by P. F. Kluge
“Wendell? That’ll be harder.”
“And Joann Carlino?”
“She wasn’t on my list.”
“Oh really? Sounds like she ought to be.”
“It might be a mistake. After all this time. She’d be nearly forty. Italian mamma. Moustache and kids.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“No, I guess not. But it’s a gamble.”
9
Among the purple hearts, there was talk of a stranger in the camp. He came last night in an unmarked car, which he parked in the visitors’ lot. He walked slowly from trailer to trailer, like a salesman or a meter-reader.
Nobody passes through here unnoticed. That’s what appealed to me about the place. These senior citizens are like hamsters, shuffling and stirring at all hours, never very busy and never quite asleep.
Martha Darmstadter, the gray panther, came out to challenge him.
“Who you lookin’ for, sonny?” Omar Bradley would be “sonny” to Martha. She’d been watering her sapling grapefruit. She pointed the hose straight at him, like the nozzle was a can of mace.
He turned and left without replying.
Not much of an incident in the workaday world, but around the camp the stranger’s visit was the biggest news since Minnie Schumacher’s stroke. Herman Biedermann guessed the stranger was a Jehovah’s Witness. Ed Riley scoffed at that. No doubt about it, the intruder was a spy from the tax assessor’s office, making sure that all the trailers had the wheels and licenses necessary to classify them as vehicles, not residences. Ex-electrician Al Ferraro countered that the stranger was almost certainly from the cable TV people, checking for bootleg wires from one trailer to another.
“Was he around my trailer too?” I asked.
“You bet,” Martha answered. “He stood there for a while, like he was getting ready to knock on your door.”
“That’s funny,” I said, thinking aloud, “because I’m the only one who doesn’t have his name outside.”
Or any sign of occupancy. No nameplate. No tiny garden, no barbecue or lawn chairs, no ceramic dwarves and deer, German elves and Negro stableboys. And then I realized that was how they found me, how they’d operated from the very beginning: by process of elimination.
Then and now, I wouldn’t go out of my way to see Kenny Hopkins. There always seemed to be a distance between us. And Hopkins kept it that way, as if he were an upperclass fraternity member and I was a freshman pledge and those positions were timeless and unalterable.
He kidded me longest about my lost virginity. Sally fielded his marine corps scare story and let it go at that, but Hopkins derided me in subtler ways, boasting of his accomplishments—arcane positions, oral sex, two girls in one night—anything to minimize my little bout of “hide the wienie.” I had a long way to go before I was a man, he said, and then he’d launch into a revolting-but-titillating tale about a certain mother-daughter combo over in Bridgeton.
I won’t say we never had fun, because fun was all he lived for, and some of it lapped over. Hopkins could steer us around an argument, and at least once I saw him avert a major blowup between Doc and Eddie. That was the incident with Claude Richards, and I was surprised that Mannheim hadn’t asked me about it, because it was the sort of story that becomes a legend.
I don’t know if Claude Richards is still alive. The last time I saw him was on a television show several years after Eddie died. Richards was then the host of a teen-hop special at the New York World’s Fair, and all I recall is that it was sponsored by the franchiser of Belgian waffles, which Richards cooked and ate on camera. But in the late fifties, Richards was an East Coast institution, the video-daddyo of Channel 10. Everybody watched his afternoon dance show. Including the Cruisers. Whenever we pulled off the road, we gathered in somebody’s room to check out Claude Richards and the Milkshake Show, or whatever it was called. The game was to rate the girls, of course, and Hopkins ran the game. His tests and charts and points system turned the Milkshake Show into a papal conclave. He had more words for breasts than I’d ever heard—boobs, tits, chalambos, casabas, watatas, lungs, melons, knockers—and he used them all.
Then Doc booked us on the show.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” Eddie said. “That’s not for us.”
“It’s for anybody wants to make it,” Doc insisted. “You know what a plug on that show means? That Richards is a hit-maker, chart-breaker—”
“—music-faker. They lip-synch the words! You want us to stand up there like a row of dummies?”
“You’re a dummy if you don’t! You want to play shore bars the rest of your life? Shake the sand outa your shoes, man! What’s with you, Eddie? You not happy performing in a place the plumbing works? That your idea of class? A sign on the door says restrooms-for-customers-only?”
“I’m not mouthin’ words!”
“I said you’d show.”
“Hey, Doc, listen close.” Eddie moved right up to him and lip-synched “fuck you.” And left the room.
“What’s wrong with me?” Doc protested to the rest of us. “What’d I do to deserve this crap?”
“I don’t mind going on,” Sally volunteered, now that Eddie was gone. “It’s nothin’ to spit at. I know lotsa people watch it. And the bread ain’t bad, right?”
“What about you, Wordman?”
“I’m all right …”
“Set him up with some broad in the dressing room, and he’ll sing like Caruso,” Kenny interrupted.
“… but it’s got to be okay with Eddie. If he’s out, I’m out.”
“And you, Wendell? You vote too.”
Poor Wendell sat there looking like the sickle-cell poster child. So often he was out of it, and never more than those macho afternoons we spent appraising white teeny-boppers in saddle shoes, pleated skirts, and tight sweaters. He never voted in any of Kenny’s games, unless we begged him to break a tie.
“Aah, he’s been lip-synching all his life,” Sally interjected, and for once I didn’t mind the rudeness, because it let Wendell off the hook.
“What do you think, handsome?”
“I love it!” exclaimed Hopkins. “Are you kidding?!”
“Lot of good that does me,” Doc said. “I got two yesses, two gutless maybes, and one strong no. The no has it. This could’ve been a step up for us, too. Record companies, TV spots, Vegas. You’d think Mr. Wilson never heard of ’em.”
“Don’t worry about Mr. Wilson,” Hopkins answered. “I’ll work it out with him.”
“How?”
“Never mind how. We’ll be there.”
We arrived on time, well groomed and neatly dressed. Claude Richards wasn’t around, but his assistant gave us our cues and marks, moving us around like we were manikins in a showroom window. Then we retreated to our dressing rooms. And changed.
I hope they saved the tape. Or maybe I don’t. The gang that stormed the Milkshake Show stage had nothing in common with the eager-to-please, spic-and-span crew that had coasted through rehearsals. We dressed like thugs. We were thugs! Eddie turned his back on the audience—because he was afraid his parents would see him, Sally said—while Hopkins and I danced together, cheek to cheek. It was about the silliest thing I’ve ever done, but it got us through an impossible bind. And it was my best memory of Kenny Hopkins, who dreamed it up and convinced Eddie. When Claude Richards raged at us after the show, Kenny’s excuse was that we were all just going through a phase.
That was his slogan. “This is just a phase I’m goin’ through.” He said it so often, and in so many different situations, that it was impossible for me to recall him without its coming to mind immediately. He’d be leading some drunken girl out to the parking lot, ushering her into the back seat of his, or anybody’s car, and he’d peer back over his shoulder, smile, and say, “Just a phase, Wordman.” I’d find him miserably drunk in the men’s room at Vince’s, with a bear hug on a toilet bowl, and he’d say it while he retched and heaved: “Just a phase I’m going through.” O
pening a paycheck, crashing a car, getting in a fight with some Polish kids from Metuchen, it was all just a phase. It got so that Eddie, introducing him onstage, said, “Watch it, ladies, we got Kenny Hopkins on drums, just going through a phase.”
Still, Hopkins and his slogan made me uncomfortable. The rest of us liked to think we’d go on forever, but Hopkins and his saying suggested we were kidding ourselves: this was only an episode. That’s not to say he didn’t work, but his approach was that of a lifeguard on a nubile beach, a waiter in the Catskills. It was seasonal, summertime, soon to be over.
I was nervous about calling Kenny Hopkins, not sure of what to expect. I couldn’t rely on my memories of him, and I didn’t trust his memories of me.
“Kenny Hopkins? Is that you?”
I was in a restaurant phone booth in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and I’d used only a fraction of the coins I’d piled on the counter in front of me. One call went to the alumni office of the college Hopkins attended for a year before flunking out and turning Cruiser. The second went to the business phone number they gave me, a bank called First Mountain-side, in the New Jersey suburban town of that name. And now I had the phone number of Hopkins’ home, readily provided when I insisted my business was urgent.
“Yes … who’s this please?” There were family noises in the background, kids and TV. I wondered what Kenny’s wife looked like. He was always spelling out requirements for his ideal woman: “hair down to her ass,” “great rack of tits,” “tight little ass,” “legs like satin,” on and on.
“It’s Frank Ridgeway.”
“Frank …”
“From the Cruisers. Remember me?”
“Of course I do.”
“I’m driving through your area tomorrow night, and there’s something I have to talk to you about. I know this is short notice but—”
“Is it a problem of some kind?”
“Uh … sure it’s a problem.”
“Then I’d be glad to help you. How’s … let me check … eight o’clock tomorrow morning, down at First Mountain-side.”
“Great! I’ll be there. See you then, Kenny.”
“Yes. Good to hear from you … Frank.” First names didn’t come easily to him. Neither did nicknames. He was the only one who never called me “Wordman.”
There was no reason for me to return home when I did, but Mountainside was only thirty minutes from where I lived, and it seemed perverse to sleep in a motel just miles from the house I nearly owned and the wife I used to love.
I hadn’t been gone that long—three days, two nights—but driving through familiar streets, I had the odd feeling you get when you return to a place you’ve left years ago. It felt like I’d already moved away.
I drove down Butler Street, past our house, as if I were checking out an old girlfriend’s home: a light in the window meant she was home, a dark window meant she was out with someone else. I’m not sure which I was hoping for, but Doris was out. The whole place was dark. I drove down two more blocks, to where Butler dead-ends against the highway right-of-way, pulled a U-turn, and headed back. Butler. I was the only one who still called it that. Three years ago, when they finished filling empty lots, there was a petition to change the name to something more prestigious. Butler, they said, sounded like a row of servants’ quarters. Doris voted for the new name, while I held out for Butler: a house divided. The mail now comes to something called Old Sawmill Way.
I found a note in the kitchen.
Frank:
I want to talk soon. We’ve got to clear this up. I can’t go on living in limbo. I need to know what you think.
Doris
I took a beer out to the back of our half-acre lot and sat down on the grass, listening to the trucks rush down the highway to New York. Some nights you could hear them, some nights you couldn’t, depending on the weather. In our neighborhood, they were the weather. I wondered where Susan Foley was tonight, what she was doing. Susan was a Cruiser.
Her approach to sex had a lot going for it, I guessed. It was fun, it put you in touch with yourself, it trimmed away inhibitions and repressions like so many dead branches. And it was a nice way of getting to know interesting strangers: it beat sitting in a movie house or pickling your brains at a singles’ bar. But I was a child of the fifties. I asked awkward questions awkwardly. I couldn’t help wondering what things meant and where they led, and just asking those questions betrayed the forlorn hope that things ought to lead somewhere and ought to mean something.
Ah, but Susan Foley would surely have an answer for me, or at least another question. Come now, what’s it mean to live with someone who doesn’t love you, and whom you’ve stopped loving? Where does that lead, except to trading in betrayals? Either way—hers or mine—you wound up in a motel room with a stranger.
She was right, of course. I came from a middle generation. Our parents stayed put: one house, one spouse. Our kids lived and rutted in vans. And we were somewhere in between, restlessly encamped in neighborhoods that weren’t neighborhoods anymore, where for-sale signs flourished like hardy perennials and a golden wedding anniversary was as old-fashioned as a quilting bee.
In the house, the phone was ringing. I got up dutifully, half hoping that I’d miss the call by the time I arrived inside. But my caller waited.
“Frank?”
“Yes.”
“This is … you know …”
“Who?”
“Susan …”
“Where are you?”
“Still here.”
“You sound closer. Like a local call.”
“I wish. Did you find Hopkins?”
“Yeah.”
“Where, New Jersey?”
“Yes. I’m seeing him tomorrow.”
“There’s a show on TV tonight. One of those celebrity news shows. I was just looking through the TV listings, I saw they’re having a segment on Eddie Wilson.”
“That’s why you called? To tell me about the TV show?”
“I’d have found another excuse. I just wanted to tell you that … you’re a likable guy.”
“Did you say lovable?”
“That too.”
“Same to you, lady. But I wasn’t supposed to ask what happens next.”
“It’s complicated. At both ends. But I hope we meet again. I bet we do.”
“How?”
“I’ll take care of that,” she said.
The program on Channel 4 was one of those brisk, frothy anthologies of celebrity profiles: a video magazine for people who found People tough going. Its hostess, Charlene Madison, was a promiscuously enthusiastic beauty who specialized in intimate conversation with the famous. She mangled the language a bit—“hopefully” and “enthused” were her forte—but she had wonderful legs, glossy black hair, a passable rack, and what’s more, she seemed about to proposition everyone she interviewed, from Reggie Jackson to the Incredible Hulk.
The show was almost over before they got to Eddie.
I saw a woman walking through a cemetery: a fortyish blonde who nonetheless seemed somewhat matronly. She carried a bunch of flowers.
“Phyllis Wilson Hackett, a Lambertville, New Jersey, housewife, visits this Vineland cemetery at least once a month. Sometimes she brings her two children or her husband, a township engineer. Or, as today, she comes alone, to weed or decorate or merely visit the grave of her first husband.”
A brief shot of the gravestone, with Eddie’s name and dates. They hadn’t changed.
“Yes, Mrs. Hackett’s first husband was the man now recognized as one of the forebears of current music—the premier rock-and-roller Eddie Wilson …”
They found it! There was Eddie on Claude Richards’ show, staring insolently at the camera, then abruptly turning his back, as if determined to remain a man of mystery. I caught a tiny glimpse of myself, unrecognizable, and heard a snatch of “Far-Away Woman.” Then it was back to the grave, with Phyllis hunkered down next to the tombstone, like they were on a date together.
/> “We married right after high school, in June 1955 …”
Black-and-white stills: yearbook profile, a wedding picture, a honeymoon beach shot, Eddie mowing a lawn someplace. And quickly back to Phyllis and the tombstone, in time to see tears well.
“Eddie started in music right away. It’s all he ever wanted to do. People said he should be an engineer, what with Sputnik and catching up to Russia. But Eddie lived for music. Lived and died …”
A change of scene. And costume. Dressed like Annie Hall, Charlene stands in front of a Greenwich Village oldies record shop. Through the window we see hairy ferrets in army clothes rummaging through record bins. The owner emerges, a heavy balding subway type.
“Most popular records have the life span of a daily newspaper …”
Shots of Billboard’s Top 100 lists, several years of lists, Scotch-taped to the store walls. Jump from one absurdity—“When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie”—to another—“Purple People Eater.” Who remembers? Who cares? Bits and pieces are played. Then the camera finds “On the Dark Side,” Number 27, March 1958. And we hear it, coming right out at us, irresistible.
“… but sometimes they come back to life, bigger than ever. It starts in specialty collector stores like this …”
A locked glass case protects a treasury of 45’s: “Love Me Tender,” $30; “Peggy Sue,” $60; “Dock of the Bay,” $15. “Far-Away Woman,” $50.
“Mr. Cohen, why have Eddie Wilson’s records taken off almost twenty years after they were released?”
“I didn’t see it coming. Not this one. I’m no prophet. But looking back, I’d say the guy had the same kind of appeal you see in James Dean. You know? Innocence is what I call it. He was loud and raunchy, all right, but the bottom line is innocence. And that commodity, lady, is always in short supply.”
Shots of reissued albums in a newer store, of a Variety ad announcing upcoming production of The Eddie Wilson Story, and finally, a British group, The Funky Company, performing “Down on My Knees” in a crowded amphitheater.
That’s it, I guess. It’s over.