The Teddy Bear Habit

by James Lincoln Collier

  So there they were, as I went through the park, with their beards and their funny clothes. As I came along they stared at me. I guess they thought it was queer to see an ordinary kid carrying a guitar through the park at nine o’clock at night. They looked at me, and talked about me, and sometimes one of them would call out, “Hey, kid,” and make a wise remark. I had the feeling they all had X-ray eyes and could see those jewels through the guitar. Or that the Hermes Sapphire was so bright it shined through everything. I wished the guitar and the teddy and the quarter of a million dollars worth of jewels would vanish, just disappear. And me along with them, too.

  Finally I got out of the park and onto MacDougal Street. The sidewalks were crowded with people. Three or four motorcycle cowboys sat on their bikes along the curb. A bunch of men and women in black leather jackets and crash helmets were clustered around them. Every so often one of the cowboys would gun his engine, making a huge roar. As I went by the motorcycle cowboys stared at me. They didn’t say anything, just stared; and I had the feeling that they too knew that I had the Hermes Sapphire in my guitar case.

  I turned onto West Fourth Street. People flowed in and out of bars and coffee shops. A mounted cop came slowly up the street. Strange people came and went. They all stared at me. I kept on walking. I didn’t look at anyone. Everybody looked so big. Mayba it was the night lights.

  Finally I got to Wiggsy’s. There was a crowd of people clustered around his stoop, the folk singers and hippies who usually hang around Wiggsy’s. They were singing “John Henry,” a famous folk song. They all looked dirty and mean, and they gave me the feeling that they’d just come back from doing some evil thing, like torturing people or eating live rats. They were sitting all over the steps, blocking the way. I didn’t like the idea of walking up those steps through them; but more than that I wanted to get rid of those jewels.

  I said, “Excuse me,” as politely as I could, and started up the steps. Most of the people slid over a little to let me get by. Sitting on the top step was a big motorcycle guy in a leather jacket with a zigzag of lightning painted on the front. He didn’t move out of my way.

  “Excuse me, please,” I said.

  He just stared at me and didn’t move.

  “I have to go in there,” I said.

  He didn’t move. “Where you goin’ with that geetar, man?” he said.

  “I have to take it in there.”

  He still didn’t move. I didn’t know whether he was really mean or just trying to give me a bad time or what. “What’s a little kid like you doing out this late at night? “

  “I have to bring this guitar back.”

  None of the other folk singers paid any attention. “You blow that geetar, kid?”

  “A little bit,” I said.

  He put his hand over mine on the handle of the case. “Lemme see it, man. I’ll show you how to blow that thing.”

  “Please. I have to give it to Wiggsy.”

  “I ain’t goin’ to hurt it, man. I’m just gonna show you how to blow it.” His big hand was still over mine; and now he began to unpeel my fingers from the handle.

  Then the glass door to the shop opened and Wiggsy stood there, wearing a Chinese-coolie hat and a silver and red shirt which swelled over his huge belly like a balloon, filling the whole door.

  He spoke in that soft dangerous voice of his. “Let the kid alone, Sharky, or I’ll break you in half.”

  “I was just jiving the kid, Wiggsy,” Sharky said. He tried to sound tough, but I could tell he was scared of Wiggsy, which gave us something in common.

  “Well, forget it,” Wiggsy said. “What’re you doing here, babe?”

  I held out the guitar. "I’m bringing this back. I don’t need it anymore.”

  He didn’t move out of the doorway. It was plain he didn’t want me to come into the shop. “What happened? The show fold or something?”

  “No. They got us all special guitars. I figured you’d need this back.”

  He grunted and took a cigarette out of his beard. “Dig.” He took the guitar. “Okay babe, you get home and get into bed before your old man gets tough with you.”

  I went down those steps and up West Third Street to Sixth Avenue pretty quick. I didn’t look around much either.

  But I had done it, and now all I could do was to wait and see what happened. Of course the next day I had to go to rehearsal without the teddy, but it didn’t matter. Now that I was a loser and more or less out of it, I didn’t get nervous. There wasn’t anything to lose anymore, so there was no point in getting nervous.

  Mainly they were rehearsing the four winners, but they put us two losers up in there too, so that we’d know what to do in case one of us had to substitute. I played through my stuff perfectly, hardly without thinking about it. I didn’t make a single mistake. But it was over, and I knew. I felt kind of sad, and when we went down to the drugstore to sit around and act like big shots, I felt like an outsider. It wasn’t my scene anymore.

  That night I went over to Stanky’s to fill him in on what was going on. We went into his room. I told him about being scared going through the park, and Wiggsy looking so tough, and the motorcycle cowboy who tried to take the guitar.

  “Sorry about that,” Stanky said.

  I punched him in the arm. “Sorry about that,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  Then we went out to the living room and watched television and slopped some grapes around that we'd swiped and said sorry about that a lot; but as I say, I had no feeling for it. When Pop called at ten o’clock to tell me that if I didn’t get my tail home in five minutes he’d warm it for me, I was just as glad; and I peeled.

  I cut over Eleventh Street and went down Sixth Avenue to avoid going through Washington Square Park. I was scared of it, and besides, I was afraid I might run into the big guy, Sharky. Sixth Avenue isn’t scary. It has banks and drugstores and P.S. 41, and it seems safe.

  I went quickly down the avenue, turned into West Fourth, just happening to glance toward our building as I rounded the corner. A fat man with a red fez was going through the door.

  I stopped dead. Two thoughts went through my head at once. One was that Wiggsy was going upstairs to tell Pop something. The other thought was that he was looking for me. I didn’t know whether to run toward the door or in the opposite direction.

  Finally I crept forward along the sides of the building, and peeked through the glass in the door. There was nobody in the hall. I opened the door a crack and listened for footsteps going up the stairs. There was no sound. It spooked me.

  I slipped through the door, tiptoed to the foot of the stairs, and looked up.

  Wiggsy came out from around behind the stairs, where they kept the baby carriages and bicycles. In that tiny hall he seemed to loom up over me like a huge black shadow, blocking out the light. I stared up at him, and trembled. He was holding the teddy in one big hand.

  My mouth dropped open, but nothing came out. Our eyes met. “You left this in the guitar again, babe,” he said calmly. “You’re gonna lose it if you’re not careful.” He held the teddy out, and I took it.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  He patted me on the shoulder. “See ya, babe,” he said, pushed past me, and went out the door.

  I squeezed the teddy. The jewels were still inside. The only thing I could think was: maybe he knows I know.

  I ran all the way up the stairs.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE SHOW WAS scheduled for nine o’clock Friday night, and by Tuesday everybody was in a panic. We weren’t rehearsing at Woodward and Hayes’s anymore. We were working in an old movie theater on Seventh Avenue, near Times Square. This was the theater where the show was to be held. All the time we were rehearsing the stagehands and scenic designers were getting things set up the way they were going to be on Friday night.

  Until now all the different acts had been learning their stuff separately. The dancers had been working in a dance studio, the singers in a rehearsal hall, us
at Woodward and Hayes, and so forth. Now they brought us all to the theater to put the whole thing together.

  It was a mess. In the first place, the big stars had finally come around. That’s how it works. All the unimportant people like us and the dancers learn their parts first. The big stars don’t join the show until it’s almost too late.

  Our stars were a singer called Mel O. Tones, a girl dancer named Frisky Legge, and of course the old comedian, Jerry Wastebasket. Naturally the first thing these stars did was to change everything we’d learned. Jerry Wastebasket said that the jokes we were supposed to do stunk, which was right, except that the new ones he got for us were worse. Mel O. Tones said that one of our songs sounded too much like his big number, so Damon Damon had to rush out and get a new one to teach to us. The dancer, Frisky Legge, said that we should stand farther back when she was being introduced; after all, she was the star, and we would distract the audience.

  To be frank, I’ve never seen three more egotistical people. They strutted around the stage, boasting and ordering people around. They all had slaves that followed them around handing them things and getting chairs for them, and saying, “Mahvelous, honey, sheer genius.” Every time some little thing went wrong they threw a fit. For example, one time one of Frisky Legge’s slaves brought her some coffee that was too cold or didn’t have the right amount of sugar or something. She got red in the face and cursed and screamed and finally flung the coffee halfway across the stage at the director of the show.

  Jerry Wastebasket didn’t rage around so much. What he did was to boast about himself. He never stopped. He was always going on about what smash he’d been in some movie they made when Washington was president, and how he made a million dollars a month, and how he got mobbed by fans everywhere he went and could hardly get a moment’s peace. I didn’t notice any mob of fans outside the theater when he came in the afternoon, but he explained that the fans were smart; they knew the cops would chase them away from the theater, so they usually waylaid him in the lobby of his hotel. Sometimes it took him almost an hour before he could get his supper, he said.

  Actually we six kids weren’t doing much rehearsing. The director had to spend most of his time getting the big stars straightened around. Mainly we sat around on the seats in the theater and watched. It was interesting at first, but after a while we got bored listening to Mel O. Tones miss the same notes over and over again. The only good part was that Damon Damon, the Button King, sat behind us making snotty remarks about the stars. He said that it was a known fact that Mel O. Tones was an illiterate and hired people to read his fan mail to him. It was another known fact, he said, that Jerry Wastebasket was always going in and out of mental institutions and had only gotten on the show because he had something on the producer. It was also a known fact that Frisky Legge was a kleptomaniac. She had been arrested in Detroit the summer before for stealing a girdle from a five-and-ten, but they hushed it up when they found out who she was.

  Damon Damon would get us all giggling with his cracks, and then when the director would turn around and frown at us, he’d give us a wink and say, “I simply won’t tolerate this giggling, dearies.” Then he’d lower his voice and tell some known fact about the director.

  On top of everything else, the show was about an hour too long. It was supposed to be a one-hour show, but it had come out to two. So they were frantically shortening everything, and of course every time one of the stars got his part cut down a little he’d get furious and throw a fit. I’ll say this, though: watching the stars throw fits was a lot more interesting than watching them sing or dance.

  Naturally they expected us all to hang around late those last few days. On Tuesday I had to call Pop and tell him I was having supper at Stanky’s. On Wednesday I called him again to say that Charlie Williams and I had a science project together, and his mother was going to fix us some sandwiches. It was a busy week for lying. I’d already told him that I was sleeping over at Stanky’s on Friday night. Of course I was going to sleep there; but in order to get out for the show we’d told Mrs. Stanky that we were going roller skating. So that was another lie.

  In any case, we were still hanging around the theater at about eight o’clock Wednesday night when Frankie Sanchez, the other understudy, began to feel lousy. Nobody thought anything of it. All we’d had for supper was stuff you could get out of the candy machines in the lobby: orange drinks and peanuts and chocolate bars. You could get sick on that stuff.

  “I got a terrible gut ache,” he told Damon Damon.

  “There are some benches in the lobby,” Damon Damon said. “Go lie down there until you feel better.”

  So Frankie went out and lay down; and then after a while he came back in, looking gray and sweaty. “I think I better go home, Mr. Damon,” he said.

  “My, yes. You look terrible, Frankie. Come along, we’ll find a cab.”

  They started up the aisle and out toward the lobby. We watched them go, feeling sorry for Frankie. Frankie wasn’t really good enough for the show, and everyone knew it. He’d worked very hard on everything, practicing at home and all that, and he’d gotten to where he could get by if he had to.

  They walked up the aisle, Damon Damon going first and sort of leading Frankie out by the hand. Suddenly Frankie jerked loose and tore past Damon Damon, his hand over his mouth. The director turned around. Everyone on stage stopped rehearsing and watched.

  Frankie just about made it into the lobby and then he fell down and got sick. We all charged out there. By the time we got to him Damon Damon was in a phone booth and about five minutes later an ambulance came peeling up the street and screeched to a stop right out front. They carted poor old Frankie off on a stretcher, but before they left the ambulance doctor told Damon Damon that Frankie was having an attack of acute appendicitis.

  As it turned out, they operated on him right away, and in a couple of days he was feeling good enough to break down and cry about missing out on the show. Afterward we all chipped in and bought him a Sonny and Cher record to make him feel better.

  I was the only understudy left. Damon Damon said to me, “George, I absolutely forbid you to get ill. If you feel appendicitis coming on, you must simply grit your teeth and bear it. The minute the show is over you may fall down dead on the stage, but not a second before.”

  The whole thing started making me nervous all over again. You take five kids about my age, there’s always a good chance that one of them will come down with a fever or mumps or break his collarbone or something. It happens all the time. Now there was a chance that I’d get on the show after all. It confused me. Half of me was hoping that one of the other kids would get sick. Nothing serious; nothing you could die from like Frankie’s appendicitis. Maybe a rash that looked like measles but went away the day after the show. Or a twisted ankle from basketball—not a bad twist, just the kind the doctor says to stay off of for a few days.

  On the other hand, half of me wanted them all to stay healthy; for of course there was no way I could get the teddy onto the show. It’s one thing to foul up in front of Damon Damon and Mr. Woodward and a few kids. It’s another thing to do it in front of forty or fifty million people, including practically everybody in your school. If I got on the show and messed it up, I’d have to commit suicide, or at least run away from home. Really, how could you go back to school if you messed up on a big national television show?

  But I knew that if somebody got sick I’d have to go on. There wouldn’t be any way out of it; and I began racking my brains to figure out some way to have the teddy around where I could see him, even if it was at a distance. Maybe there was someplace I could stick him down behind some scenery or hanging from a catwalk overhead.

  And what was I going to do about the fact that inside of the teddy there were a few little trinkets worth a quarter of a million dollars? Suppose some stagehand happened to kick the teddy out of the way? Suppose somebody tossed it into a rubbish can? Wow. It made me shudder to think of it. When Wiggsy found out that it w
as missing he’d just naturally think that I’d squealed on him to the police.

  One way to do it would be to take the jewels out of the teddy and hide them in my drawer while the show was on, but it was risky. Anything was risky. For that matter, I wasn’t sure that Wiggsy knew I had discovered the jewels. I didn’t know anything and everything was scary.

  I woke up early Thursday morning and immediately began thinking about where I could hide the teddy if I went on the show. I wasn’t up early because I wanted to be, but because Pop was making a lot of noise around the kitchen. When he is having trouble with a comic strip he sleeps late and doesn’t say much when he gets up. When everything is going well he leaps out of bed bright and early and starts fixing one of his famous huge breakfasts. He goes singing around the kitchen, slamming pots and pans so that it’s impossible for me to sleep. He pretends it’s all accidental, but I think he does it because he wants somebody to talk to about his comic strip.

  This morning he was making pancakes. I went into the kitchen. What a mess. He had slopped orange juice around and there were about a hundred bowls all over the kitchen counter. I could tell that he’d started to make the batter in a bowl that was too small, and he’d had to dump it into another bowl. But I couldn’t tell what all the rest of the bowls were for, except that he’d got them dirty one way or another.

  He was awfully cheerful. “Pancakes, George, pancakes. We’re going to have delicious homemade pancakes this morning.”

  “I figured that out,” I said.

  “Don’t get smart with me, fella, or I’ll make you wash the dishes.”

  “That’s okay with me,” I said. “It would take me the rest of the day and I’d get out of school.”

  “Wise guy,” he said. He shook the stirring spoon at me, pretending to be angry, and naturally some of the batter splashed on the floor. “Oh well,’ he said, “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. “

  I sat down at my place at the kitchen table. “You can’t make an omelette without spilling a lot of orange juice either, huh, Pop?”