Eddie and the Cruisers Read online

  “Joann, next to you, these college chicks are … remember that night at Vince’s? That first night onstage? How I was? That’s the way you look now. Listen, these people are way behind us …”

  “I don’t think they think so. It doesn’t bother them, it bothers you …”

  She never finished. Suddenly, my freshman roommate, Keith Livingston, stood before us. He wore a blue blazer, chino pants, white bucks. He was from Short Hills, New Jersey, he owned an M.G., and he claimed that his girlfriend, standing next to him, would take it in her hands and play with it. On off-weekends, he drove into town and picked up locals, whom he called his “fucking machines.”

  “Ridgeway! When did you get back?”

  “Just this afternoon.” I introduced Joann to him, and he presented Lois, a “nice girl” whose picture had greeted me every morning for a year, wedged into a corner of our common mirror.

  “You back for the weekend? The rites of spring?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s perfect! Know who’s playing tonight? They got the Parkway Cruisers! Mean-assed black group out of Newark.”

  “Actually, there’s only one black in the group,” I corrected, avoiding Joann. “I hear.”

  “That so? Hard to tell what’s what anymore. Say, why not come by the dorm? There’s a keg party. Everybody’ll be there.”

  “When is it?” I asked, hoping that he’d leave so I could talk more with Joann.

  “We’re on our way.”

  “Well, I don’t …”

  “Come on, Ridgeway. What, you’re not traveling incognito, are you? Have you eaten?”

  “Not yet.”

  “We’ll get you into the dining hall. They never check on weekends anyway. What’s an elephant scab more or less?”

  I looked at Joann. “Breaded veal cutlet.”

  “You’ve never had an elephant scab? Come on!” Livingston urged her. He wasn’t subtle about his staring: I’m sure he was playing imaginary “motorboat” between her breasts. “They had a food riot this year. Did you hear about it? I guess not. Guys slinging handfuls of mashed potatoes at each other. You should have seen it. Well, come on, let’s eat.”

  He bowed gallantly to Joann, who gave me a look that asked what she should do and received back a look that said … please, come. I knew she never would.

  Joann Carlino got out of the chair, took my arm, and walked with me out of the guest house.

  “Thanks,” I whispered, “for not … you know …”

  “I know,” she answered.

  “You’re always helping me out of jams. It’ll only be a little while. You want to leave a note for Eddie?”

  “Eddie’s talking to Wendell,” she said. “Don’t worry about Eddie. Sally went for a six-pack. Hopkins is out being himself. We’ll hear about it in the morning.”

  We walked The Path, a broad gravel corridor through the heart of the campus, with the dorms at one end and an abandoned seminary at the other. The Path was the back-bone of the College, the first walk you took whenever you arrived, and the last before leaving. In September, freshmen ran the gamut on The Path. In June, colorful processions pomped and circumstanced their way to graduation. In between, you never knew what you’d find. I’d seen Robert Frost quite early one morning. And, another morning, a quite naked faculty wife.

  Joann Carlino stopped traffic on The Path. We were barely a hundred yards along when Lois started chatting with Joann, as if to draw some of the attention to herself, and Livingston pulled back beside me.

  “Ridgeway, where did you find that … piece!” A high compliment, coming from Livingston. “She’s incredible! I never knew you had it in you. Where were you hiding your talent last year?”

  “I’ve been working on it,” I said. Walking behind the girls, I heard Lois jabbering about dance weekends hither and yon, how Oberlin differed from Ohio Wesleyan, and Joann faking polite interest, as if she’d been wondering the very same thing that morning. Meanwhile, Livingston was dying.

  “I’d eat her on credit,” he whispered. “How is she?”

  I mumbled a nonanswer. It was strange. Livingston was knocked out the way I wanted them all to be knocked out, but now that it was finally happening, it felt all wrong. Joann Carlino was an overwhelming beauty, tall, dark, buxom. Lois was a nondescript teenager well on her way to becoming a matron. But more than looks separated them. There was a nasty edge in Livingston’s admiration. Joann Carlino was the sort you lusted for, beat off over, banged your head against the wall about. Lois was the girl you married. That’s the distinction he was making. I hated it then, and I hate it now, because it turned out to be true, for him and for me. But being true doesn’t make it right.

  “You know Mike Henderson? Sigma Pi? He was saying he thought he saw you on some television shoe, singing or something.”

  “Me sing?”

  “I know. I told him he was out to lunch. Where have you been, though? Is she … what … Puerto Rican?”

  “Italian, I think.”

  “A-fucking-mazing. We don’t get many like her around here.”

  We stepped into the lobby of the dining commons. Inside the hall, I heard the slam of trays, waiters asking how many bug juices, how many milks. I smelled grease and disinfectant. I watched Livingston drop an arm around his girlfriend’s shoulder and lead her down the long long aisle. You know the walkway that leads out into the audience at the Miss America Pageant? And you’ve heard about the main street of Pamplona, when they run the bulls? Put them together and you’re entering Pierce Hall on the Friday night of a dance weekend, circa 1958.

  Joann watched Livingston and Lois stroll down the aisle. She hesitated, held back, surprised, amused, a little scared. There were hoots and whistles for Lois: not more than two or three hundred in the audience knew she was beating Livingston off pretty regularly.

  “We can skip it,” I told Joann. “It’s no big thing. There’s a hamburger place …”

  Inside the hall, the audience grew restless, mooing like penned cattle, stamping their feet, banging utensils against plates and pitchers. Sugar bags flew through the air, like rice at a wedding.

  “It’s like the Jersey shore,” I said. “That’s what I was trying to tell Eddie.”

  But Eddie was right, and I was wrong, and I knew it even then. These raucous weekends were the flip side of a smugly patrician mentality. Call it wild oats, blowing off steam, letting your hair down—the wildness was all intramural, sanctioned by the college. It came with the tuition.

  Livingston was looking back at us, like we were lost. He waved to us to come in. At the same time he leaned forward, as if to tell his buddies, “You’re not going to believe this!”

  “We better not,” I said. I must have reminded Joann of the antsy kid who didn’t want to join the Cruisers onstage because he was afraid the jaded summertime crowd would sniff out and destroy a virgin rock-and-roller. She put her hand on the inside of my arm and drew herself so close to me that I could feel her breathing.

  Silence greeted us. A vast cavern of silence, like there’d be silence if Angela Davis showed up at a rodeo. An amazed, breath-holding, eye-popping silence till we were halfway down the hall, Frank Ridgeway, Class of ’61, and Joann Carlino, black sweater, silver crucifix, blue jeans, her hand tightening around my arm, who had matriculated in a class they’d never join. Then one of the waiters dropped a tray of elephant scabs and the place turned into a zoo: howls, whistles, groans, screams, and cheers, all of it for Joann Carlino, my best friend’s girlfriend, my homecoming queen.

  • • •

  “Did I do all right at dinner?” she asked, when we walked back across campus.

  “All right? Are you kidding?!” She held my arm, not as tightly as before but like we were a relaxed couple, strolling home at the end of a nice evening. I remember how the grass smelled then, and that owls were hooting down by the river, and that we met an elderly German professor who greeted us courteously and, when we left, gave Joann an Old World bow.
r />   “When that Lois girl asked where did I go to college, I didn’t know what to say.”

  “You told her you worked in the city. Fine!”

  “And whether we were pinned or lavaliered …”

  “Forget it. Did you enjoy yourself at all?”

  “The man we met. Your professor. Him I liked.”

  “You never see him, dance weekends. He doesn’t chaper-one parties or go to dances. He just stays indoors and waits for the storm to blow over.”

  “If I could just sit in the back of his class, invisible, a fly on the wall, I’d like that.”

  “You don’t have to be invisible,” I said, stepping in front of her. The dreaded, hoped-for moment had finally arrived. “You’re good enough to be here. You could make it in a place like this.”

  “You mean I’m good enough for you,” she countered quickly. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Sometimes I think you’re too good.”

  “How do you know I’m not?”

  “I didn’t mean …”

  “Eddie said different.” She laughed, not that it was funny, but she wanted to stop the conversation from turning personal. Her laughing did the job. And Eddie’s name. She pulled me forward.

  “Thanks, Joann. For the lovely date.”

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “No.”

  “You’re welcome, then,” she said.

  We were close enough to the guest house to see the cattle-car from Denison, a busload of blind dates for desperate underclassmen, kids without cars or fraternity connections, losers and loners and closet cases. I explained how it worked: how upperclass proctors matched the dregs of both schools in advance. Now, when the bus pulled in, the poor girl’s name was called and her date met her at the door. “Want a beer?” “Not yet, thank you.” “There’s a party up in my room.” “Uh-uh.”

  “A year ago, I was in that crowd,” I told Joann.

  “How’d you make out?”

  “I didn’t win the pig pool.”

  “That’s something.”

  “I came in second. The guy who won, I think his date was missing a nose.”

  She laughed at that and held my arm tighter. I think she liked me when I was at my most awkward. My helplessness brought her closer. Whenever I asserted myself, she pulled away. But not that night. No, that night I was a regular smoothie. I turned and opened my arms, and my mouth was on her mouth, nothing she could do about it. I remember she opened her mouth, just a little, just a moment, just touched my tongue with hers, and then it ended. The kiss stopped there. Her hands reached my shoulders and gently pushed me away.

  “Let’s go back,” she said.

  They were waiting on the porch, watching us come down the walk and through the door, where Joann split off and went upstairs, and I stepped out alone.

  “Show time yet?” I asked.

  No one answered. They slouched in their chairs, feet up on the furniture, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, like they were posing for a tough-ass album cover. I saw they decided to dress tough, too—worn jeans, T-shirts, leather jackets—like we’d dressed on the Claude Richards show. I was in ordinary khaki slacks, Hush Puppies, and a blue short-sleeved shirt.

  “I’ll get my other stuff on,” I said. I’d packed my Claude Richards outfit: black slacks and a used shirt that said “Ricky’s Sunoco” on the back.

  “No,” Eddie said.

  “Only take a minute …”

  “I said no,” he insisted. “You stay like that.” I looked into his eyes and saw there was nothing I could do. They told me, too, those hunter-hunted eyes, that Eddie knew.

  If you could go back and choose one night to see Eddie Wilson and the Parkway Cruisers, to catch us when we really cooked, it would have to be that spring night in Ohio, that one incredible show which summarized everything we were about and foreshadowed our doom.

  I don’t know why it happened just then, what there was in that audience of college snobs and drunks and makeouts that brought out Eddie Wilson’s fine and angry genius. There were lots better audiences closer to home. But maybe that’s what did it: the unfamiliarity, the tension, the manifest hostility with which Eddie faced the audience. Or it could have been personal. It could have been just me.

  They hadn’t waited for us to start the party. A local group, not a bad one, had been playing a solid hour of white rock and roll—Everly Brothers, early Presley, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran. We set up behind them while they were still working, gazing out on a crowded hall. You’d look back at it now and maybe you’d laugh: short hair, old clothes, dance steps that are out-of-date. But laughing is the easy way out. You’d miss something if you only laughed.

  The locals were no slouches. They finished with a rousing five-minute version of Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Want to Dance?” They nodded as if to say “top that” when they moved off … and they stuck around to see if we could.

  Somebody from the college social committee popped up at the microphone and began a long, flat speech. It sounded like we were there to accept an honorary degree, not play a dance, and that’s when I knew that Eddie would be wild that night.

  “… and to Dean Thomas …”

  “Get on with the music!” Eddie shouted.

  “… and the campus senate, who provided …”

  “Get on with the music!”

  “Okay, everybody. Here they are, Eddie Wilson and the Parkway Cruisers!”

  The crowd cheered, pushing toward the stage to get a good look at us. Here and there various ex-classmates had spotted me, and the word was passing through the audience, but it didn’t feel right. Eddie and the others—except for Wendell, who always wore a suit and tie—were dressed like gas-station attendants. I looked like a stranded motorist. I was sure people were wondering what I was doing up there with the Cruisers: Had I won a bet? Or lost one?

  “You got some fine college here,” Eddie began as soon as the applause died down. “All the advantages. Ivy walls.”

  Hopkins hit the drums.

  “Lecture halls.”

  Another hit.

  “Full-dress balls.”

  Drums and guitars. I faked and fumbled, wishing they’d told me they were doing a special intro, because I was sure everybody was watching to see whether I really belonged.

  “And you got the Cruisers

  For the nasty stuff …

  For the get-down music

  And the hangin’ tough

  Better grab a woman

  Don’t mention your name

  ’Cause after tonight

  She won’t be the same …”

  Then it exploded, from gospel chant to impromptu song to a rocking, nasty version of “Down on My Knees.” Out of touch as I am with music since Eddie died, I still refuse to see how anyone could surpass what he did that night. We played for nearly two hours, no breaks, no patter, no tuning or stalling, Eddie rushing from one song to another, and the way he pounced on the songs, the way he explored, prolonged, teased, reprised, exhausted them, you had to think—and I later confirmed this with some other people—that he was fucking the songs. We all thought it. At the time, though, we were struggling to keep up.

  He destroyed the audience. The difference between what they expected and what they received was the difference between a swimming pool and a tidal wave. Oh yes, it was just like that. They’d come to dip and stroke and splash, but Eddie swept them away, spun them around, pulled them under, carried them off, deposited them gasping and disoriented on strange shores. I refuse to believe that anyone who was in the room that night could not have been changed by the experience.

  How can I recapture that night? I can’t sing it, play it, or relive it. All I can do is recall bits and pieces. One thing I recall is, how as soon as Eddie had established a certain musical feeling, so that everyone thought they knew where they stood, he’d abruptly jump to its exact opposite, force-marching us from one extreme to another.

  One of our prettiest songs, for instance,
was called “The Tides.” It was a slow, harmonic a capella doo-wop that Doc Robbins had written. Written? Well, stolen. It was a prosaic meld of two other songs, Roy Hamilton’s “Ebb Tide” and Nolan Strong’s “The Wind.” But the sensuality of our singing overcame the banality of the lyrics.

  “The tides roll in”

  Eddie sang, low and brooding, and behind him we harmonized

  “do-wee-ooh—do—wee

  And touch the sand

  doo-ooh-wee

  Roll out again

  ooh-waah

  Out of sight, of land

  ooh-waah

  So my love for you

  so my love for you

  May ebb and flow

  flow … love

  Depart the beach

  Return and grow

  grow love …”

  And they’d all be slow-dancing, hanging on tight, while we harmonized a bridge, and I might as well tell you that nothing moves me quite as much as a slow, well-sung 1950s a capella doo-wop: it’s youth, springtime, and first love, a whole state of feeling which Eddie promptly destroyed before our last harmony had faded. Before we knew it, he was jumping up and down, Mick Jagger’s sardonic embryo:

  “Hand-holdin’ women are not my style …

  Hand-holdin’s fine, but just for a while …”

  I glanced over at Sally. He shrugged his shoulders. We were hearing all this for the first time, this doggerel verse that spilled out between songs, the raw material of a dozen unwritten, never-written tunes.

  “When the lights go out, when the clock winds

  down …

  Got to find me a woman who’ll go down town

  No hand-holdin’ baby