Walk, Don't Run

by Steven Jae Johnson

  We strolled up the side entrance, through the wings, and out onto the main portion of the stage.

  “Man,” I said, “there’s enough room up here to have five bands.”

  Eddie walked to the front of the stage and looked down into the orchestra pit. “Hey, look at this, Rusty.”

  I walked to the front of the stage and we both stood there as if gazing down from a giant cliff.

  “Damn,” I gasped, “there’s a rising stage where the orchestra pit should be. Hmmm….”

  I slyly looked over at Eddie, who was smiling and seeing if I had received the same thought he had.

  “Wait a friggin’ minute here, moon-doggie!”

  I darted back to the wings where the lighting board was located. I ran to it and looked up and down at all of the knobs, levers, and switches.

  “Holy moly!” I yelled. “There’s a button here that says ‘Rising Orchestra Pit Stage.’”

  Eddie yelled, “Don’t just stand there, Fabian, throw the damned thing and see if we shoot to the moon!”

  I leaped into the air. I came down on the floor while hitting the switch with my hand and yelling, “Sputnik away!”

  From the depths of the theater, a sound began to emanate as if a dying dinosaur were saddled with a hangover and the Asian flu. I ran back to the front of the stage where Eddie was now looking down in amazement.

  “It moves and there’s a door down there!” Eddie yelled. “That means we can put the band on it, and—”

  I cut him off. “We casually stroll out from both sides of the wings looking like Frank Sinatra and Elvis the Pelvis, pick up our microphones, and start singing!”

  The side door opened. It was the band.

  The crowd began filtering in as we helped the band set up on the rising orchestra pit stage in its down position. We did a sound check as the guitars were tuned and the drums were hit. I noticed how excited Eddie was getting during all the preparation and I related one thousand percent. He loved the excitement of getting everything together for the show as he checked this and ran over cues for that. The tension of pulling off a show fed something in him he couldn’t get enough of. He parted the curtain and became bug-eyed about how packed it was getting.

  “Show time!” Eddie yelled for the performers and the stage crew.

  The band took their positions downstairs on the rising stage.

  “Good luck, partner,” Eddie said, hugging me enthusiastically.

  “You too, Zorro. We’re gonna rip this joint apart.”

  Eddie went stage right and I stage left.

  The East L.A. Junior College auditorium was packed to capacity. Since it was now standing room only, the back of the theater looked like a lineup at a police station. The energy emanating from the five hundred teenagers and young college students burst through the curtains and slapped Eddie and I like a scorned girlfriend. The excitement had now built to a fever pitch. Eddie’s body twitched as he danced in place. Cat calls and whistles came from the already noisy crowd. Finally, the announcer for the event approached the backstage microphone after giving Eddie and I the thumbs up.

  “Please welcome Eddie Olmos and Rusty Johnson with their band—THE LEFT HAND!”

  Charged with enthusiasm and a free ticket to scream our heads off, we took full advantage of the situation. The audience was made up of every friend, relative, and school chum that we’d had ever known in our suburban lives.

  The screaming—yelling—cheering—and stamping of their feet sent shock waves through the auditorium and for a moment, it felt as if the San Andreas fault had given way. The excitement made us dance in circles as we felt the sea of emotion and were about to dive in.

  Eddie signaled the band to start the song and the stage manager threw the switch. The rising stage started moving to meet the main stage as the band started the introduction to “Slow Down” by the Beatles.

  The music filled the large room bouncing between the walls and generating the rock and roll that got the crowd to its feet. I looked across the stage at Eddie and watched him dancing and jogging in place waiting for the band to reach our position.

  The anticipation peaked in our minds. The audience was perfect. The band was perfect. The mood was perfect.

  Our emotions were working in perfect harmony. We both glanced down at the rising stage, knowing it would arrive within a few seconds.

  Then, without warning, the moving stage started shaking before it came into view of the audience. It groaned with a dying scream as if it were a giant oil tanker turning on it’s side.

  And it stopped!

  With the music going and the audience pumped, the rising stage was S...T...U...C...K!

  The orchestra pit stage, fully loaded with all the musicians, had broken a good ten feet from the main stage. It would not rise into position to be level with the main stage.

  The audience could hear music but had absolutely no idea were it was coming from, for they could not yet see the rising orchestra pit with the musicians on it.

  Eddie ran across the stage and slugged me, bringing me out of my shock.

  “Snap out of it! We’ve got time! We can fix it! They’ll just keep playing the introduction.”

  He leaped seemingly five feet off the ground, turned in mid-flight, and ran over to the dazed stage manager. Eddie and the stage manager were busy at the stage controls throwing the levers back and forth. The stage manager was frantically looking down at the rising stage, seeing if each time he threw the lever, it moved. It didn’t.

  The band kept playing the introduction again and again.

  The audience members were looking back and forth at one another, perplexed. All the audience saw was four black heads of Beatle hair sticking up over the lip of the front of the orchestra pit going nowhere—while their ears told them, Shouldn’t the singing have started by now?

  “Can’t you fix it? We’re dying here!” Eddie yelled over the music.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong,” the stage manager yelled back, frantically throwing more switches. “This has never happened in the nine years I’ve been here.”

  The band is stuck and we can’t get to them.

  Perfect, I thought.

  “Rusty!” Eddie screamed. “I’ll signal the boys to start playing a solo to stall for more time.”

  He ran to the corner of the stage wing in full view of the audience. Their applause was dying down, but erupted again when they saw him. Eddie yelled down to the band, “Do solos! We’re trying to fix it.”

  “Signal to them to jump up and down on it,” the stage manager yelled. “Maybe that will jar it loose.”

  Eddie yelled down to the band again. “ALL YOU GUYS JUMP UP AND DOWN!” He jumped up and down to show them how in case they couldn’t hear him. He looked out to the audience while jumping, then he mugged for them. They pounded on the back of their seats, stamped their feet, and screamed “Go, Eddie! Go!” He couldn’t do anything wrong. Eddie had saved the day by turning the new Righteous Brothers into a carnival act.

  The band jumped while playing the same introduction over and over.

  The stage manager screamed, “HARDER! MAKE THEM JUMP HARDER!” He threw more levers to no avail.

  Eddie and I, still jumping like we were on pogo-sticks, yelled from the side,

  “HARDER, YOU GUYS. JUMP HARDER!”

  I glanced up to see members of the audience follow suit with the new dance being created before their eyes: The Olmos Hop.

  Eddie turned to me, “We gotta jump, Johnson. It’s the only way out. Our landing on it will jolt it loose.”

  I glanced down into the black hole.

  “That’s ten feet, daddy-o. Let’s go!” he screamed over the music and laughter.

  Like Japanese Kamikaze pilots, we ran hollering and screaming. “Oh, shiiiiiiitttt!”

  We leaped up and out into the air. The band looked up over their heads to see two descending butts with legs pumping like they were riding bikes coming straight at them. We landed on the stuck sta
ge “Ka-Boom.” We quickly put our hands on the floor of the stage to see if our Tarzan act succeeded.

  “There it goes! It’s moving!” Eddie yelled triumphantly.

  The audience sprang to their feet for our aerobatics with thunderous applause. The stage came into view and the energy was so acute that you could hold it in your hand.

  We sang the first verse of a Beatle’s song: “Well come on, pretty baby…”

  Crossing in front of each other, we worked both sides of the room, ducking down low, smiling and mugging, pointing and gesturing with outstretched arms.

  When the song ended, the pandemonium was ear shattering.

  “Thank you very much,” Eddie said.

  “What I’m afraid of,” I said in the microphone, “is this could have set the tone for the rest of our career together.”

  The audience howled and applauded.

  “Anyway,” Eddie summed up, “Rusty and I and the band want to thank you all for coming.”

  I made a giant gesture with my left hand and pointed to Eddie as he yelled into the microphone, “All right, people. Let me hear you say yeah!”

  The audience screamed, “Yeah!”

  “This is a man who almost literally broke his butt to entertain you tonight.”

  The audience burst out in laughter, rose to their feet again, and went wild. We each put one arm each around one another, bent at the waist, and immersed ourselves in the addictive emotion.

  Eddie turned to the band. “‘Everybody Needs Somebody to Love’! Ah-one, two, ah-one, two, three, four…!”

  And we were off again. All I knew was that I loved singing with Eddie.

  I was in heaven.

  5

  Lonesome Town

  Phone calls were expensive back then, so my main contact with Joey was through letters. Although I was happy playing with Eddie, Joey was having a difficult time adjusting to life in New Jersey. The tone of his letters was melancholy, and often saddened me. He was still crushed by the move and longed for his life in Southern California.

  The reality of his new life dogged him every second of every single day. His anger about being uprooted and transplanted to a cold dreary environment continued to plague him. He hated the cold, and had become sullen, reclusive, and disinterested.

  It was as if he had reached the end of his dream without even touching it. In his letters, he confessed that he had even been thinking seriously about running back to California on a Greyhound bus.

  For Joey, life had become dull and routine. He converted the basement of his parents’ house into a bedroom, where he could have privacy in his sadness. He would often pay local winos to buy him a pint of whiskey, then he would take it to his basement bedroom and drink it once his parents had fallen asleep. He spent most of his time in the basement, and often wished for a bad cold, so he could stay home from school. The disconnection from everyone while he was in his cave felt sweet these days.

  I understood what he meant, but I continued to hope that he would settle in and ride things out until graduation. Then he could join me and Eddie back in California.

  Sometimes I could get excited by that thought. Other times it all seemed like a pipe dream. I was still angry at Jenny for crushing our dreams, but I forced myself to think that it would all work out, in spite of what had happened. I tried keeping those thoughts front and center. I was happy playing with Eddie, but I wanted it all. I wanted Joey to be a part of the happiness I felt.

  In my mind, I wouldn’t be happy until that happened.

  6

  Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool

  Eddie didn’t like the feeling he was getting from his girlfriend, Irene. She seemed bitterly silent. Closed down inside. “Cold as ice,” Eddie mumbled to me over his shoulder as we left the movie theater one night.

  It was beginning to wear on Irene and Bette that their boyfriends were spending all their time in and around the music business in Hollywood. I had moved in with Eddie and his dad. We shared the old room that Eddie and his brother Pete shared. Pete was now in the Marines. We were traveling every night from Montebello to Hollywood and the call of the wild in tinsel town kept us out until three or four in the morning most nights.

  Eddie and Irene and Bette and I pulled into a Denny’s restaurant parking lot. The parking lot was full of Mack trucks cutting their engines down from long hauls as soot sprinkled from their exhaust pipes. We chose a table inside the eatery and took our seats. Not like boyfriends and girlfriends, but like two opposing football teams taking the field. Boys versus girls.

  After much deliberation over the subject of Eddie and I spending too much time in Hollywood, Irene and Bette had reached a decision on what they did and didn’t want.

  “We’re just not seeing that much of you guys anymore,” Irene said. “We don’t feel part of your new life. You don’t take us with you anymore. Something’s got to change.”

  “Our work hours are hard enough on us,” Eddie said, trying to ameliorate their frustration. “If you two want to come while we play and sing, you’re welcome to. But I think it would get old after a while.”

  “I’m not interested in hanging around in nightclubs that much,” Bette broke in sharply. “I personally don’t get it.”

  I shook my head—not bewildered, almost insulted. This was my dream, after all. It hurt to think that the girls couldn’t see that.

  “Listen, Bette,” I said, sitting up straight and narrowing my eyes. “You know I adore you, but I was a singer and a musician when we met in school. If you wanted someone to drive a station wagon, you should have dated a guy from the chess club.”

  Eddie snickered at this remark.

  “This is a deep commitment for us,” I said, “going back all the way to Joey Zagarino. You’ve always known that.”

  The relationship between Bette and I had been slowly crumbling. In the back of my head, I knew it was coming, but I held onto the hope that Bette and I would somehow keep it together. Deep down I knew, though, that we might be two different people who wanted different things. Eddie and I wanted adventure and stardom; Bette and Irene, it seemed, wanted security and a “normal” life. I knew that it didn’t make them bad people, but I wished they understood what Eddie and I wanted and what we were striving for.

  “I’m not getting out of music and performing to try and live some suburban lie. I’ve never wanted that and I’ve never kidded you about wanting that. This world looks pretty much the same to me—so I’ve decided I’m going to be as unique as I can. I saw how giving up his dreams made a drunk out of a great man—my dad. I feel lucky to be a singer and a musician. There are times up on that stage when I feel like I’m one of God’s angels sent to calm a screwed up world—and I’m not going to wake up fifty years old, wishing I would have tried. I have to prove to everyone—and especially myself—I’m going to make it in this business.”

  The intensity and candor of my words hit a deep nerve in the girls.

  Irene spoke next. “So it’s going to be this way always? The night life, I mean.”

  “Yes,” Eddie said simply as he looked straight into her eyes.

  She took his answer in, closed her eyes for a moment, and said, “I see.”

  The air between the four of us stirred slightly with the emotional vibrations of four powerful people. A waitress walked over and offered more coffee.

  “No, thank you,” I said flatly. “Just the check, please.”

  “This is what you have to have, to be happy?” Bette asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “Is this turning into an ultimatum?”

  The girls looked at each other as soon as they heard that word, as if it were a cue.

  “Now that you brought it up, yes, it is actually,” Bette answered sharply, laying her and Irene’s cards on the table.

  “So, let’s hear it,” Eddie said, trying to stay calm.

  “Either,” Irene started, “you both give up all this Hollywood stuff and come home and work, or go to college…or…or—”r />
  Bette cut in, “—or we think it might be better if we moved on. See other people, you know?”

  It was out now and there was no turning back. Eddie and I darted looks at each other.

  “We never see you guys anymore,” Bette continued. “How do we know you haven’t got girls in Hollywood? What I mean is…If we can’t have what we want together, then maybe we should find what we want with other people. Neither one of us is happy.”

  “True, Irene?” Eddie asked.

  “True, Eddie,” she admitted.

  “Now, let me get this straight,” Eddie said, “if we don’t quit what we’re doing, both of you want to end our relationships. Right here.” He glanced at me as if to say help. “Right now?”

  They nodded in unison. “That’s right.”

  My heart sank. “Kind of a collective break up, huh?”

  “We’ve got a lot riding on this, you two,” Eddie snapped.

  “And so do we,” Bette defended. “I, for one, can’t wait around for a man who’s looking to be the Rolling Stones and tour the world. I want a home and a family. Irene and I have talked about it a lot. She feels the same way.”

  “I get it! Okay?” Eddie said, raising his voice.

  “Hold it down,” Irene interjected, as heads turned at the nearby tables. “Let’s just all keep our voices down.”

  Bette stirred her cold coffee. I cut the crust of my banana cream pie. Eddie flipped the lid of the creamer nervously and Irene opened her purse to take out a Kleenex.

  A long silence passed between all four of us.