Eddie and the Cruisers Read online

  “You got it. Eddie had himself a terrific vacation on the shore. He went to mattresses in Kosherville. Right, Wordman?”

  I stayed out of it.

  “That’s all it was? All play, no work?”

  “Chicken soup and brisket of beef. Not my speed, kid. I was in Philadelphia.”

  “I heard the Cruisers rented a recording studio down in Lakehurst.”

  “What kind of homework you been doin’?”

  “I should have mentioned it before. I contacted your former manager. Earl Robbins.”

  “Where’d you dredge him up. Outa what sewer?”

  “He’s a disc jockey now. Eastern Pennsylvania.”

  “Yeah? You think you might be in touch with him again?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Give him a message. Remind him I got the name Eddie Wilson and the Original Parkway Cruisers sewed up tight. Copyrighted and paid for. I hear he’s screwin’ around—it’s his ass. You tell him that.”

  “I don’t want to involve—”

  “Tell him I’m still waitin’ for him to show up at Eddie’s funeral. Put that in your interview.”

  “About Lakehurst …”

  “So?”

  “The studio. What happened there?”

  “Studio? You call it a studio? Doc called it a studio. I call it a rusty, dusty piece of crap.”

  “But what happened there?”

  “What makes you think anything happened? Eddie messed around with some new material, him and Wendell …”

  I could see that Sal was still hurting, after all the years.

  “They went out into the woods and had a séance. Or a beer party. I don’t know. I wasn’t invited. … Say, Wordman …”

  He was still pained and angry. I could see old wounds reopening, poisons seeping out through cracking scars.

  “… should I tell him how Eddie got you laid the first time? I mean, if we’re gonna list all our great accomplishments, that’s the match of anything that came out of Lakehurst.”

  “I don’t think that’s what this man’s after,” I said, my ears burning in embarrassment. Susan Foley was smoking a cigarette quietly and looking through the visitors’ guide. That meant she hadn’t missed a thing.

  “I don’t know much about Lakehurst,” I said. “I wasn’t around much either.” I spoke to Mannheim but my words were meant for Sally, to calm him down and make him hurt less. “Eddie and I had our ups and downs. Toward the end it was a down. We’d played a college not long before and … something happened … that strained our relationship. Nothing permanent. Except that he died. That made it permanent. Anyway, I draw a blank on Lakehurst.”

  “We were all go-fers near the end,” Sally said. “Except for Wendell. Him and Eddie were a regular Huck and Jim. Ah, the hell with it. What did you want to know?”

  “Those studio sessions.”

  “What Wordman says goes double for me. My wife’s been getting calls every day back home. No tapes. No unreleased masterpieces. Anybody asks you, tell him to stay outa my attic.”

  I watched Mannheim pause and decide to give it one more try.

  “Some things you’ve said lead me to believe maybe the Cruisers weren’t as tight as they used to be near the end. Like maybe Eddie Wilson was getting ready to cut out on his own, or reconstitute the group. Could it be he was jamming with new people out in the woods? Presley was on the East Coast that spring, and Buddy Holly …”

  Sally was due to explode, I thought, and this time I wouldn’t try to stop him. Mannheim combined obsequiousness and arrogance: he kissed ass for what he wanted, and he sneered at what he didn’t need.

  But Sally surprised me, leaning back in his chair, closing his eyes, smiling wearily like he’d heard it all before.

  “Who knows what was on Eddie’s mind at the end?” he asked with a shrug. “Do you know, Wordman?”

  “No,” I said. “Eddie was hard to figure, toward the end.”

  “We were tight for years,” Sally said. “Ain’t nobody was tighter than Eddie and me. Nobody. That the truth, Wordman?”

  “Yeah, Sal.”

  “But at the end?”

  “At the end? At the end they buried him. I was there at the end. And I’ll tell you one thing, kid. I didn’t see no Elvis Presley pull up at the funeral. Nor no Buddy Holly. Wasn’t nobody famous there that I remember. Now was there anything else you needed?”

  There wasn’t really. I was sure of that. But Mannheim was smooth. He wasted an hour of tape feigning an interest in the post-Eddie Wilson Parkway Cruisers. He wanted to know all about how gallant Sal held the group together, kept the name alive, loyally waited for the predestined rediscovery. He asked about Sal’s new material, his future plans. And, sad to say, it seemed to work. Starved for credit and attention, Sal poured out all his plans—an original score for The Eddie Wilson Story, a Cruiser festival on the Jersey shore, and so on. By the time they finished, he was full of enthusiasm. Seeing Mannheim and Susan Foley out the door, he said how he’d always tried to do what Eddie would have done so that, in a sense, Sally was living for both of them. As long as he survived, Eddie’s life continued.

  “If he was around today, he’d be on the road with me now,” Sally assured him. “And we’d never run outa gas.”

  “Nice kid,” Sally said.

  “The hell he is,” I answered.

  “All right, he’s a piece of shit. So what? A little ink never hurt the bookings.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, Sally. Whatever’s coming to you, you deserve it.”

  “Beer?”

  “Sure.”

  “I deserve one myself,” Sally said. “A small beer. What’d you say it was? Small beer? You told me once. The way you were always coming up with stuff.”

  “Small beer? The second or third batch. Weaker than the first.”

  “Penny-ante, second-rate—right? Bottoms up.” He swallowed and belched. “Tastes okay. Light beer. That’s what they call it these days. Half the calories. So I drink twice as much. Progress! Where you been hidin’, Wordman?”

  “High school teaching in northern New Jersey. Same place ever since I got out of college.”

  “No lie! I used to wonder about you. I figured you moved to California, maybe. Writin’ for movies under an assumed name or something.”

  “No, I never left the Garden State.”

  “I been playing the shore spots pretty regular through the years. How come you never stopped in?”

  “I don’t get down there much anymore.”

  “Yeah, it’s changed, it’s gettin’ built up now,” Sal conceded, as if new construction were what had kept us from running into each other for fifteen years.

  “You hear? Vince died. Prostate cancer. Damn thing, it’s like walkin’ around with a time bomb up your ass. But you look okay, Wordman.”

  “You too.”

  “I got a place in Haven Beach, right on Barnegat. Come down in the summer, we’ll go crabbing.”

  “Thanks, Sally, I’ll do that.”

  That’s when it happened. Sally noticed that I didn’t ask for his phone number or address. And I noticed that he hadn’t offered it. And the awkwardness cracked us up.

  “Ridgeway, I don’t want to meet your lovely wife and kids,” he said. “I really don’t.”

  “I don’t want to sample your polluted crabs.”

  “So what brings you out here? Or are you gonna tell me you were drivin’ along the highway, saw my name on the marquee, and decided to say hello for old time’s sake?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You want something, don’t you? You don’t want a job. You don’t write songs for a living. You’re not gonna touch me for a loan. And I guess you already seen the show. Beats me, Wordman. I got nothing you want.”

  No, he didn’t. He had little enough for himself but a dozen songs to recycle forever, like one of those roadhouse jukeboxes where they never change the records.

  “It’s this Eddie revival. Caught me at a funny time
. I’m tired of my job. My wife’s tired of me. And all of a sudden, I’m hearing ‘Far-Away Woman’ on every corner, and I start thinking about the old days. This Mannheim finds me, and all of a sudden it’s all I care about.”

  “Mannheim came to you first?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come he didn’t say so?”

  “Sally, he’s an operator.”

  “So what’s your operation? How come you didn’t clue me in when you came in here? What makes you so all-of-a-sudden cute?”

  “Sally, what difference does it make?”

  “I feel like I’m being double-teamed. That’s the difference.”

  “I’m not working with him, Sally. He came to me first because I live close to New York. Okay?”

  “And then after he sees you, you decide to stroll down Memory Lane. That it?”

  “That’s not all. You might as well know. I heard from Doc Robbins.”

  “Now we hit bottom.”

  “I know you never liked him …”

  “I had eyes and ears. And a nose. A nose was all you needed.”

  “He’s hard up these days, Sally. You saw him, you’d have pity.”

  “When he’s dead, I’ll pity him. Remember the funeral?”

  “Sally, he was full of gimmicks. Then and now. He wants to revive the Cruisers—”

  “Revive?! He’ll need reviving …”

  “He talked about the movie too.”

  “That figures!”

  “All that’s between you and him. You guys fight it out, I don’t care. But there was something else. Somebody wrecked Doc’s place. I saw it. They were after the Lakehurst tapes!”

  “Lakehurst tapes?”

  “Doc thinks—and I guess some people agree with him—that Eddie was up to something big that month.”

  Without warning, Sally reached out, picked up the coffee table, and heaved it across the room. Empty beer cans and newspapers crashed against the floor. I jumped up while Sally collapsed back onto the sofa, laughing or crying, I couldn’t tell. He was like one of those stretched-out incredible faces you see in newspapers, mouth twisted, tears pouring, and you have to read the caption before you know whether you’re at an earthquake or a circus.

  Sally gestured me back to my chair and slowly settled down.

  “My Rod Stewart imitation,” he said, and then he cried, or laughed, some more. “Lakehurst tapes, huh? Something Eddie put aside for posterity. That what they’re lookin’ around for?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s amazin’, Wordman. It cracks me up, it truly does.”

  “What does?”

  “They started playin’ our stuff again, and I really believed that this time, after twenty years of just makin’ it, it was my turn. I figured, well, Eddie had his shot, now this is mine. It’s me they’ll come to. What a fuckin’ dummy I must be!”

  “Ah, Sally …”

  “No, don’t ’ah, Sally’ me. I get the picture now. It’s still Eddie, isn’t it? Nothin’s changed. They couldn’t care less for me. It’s more Eddie they want.”

  “Even if it doesn’t exist?”

  “Yeah, that’s funny too. What was it you used to say, Wordman? About proving that something hadn’t happened. You remember?”

  “I said it’s hard to prove a negative. I get you. The tapes are like that.”

  “Hard to prove a negative,” Sally repeated. “It sure as hell is. Especially when the negative ain’t true.”

  “What?”

  “I’m telling you: the negative is positive.”

  “You told Mannheim …”

  “A lie. There’s tapes.”

  Sally went crazy in Philadelphia, knowing that Eddie and Wendell were exploring new territory in Lakehurst while he sat around his home, driving his uncle’s bakery truck around a neighborhood that hadn’t changed in years. Before a week went by, he tried calling Eddie, but there was no phone at the quonset, and Eddie was rarely at the motel Doc had mentioned to him.

  “I tried for days. Finally I got through, at six in the morning. I guess I woke him up. I told him I wanted to be with him, the way I’d always been. Hey, I was no chump. I had ideas! And Eddie, he says, sure, he’d like to hear them. I start pitchin’ over the phone, anything I could think of, and he says, ‘Yeah, Sally, sounds great. We got to talk sometime soon.’ And then, you know, that was it. Time to hang up. ‘This phone call must be costing you a fortune.’ Hell, after that I knew what I had to do. Have it out with Eddie. I’d crash his private party.”

  Sally prepared himself for a final scene, marshaling arguments for a speech that he forgot as soon as he arrived. But twenty years later he remembered his speech: how they’d started together, a pair of buddies out for loose change, how they’d worked hard and played hard. “In my family, they say, ‘Don’t do business with friends,’” Sal was going to tell him, “‘but who the hell else you want to do business with?’”

  Now he was ready to chuck it. To hell with business, to hell with friends. He arrived late at night—the radio station was playing the national anthem, he recalled—but there were a couple cars tucked between the pines, big-assed cars with New York and Pennsylvania plates, and chauffeurs waiting quietly inside. He knocked on the door, scared as a guy who interrupts a Mafia sitdown, and no one answered. He pounded away, furious at the lockout.

  “That Joann chick finally opened up. Eddie’s chick. You remember that lalapalooza?”

  “Yes.”

  “She acted nonchalant. ‘Oh, hi Sally.’ I pushed past her. ‘Where is he? I got to see him now!’ Know what it was like in there? Ever walk into an all-black place by mistake, just needing a beer? Everything stops all of a sudden?”

  “Like that?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Who were they?”

  “You don’t understand. I just told you. It was a room full of niggers. South Philly, wall-to-wall. And booze and food and chicks and bodyguards and instruments. Jesus Christ!”

  “Who were they?”

  “How the hell should I know? They didn’t exactly form a receiving line so I could be properly introduced. I saw some of ’em turn their backs and slide into corners, like they was worried I was takin’ names. I spotted Eddie and went to where he was, next to Wendell. Wendell smiles hello and moves off, but before I could say a word, some overdressed spade moves in, lays a look on me, and says to Eddie, ‘You promised everything would be secret.’ Eddie is upset. Not with him! With me! ‘It’s all right, man, I know him.’ ‘We don’t,’ says the spade. ‘Just give me five minutes,’ Eddie begs. And then he grabs me by the elbow and pulls me outside.

  “‘Just give me five minutes!’ I lay into him. ‘Five minutes to get rid of me, right? Well, I got news, Eddie. It ain’t gonna take that long.’

  “‘Sally, I’m sorry,’ Eddie says. ‘I know it’s been rough for you.’

  “‘Rough? It ain’s been rough! It’s been easy, Eddie. All day long with nothin’ to do. You wanna tour with Father Divine and the Chocolate Chicklets, find somebody else to play the tambourine.’

  “‘Don’t cut out on me, Sal,’ Eddie says. ‘This month was an experiment. Something I worked out with Wendell. Something I had to try. I don’t know how it worked out. But we came up with something that’s not like anything else …’

  “‘Great! Where will I read about it? Ebony?’

  “‘The people you saw inside were only part of it. There’ve been others. Names you’d recognize.’

  “‘Too bad I never got to meet them.’

  “‘The whole project was on the sly. It was the only way to go. I had to do this!’

  “‘Yeah? Who forced you?’

  “‘You don’t understand!’

  “‘Ain’t that the truth. A big dumb guinea, what’s he gonna understand? Give him an organ grinder and a monkey.’

  “‘One month is all I asked,’ Eddie said. ‘Three weeks is gone. Sally, I need one more week and then we hit the road again, just like before. You can leav
e if you want to, but I hope to hell you don’t.’

  “‘Why?’

  “‘Because wherever I go, I don’t want to forget where I’m coming from.’

  “‘Sure, Eddie.’ I tried sounding tough, but Eddie’s hands were on my shoulders and there were tears in his eyes. ‘I’m your rear-view mirror, right?’

  “He just shook his head like he was saying no, more than that, more than that.

  “‘Well, what the hell,’ I said. ‘It’s a living.’”

  “So I left,” Sal said. “And we hit the road again, just like Eddie promised. You know what happened next.”

  Sally stood up and took off his cummerbund. His gut sagged out.

  “Beer and pizza,” he said. “Before long I’ll need to wear a corset for this show.”

  “So there are tapes,” I said. “You figure Eddie actually came up with something?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Something. Christ knows what. You want that last slice? I’ll throw it out if you don’t.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Fuck it, I’ll skip breakfast,” Sally said, reaching for the last slice and a last beer to wash it down. “Like hell I will. Let me tell you something, Wordman. For all I care, they coulda buried those tapes with Eddie.”

  “You don’t care?”

  “I got a simple little act. Twelve songs. Run through ’em all in forty-five minutes, with time-outs for wet hankies and under-the-table feels. They find those tapes, what’s in it for me? I can’t play that stuff. Do I hire the Sweet Gospel Singers?”

  “They’re worth money,” I reminded him. “Right now they’ll pay anything.”

  “Sure. But I won’t see a dime, Wordman, and neither will you. Entitled or not, they’ll find a way to screw us out of it. They always do. Guys like you and me, they strike oil under your backyard garden, all you get is dead tomatoes. No thanks, I’ll keep plodding.”

  “Aren’t you curious about what Eddie was up to? Money aside?”

  “I used to wonder. It ate me up. But now … it’s been so long.” Sally stopped and studied me, as if deciding whether or not I could be trusted with what he was going to say.

  “Ever want to be famous?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”