“Why should I be in trouble? I had to register for my tutoring school.”
“George, I believe that’s a story you’re making up.”
“God, Sinclair, what a thing to say. I don’t go around accusing you of being a liar.”
He looked at me sort of confused. Then he said, “Well, it doesn’t sound sensible to me.”
“Don’t give me that jive, Sinclair. If I have to be tutored, I have to be tutored.”
“We’ll see what my father says.”
I didn’t have to be told that. I went on up to the porch. Uncle Ned was sitting there, grunting his way through the paper. When he saw me he put the paper down. “Well, George,” he said.
“Gee, Uncle Ned, I’m sorry I forgot to tell you about registering. I thought probably Pop told you.”
“He never said a word. What’s it about?”
“I’m supposed to go to tutoring school this summer. I flunked a lot of stuff.”
“I’m surprised. Your father told me you’d done pretty well this year. Not as well as Sinclair, of course, he’s an exceptional student, but well for you.”
“I guess he was sort of ashamed of me. Maybe that’s why he didn’t mention about tutoring school.”
“What exactly did you fail?”
“American history, and math, and I almost flunked French, too.” The minute I said math I knew I’d made a mistake.
“Math? I could have helped you with that. What was the course?”
“Beginning algebra. I guess that’s another reason why Pop didn’t tell you about it. He knew you’d want to help me with my math, and probably he didn’t want to bother you. I mean being busy the way you are.”
“Nonsense, I would have been delighted. With a student as exceptional as Sinclair around, I never get much practice tutoring. Well, all right, now what is this school?”
“I have to go in again on Thursday for some placement tests. Then after that I find out when my classes are.”
“And where is this school?”
But I’d been smart enough to work that one out. Being a teacher, Uncle Ned was bound to have books and things in his office where he could check up. “The Hedley School,” I said. “It’s on East Fifty-eighth Street. Between Park and Lex.” It was a pretty classy school in a classy neighborhood, and I picked it so Uncle Ned would believe that I was going to some respectable place, not some dump where I might get mugged. The reason why I knew about it was because this friend of mine, Josh Harris, got sent there the summer before because he’d practically flunked out of school.
“The Hedley School. That’s a sensible place.”
“Well, I guess that’s what Pop figured. That’s why he’s sending me there.”
“And you have to go back to New York on Thursday?”
“Yes, for placements.”
“I see,” he said. Then he put out a grunt. “I think it must be time to wash up for supper, George.”
I was pretty glad to get away and I went. But I knew that he was going to do two things. The first thing would be to write Pop an airmail letter in Paris asking about it; and the second thing would be to call the Hedley School. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do about the second thing, but I had the first thing figured out. So after dinner, when Sinclair was in his room working out some chess problems from a book he had, I went onto the porch where Uncle Ned and Aunt Cynthia were sitting and said. “Have you got Pop’s address written down somewhere? I’m supposed to write him a letter.”
“It’s in that little red book by the telephone, George,” Aunt Cynthia said. I went out into the hall where the phone was, found the little book, and took it upstairs. I shoved it in my pocket, borrowed a piece of paper and a pencil from Sinclair, went into the bathroom and locked the door. Then I opened the book. I figured that they’d have written Pop’s Paris address in pencil—people don’t usually put in temporary addresses in pen, especially people like Uncle Ned, who’s got everything carefully figured out. It wouldn’t be sensible, putting in temporary addresses in pen. And I was right—the address was in pencil—Hotel Le Mazarin, 63 Rue St. Andre des Arts, Paris 6, France. It also had the phone number—325-3251. I copied the address and phone number onto the piece of paper I’d borrowed from Sinclair, folded that up and stuck it in my back pocket. Then I carefully erased the name of the hotel and tried to think up another hotel name that sounded French. The only French name that came to my mind was Gaston; so I put down Hotel Gaston, 20 Rue St. Andre Des Arts. Then I changed the phone number a little. After that I went into Sinclair’s room, where I was staying, wrote Pop a nice letter about how Sinclair wasn’t so bad after all, we were having a lot of fun working on his computer, sealed up the letter, and took the address book back down to the telephone table where it belonged. So that was that. Of course, if I got into a car crash and was killed, Uncle Ned wouldn’t be able to write Pop about it, but I figured that was just as well—it’d spoil his vacation to have his only son killed in a car crash.
Chapter
I don’t suppose you’ve ever been through something like this. I guess most people haven’t, but at the beginning there’s such a swirl of things happening to you that you don’t have much time to think. There always seems to be five people around you telling you what to do and you just go numbly from one thing to the next, obeying orders. I guess when you finally get rich and famous you stop obeying orders and give them out instead, but at the beginning they want you to do what you’re told. It’s pretty confusing, because a lot of times they don’t bother to tell you why, they just give you an order.
On Thursday Woody kept me busy getting ready for this conference with Mr. Fenderbase, and I didn’t have time to think about it. From the way Woody talked about him, I figured he must be a close friend of God’s. Mr. Fenderbase was going to settle my fate. If he liked me I would be George Stable, The Boy Next Door, and get to be rich and famous. If he didn’t like me I would be George Stable, prisoner at Sinclair State Pen. In order to get ready for this conference with the friend of God’s, Woody took me out to some stores and bought me a lot of Boy Next Door clothes. According to Woody, Boys Next Door wear brush denims and purple and green shirts. He bought me about six different outfits. Man, was it expensive. The shirts cost fifty dollars each and shoes seventy-five dollars, and like that. Most of the things I never did see the price of—they just added everything up and Woody paid it with his credit card without batting an eyelash.
Then the next thing was the haircut. I don’t mean a regular haircut like the kind Pop gets me that costs two-fifty. I mean a razor cut that cost thirty-five dollars and took almost two hours. Man, I went crazy sitting in that barber’s chair. For boredom it was worse than watching Sinclair build his computer. Then, when they finally got me all jazzed up in these fancy clothes, they took me over to this photographer to have my picture taken.
That was pretty funny, or it would have been if everyone hadn’t been so serious about it. In order to give me a Boy Next Door look, they’d rigged up about six feet of porch railing. I was supposed to lounge around on this playing the guitar and eating an apple. I pointed out to them that you couldn’t hold an apple when you’re playing the guitar unless you held it in your teeth, which was going to look pretty silly. They didn’t care much about that, they got me leaning against the railing, with the guitar sort of propped up against me, and the apple in my hand. There was supposed to be a big bite gone out of the apple so it would look like I was really eating it. I had a lot of trouble taking a bite that would satisfy the photographer. First the bites weren’t big enough, and then they were too scraggly and not neat enough. The photographer kept saying, “Give us a nice clean bite, sonny, give it a touch of class.” Finally, when I’d bitten up nearly a whole bag of apples he cut a bite into one with his jackknife. I doubt if I could have made a bite that big if I’d had a mouth like a horse, but it satisfied the photographer.
Between the photographs and the clothes and the haircut there wasn’t much tim
e to talk about music. But Woody told me not to worry about it, he and Superman were giving it a mull, and would come up with something. “We’ve got to firm up your image before we can decide how the music is going to go. Superman wants to give it the Nashville sound, but I’m not so sure. I think I’d rather get into something with a heavier background—oboes and strings, maybe. I’ve got a feeling for not going too heavy on the hick stuff. We’ll be stuck with it if the country music boom collapses. Myself, I don’t like the hayseed image, I see you more as a suburban Boy Next Door—you know, the newspaper route and hanging out at the pizza parlor, playing the juke box. It’s good identification— those suburban kids are the ones who have the money to spend on records, anyway.”
“I hope we’re going to make the record soon,” I said. “I’m beginning to get nervous about it.”
“Don’t worry, baby. Woody’s got it all in hand.”
I’d been around the music business long enough to know how these things work. You don’t just go into a recording studio and sing a few songs and come out again. There’s a whole huge deal involved. It might take weeks to make one record. Generally they have the backup group come in and record first. Then when that’s on tape, the singer comes in and works against the recorded background. They might even do it in three or four stages—the rhythm section first, then the strings if it’s that kind of record, and then the choral group, and finally the singer, all on separate tracks. The advantage of doing it this way is that they can balance it all in the studio later. Also if they want to change something in the background, say, they can just fix up that part without having to bring everybody else back to record the whole thing over again. I must say, it doesn’t seem like a very natural way of doing things. I would sing my part in an empty studio with the background being fed into my ears with earphones. It’s hard to do that, because you can’t hear what you’re singing very well. You get out of tune a lot. I must say the whole thing made me feel more like a soldier in the army than an artist. But that’s the way you get rich and famous in the music business.
In the afternoon Woody took me to a meeting with Superman. “He wants to have another look at you.”
“I wish he’d stop treating me like a poodle in a dog show.”
Woody shrugged. “He’s a cold-blooded guy, baby. He doesn’t think of his artists as human beings. He sees them as so much clay he can peddle if he can mold it right. As far as he’s concerned, George Stable isn’t a boy, he’s a hunk of meat with sales potential. Sure, it’s coldblooded. But it works—he’s got more gold records to his credit than nearly anybody in the business.”
“I still don’t like it. He makes me feel creepy.”
“You don’t have to like it,” Woody says. “You just have to go along, and by and by you’ll be rich.”
When we got to Superman’s office he was sitting behind his desk wearing that Camelot T-shirt. He stared at us. “I just wanted to see if you guys were still alive,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“Good,” Woody said. “We’ve got some test shots made, and we’re beginning to move on the music.”
“Hmm,” Superman said. “Fenderbase wants to go over the situation soon. Don’t leave any loose ends.” He leaned back in his chair, lit one of his big cigars, and began blowing smoke all over us. “George, if we’re going to work together, we ought to get to know each other better. Why don’t you come around to my place some evening and we’ll have a chat?”
The last thing I wanted to do was go around to Superman’s place for a chat. He scared me. “Gee, maybe it would be best after Pop gets back from Europe. I’m supposed to be up at my Uncle Ned’s in time for dinner at night.”
He nodded. “We’ll work it out sometime. If I gave Uncle Ned a bell, he’d understand.”
I didn’t want that either, but I didn’t say anything, and Superman didn’t say anything either, and we left.
So that was that. Woody told me to be in New York on Monday, and I took the train back to Pawling. I was getting pretty used to riding that train. One good thing about it was that it only took ten minutes to walk from the station to their house. I got there in time for supper. When I got there Uncle Ned was sitting on the porch, grunting away as usual. “How did it go, George?” he asked.
“Okay, I guess,” I said. “I start on Monday.”
“How often do you go down?”
“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. For now, I mean. They said they might have to change that as we went along.”
“I see,” he said. “I guess it’s time to wash up.”
That’s all he said about it, and it made me suspicious. I figured he got some letters out on the subject, and was playing cool until he got some answers. But I didn’t know that for sure.
Sinclair wasn’t so good at keeping his cool, though. After dinner we were up in his room, playing chess. Being beaten at chess by Sinclair wasn’t my idea of fun, but I felt sort of guilty about what I was doing, so I agreed to play to be nice. The first game he beat me in about six moves with some trick he’d learned. The second game I concentrated more, but he still beat me in fifteen minutes. “Let’s quit,” I said. “It must be pretty boring for you to beat me so easy.”
“It isn’t much of a challenge, George. You ought to concentrate more.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I don’t have that kind of mind. I mean if I was more of the concentrating type I wouldn’t have flunked so many courses.”
He gave me a look. “George, I don’t believe you flunked any courses. I believe you made this whole thing up. You’re not going to tutoring school. You’re doing something else.”
It just went to show that Sinclair wasn’t as dumb as he seemed. “Sinclair, don’t be crazy,” I said. “Why would I go to all the trouble of going into New York everyday if I didn’t have to?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m suspicious.”
“Don’t be crazy, Sinclair. If your father believes me, why shouldn’t you believe me?”
“That’s what you think. He doesn’t believe you.”
“How do you know that, Sinclair?”
“I heard him talking to my mother.”
“What do you mean you heard them?”
“I just heard them.”
“You were listening.”
He blushed. It was the first time I’d ever caught him doing something wrong. “Well, anyway, what did they say?”
“I’m not going to tell you,” he said.
“What kind of crap is that, Sinclair?”
“Oh, well,” he said, “I’ll tell you. My father said it didn’t make any sense. Why would your father send you up here if you were supposed to go to summer school? Why couldn’t you have stayed with some friend in New York?”
“I would have, Sinclair, but Stanky was going to music camp and his parents were going to California.”
“Is that the only friend you have?”
“No, I have lots of friends.”
“And I suppose they were all going to music camp.”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore, Sinclair. I don’t care if you don’t believe me, it’s true anyway.” I got up from the chess table. “I’m going to read,” I said. And so that ended the conversation; but I knew I had better do some practicing on my lies—they weren’t good enough.
Chapter
On Monday I took the train down to New York again. The train ride was beginning to get boring. There wasn’t anything very spectacular about the sights along the way—just trees and roads with cars humming along them faster than the train, and closer into the city, a lot of buildings, about half of them slums. On top of it, there was something wrong with the tracks, so the train bounced and jounced so much that sometimes you couldn’t even read, you just had to sit there being bumped around and wishing they would fix whatever was wrong. So when the tracks were bouncy, I’d look out the window at the trees and when they were smooth, I’d read some S-F, but still, it was boring, and I was always glad to get int
o New York. There are a lot of things wrong with New York, but at least it isn’t boring. But on that Monday it wasn’t very exciting, either. For one thing, it was drizzling. For another thing, the meeting I was supposed to come in for had been canceled. “I would have called you, babe,” Woody said, “but I don’t have your phone number, remember?”
“Oh,” I said. “I forgot. I’ll bring it in next time.”
“I’d have thought you’d have learned it by this time.”
“I guess I should have,” I said. “I have trouble memorizing phone numbers sometimes.”
“Bear it in mind, babe. But be here on Wednesday. We’re meeting with Fenderbase and the biggies.”
So there I was stuck in New York. I couldn’t go back up to Pawling, because I was supposed to be in tutoring school. Oh, I suppose I could have said that classes were canceled for some reason, or there’d been a fire in the boiler room, but I didn’t want to add any more lies to the ones I’d already told: I was having trouble enough keeping them straight already.
I decided to go down to Greenwich Village. I figured I might run into somebody I knew. There was always a chance that some friend of mine would be shooting baskets at the West Fourth Street courts, if it wasn’t drizzling too hard. Anyway, it would feel kind of good to be back in my own neighborhood for a few hours. I could go to Crespino’s, which is a lunch counter Pop sent me to a lot when he was too lazy to cook, and have a hamburger. It would make me feel at home. So I walked over to Times Square and took the Seventh Avenue local down to Sheridan Square, and then just by habit I started walking down West Fourth Street, just sort of idling along, and all at once I found myself standing in front of my own building. Our apartment is on the front, on the fourth floor. I crossed over to the opposite side of the street and looked up. There were some lights on in the living room. I didn’t know who Pop had rented it to, whether it was some single person or a family, although a little apartment like ours wouldn’t hold a very big family. Of course, with these sublets, sometimes they cram in more people than usual. I mean it might be some professor from New York University, which was only a couple of blocks away on Washington Square, and maybe he had his wife and his kid there, too. I’ll admit it, I was getting pretty curious. I mean suppose some kid was sleeping in my bed, where I’d slept all my life, and doing his rock collection or enameling kit or whatever his thing was, on my desk. It gave me a kind of funny feeling to think about that, as if I had a sort of twin, like in that doppelganger movie where this guy had a double who was just like him, only in another world. I wondered if he was using any of my stuff. When I’d gone up to Sinclair’s I’d taken pretty near all of my clothes, mainly because I didn’t have very many, and my acoustic guitar, and some of my records, because I knew Sinclair didn’t have any rock, and my bathing suit and stuff like that. But most of my junk was still in the apartment. I mean like my camera and light meter, from the time when I had a hobby of photography. It was a secondhand Nikkormat that Stanky sold me for twenty-five dollars which was a pretty cheap price, mostly because he wanted somebody to do his photography with. I didn’t last at it very long. For awhile Stanky and I went around taking shots of addicts nodding out in doorways and the Empire State Building through fire escapes and stuff like that which was supposed to be artistic. But then came having to develop them and print them in this dark room Stanky had rigged up in the basement of his building. That was pretty boring, and I gave up photography as a hobby. Stanky was disgusted with me, but I explained to him that I didn’t have much stick-to-it-ive-ness. He said, “I know that, but you have to get over it, George,” I said, “I don’t think I ever will.” He said, “You ought to try,” and I said, “Sorry about that,” and that was the end of the photography. But I still had the camera and the light meter and some other dark room stuff, and I wondered if whoever was living there was fooling around with it. It would make me sore if he was, even if I never used it anymore.
Rich and Famous Page 5
