Eddie and the Cruisers Read online

  Who’ll nip and tuck

  Want a girl off the streets

  Who knows how to …”

  Kenny hit the drums as soon as he heard what was coming, and Sally hit the guitar. They were no prudes, but they liked steady work. Sally looked at me again. What goes on here? What the hell goes on? Out of control, Eddie rushed into the next song, a little number we’d cooked up for the Claude Richards show and decided against doing at the last moment.

  “Maybe she will, maybe she won’t

  The girl say take it easy

  And I see her point

  But I want some more than kiss and tell

  Want to ball that baby

  Want to ring her bell

  Want to know that woman

  Stop her talk

  Want to groove my baby

  Till baby can’t walk …”

  The whole evening was like that—tender songs like “Call on Me” and “Blue Lady” juxtaposed with carnal raunch. And again and again, those scary, damn-near-demented introductions. The strangest of all he saved for last, right before “Far-Away Woman.”

  “Want to thank you people

  For making the scene

  Now the show’s about over

  And I’m gonna come clean

  Gonna present the Cruisers

  One by one …

  On drums … Kenny Hopkins.

  First guitar and sax, Mr. Wendell Newton.

  Second guitar, Sal Amato.”

  My turn came. And went. He didn’t mention me. He turned away till someone—I’ll always blame Keith Livingston—shouted, “You forgot somebody.”

  “Who’d I forget?” Eddie asked, like he’d made a bona fide slip.

  “Over there. In the corner.”

  “Oh … oh yeah.” He spoke in a rueful, how-could-I-have-done-that voice. “In the corner we got Toby Tyler.”

  Laughs. I stood there, praying that would be the end of Eddie’s joke.

  “Not his real name. Stage name. Show business nom de plume. Toby Tyler. He’s the little boy who ran away from home and joined the circus, isn’t he? Snuck into the tent without a ticket, so he could see the wild animals inside. The savage beasts, the clowns and freaks. Let’s hear it, everybody, for Toby Tyler.”

  Applause and laughter, mingled with a few shouts of “asshole!” and he launched into “Far-Away Woman,” a fierce, stretched-out version. As soon as we ended, Eddie leaped off the stage, ignoring calls for an encore, pushed his way through the crowd, and vanished out the door.

  The Ohio band took the stage to mop up. But they might as well have started setting the tables for tomorrow’s breakfast, because there was no act on earth that could follow us that night. I left as quickly and inconspicuously as possible. I crossed the campus, walked into a fraternity party, snatched a six-pack of beer, and walked out again toward the college graveyard, opposite the guest house. I sat down on the grass next to a favorite spot of mine, a Civil War tomb, and started in on the beer. The grave belonged to a Union officer who’d been killed—beheaded, according to college legend—in the spring of 1865, practically on the last day of the Civil War. I liked his timing.

  Well, it could have been worse, I told myself. Eddie could have told the story of my lost virginity. I could have died on stage, like opera singer Leonard Warren, or collapsed like Judy Garland, or had an egg smashed into my hair, like Email Jannings at the end of The Blue Angel. Sure, it wasn’t all that bad, little enough price to pay for a good year on the road. I’d made friends, played songs, gotten laid, and now it was over. Eddie had revoked my membership in the Cruisers. So it was back to college. A year from now, if I were lucky, I’d be staggering around in the cornfields, copping feels and blowing lunch on my way to the asshole-of-the-year party. This year, though, I’d better stay away. I might win in absentia, but if I showed my face I’d be in by acclamation.

  “Wordman?”

  She found me out there, when it was nearly dawn. I knew she would. I’d pretended I didn’t see her coming, but I’d watched every step. I’d seen her search the porch and cross the road and look down The Path. “What have you been doing out here? Have you been here all night?”

  “I like cemeteries,” I said. “Old ones like this, anyway. You come back anytime and nothing’s changed. There’s no catching up to do.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “I wish. Did you see the show?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought it was terrific. If you like public executions.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t bother. You’ve got your own problems. The way he acted onstage, I figured you were in for it tonight.”

  “What’s that mean?” she asked.

  “I mean, the business. How’d it go? ‘Fuck that woman till she can’t walk’?”

  Two fast slaps, one on the left, one on the right, and she was ready to deliver more.

  “I’ll take a bus back East,” I said.

  She knelt down then and touched me where the slaps had landed. “Eddie’s up there crying. He’s been crying all night.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Whenever I try to talk to him, he turns away.”

  “Is it because of us?”

  “There’s nothing between us for Eddie to cry about,” she answered. I was hoping she’d at least think it over a little.

  “Well, I guess you cleared that right up.”

  “Don’t be like that. He needs you.”

  “Did he say he needed me?”

  “I know he does. He’s under pressure now, acting crazy. I can’t reach him like I used to. Maybe you can help.”

  “Toby Tyler?”

  “He’s your friend.”

  That morning we headed home. It was a grinding, interminable journey compared to the buoyant outward drive. Everybody was fagged out, so we took turns at the wheel, with hillbilly radio stations to keep us company. The only time we talked was when we pulled off the road for gas and food. We were at a Howard Johnson’s near New Stanton, Pennsylvania, eating fried clams, when Hopkins started boasting about some girl who “tuned his skin flute” the night before, and somehow he found a chance to call me Toby Tyler.

  Eddie’s hands were faster than Joann’s. He grabbed Hopkins by the collar and pulled him across the table.

  “That’s it!” he said, shoving him back across. He looked at me, and I thought he might say something—smile, nod, shake hands. He just looked at me though, as if he were checking for the first time to see if I were there.

  Eddie and I never talked about that night. Maybe he felt it was best not to, or maybe he was waiting till it was further behind us. So it happened that our friendship turned low-key and cautious. I still don’t know whether my staying with the group made any difference to him. He seemed so far away, those Lakehurst weeks, but maybe Joann was right. Maybe he looked back from wherever he was headed and felt better, knowing I was still around.

  12

  There’s one thing you have to know if you’re around old-timers like my neighbors. Every event, from getting up to going to bed, is scheduled; everything fits into a fixed daily routine. Never change your routine, never upset your neighbor’s: that’s the social compact here. And that’s what my hunters attacked.

  The camp has been in an uproar for two days. Every trailer that has a phone—every trailer but mine—has been receiving odd phone calls, day and night. Naps have been ruined, meals interrupted, peace and quiet shattered. Sometimes it’s a man who says he’s from Tony’s Pizza or the Nielsen Survey. Or a woman: Avon calling. Often it’s rock music blasting over the wire. Sometimes silence.

  The old-timers are helpless before this kind of attack. They can’t disconnect. They never know when they might need an ambulance or a tank of oxygen. The phone’s their only connection to the outside world, doctors and relatives. So there’s nothing they can do but jump up and answer every call, no matter what.

  It’s like the place was under siege. The dawn patrol n
ever assemblés. Bleary-eyed and faltering, they slouch in lawn chairs outside their trailers, waiting for the next phone call. Yesterday, at my suggestion, Herman Biedermann called the phone company to see if the calls could be traced, and all they could tell him, when the answer came this morning, was that they were placed from various pay phones all within a twenty-mile radius of the camp.

  This morning, the attack entered a new phase. Now they ask for Frank. And hang up. “Frank there?” “Say hello to Frank.” “Tell Frank Eddie called.”

  I’m Frank. I felt guilty as soon as the phone calls started, knowing they were aimed at me. I went out of my way to be helpful. I was the one who urged Herman to contact the phone company. But now that they’re asking for Frank, private guilt has been turned into public exposure.

  “Get a phone of your own, why don’t you?” Martha Darmstadter suggested.

  “Frank, we need our peace and quiet,” Ed Riley confided. “That’s why we came here in the first place.”

  “If it’s the money, we can all chip in,” Herman hinted.

  A phone of my own won’t solve a thing, but I couldn’t tell them that. So I lied. I told them I’d requested a phone but that the installation would take a week to ten days. By then, I thought, it would be all over. But Martha Darm-stadter, who reams out public utilities for sport, double-checked me. The result is that I’ve been caught in a lie. They’re meeting this morning, in her trailer. The caucus has lasted three hours already—pie and coffee included—but how can there be any doubt about the outcome? They’ll ask me to move out.

  “Normally I’d ask you to leave; I’d bounce you right out of here, understand?”

  The deputy warden at Rahway State Prison, Herbert Sanders, was like a lot of civil service blacks: the innate caution that brought them so far mingles with the angry premonition that they’ll get no further. They pride themselves on going by the book, but they know they didn’t write it.

  “Yes, sir,” I responded.

  “You put your request in writing. We check you out. We check it with the prisoner. There’s a pamphlet of do’s and don’ts for visitors. You want to come back again, make sure you read it.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “You plan on coming back?”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Good.”

  “Why … good?”

  “He gets so few visitors—so goddamned few!”

  The visitors’ area was a fenced-off lawn, outside the cell block. Someone had tried to make it into a picnic area. Sapling shade trees stirred in muggy summertime air that smelled of Perth Amboy refineries and the polluted Raritan. There were swings and slides for kids and a fireplace for cookouts. Ignore the high-wire fence, the patrolling guard, the brick walls, and you might be in a park someplace, a park where all the men wore faded denim and all their wives were welfare-fat, and everyone spoke in whispers.

  You could hear the gates opening and closing whenever prisoners came out. Reunions were constrained and awkward: an initial greeting, a touch of hands, a quick retreat to the farthest corner of the yard. I waited for Wendell at a picnic table near the door, gazing over the fence at a highway where early weekend traffic beat the rush to the Jersey shore.

  “What’s he in for?” I’d asked the deputy warden. I didn’t want to ask Wendell. The way he shrugged, he made me feel I’d asked a stupid question.

  “B and E, I guess.”

  “That’s …”

  “… not a railroad. Breaking and entering. I’ll check his file. Stop by my office on the way out.”

  “Was he guilty?”

  He laughed at me. “You don’t get far talking guilt and innocence around here.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Just don’t mention the Dewey Decimal System. Take a tip from me. Stay ’way from Mr. Dewey.”

  Sanders walked away, chuckling. I was the only white visitor, the only adult male visitor, in the area. While I waited, I wondered why it was that I’d lost touch with Wendell Newton, and with all the rest of them. We didn’t have to play together after Eddie died, but we could have stayed friends. I exchanged visits, traded Christmas cards with dozens of people who meant less to me. So why not the Cruisers?

  Looking back, I realized that I’d never even tried, not so much as a phone call or a postcard. That was my fault, no doubt, but not mine alone. The others weren’t any different. They’d scattered just as I had, no turning or returning till now, and I was the first one back. So it wasn’t just me. It was melancholy tribute to Eddie, who brought us together and whose death killed all thoughts of our staying whole. When he died, it turned us into fragments. Wreckage. And we knew it.

  A shadow crossed the green-painted picnic table, fell over my shoulder and onto my hands, and then a man filled the space where the shadow had fallen and I was looking at Wendell Newton for the first time in twenty years.

  “I remember you,” he said, his eyes welling with tears, like remembering me was the proudest, finest thing he’d ever done. “You’re the Wordman.”

  “Hello, Wendell.” I shook his hand. I held it. “I remember you, too. I really do.”

  But I wouldn’t have recognized him. He’d always been thin and frail, but back then he had a feverish energy that made you forget how puny he was. I remember how he sweated when he played, how the veins in his neck bulged when he blew the sax. That was gone now. He was a skinny fidget who wore Coke-bottle glasses, and his hair was mostly white. It hurt me, seeing him like this. I couldn’t help it; I asked the question I’d decided to save for last, or not to ask at all.

  “Wendell … what happened?”

  He smiled and shrugged, as if he hadn’t quite decided.

  “The sixties.” He laughed a little at that, just in case he’d said something funny. “It’ll take some time before I get nostalgic for the sixties. Now the fifties, that was tops. Prime time. But after that … you don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Yes, I do,” I insisted. “Where’d you go?”

  He nodded, but I felt that he was forcing himself, playing a tune his heart wasn’t in.

  “I didn’t get far,” he said.

  “Newark?”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that. Oh no. I been all over. All those places Eddie wanted to play. I toured with Ike Turner for a while. Rufus Thomas. Eddie would have loved it.”

  “Then what …”

  “It was never the same. Never the same excitement, the same chances being took. It was just a job. A Sally-type job, punchin’ a clock, playin’ notes, hoppin’ back on the bus. I missed you guys. Eddie. All of you.”

  “Wendell, if you’d contacted me …”

  “Don’t bother,” Wendell said. “I don’t want to hear you talking like that. You guys were part of the best time I had. There’s nothing to apologize for. It ended, was all, and other things came along. It’s the way things go.”

  “But prison!”

  “You want to know my record, Wordman, ask the warden. He keeps score. Tell him I said he could tell you, dates and details and all. I don’t mind. I just don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You still play?”

  “Sure,” Wendell said. “Records and the radio. And in my head—there’s music in my head. That’s the music nobody else hears. The incredible solo instrument of all time. How about you?”

  “What about me?”

  It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. I’d thought of the visit as a one-way investigation. It hadn’t occurred to me that Wendell would be looking back at me, that they all would, and that they’d be pleased or disappointed by what they saw.

  “Whatever happened to you, Wordman? I’ve wondered, I sure have. Trying to guess what you were up to. Time to time, down in the library, I try looking up your name, just trying to keep up with you. We got Twentieth-Century Authors, Books in Print. We got the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature …”

  I had to turn away then. I couldn’t face him. I couldn’t tell him that what he was look
ing for couldn’t be found.

  “Being a writer is something,” Wendell mused. “And hard. It’s got to be hard. I recall, you used to talk about it all the time. How many books you write so far?”

  “Wendell …” That was the pivotal moment: I couldn’t disappoint him. Not when losing touch already seemed like the most enormous cruelty I’d ever committed. “I’m working on one now. And you’re in it!”

  “Me?”

  “And Eddie and the whole bunch. It’s about the old days, when we were Cruisers together.”

  “Eddie’s on the radio again!” he remarked excitedly. “You hear him? Old Eddie’s fixing to be a star. You hear? Eddie’s coming back!”

  I wasn’t sure what Wendell meant. It seemed like he believed that Eddie might really be coming back to life, or that he’d never died. What’s more, I had trouble following Wendell—not just his logic but his speech itself. When he was young, what little he said came out so intelligently, so carefully pronounced, that Sally accused him of being a foreign student. Now, Wendell sounded old.

  “You gonna see it happen, Wordman. Eddie in the big time! I hope his old friends won’t be forgot.”

  “You listen to music, Wendell?” I was stalling. I was trying to make up my mind. Was Wendell crazy?

  “I sure do. And you know, sometimes out in the yard, these kids we get in here stand around and sing. Believe it, Wordman, they do some of Eddie’s and your songs. Jiving and doo-wopping and harmonizing. Street-corner stuff. And I hang back, it almost makes me cry. It gets me sad and happy all at one time to think, ‘Hey, that’s me singing! That’s me. I was part of that!’”

  “You were, Wendell,” I said. I almost cried myself. “You were one of us.”

  “Hey, don’t get down about me, Wordman. They treat me pretty good here. Oh damn! What’s today?”

  “Saturday.”

  “Oh damn!” He sat back down disconsolately. “Library’s locked on Saturday. I wanted you to see the library. I figured you’d be interested. You got to come back and see what I done there.”

  “I’ll come back.”