Eddie and the Cruisers Page 13

  It is not over.

  Charlene drives up a pleasant residential street, parks in front of a well-maintained Victorian two-story, walks up the steps to the verandah, where Mr. and Mrs. Wilson are waiting.

  “Hi there,” she greets the two palpably nervous oldsters. Mrs. Wilson rises to shake her hand. Eddie’s father, with a cane in his hands, doesn’t budge. He motions Charlene to a nearby chair.

  “Rock and roll was pretty controversial music back in the fifties. Did you approve of your son’s decision to become a rock-and-roller?”

  “Wasn’t my decision to make,” snaps the retired dentist. “Was his decision. My old man said I should be a farmer. I felt like drilling in people’s mouths. That was my decision.”

  “How about you, Mrs. Wilson?”

  “Whatever he decided.” She has trembly hands. She folds and smooths an imaginary wrinkle in her dress.

  “Stop that wobbling,” scolds the old man.

  “I’m not sure we wanted him to be playing a guitar forever … for the rest of his life, I mean. He had a wife to support, and we hoped that someday there might be grandchildren …”

  “He never borrowed a cent!” the old man interrupts. “Not from us or anybody. Bought everything cash on the barrel-head. That’s how I was raised. That’s how he was raised. My wife didn’t have anything to complain about. Neither did his. She still doesn’t, I figure.”

  Charlene smiles. Old folks say the darndest things.

  “Did you like his music, Mrs. Wilson?”

  “No lies, Mother!”

  “Well, it wasn’t quite what …”

  “Hated it! Couldn’t stand the stuff!” He leans forward, leering. “I come from a time when we touched the girls we danced with, ’stead of throwing them off walls.”

  “How do you folks feel, hearing Eddie on the radio again after so many years?”

  “We’re glad that young people find something—”

  “Not a bit surprised! All they’ve been doing is copying him for twenty years. I’ve got ears. Copycats is what they are. You call them rip-off artists. My day, we called ’em copycats!”

  The two women retreat inside the house, up the stairs, down a hall.

  “This was Eddie’s room,” his mother says. “We kept everything as it was … only neater, of course.”

  A bed with an Indian blanket. On the walls, pictures of fifties cars and baseball players, and Playboy-type bunnies, minus contemporary public hair. A closetful of clothes, shoes on the floor, a sleeping bag in back. In one corner, a broomstick with a rack of 45’s and a pile of l.p.’s, with the Cruisers’ album on top. And Eddie’s radio, an old-fashioned Philco beehive.

  “The fights we had about that radio!” his mother reminisces. “Eddie played it all hours of the night. ‘Why can’t you listen to music during the day and sleep at night, like other folks?’ we’d ask him. And Eddie would say he had to listen then, because night was the only time he could pick up stations from New York and Philadelphia that played the kind of music he’d like to hear. So many nights, he’d sit up in the dark, listening to that radio. His father said he was like a spy, receiving secret messages.”

  Charlene touches the radio. She strokes it.

  “It’s an antique, now,” Mrs. Wilson says. “But it still works.”

  “May I?” Charlene asks.

  “Please.”

  She reaches for the knob, faces the camera.

  “Eddie Wilson now has been dead for almost as many years as he lived. But in his short span of years, he had time enough to do more than listen to music in a dark room. He made some music of his own, put it on the network, sent his message.”

  She switches the radio on.

  “‘Far-Away Woman.’”

  She smiles.

  “Message received.”

  Time for a commercial. I started to turn off the TV, but before I arrived, the show was on again, with Charlene Madison back in the studio, trading tune-off banter with her cohost, a former quarterback.

  “Billy, I’m sorry to say there’s a footnote to our last story. The Eddie Wilson revival hasn’t been an unmixed blessing, especially for his parents. Last Sunday, while the Wilsons were at church, someone broke into the Wilson home. they searched and robbed the house.”

  “That’s awful, Charlene. Did they know whose house they were in?”

  “I’m afraid they did. That’s the worst of it. The intruders moved from cellar to attic, but the only room that’s missing anything is Eddie Wilson’s. They cleaned it out, Billy. I spoke to Mr. Wilson today. He’s hopping mad. Says if they come back, they’ll get a souvenir they won’t forget.”

  “That’s one feisty gent, Charlene. Who would do such a thing? I mean, what kind of sick mind would …?”

  “Eddie Wilson material is very valuable. That’s the theory the police are working on.”

  “Some world!” Billy reflects. “Next week, we’ll visit with Cheryl Tiegs, John Belushi, and baseball’s ‘Mad Hungarian’ relief pitcher, Al Hrabosky.”

  10

  You know how it is, when you leaf through your college alumni magazine? You see that so-and-so is a senior counsel and someone else is taken seriously in the State Department and yet another ex-classmate is performing surgery? And you remember them, not as future lawyers, diplomats, or doctors, but as dormitory masturbators, dance-weekend drunks, exam-time plagiarists? You know that somebody has got to be kidding.

  That’s how I felt when I found that First Mountainside was a church not a bank, a red brick neo-Colonial complex across the street from a shopping center, with a school, a rectory, and an ample parking lot in which the Reverend Kenneth Hopkins waited to keep his appointment with me.

  “So it really is you!” he exclaimed, as he walked over to the car.

  He was a good-looking man, blond and trim. He wore brown corduroy trousers, a purple turtleneck sweater, and some brightly striped running shoes.

  “How are you doing, Kenny?” I asked, as we shook hands. “Are you the Reverend Kenneth E.?”

  “That’s me. And my father before me. I kept it a secret when I was a Cruiser. Now I keep the Cruiser stuff a secret.”

  “Just going through a phase back then?”

  He acknowledged his old slogan with a smile that was only slightly forced. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  “Expecting me?”

  “Yes. Or someone like you. Come inside where we can talk.”

  He led me across the parking lot, through a side door, and down some steps to one of those bright, multipurpose basements where teenagers are supposed to play Ping-Pong and drink Coke instead of hanging out on street corners. In the rear was Hopkins’ office, a book-lined Protestant confessional, with comfortable seats and a cup of coffee for all comers. There was no one in the basement. So far as I could see, we had the whole place to ourselves. Still, he looked out cautiously and made a point of closing the door.

  For a moment we just stared at each other, measuring memories against changes, checking out the growing and the aging. We both did it, so neither one was embarrassed. Then Hopkins broke the silence.

  “What’s going on, Frank?” he asked quietly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I saw that television show. People tearing apart the Wilson house. And now … here you are.”

  “Well, Eddie’s back, they tell me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I know it’s crazy. I don’t understand it myself. You’re the preacher. Know much about miracles?”

  “Miracles? Not much.”

  Just then the door pushed open, and a woman backed into the office carrying a good-sized coffee urn. Hopkins helped her set up the urn. Then he introduced his wife, Jeanette, an utterly plain, pleasant woman who stared at me as if she expected to give my description to the cops. She left only when her husband pointedly thanked her and held open the door. Even then, I guessed she was eavesdropping right outside.

  “No tits, no ass, buck teeth, b
ut I love her,” Hopkins whispered. “Usually she doesn’t bring the coffee machine till after lunch. She saw that show last night, and then I made the mistake of telling her that you’d be coming by. I think she put the two together. She tossed and turned all night.”

  “Me—and the break-in?”

  “I told her it was a coincidence,” Hopkins said. Then, after an appraising glance, he added, “I hope I was right.”

  “Relax, Kenny. It wasn’t me.”

  “The others, maybe. Not you. Sally. Doc. What the hell is going on, Frank? It was twenty years ago! I don’t understand.”

  “I was in touch with Doc,” I began, as calmly as I could. “He contacted me right after the radio started playing ‘Far-Away Woman.’ He thought that Eddie made some tapes at Lakehurst which might be hot stuff now. He floated a rumor himself to that effect. He asked me to check around and see what I could find out. He knew there were other people out looking.”

  “Is that your job, Frank? Out treasure-hunting with Doc Robbins?” Kenny was angry. He regarded me with the kind of hostility you feel when you get up to answer the doorbell, expecting company, and it’s a salesman. “Well, I’m going to tell you all I know, and then you can go. I don’t know what was happening at Lakehurst. Not that I didn’t wonder. Who wouldn’t? … Well, one day I got tired just sitting around the house. It ticked me off, the way Eddie cut me out. So I called down to Lakehurst. He wasn’t in, of course. The switchboard girl at the motel said he was almost never in. And she didn’t mind adding that he was kind of a pain, with calls piling up from out of state, New York and Alabama and all. That puzzled me. I wondered what the hell Eddie was doing. So I called up Doc and got me a job on a cruise ship. And, believe me, it was a ball!”

  “What do you think Eddie was up to?”

  “I don’t know. I assume it was something fairly grandiose. And that nothing came of it. That’s all I know. Now if there’s nothing more …”

  “It wasn’t just the tapes, Kenny. I mean, I’m curious but I don’t care about the money. There were some other questions.”

  “Like what, Frank?”

  “I thought that by going back I could … I don’t know … establish contact with whatever we had going for us back then. There was a special feeling to that year. Maybe I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now. Whatever we had, I miss.”

  “What was it we had, you miss?” He spoke like a minister again, probing tactfully, listening. I had a feeling he was interested. “How would you describe it?”

  “A feeling. That the future would be good, that we’d grow right into it, like driving down the road on a summer night, and that everything would kind of come together, work and love, into one continuous adventure, that we could look down the road and see the distance we’d traveled and the miles ahead of us, and it would all make some kind of emotional sense. …”

  “We were young then,” he volunteered when I paused, but my confession kept coming.

  “After they started playing our music again, I went upstairs and found my record collection. Know what my record collection amounts to? About a dozen l.p.’s and maybe a hundred forty-fives, and not one of them is less than fifteen years old. They were sitting in a cardboard box I never quite threw out. Well, one night, I closed the door. I fished around for a plastic spindle to fill up the hole in the middle, and I played those records. All of them. You know what it was like?”

  Kenny nodded, smiling though his face was sad.

  “Those cheap little discs, scratched and dirty, with my initials on the label, sitting in the attic … they were alive! The harmonies and falsettos and doo-wops. And the emotions. I listened to those songs, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t face myself, and what had happened to me. The walls closed in. The house I lived in felt like a damn tomb! I had a tightness in my legs that made me want to run and a vague hurt feeling in my chest, and I had to get out of the house, into my car, out on the road, driving …”

  I ran out of words. I found I was standing, pacing in the office. Describing the music reinfected me with caged restlessness. When I finished, I forced myself back into the chair and looked over at Reverend Hopkins, who had danced cheek-to-cheek with me on a television show a few lifetimes back.

  “You must be good at what you do, Kenny, getting me to spill like this. We meet for the first time in years, and it all comes out. It’s amazing, considering …”

  “Considering what?”

  “We were never really friends, were we?”

  “It’s okay, Frank,” he said. “I have a confession of my own to make. Not much of a confession, but I think you’ll get the drift. It’s that … I know how you feel.”

  “You too?”

  “Me too. I’ve got a broomstick of forty-fives myself.”

  He said it so shyly, with such a show of boyish shame, you’d have thought he’d confessed to owning a deck of dirty playing cards. I studied him and he glanced back at me and we smiled. Then we laughed, and before long neither of us could stop. We laughed and laughed till there were tears coming out of our eyes.

  “Isn’t it odd?” Kenny was asking. “We bought a summer home last year, up on Lake Hopatcong, and I hired a bunch of kids to add on a kind of porch-sundeck. A bunch of shaggy kids, each with his own van or pickup truck. They hammered away and I tuned out. I was working on a sermon. And then I heard them singing, shouting, harmonizing. ‘On the Dark Side.’ Loud and off-key and full of fun. I remember sitting there, asking myself, ‘Why am I hearing that song? I’m nearly forty, I’m a clergyman, and that song still lives. Why is this happening to me? Me of all people?’”

  “Why you of all people?”

  “Don’t you see? Because I was the one who was sure it wouldn’t last.”

  We had walked across the street to the shopping mall, where there were benches and fountains and miles of shops.

  “There’s some ministers, and some doctors too, if you came to them the way you came to me, they’d suggest that maybe you just want to be a kid again. Or, put it another way, that you don’t want to grow old. Have you considered that?”

  “Sure. Kenny, I work with kids. I’ve seen them every day for a dozen years. Could be I’m jaundiced, but they don’t have anything I want. And they don’t have what we had. That’s the disturbing thing. Whatever it was, it didn’t last.”

  “And you’d like to plug back into … whatever it was. And see it continue.”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “I see.” His response sounded noncommittal. “I don’t know what to tell you. You tell me about Doc and Sally, it’s hard for me to imagine what there is to find. And Eddie’s dead. And poor Wendell …”

  “Hold it. What about Wendell?” I’d meant to ask about him, but I hadn’t gotten around to it. I now realize that I had a bad feeling about Wendell Newton. I felt that Wendell was dead, simply because I couldn’t picture him alive. The more I thought of that frail, talented black kid, the surer I was that he couldn’t have survived from then till now. No way.

  “Come on over here and have a seat,” Kenny said. It felt like we were in a bad-news hospital ward. There was a fountain at the heart of the mall, crowded with footsore shoppers and pregnant mothers and dutiful husbands resting up for their next foray into Bamberger’s or Korvette’s or Two Guys from Harrison. Kids and ice cream all around, and the piped-in music was “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”

  “It didn’t work out for Wendell. See, Frank, at Christmas we go to hospitals and institutions. Singing carols and passing out little gifts and putting on parties. A couple of Christmases back, we went to Rahway.”

  “He’s in prison?”

  “Was. First I saw him, it looked like he was on the staff. He seemed to have the run of the place. But that’s only because they’re used to him. Like a mascot.”

  “Shit! Prison?! Wendell?!”

  “Only sometimes. Next year, I met him down at Matawan. From prison to asylum. He commutes.”

  “Oh Ch
rist!” I buried my head in my hands.

  “I’m sorry, Frank,” Kenny whispered, placing an arm around my shoulders while I sobbed. I remembered wondering whether Mannheim had found Wendell in whatever Bedlam they confined him, and if he’d delivered my message about life turning out to be longer than expected.

  Kenny accompanied me to my car and we both stood there for a while. The parting was awkward because I think we knew it wasn’t likely we’d meet again. I saw Kenny straining to find the right note for us to end on.

  “I’m worried about you, Frank.”

  “I worry myself.”

  “Old songs, old memories … I don’t know whether to clap you on the back or warn you off.”

  “Just a phase?”

  “I’m not so sure. There’s something haunting about those times. I understand why those songs make you restless. But if you go back into the past, at least be sure you see it whole. There were bad times too. Hassles. Arguments. Things I’ll bet you’ve forgotten.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I remember one night in Ohio, Eddie played hell with you.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. Things weren’t the same after that night. You’re right, Kenny.”

  “Think about it, Frank.”

  After seeing Kenny Hopkins, born again, I decided it was time to check in with Doc Robbins. He’d asked me to call in now and then, and though I didn’t kid myself about his motives, it felt good to know that there was someone else on my team, even if it was Doc.

  I dialed the direct line Doc had given me.

  “KCGM. Ed Hickey here.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Edsel Hickey.” The voice sounded like the name, rural and out-of-fashion. “No jokes, mister. It’s been a bad couple days.”

  “I was calling for Doc Robbins. I thought this was his personal line.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ridgeway.”

  “Well, Doc ain’t here anymore, Mr. Ridgeway, I’m sorry to have to tell you.”

  “When’s he due?”

  “He ain’t. He’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes sir. Dead. And that’s puttin’ it mildly.”