Billy Lives

by Gary Brandner

  The jottings in longhand were an encouraging start, but he had made many starts in the last few years that had come to nothing. This time, though, Dean Hardeman felt that once he typed up the notes — recorded them in good black pica letters on white bond — he was committed and would see it through to the end.

  With one hand he picked up the telephone while he flipped through a personal directory with the other. He found the number of his travel agent and punched it out on the phone buttons. While he waited for the connection Hardeman shifted the typewriter to capital letters. At the top of the page he pecked out the words: BILLY LIVES!

  CHAPTER 6

  Wednesday was a bright blue day in Los Angeles with a crisp wind from the north cleaning the sky. Conn Driscoll’s alarm clock buzzed him awake at 7:00 A.M. He slapped the clock into silence, knowing it would buzz again in another five minutes.

  Driscoll lay under the electric blanket, which he kept at a gentle three setting, and let his mind ease into wakefulness. His morning ritual began as he mentally ticked off the things he had to do that day. This day there were plenty.

  Al Fessler had turned his office and his secretary over to Driscoll for the rest of the week. The PR man had never had an office of his own because he felt it would constrict his movements. And what would he do with an office during the weeks he liked to take off between assignments? This time, however, he could see that it would be helpful to have a base of operations while getting the Billy Lockett hype off the ground.

  As the alarm clock began its second buzz Driscoll hit it again, this time punching in the off button to silence it for good. Normally he stretched the waking up process over twenty minutes or so, but today he was eager to get started.

  He showered and shaved and went into the kitchen to put on a pan of water for instant coffee. Driscoll’s apartment, three small rooms in a new complex at Marina del Rey, cost him three hundred dollars a month. It was too much, but with no dependents or outside expenses, he could afford it. He had a cleaning woman who came in twice a week, and he ate most of his meals out, so the apartment reflected very little of Driscoll’s personality. He used it mainly for sleeping and screwing.

  Driscoll ate a donut with his coffee, read the Times entertainment section, turned on the radio for a freeway report, and left for his first appointment of the day. It was with his artist, a wildly talented eccentric who insisted his name was Xenon Quarles. That was all right with Driscoll. Quarles did beautiful work, and he did it fast. He could call himself Fred Flintstone if he wanted to.

  Quarles worked in a shabby store-front studio on Robertson Boulevard. Not on the part of Robertson that runs through Beverly Hills, but the low-rent area south of Pico. From the size of his fees, he could have had better, but like everybody else in town, Quarles was maintaining an image. His personal image was that of the serious artist forced into taking commercial assignments to keep bread and wine on the table. As far as Driscoll knew, Quarles had never done anything but commercial work. He was much in demand for pop posters and could handle any style currently in vogue from Art Nouveau to Grand Guignol. He dressed in grubby thrift-shop clothes but was rumored to be worth half a million dollars.

  Driscoll found a parking place a block from the artist’s studio and walked back past a body shop and plumbing supply store. The windows of the studio were opaque with years of undisturbed grime. The display shelves behind the glass were stacked with trash. Nowhere was there any kind of a sign identifying the proprietor or his business. Xenon Quarles depended on word of mouth to advertise his work. It was all he needed.

  It took some effort to open the door against the rags, papers, and other litter that covered the cement floor. Driscoll pushed his way in and found the artist off to one side mixing paints in old coffee cans. Quarles had on a raveled brown sweater and a pair of torn pants that may once have been green. Most of his face was hidden behind curly black hair and beard. What could be seen was pockmarked and ugly. Quarles had been described as a tall, dirty Toulouse-Lautrec.

  “Hi, maestro,” Driscoll called cheerily. “Got the Billy poster finished?”

  Quarles scowled at him, continuing to stir the can of paint. “When did I tell you it would be done?”

  “Today.”

  “Then it’s done. Wait a minute.”

  The artist stirred for several more minutes, adding drops of pigment until the shade of the paint in the coffee can satisfied him. Then he wiped his hands carefully on a rag and picked his way through the clutter to the back of the room. The wall there was lined with narrow upright bins. Quarles drew out a large poster board and carried it back up front where he laid it across an inverted carton for Driscoll’s inspection.

  There was Billy Lockett in a white sequined jumpsuit, legs spread, arms out from his sides, one hand holding an electric guitar also white with sequins. Billy’s mouth was slightly open, his eyes cast upward. The background was a stipple of colors that suggested an endless crowd of people. Billy’s flowing blond hair was back-lighted to produce a halo effect. Nothing blatant, merely a suggestion.

  Across the bottom of the poster in stark black letters was printed: BILLY LIVES. A space was left for the printer to add concert dates, ticket prices, and whatever.

  Xenon Quarles returned to his paint mixing and affected an air of utter indifference about Conn Driscoll’s appraisal of his work.

  “It’s beautiful,” Driscoll said.

  “Naturally,” Quarles agreed.

  “It’s even better than the way I saw it in my mind.”

  “Of course.”

  “The halo bit with the hair is sheer genius.”

  “Sheer schmaltz,” Quarles said, but his voice betrayed his pleasure.

  “No kidding, maestro, it’s the best thing of yours I’ve ever seen.”

  “A cartoon.”

  “There’s just one little thing …”

  “What?” The artist whirled on him like a mother bear whose cubs were being threatened. “What thing? What little thing? Are you telling me there is something wrong with my work?”

  “No, no,” Driscoll said hastily. “Nothing’s wrong. Your work couldn’t be better.”

  “What then?”

  “Just a trifle about the lettering.”

  “Lettering! Tchah! A child can letter. What’s wrong with it?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it. You left something off, that’s all.”

  “Left what off? Damn you, Driscoll, will you stop this mealy-mouthing and tell me what’s bugging you.”

  “You left off the exclamation point.”

  “Exclamation point! What the hell do you want with an exclamation point?”

  “Right here after Billy Lives there should be an exclamation point. I’m sure it was there on the rough layout I gave you.”

  “Driscoll, what you are saying on this poster is that this kid, who everybody knows is dead, is really alive after all. And with that piece of news you want to give them an exclamation point. Who are you trying to reach with this, a bunch of idiots?”

  Driscoll answered that with the quirk of an eyebrow.

  “I see what you mean,” Quarles said. He picked up a brush, dipped it into a can of black paint, and deftly added the punctuation mark. “There you are,” he said, “BILLY LIVES!”

  “Thank you,” Driscoll said. “Do you have Al Fessler’s address where you send the bill?”

  “I have it.”

  “Fine. See you around.”

  Driscoll delivered the poster to a printer in Hollywood along with Quarles’ formula for mixing the inks. He had them run off a photocopy, which he took to a jobber where the image of Billy Lockett would be printed on several thousand one-dollar, white T-shirts. The T-shirts would thereafter be sold for five dollars apiece.

  There was still the billboard on the Strip, but that could wait until the month before the concert, as could the newspaper ads. Driscoll reminded himself to bat out a commercial to be played on the local rock stations. Never mind the midd
le-of-the-roaders; their listeners didn’t buy pop records or go to rock concerts. Same for television. They could safely ignore it.

  It was eleven o’clock by the time Driscoll arrived at the office at Crossroads of the World. A stringy mar with horse teeth was waiting for him with a large square suitcase in the anteroom.

  “Hello, Phil,” said Driscoll. “Come on in.”

  Phil Carbo leaped up from his seat and hurried into the inner office behind Driscoll, clutching the suitcase under one arm. Carbo was a gimmick peddler known along the Boulevard as the Sultan of Schlock. He claimed to have originated the magnetized, glow-in-the-dark Holy Family for your dashboard, though he said the idea was stolen from him and made a fortune for somebody else.

  “What have you got for me, Phil?” Driscoll said, seating himself behind Al Fessler’s desk.

  “After I get your call Monday, I work straight through,” said Carbo. “I got a couple items here you really gonna like. Class merchandise.”

  Carbo popped open the suitcase and brought out a blue satin pillow, 12 inches square, which he displayed as though it were the Mona Lisa. On the face of the pillow was a head-on photograph of Billy Lockett, eyes closed, mouth open in song.

  “A Billy Pillow,” Carbo said.

  Driscoll nodded slowly. “Not bad. A lot of the girl fans might like to take one of those to bed with them. Some of the boys too, for that matter.”

  Carbo beamed at the approval. “This is just a mockup, you understand. I just glue the picture on there. For the real item you can appli … appli … what is that word?”

  “Appliqué.”

  “That’s it. I know I can place these items in at least twenty stores right now.”

  “What else have you got?”

  Carbo dived into the suitcase again and came up with a glazed beer stein of the type popular with college fraternities. On the surface where the fraternity crest usually went was Billy’s face again and the poorly lettered legend, BILLY LIVES!

  “A Billy beer mug,” Carbo announced.

  Driscoll pursed his lips, shook his head negatively. “No good, that’s the wrong image. Billy’s fans are not your beer drinkers.”

  Carbo dipped a hand into the mug. “A Billy hash stasher?”

  “Forget it.”

  Regretfully, Carbo put the beer stein away and brought out another object, which he kept hidden from Driscoll behind his hand. “This item you are positively going to love,” he predicted.

  Carbo manipulated the gadget for a moment, then with the sound of a spring released, a little man-shaped object popped up to the ceiling and came floating back down buoyed by a white silk handkerchief.

  “A Billy Skydiver Doll,” Carbo said proudly.

  Driscoll winced. “Phil, that’s in rotten taste. Even for you.”

  “I am up all night getting it to work right.”

  “Put it away.”

  With a heavy sigh, Carbo folded the white handkerchief around the little doll and laid it back in the suitcase. “I have one more item for you,” he said. “A guaranteed winner.”

  The last of Carbo’s items was a 5-by-7 photograph of Billy in a metal frame. The photo was printed on a sheet of plastic with fine ridges. As Carbo tilted the picture slightly up and down, the photo of Billy seemed to open and close its eyes.

  Driscoll studied it for a moment, then shrugged. “Why not? I’ll get an okay from Al Fessler, and you can be ready to go ahead on the pillow and the picture. You’ll get the usual percentage of sales, plus a bonus if they move well.”

  “Oh, they’ll move,” Carbo assured him. “Don’t worry about that.”

  A beeping sound somewhere in the room startled Driscoll until he located it coming from the intercom box on Fessler’s desk. He nodded a goodbye to Phil Carbo, then said, “Yes?” into the box several times without getting a response.

  Finally Al’s secretary put her head into the office. “Greg Neely is outside, Mr. Driscoll,” she said. “He wanted to see Mr. Fessler but says he’ll talk to you.”

  Greg Neely did pop-music criticism for the Times and contributed articles to publications like Rolling Stone and Creem. He was not a young man to be brushed off.

  “Hey, that’s great,” Driscoll said, knowing he could be heard in the anteroom. He arranged his face into an expression of delight and came around his desk to usher the visitor in personally. A young man in a tie-dyed outfit and a Sonny Bono moustache slouched at the secretary’s desk.

  “Hey, come on inside, Greg,” Driscoll said. “Al’s turned me loose in here for a week while we get things set up.”

  “I really wanted to talk to Fessler,” the young critic sulked, “but I suppose you’ll do.”

  “I know Al would be anxious to talk to you,” Driscoll gushed, “but in the meantime, maybe I can answer some of your questions. He let Neely take the visitor’s chair, then sat down behind the desk, leaning forward in an attitude of attentiveness.

  “My first question,” Neely said, “is what the hell is this ‘Billy Lives’ ripoff?”

  “Ripoff? What do you mean, Greg?”

  “What I mean is we both know Al Fessler went into hock promoting Billy Lockett and setting up a Forum concert for September. Now Billy’s dead, but Fessler’s got you working the local hype merchants overtime trying to pump life into the corpse.”

  The little shit is after something, Driscoll thought. He said, “That’s not fair, Greg. Sure, Al Fessler had money invested in Billy because he believed in the boy’s talent and in his future. A lot of people did. There’s a lot of fans out there who feel a dreadful sense of loss at having Billy taken from them so suddenly. By staging a Memorial Concert Al felt he could give everybody a chance to say goodbye to Billy properly.”

  “And Fessler could say hello to a million dollars. I hear the tickets start at ten.”

  “We haven’t actually scaled the prices yet, but I’ll admit tickets won’t be cheap. We’re figuring on some high-powered talent being there, and those boys don’t work for nothing.”

  “Who have you got lined up so far?”

  “Greg, I gave my word I wouldn’t mention any names before the papers are signed. We’ve got to look out for lawsuits over conflicting commitments, that sort of thing.”

  Neely wrote something in a notebook.

  “As soon as the talent is signed, you’ll get it first, Greg. You have my word on that.”

  Neely continued to scribble in the notebook.

  “Hey, if you’re doing an article I can feed you a lot of good stuff on Billy. Pictures too.”

  “It might not be the kind of article you have in mind,” Neely said, still writing.

  Well, there it is, Driscoll thought. This pimply little creep was threatening to blow up the whole million-dollar operation. And the hell of it was, he could do it with a piece of hatchet journalism in the Times or Rolling Stone. The kids were getting stirred up anyway about rising prices for concerts, and if the word got around that Billy Lives! was a ripoff, the promotion was dead.

  “The only reason I would do an article at all,” Neely said carefully, “is that my sound equipment is giving me problems.”

  “How is that?” Driscoll asked, just as carefully.

  “I have a stack of albums halfway up my wall that I’m supposed to review, and that would keep me plenty busy. But I can’t even listen to them properly.”

  Aha!

  Driscoll made his face show concern. “Trouble with your sound equipment, you say?”

  “That’s right. I’m still using one of the old LLT Formula Five quad systems, and I’m getting a lot of crosstalk. No way I can give the new albums a fair listen with that racket going on.”

  “No, of course you can’t,” Driscoll agreed. Then, with a pantomime of having suddenly thought of something, “You know, this is a hell of a coincidence, but just last week Vic Faust down at the Sound Shack was telling me he had a whole new line of Kasaki components in. He was hoping he could place one of the top-of-the-line quad outf
its with somebody who really knew sound quality. Somebody who might, well, spread the word.”

  “That is a coincidence,” Neely said. “Of course, you know I couldn’t plug Kasaki or the Sound Shack in print. You know how the Times feels about that.”

  “No no no,” Driscoll said, “nobody would expect you to do anything like that. Just talk it up a little among your friends. A word from you carries a lot of weight, Greg.”

  The young critic pretended to consider, but Driscoll knew he was in the bag.

  “I suppose I could do that much,” Neely said. “I mean, if it’s good hardware, I don’t mind telling people about it.”

  “Hey, that’s great, Greg. I’ll pass the word to Vic Faust, and he can probably have the equipment to you by tomorrow afternoon.”

  “He’ll deliver it to my apartment … not to the Times?”

  “Oh, sure, Greg.”

  Neely closed the notebook and dropped it carelessly into a pocket. “I’ll be moving along. Nice talking to you, Driscoll.”

  Yeah, and profitable, Driscoll thought. He said, “Drop around any time, Greg.”

  He stood in the doorway smiling until the young critic had walked out into the courtyard of Crossroads of the World, then he sagged into the chair behind the desk. That had been a near thing. He would square the quadrophonic equipment with Vic Faust somehow — get him some plugs from the FM deejays, concert tickets for his kids. Driscoll would work it out one way or another and hope that the bribe would keep Neely quiet. A badmouthing from him could kill the concert deader than Billy Lockett.

  The intercom beeped again. Rather than fight with the thing, Driscoll walked around the desk and stuck his head out the door.

  The secretary looked up at him and said, “You have a call from Vernon Karp.”

  “Karp? I don’t know any Karp.”

  “He says he’s the book editor of the Herald-Examiner.”

  “I didn’t know they had a book editor.”

  “Shall I brush him off?”

  “No, I’ll take it.”

  Driscoll went back into the office and picked up the phone. “Mr. Karp, how good it is to hear from you. I never miss your column.”