Eddie and the Cruisers Page 2

  By nine o’clock, everybody’s behind their airconditioners. I stay indoors till dark. I’m either working or napping—restless, unsatisfying naps with all my clothes on, from which I awake feeling smothered and guilty about writing not done.

  Early evenings, I’ve decided, are the time to relax, move around a little, take chances. So, in the hour of barbecues and garden hoses, I emerge with my lies: I am someone named Frank Dayton; I am divorced; I am recovering from an operation which everyone assumes uncovered a hopelessly metastasized cancer. All I had to do was mention the name of the hospital, a famous institution of last resort. Herman Biedermann hinted he could line up laetrile. I asked, instead, for an occasional lift to the I.G.A. store. Since I ditched my car to make my trail harder to follow, Herman is my supermarket connection. He drives, I carry the groceries.

  I fit right in here. With remarkably few questions they’ve accepted me into this melancholy little commune, assuming that I am waiting for the same dread call that they’re expecting. In this, of course, they are dead right. No one asks how much time I have, but I know they’ve discussed it among themselves, and the answer has to be: not much.

  1

  It began on a Sunday morning.

  Not in church. It was at the Safeway supermarket.

  We do all our food-shopping on Sundays, before the churches let out, and it’s become something of a ritual in itself. Bringing home the bacon, bringing in the sheaves.

  Do you remember an old daytime TV show called Supermarket Sweep? A half-dozen contestants line up at the checkout counter of one of those huge suburban stores where the aisles go on for miles; the cookies alone take up a hundred yards. At the buzzer, the competitors rush out the starting gate and race up and down the aisles, heaving one item after another into their shopping carts. They have five minutes to rampage through the store, and the winner is the one who makes it back to the cash registers with the most expensive load.

  That’s my family.

  While they cruise the aisles, I sit near the door, atop a pile of twenty-five-pound dog-food bags. Sometimes I flip through People magazine, or chat with my students’ parents, or smile and wave at my family: buy this not that, get the big size not the little.

  On other Sundays, bad-mood Sundays, I just think. This was one of those. I watched my wife and two daughters moving around on the other side of the cash registers. I felt like an outsider, a spectator. They weren’t mine, they had nothing to do with me. As I watched them proceed from meats to vegetables, I realized for the first time that more than laziness or mere habit kept me from joining them: something inside me was keeping a distance. Something always had.

  What would I have made of this, on my own? Probably nothing. I had grown used to being the man I was and had no idea how to go about changing. I’m sure my perching exile atop the dog-food bags would have become just another habit, like my scary little trick of driving with the headlights off on moonlit nights.

  That’s when it all began.

  I heard a radio playing music, rather loud. A group of checkout clerks and bag-boys were standing around somebody’s portable radio, listening to music and moving to the beat. They must have liked it. They turned it up again, and this time it was way too loud. The manager popped up behind his glass-walled cubbyhole, cast me an apologetic glance, and shouted for them to turn that damn thing down or they’d have to turn it off. The kids looked over at the manager. They’d heard him, but there was an irritating ten seconds of noncompliance while they waited for the music to end. By the time the manager was ready for a second warning, the song was over.

  Doris and the girls reached the cash register just then, so there was nothing I could do right off. But the kid who helped carry our bags to the car—actually, all he did was push the cart through the parking lot and lift the bags into the trunk—had been in the group around the radio. I knew him from school. He was one of my students, a soon-to-be high school graduate who wasn’t college material and wasn’t worrying about it.

  “How are you doing, Anthony?” I asked.

  “Fine, Mr. Ridgeway. Could you call me Tony?” He asked politely, but in a way that told me he knew my control over him was ending. He was going to be a high school graduate. Named Tony.

  “Sure, Tony. Hey, I wanted to ask you about that song.”

  “What song?”

  “On the radio at the checkout counter. A bunch of you were listening. The manager broke it up.”

  “Oh yeah … that song.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well … what about it?”

  “Is it a new hit?”

  “I guess so.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who’s it by?”

  “Got me. Some group. Sounded like a bunch of guys.”

  “You like that sound?”

  “Well …” He backed off a little, abashed by the older generation’s curiosity. A little annoyed. He’d already spent so many mornings scrambling for answers to my questions, and they were always wrong.

  “That music up your alley, Anthony?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “Yeah. Suits me fine.”

  I tipped him fifty cents, slammed the trunk, and watched Tony walk away. No doubt he wondered why his high school teacher couldn’t mind his own business. Was I trying to get “with it”? That would be a joke!

  But the joke was on you, Anthony. And it was my business. And I was “with it.”

  I wrote that song.

  And I was one of the guys you heard singing.

  Long time ago.

  2

  The song was no fluke. I kept hearing it. I heard it late that night in my den, while waiting for the late news. I heard it when I drove to school Monday morning: Eddie Wilson and the Parkway Cruisers singing “Far-Away Woman.” In the parking lot, the study hall, up and down the corridors, it was in the air, alive and sounding like new.

  At first, I was amused. To think that after a dozen years of inflicting great literature on captive juveniles, after all the recitation and discussing and testing—“Thanatopsis” and “Oh Captain, My Captain”—my big breakthrough might be the casual product of a long-ago summer: “Far-Away Woman”! Suddenly, I was part of my students’ lives. By accident, I’d connected. Where they drove, or danced, or copulated, my words followed them, my voice singing in the background. And they didn’t know it.

  That would have meant a lot to me once. I came back to this high school as a teacher just six years after I graduated, and at the start, I was all full of hope of connecting with my students, bartering my reading for their youth. I would help them grow, and they would keep me young. I wanted to be near them, and I hoped they would want to be around me. Not anymore.

  I wanted to keep quiet about “Far-Away Woman.” What good would it do if people learned that Mr. Ridgeway had once been a Parkway Cruiser? Would my students ask me to emcee talent night? Interview me in the school paper? Spare me that! And spare me the wry wit of my colleagues, who have the minds of clerks and the style of turnkeys. No. I’d had good reasons for never mentioning that summer, and now that this one echo was sounding, my reasons were better than ever. I’d been a teacher for a dozen years; I was a Cruiser for only one. I was—I thought—a good high school teacher, whereas my singing was average, my guitar playing downright bad, and only an odd knack for writing lyrics had persuaded Eddie Wilson to take me into the group. Most important of all: that was then, this was now. The then and the now didn’t connect. Not at all. My life as a Cruiser had died on the shoulder of the Garden State Parkway, along with the man who inspired it. When he died, I decided the time of wonder and adventure was over for me. It was time to get to work, to marry, buy a home. When I thought back on that one brief episode, I figured it was gone forever.

  So what, I asked myself, if some disc jockey dug into the archives and blew dust off some relic 45 called “Far-Away Woman”? He played it as a whim, a blast from the past, a moldy oldy from the musi
cal groove-yard, gone from the charts but not from our hearts. Who knows how these things happen, these mass-cultural tumults, these vogues and fads and styles? The record draws a response; from way back and far off it reaches out, touches hearts, and triggers memories, and it’s all an accident. Before you know it, it’s over.

  “… and so I dare to hope

  though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first

  I came among these hills …”

  You can’t ask high school students to read poetry aloud. The tough kids march through it fast, like they were reading out of an auto-parts catalog. The sensitive ones, the college preppies, go overboard: they all sound like Liberace. No matter, one side of the classroom ends up laughing at the other, and the poem gets lost. So I do all the reading, slow, plain, direct, as if we were having an important talk. If my students have to laugh, they have to laugh at me. And they do.

  “What’s Wordsworth getting at?” I asked, rising from my chair and moving out to the front of the desk. My informal, conversational posture.

  “You understand the situation?” I continued. “The poet has returned to a place he loves, a place in the country. He hasn’t been back for years. He’s looking for changes in the place. But places don’t change …”

  It wasn’t working. The plainest, nicest springtime poem in the textbook might have been written in Sanskrit. Some of them were taking notes; at least, they were moving pens across paper. Their yellow magic markers squeaked and left blotches the color of urine stains on public property.

  I spoke. They wrote. Truth turned into cliché at the stroke of a pen, filed away and forgotten along with my other senior English themes: “Freedom/Responsibility: go together.” “Irony: diff between expect reality.” “Juxtapose: place opposite to show something.” And what else? “Ridgeway sucks.”

  At least the punks didn’t pretend industry. They slouched in their chairs and stared out the windows or rooted for the clock on the wall. Give me the punks. Any day.

  “Poems don’t change. But people do. People change. People change and …”

  And I despaired. They were too close to graduation. Proms, parties, graduation … liberation. The sap rising in dozens of erect, untested penises. Ink drying on a sheaf of birth-control prescriptions. A sense of urgent, straining ripeness. “Far-Away Woman”!

  “… or maybe they don’t change. What do you think, Mr. Russo?”

  “What do I think?” Tony leaned back even further in his chair, Gary Gilmore indifferently awaiting the sentence of the court.

  “Yes.”

  “About what?” Such a tone of weariness from him. And why not? Twelve years in this chalky, penal world: cafeteria food, halls that smelled of disinfectant, broken lockers. Twelve years that were almost over, and now I insisted on a reprise of the same old shit. Couldn’t I respect the rights of a short-timer?

  “About people, Anthony.” I relished the “Anthony.” I could see he hated it and watched him wondering how he could defy me. He thought about it, taking time to calculate. There was an intelligent man in there someplace.

  “What people did you have in mind?”

  “Well, take the narrator of the poem. Since that’s what we were talking about.”

  “I wasn’t talking,” he corrected me.

  “Now you are,” I snapped. “Read it.”

  He read aloud, and badly, but I’ll say this: everybody listened.

  “Well,” I pressed, “what do you think?”

  “He says he’s changed. Sh—shoot. What’d you ask me for? It’s right there. He’s changed. Sure. Know what, Mr. Ridgeway?”

  “What?” He was on the attack now. He was going to try to get away with something. And I couldn’t stop him. I started it.

  “This guy isn’t in the hills. He sounds more like he’s over the hill.”

  They liked that. The punks laughed first, but the note-takers joined in, once they figured they could get away with it.

  “Over the hill, around the bend, washed up. A quart low, minimum.”

  The bell rang then. Point, game, match … and diploma … to Mr. Russo.

  I watched them leave and turned back to my desk, gathering up a stack of exams I decided I wouldn’t bother grading. I sat heavily in my chair and swiveled toward the blackboard. It was no good. Why bother? What lived for them was dead for me. What lived for me was dead to them. Except, of course, that song—an exception, in this case, which proved the rule.

  No, I’m not such a hot teacher after all, not these days. Not funny enough to be liked or tough enough to be respected. And the main reason is that I don’t much like my students. It wasn’t always that way. My second year, they voted me most popular faculty member and dedicated the yearbook to me, complete with an epigraph from Chaucer that I suggested: “Gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.” Back then, I would’ve made Tony Russo my personal reclamation project. I’d have slapped him with a week of detention and stayed after school with him, talking late, winning him over. And if “Far-Away Woman” had popped up then, you can bet the whole school would’ve known about it. I’d have had everybody writing lyrics, and singing them too.

  What went wrong? All I can tell you is that, as the years passed, the gap between me and my students widened. I thought less and less of the kids who’d inherited my youth. I resented and envied them. Maybe it’s an occupational hazard, inevitable when you see them marching in every September and out every June, year after year, a bountiful harvest of C’s that might as well be F’s. Am I putting down the kids? Well, I guess I am. Were we any different? Yes, I think we were. Sorry, but I think that things are winding down in America right now. Perhaps I shouldn’t complain—nobody ever said that things would stay the same forever, let alone improve, so let’s just leave it at this: a dozen years of seeing what goes in and out of a public high school has made a pacifist out of me. I pray for peace, peace in these kids’ prime and in my old age, because if these kids ever get into a war, it’ll probably be a wrong war. And, worse yet, I bet they lose.

  I got up to leave and saw the guy sitting in the back row, as if I’d kept him after class. Except that he wasn’t one of my students. During class I’d barely noticed him because, when it gets close to graduation time, lots of strangers show up: friends, fiancées, relatives. But now he was sitting there alone, and I didn’t know why.

  He had black curly hair, a thin face, a bit of a beak. Jewish suburban. Not the future doctor-lawyer. More the would-be film critic or musician, the kind of kid who goes into the city on weekends to ride the Staten Island ferry and listen to jazz.

  “Are you looking for someone?” I asked.

  He was probably in his twenties but dressed like a kid: jeans, running shoes, T-shirt, windbreaker. What’s more, he acted like a kid, tense and hyper. It was an effort for him to sit still.

  “Yes sir, I am,” he replied.

  “Who?”

  “You. I think.”

  “You sat all through class?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was interested.”

  “In ‘Tintern Abbey’?”

  “No sir. That’s not the lyric I had in mind.”

  “What is it then?”

  ‘Far-Away Woman.’”

  He got up, leaned down, grabbed a knapsack I hadn’t noticed, and came toward me, smiling. So I’d been found.

  “Let me make sure, first off, that I haven’t gotten everything fouled up,” he said, with an awkwardness I later realized was cultivated. At the moment it worked.

  “You’re Frank Ridgeway, Junior. Am I right so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “You live at 232 Old Sawmill Way, in town. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “You lived here as a kid, didn’t you?”

  “Why yes … but I don’t see how …”

  “That’s how I found you!” he exulted. “Some crummy article from 1958 gave all the Cruisers’ hometowns. So when I started this, I hit the
phone-book section at the public library. I never figured it would be that simple, and for a while, it wasn’t. I mean everybody else has moved. Except Eddie Wilson, of course.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Eddie’s just a memory.”

  “His parents are still alive, you know. Still living down in Vineland.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “I’m … glad to hear that. Though it seems a little strange.”

  “Strange? Oh, yeah, I see. The son dead for nearly twenty years and the parents still puttering around.” He paused and looked at me as if I, too, would fit in the category strange. “Anyway, I’ve come to the right place. I mean, just to pin it down, you are the same Frank Ridgeway who was with Eddie Wilson and the Parkway Cruisers?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and began to feel tired.

  “That’s great!” He looked me up and down, beaming, as if he’d just rescued an endangered species: now, if only it could be persuaded to breed in captivity, the future was bright.

  “I’m not sure I’d have spotted you,” he said.

  “Nobody has.”

  “I’ve gone through all the old pictures—magazines and such. What little there was.”

  “We weren’t around that long.”

  “I’ve gotten hold of everything there was to get. Pictures you’ve probably forgotten. I’ll make copies. Still … it’s not that you’ve gotten real old … it’s some other kind of change.”

  “Back then I was a guitar player who bought clothes at the Army-Navy. Now I’m a teacher. I buy suits after Christmas at Herman’s on the Highway. ‘A little profit on a lot of suits beats a lot of profit on a few.’”

  He kept staring at me and I confess I was beginning to find this rapt attention flattering, especially after Russo’s triumph of wit. The way he looked at me, you’d have thought he expected me to break right out into song. I decided I’d better set him straight.

  “Those days I had resin on my fingers,” I remarked, clapping my hands together. “These days … chalk.”