Story. You with me so far?”

  I nodded. So far. But from the way Doc stirred around in his chair, from the look in his eyes and the tone of his voice, spitting and coughing as he raced along, I sensed that from here on out we were headed toward craziness: a broken-down disc jockey spinning fantasies to a Donna Summer beat.

  “I know you, kid. That is, I knew you once, and I don’t figure people change. I know what you think. You think it’s nice, right? Nice for Eddie, nice for Eddie’s parents, and just plain nice. And I’ll bet that’s the end of it. Let me ask you, you ever told anybody you were a Parkway Cruiser?”

  “No.”

  “Not your kids, even?”

  “No.”

  “Your wife?”

  “No.”

  “It’s like I figured. You’re just sitting on it, letting it happen. Well, not me. My mind doesn’t work that way. Now listen carefully. What I’m telling you is between us, no matter what you decide. Promise?”

  “Sure, Doc.” I did my best not to laugh at him. No doubt about it, Doc Robbins was a deep-dish eccentric, the small-town inventor who spends his life raging about how the corporate biggies screwed him out of his million-dollar patent.

  “Now we can’t do much about the records. The oldies are all gone. And the reissues, well, we took a fucking there, and it’s my fault. Right after Eddie died, I sold all the rights to this highway Jew, Eisen, and now he’s sitting on the mother lode. Shit, I could kick myself. But there’s nothing I can do about it now.

  “This movie deal is something else again. I’m looking into it. The way I see it, they need help. They gotta have a story, right, some kind of script, and locations, and period stuff. That’s where we come in. Technical consultants, source material. They got to come to us. Who else they got? Eddie’s parents? Not unless they need a cast dentist. That’s another thing. There ought to be a part for both of us. Not that we should necessarily play ourselves, but they could fit us in around the edges. It’s money in the bank. Like I told you, I’m not pushing. Just a coupla phone calls. I’ll wait for them to come to us.”

  “What if they don’t come?” I couldn’t help asking. “Suppose they fake it. Set it in California, turn us into a surfer group.”

  “Let’em try! Beautiful! Let’em try. They’ll get a screwing they’re not gonna believe. We’ll sue—libel, invasion of privacy, abuse of copyright. We’ll get a lawyer.”

  “They’ve got lawyers too,” I said, but Doc wasn’t listening to me.

  “We’ll wait until they’re about half done with the filming, when the money’s committed and everybody’s working, and then we’ll jump. It’ll never go to court. They’ll settle.”

  Suddenly, I didn’t want to see Doc Robbins anymore. I wanted out and home and back to being myself. I wouldn’t help him in any of his conspiracies, but I wouldn’t hurt him either. If he failed, it was too bad, and if he prospered, fine, but either way I wanted out.

  “It sounds like you can’t miss,” I said. “I wish you all the luck in the world.”

  “You don’t see it my way, do you, kid?” he said. “You figure they’ll do what they want, and there’s no way we can stop ’em?”

  “Since you asked me … yes.”

  He started coughing then, spitting and wiping, but he kept his back to me and put his hands at the side of his head, like he was afraid of losing his toupee. When he calmed down some, he lit another cigarette. The match fizzed inside the Styrofoam cup. He made a half-hearted effort to straighten his desk.

  “I’ve lost my touch for sure,” he said finally, laughing bitterly. “If I can’t convince you, who can I convince?”

  I felt guilty about turning Doc down. Sometimes at the Safeway, there’s some eager, sad lady passing out free samples of a new product—cheese or cookies or clam dip. I take some and it tastes terrible and I walk on, feeling like a shit for not having bought anything. That’s the way Doc Robbins made me feel. He was peddling nonsense, but I wished that I could make a small purchase on my way out the door.

  “You never know … the movie people … they might be interested.”

  “Sure, kid.” Doc wasn’t taking charity. It was all or nothing. “A trip to the Coast and a chance to meet the stars. Thanks a lot. Thanks for dropping by. I knew you would. You were always a decent kid. Even if you couldn’t play worth a damn. How about a lift home? It’s not far.”

  “Sure, Doc.” I felt like a hospital visitor searching for a graceful exit, anxious to kill time with petty errands and small favors.

  “And now darkness settles over the land of ooh-baa-dee and the Voice of the Poconos sinks below the level of a lover’s whisper. Are you listening? Till rosy-fingered aurora streaks the morning sky, this is Doc Robbins sneaking into the night, with a smile on my face and a dollar in my wallet and a song in my heart. The Captain and Tennille, children: ‘Love Will Keep Us Together.’

  “Serves ’em right,” Doc said. “Let’s blow.”

  5

  I unlocked the car door and threw my dog’s collar and my wife’s checkbook into the glove compartment. Meanwhile, Doc stood watching the screen of the drive-in movie: a bunch of police cars racing down an interstate.

  “Vigilante Force,” he said. “You seen it?”

  “No.”

  “You should go, really. You might not feel so bad about Eddie dying young. It could’ve been worse. He could’ve grown up to be Kris Kristofferson.”

  “I don’t kid about Eddie.”

  “Neither do I,” Doc said. “Ah, don’t mind me, kid. I’m just a jerkwater deejay with big ideas. And no takers. Just drive on down the highway.”

  He grinned and patted my shoulder.

  “Make like a Cruiser.”

  I drove as fast as I could, badly wanting this visit to be over. On my way to see Doc, I’d been convinced that for once I should trust my instincts, follow out the feelings that led back into the past. It wasn’t my style. The Word-man, they’d called me, and I guess they meant it as a compliment. Turning feelings into words had been my bit of alchemy among Eddie and the Cruisers. But when it came to pure feelings, I was lost. Look where my feelings had landed me now.

  Emotions are risky, I realized. For a solid week memories of that Cruiser year had me in turmoil. As if some underground main had broken, the memories came welling to the surface with a freshness and clarity that shocked me. They’d convinced me that there was something important down there, something that had been buried for years but was still alive, begging to be unearthed, a spring and not a broken pipe.

  Now I knew better. Nostalgia was the impurest form of memory. Selecting and sentimentalizing, first you victimized yourself. And then, if you acted on your feelings, you entered a world of tacky souvenirs, cheap rituals, monuments to nothing. A world of ghouls, catered by morbid hucksters like Doc Robbins. If I hadn’t come to Stroudsburg, I’d remember him as a fabulous character, a roadside original. But I’d come back, and the price of the trip was that I now saw him as he was, a penny-ante predator, a dollar short and a day late.

  “Make like a Cruiser.” Sure, Doc. Grease is the word. How about digging up some Eddie Wilson imitators. A lookalike talent hunt. Hasn’t that occurred to you? Or why not do a James Dean? Hit the junkyards and blowtorch the car he died in into little pieces for the tourist trade. Pass the word: he’s still alive, he had plastic surgery. He froze himself. He cloned. Only leave me out of it.

  “Make like a Cruiser.” Already, it sounded like a slogan lettered on a T-shirt. When Eddie came up with the name, he made it sound like a password for adventure, straight out of Kerouac—endless trips across the country, explorations and discoveries along the way. There’d be no catching us when we hit the road. A good thing he didn’t live to see the junk that lined the highway, to sense the flattening of the landscape, the pointlessness of the trip.

  “Know what I was wondering?”
Doc asked. “It’s just an idea, I know you’re gonna hate it.”

  “What is it?”

  “I was thinking about bringing the group back together. You and Wendell and Kenny and Sal. ‘Eddie Wilson’s Original Parkway Cruisers.’ What do you think?”

  “What the hell do you think I think?” I snapped.

  “I think you hate it,” he replied immediately. “You don’t want any part of it, and you don’t want any part of anyone who does. Including me. Especially me.”

  “Doc, you’re a mind-reader. Only, if you read my mind so well, why’d you even bother asking?”

  “It’s my nature. Oh shit, kid, I’m sorry.”

  “Okay.”

  Like that, it was over—his hustling and my anger—and we both relaxed. When Doc finished pitching, he was good company again. You just had to get past his hustles.

  “Remember those quotes you used to give me?” he asked. “That real good stuff?”

  “I remember digging things up … but what, exactly, I can’t—”

  “Sure you can. I’d rush into Vince’s with a lot of hot talk. A tip here, a piece of the action there, getting in on the ground floor someplace else. And I’d have ’em all snowed. Eddie’d be worrying he couldn’t afford me. Sally wanted me to invest his life savings. Kenny went ‘oh wow, oh wow,’ and Wendell just sat there smiling, like we were all gonna be rich that afternoon. Everybody but you, sitting at the bar, you little prig, and as soon as I stopped for breath you’d let me have it. ‘Doctor, Disraeli would say you’re climbing the greasy pole of success.’ Or, ‘worshipping Mammon.’ I remember. ‘What’s it all mean, Doc, the getting and the spending?’ Smart-ass kid! One time, I came in wearing some threads that had a little flash, and you did twenty minutes on ‘conspicuous consumption.’ I acted pissed, but no kidding, you cracked me up, no lie. I still use some of that good stuff. Remember this one?

  ‘Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

  A being darkly wise and rudely great;

  With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,

  With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,