“That must be kind of dull,” I said. “I mean where’s the suspense if you always know you’re going to get A’s in everything?”
“I can’t help it,” he said. “I just seem to know the answers to all the questions. Of course, I’ve cultivated good study habits. The subject I hate most is Latin so I always do that right after I come home from school to get it out of the way. Then I practice the flute. It refreshes my mind. Then I do my exercises. I sent away for a bodybuilding course. The exercises are tailored to develop each muscle of the body individually. You can get muscle-bound if you’re not careful.”
“That certainly would be a shame,” I said. I felt guilty about being sarcastic, but I couldn’t help it anymore than Sinclair could help getting A’s.
He didn’t notice, though. “I do push-ups and sit-ups and work out with the dumbbells. You can borrow the book if you want. You’re supposed to do the exercises in a certain sequence, though. Otherwise you might get muscle-bound.”
“I wouldn’t want that,” I said. “Please pass the maple syrup.”
“Maple syrup? On your eggs?”
“Sure,” I said. “Don’t you ever put maple syrup on your eggs? It’s my usual thing.” That was a big fat lie. I’d never put maple syrup on my eggs in my life; I was just trying to get even. So I poured the syrup on, and took a bite. It tasted awful, but I acted like it was delicious. “So what else do you do for fun?”
“Oh, I’m afraid I’ve been sort of neglecting my homework. I’ve got into another project. I’m building a computer out in the barn.”
“A computer?” I wasn’t sure I believed that.
“Sure,” he said. “All you have to know is a little calculus. You can see it after breakfast. I’ll let you help if you think you can be careful. It’s awfully delicate, you know.”
“I’ll try my best,” I said.
It turned out to be true about the computer. They have a barn out back of the house which used to have horses and stuff in it fifty years ago when the place was still a farm or whatever it was, but now they used it for a garage and a place to stash the lawn mower and so forth. And up in the loft, where the hay used to be, Sinclair had a work bench and soldering irons and tiny screwdrivers and boxes full of radio tubes and transistors and wires and a lot of other stuff I didn’t recognize. Beside it, sitting on its own table, was this huge mass of electronic things stuck together. “Does it work, Sinclair?”
“It isn’t finished yet,” he said, “but it’ll do quadratic equations already. Watch.” He pushed down some buttons he’d got from an old adding machine and after awhile the machine began to click and hum and a piece of paper curled out of a hole in the side. Sinclair looked it over. “Right on the nose,” he said.
“How can you be sure, Sinclair?”
“I did the problem in my head first.”
“You mean you can do math in your head faster than the computer can?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “Just simple things. Here, now if you want to help me, I’ll show you what to do.”
“Maybe you’d rather shoot baskets,” I said.
“Oh, no,” he said. “My exercise course says that kind of workout doesn’t do you any good—it just builds up the legs at the expense of the rest of your musculature.”
I was about to explain that maybe we could do it just for fun and never mind building up our musculature. But I didn’t; there didn’t seem to be much use in trying to explain about fun to Sinclair.
So that was the way it went. In the mornings we worked on Sinclair’s computer. That is, I sat around watching him work on it and maybe about every half an hour I held a wire with a pair of pliers while he soldered it. In the afternoons I watched him do his exercises. In the evenings the fun was listening to Uncle Ned grunt along behind his paper. Oh, I’m exaggerating. Sometimes Uncle Ned took us over to some lake they have there and we would go swimming or water skiing. I got the hang of water skiing pretty quickly and in about an hour I was as good as Sinclair, which made him sore. “Your musculature is probably more advanced than mine at this stage,” he explained.
“Get stuffed, Sinclair,” I said. “I’m just a better athlete than you are.”
“Better is a relative term,” he said.
“Yes, indeedy,” I said. “And you’re my relative.” It was a terrible joke, but I didn’t care. It was nice being better than Sinclair at something. To be honest about it, I figured I was really smarter than Sinclair, too. But I didn’t say so; I didn’t have any proof.
Actually, sometimes I felt a little sorry for Sinclair. In one way it would be terrific to go around knowing that you were perfect, but in another way he seemed kind of out of it. He’d got himself computerized into doing everything right, and what was the fun in that? I figured some day I would try to persuade him into doing something bad for a change—eating with his fingers or leaving his clothes on the floor. I figured that if I told him it was mentally healthy for him to be rebellious every once in a while he might accept it. It would be something to relieve the boredom. But it wasn’t going to be easy to persuade him to stop being perfect. He’d got into the habit of it, and a habit like that is hard to break.
But I had something more important on my mind than Sinclair’s perfectness. I kept worrying about Woody Woodward. It wasn’t likely that the thing was really going like a jet of live steam, but there was always the chance. Some way I had to get a phone call in to New York. I didn’t want Uncle Ned or Aunt Cynthia listening in on the call. So I had to wait until everybody was out of the house. As far as Aunt Cynthia went, that was easy; she was gone most of the time to one of her meetings. But Uncle Ned was another problem. Because school was out he was around a lot—and of course Sinclair was around every waking minute.
But I had to do it, and I kept watching for my chance. Finally, about the fifth day I was there, we were out in the barn working on the computer, when I heard Uncle Ned’s VW start up. Aunt Cynthia was already out somewhere.
“Sinclair,” I said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Hurry up,” he said. “I want to get all these wires soldered so we can test some problems in analytic geometry.”
I climbed down out of the loft and ran into the house. The phone was in the front hall. I found the phone book and worked out the numbers for dialing New York, and put the call through. There was the usual humming and buzzing and then the receptionist came on and said, “Woodward and Hayes.”
“Is Woody around?” I asked. “This is George Stable.”
“Oh boy,” she said. “Where have you been? He’s been going nuts looking for you.”
A cold chill went over the back of my head, and in about five seconds Woody was on. “George, I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days. Where the hell are you?”
“Up in Pawling.”
“Well, get your little tail down here as fast as you can. This thing is hotter than molten lava. I want you in my office this afternoon at two o’clock punto.”
“Don’t start stammering on me now, George. I’ve put two years into this, baby, just be here.”
Chapter
I put down the phone, feeling sort of dizzy and faint. There were a lot of different thoughts swinging around in my mind, but they were coming and going so fast I couldn’t catch hold of any of them long enough to know what it was about. I just stood there like that, completely disorganized for I don’t know how long. Then I heard Sinclair shout from the barn, “Hey George, hurry up.”
I ran upstairs to the back bathroom, which faced out toward the barn, and put my head out the window. “Just a sec,” I shouted. “I don’t feel too good. I think I got a bug or something.”
“Well, hurry,” he shouted.
I was still pretty dazed. Of course just because Woody said it was going like molten lava didn’t mean anything. In my experience there were always plenty of firemen around to put out these blazes. It wasn’t the first time Woody had screamed at me to be in his office at two o’clock, punto, eith
er. Nothing had happened those times, so why would anything happen now?
But, I don’t know, it felt different. And what was I going to do? The obvious thing would be to find Uncle Ned, explain to him what it was all about, and get him to put me on the train for New York. But knowing Uncle Ned, the first thing he’d do would be to put out a few surprised grunts, and then he’d say, “George, it doesn’t seem sensible to me to send a boy your age off by himself on something like this.” Then he’d call Woody, and Woody would find out that I was supposed to be locked up in Sinclair State Pen for the rest of the summer. Or he’d call Pop in Paris, and Pop would hit the ceiling. No, anyway you looked at it, being honest with Uncle Ned would only make a mess out of things. It was clear that I was going to have to do a lot of lying over the next little while. Of course, the other thing I could do would be to call up Woody and tell him the truth; but that would only bring on a big mess, too. What’s the point of telling the truth if all you get out of it are big messes?
The main thing was that I had to get down to New York to find out what was going on. By this afternoon, the chances were that it wouldn’t be hotter than molten lava anymore; it’d be just plain old hot, and I could come back to Pawling and forget about it until the next time the volcano overflowed, which would most likely be sometime after next Christmas. That meant thinking up some excuse for going down to New York for the day. I tried to think of one. Maybe I could say that I suddenly remembered that I had a dentist appointment. Or that Pop had just called, Denise was sick, and they were coming home. Or that Stanky was delirious and kept calling out my name. But as excuses they weren’t any good. Anything I could think of Uncle Ned would call up whoever it was and find out. There was only one thing to do: take off. I could walk to the train station, or better, I could hitchhike into New York. You never could tell. Uncle Ned or somebody might pass by while I was standing at the station.
I flushed the toilet just in case Sinclair had been listening, ran back out to the barn, and climbed up into the loft.
“Listen, Sinclair. I just remembered I have to register for my tutoring school today. In New York.”
“Tutoring school? I didn’t know you had to go to tutoring school?”
“Sure,” I said. “I flunked practically everything last year.”
“You have to go down to New York? How could you forget an important thing like that?”
“I forget a lot of important stuff,” I said. “I wouldn’t have remembered it even now, but this friend of mine just called up to remind me.”
“I didn’t hear the phone ring,” he said.
“You probably missed it. I happened to go by the phone just as it started to ring. It hardly rang at all.”
“I still think I would have heard it.”
“Not all the way out here you wouldn’t. Anyway this kid said that they changed the date for registering and I have to do it tomorrow.”
“How did they get our phone number up here?” He was pretty suspicious.
“Oh, naturally I gave it to this other friend of mine, Everett Stanky. So I figure what I’d better do is take off right away, so I won’t foul it up or anything.”
He stared at me. “You mean you’re going to New York right now?”
“Sure, why not? I’ll just hitch down.”
“I’ll call my father.”
“Oh, I don’t want to bother him. I’ll just go and you tell him I’ll be back tonight.”
“I think I should call my father.”
“Don’t bother, Sinclair. Just tell him what happened.”
But I didn’t trust him. I climbed down out of the loft, raced into the house, and began changing my clothes.
Then I heard Sinclair open the back door. I knew he was coming in to call up his father. So I charged downstairs, out of the house, and onto their road. I didn’t know much about Pawling except that there was a big main road to New York just outside of the town. So I trotted out there and began hitchhiking, and about ten minutes later somebody picked me up.
“Where you going?” he said.
“New York,” I said.
He gave me a look. I guess he thought it was pretty funny for a kid my age to be hitching to New York. “My father sure is going to be sore. He gave me four dollars for my train ticket, but I lost it.”
“Where you coming from?”
“I’ve been staying here with my cousin.”
“Your cousin?”
“Their name is Stanky. Everett Stanky. Maybe you know them?”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. But he seemed satisfied with my story. In telling a lie the basic thing is not to make yourself look too good. I mean if you want to put it out that you’re a big basketball star, don’t say that you made the high school team when you were a freshman and averaged thirty points a game the first year. Instead you should say you didn’t get to start regularly until the end of your freshman year. I said, “I’m pretty worried about what Pop’s going to say when I tell him I lost the money and had to hitch.”
“Why tell him?”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that. I never lie to Pop.” But that was making me seem too good, so to make it a little more believable I said, “I mean, I don’t lie to Pop too much.”
So that was all right; and we talked about sports and he drove me into New York. He parked the car in a lot on Forty-second Street and I walked over to Times Square and got a couple of hot dogs smeared up with mustard and ketchup. It was twelve-thirty already. I killed some time walking around, looking at the advertisements for the porno films around Times Square, and then I went up to Woodward and Hayes to find out how on fire everything was.
Woody just shook his head when he saw me. “Baby, you sure are a pain in the butt. I called your home and some chick said you’d gone to Europe. What are they, crazy or something?”
“Pop went to Europe,” I said. “He sublet the apartment.”
“Where are you staying?”
“With my cousin upstate.”
“Upstate? How far?”
“Oh, it isn’t far. It only takes about an hour on the train.”
He whipped out his pen. “Lemme have the address and phone number so you don’t get lost again.”
But I didn’t want Woody getting into any conversation with Uncle Ned. “I forget the telephone number. I’ll get it next time.”
“All right, what’s the address.”
Or write any letters, either. “I . . . ummm. . . .”
“Don’t tell me you forgot the address of where you’re living?”
“Well, it’s just this little town. I know where their house is.”
“I don’t suppose this little town has a name,” he said.
“Pawling.”
“Pawling?” He looked suspicious. “That’s two or three hours up, isn’t it?”
“Oh no, it’s only around an hour on the train. I don’t remember exactly, though.”
“How did you get into town?”
“I hitched.”
“Hitched?”
“Yes. My Uncle Ned gave me money for the train ticket, but I lost it.”
“George, how could you lose the train money between the house and the station?”
I blushed. “Well, actually I didn’t lose it. I owed it to some guy and he saw me at the train station and made me give it to him. He was a pretty big guy.”
“How come you owed this big guy money?”
I was beginning to get pretty nervous; I had a lot of lies out and I was beginning to lose track of them. “Well, see, he let me ride his motorbike and I tipped over and busted his tail light.”
Woody shook his head. “You lead a complicated life, George. All right, now listen, Georgie, this thing is screaming for action like a fire siren. As far as Superman is concerned, all systems are go. He’s putting it to the President of Camelot, Mr. Fenderbase. Next fall, Georgie, it could be star-time.”
“So I don’t have to do anything until September?”
“Are you ki
dding? We start in right away—new clothes, the hair cut, the image, the public relations boys, the whole kit. I’m going to run your tail off from now until Labor Day. I want to know where you are every minute.”
“Okay,” I said, swallowing.
He leaned back in his chair. “Now, here’s the drill. We’ve got a meeting with Mr. Fenderbase next week. He’s the biggy. He wants to get a look at you. Then we’re going to cut some experimental demos, just to see what kind of sound we want to aim for. Then after that, we’ll try you out in a live situation. Probably we’ll fit you in with a short segment in a concert somewhere, just to get audience reaction. And if it’s all working in the fall, we’ll cut a record, we’ll look for some television guest shots, we’ll start booking you around the New York area for some exposure. I suppose your old man won’t let you drop out of school.”
“I don’t think he would,” I said.
“Well, we’ll work that out when the time comes. Maybe you can be tutored. But let’s not count our chickens before they hatch. There are a lot of places we can go wrong yet. Meanwhile, be in here Thursday morning at ten. Punto.”
So there it was. I left Woodward and Hayes’ office, went down on the street, and bought another hot dog smeared up with stuff from a lunch cart just to calm my nerves. Everything about it was scary. I mean it was scary enough thinking about what I was going to tell Uncle Ned, without having meetings and demo records and concerts to worry about. And I think I’d have just sort of fainted right there, except that I knew there was a pretty good chance that there’d never be any demo records or concerts, or maybe even no meetings with biggies, so there was no point in getting nervous over something that might never happen. So I calmed down a little, walked over to Grand Central, and took a train up to Pawling, trying to work out my excuses. Thursday was two days away. I had time, but I knew I’d better not lay it on Uncle Ned at the last minute.
I got back to Pawling at five-thirty, and walked over to Sinclair’s house, feeling pretty scared. I had a story figured out, but I didn’t know if it would work. Sinclair was out front mowing the lawn, and he stopped the minute he saw me come up the street. “Boy, are you in trouble,” he said. “I knew you would be.”
Rich and Famous Page 4
