Eddie and the Cruisers

by P. F. Kluge

  “What happened?”

  “Somebody killed him. He was on the air two nights ago. Somebody musta come in and got him. All anybody knows is that the same record starts playing again and again, with no interruptions. Five times, Paul Anka singing ‘Having My Baby.’ You know what Paul Anka quintuplets can do to a listening audience? They called the station. No answer. They called the cops. The cops picked me up, since I had the keys. I’m the one who opens up mornings, with the weather and stock prices.”

  “You’re sure he’s dead?”

  “Son, I cleaned up the place. He’s dead. I got the mops and pails to prove it.”

  • • •

  Doc’s death hit me hard. Maybe it was because I’d seen how he was living in that forlorn tourist cabin, or because my own house was empty now. Anyway, it hurt. I thought about his loud suits and jive talk, his schemes and deals, and I realized how I was taken with the man. He was out-of-date now. He smacked of carnivals and confidence schemes, one-night stands and offices rented by the week. The music business of the fifties suited him. He blew into radio stations with a briefcase of 45’s and a bottle of Jim Beam. “Have I got a record for you!”

  And now he was dead. Not dead: murdered.

  “There’s no shortage of crooks in the world.” I could hear him laughing at me as I puzzled over things. I doubted it was Mannheim. Sure, he might be a hustler. But I couldn’t see him as a wrecker, or a killer. Still, for Doc’s sake, I decided to check him out.

  Mannheim had said he worked for Rolling Stone. That’s what he’d told Sally. Rolling fucking Stone. I bought a copy and called the office number on the masthead. I asked for someone who knew about assignments, explaining that I wanted to verify that a certain free-lancer was working for them on a certain story.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Elliot Mannheim.”

  “What’s the story?”

  “Eddie Wilson. I used to play with him.”

  There was a long pause at the other end. I thought we’d been disconnected.

  “Hello … are you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about Mannheim?”

  “He’s not on assignment for us.”

  “You never heard of him?”

  Another gap.

  “I didn’t say that. I said he wasn’t working for us.”

  “But you do know of him?”

  “Listen Mr. … uh … Ridgeway. You called the switchboard and asked to talk to one of the editors, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “They put you through to me. Did I … when I picked up … did I give you my name? Or just say hello?”

  “Just hello. I still don’t know your name.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Why?”

  “Because now I can tell you. Have nothing to do with Elliot Mannheim. You hear me? Nothing.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “Nothing.”

  He hung up.

  11

  Eddie Wilson is dead and Wayne Newton plays Vegas forever, and if that doesn’t shake your trust in the Almighty, nothing will. But for me, Eddie’s death was a disaster of a more personal kind. Two months before the accident, and one month before he holed up in Lakehurst, Eddie and I fell out.

  It was all my fault. In April 1958, Doc Robbins told us we’d been offered a booking he was inclined to turn down. It was out of our territory, in Ohio, and the money wasn’t that great. We hadn’t played that many colleges, since we knew the equipment was often terrible and the hours long. So Doc was running the offer past us, for form’s sake, knowing we’d much prefer to spend that weekend in an out-of-season bar in Asbury Park. Then he mentioned the name of the college.

  “That’s where I went!” I exclaimed. “That’s my college!”

  “No wonder they’re so cheap,” Sally muttered. “What’d they throw in to sweeten the offer, Doc? Library privileges?”

  “Dance weekends are incredible out there. You should see what happens. The whole place goes crazy!”

  “How’s the trim?” Hopkins asked.

  “It’s an all-male school, actually.”

  “Oh, terrific,” Hopkins said. “We play ‘Far-Away Woman,’ what do they do? Face Mecca?”

  “Pull out their high school yearbooks and beat off,” Sally jeered.

  “You don’t understand,” I persisted. “That’s what makes it so wild. Six hundred guys haven’t seen a girl since New Year’s. They bring them in by train, by car, by the busload—cattle-cars, they’re called. It’s like they were dropped into a prison.”

  “Place sounds like it belongs on Zoo Parade,” Hopkins said.

  “Cut it out,” Eddie said. “They must be doing something right.” He’d been watching Claude Richards, but now he was smiling at me. He’d delivered a compliment, certified my membership. “You want to go back there, Wordman?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Please, I really do.”

  “Why?”

  “I just … I don’t know … you’ll understand, when you see the place.”

  “The hell with it,” he said. “We’ll go.”

  Why? Why did it matter so much to return as a Parkway Cruiser to that horny, cloistered hillside I’d abandoned just a year before? At first, I assigned myself high motives, literary-sounding: “Tintern Abbey,” Look Homeward, Angel. But that was nonsense. I didn’t want to see the place so much as I wanted the place to see me. I wanted to snow them, titillate them, blow them away—the professors, the guys down the hall in the dorm, the faculty wives I’d coveted—I wanted them all to eat their hearts out! While they’d been filling up blue books and lobbying for tenure, I’d been out in the world. I’d played bars, written songs, gotten laid. I was a Cruiser! Catch my act, see me tonight, talk about me when I’m gone. “Oh yeah, Ridgeway. Crazy son of a bitch. Lit out of here and joined a rock and roll band!”

  I remember that westward drive in springtime. I remember it so clearly that if I drove the same route today, I’d associate certain conversations with landmarks, a whole soundtrack of memories all along the road. I remember how dawn found us crossing the Pulaski Skyway, with Jersey’s polluted marshes turning gold below, and warehouses, factories, and railroad yards stretched out forever, and a convoy of early garbage trucks stirring up hundreds of birds that had been nesting on a mountain range of landfill refuse. “Good-bye, Garden State,” Eddie said, waving at the three-ring sign over the Ballantine brewery in Newark.

  “This is where we’re from, Wordman,” Eddie said. I’d never seen him higher. “People drive through here, they roll up their windows so they don’t have to breathe none of the air. Not me!”

  He rolled down the windows and took a deep gulp of New Jersey.

  “Ain’t that ripe! Man, I thrive on it. I make music outa it. It knocks me out! You got miles of swamp and mountains of dumps and all different-colored rivers. You got automobile graveyards and radio transmitters and ball parks and breweries all mixed up, birds and rats and people making garbage and using garbage and pilin’ it up to the damn sky. Holee shit, man! I love it! No wonder the Statue of Liberty faces the other way.”

  Then the mood changed. We left the factories behind us, and the bedroom suburbs, the people and the territory that belonged to us. Sally, Wendell, and Kenny were in the station wagon, Eddie, Joann, and I in the new Ford. As soon as we climbed Jugtown Mountain in western New Jersey, there was an odd feeling in our car: in front of us lay undiscovered country. The radio thinned out and nearly died, with inches of silence between country-western stations. There were hex signs on the barns before long, and Amish wagons along the shoulder of the road. Eddie grew more somber by the mile. It touched me to know that this was something he was doing out of friendship for me.

  “They mostly from the East, these college friends of yours?” he asked.

  “All over,” I replied. “Don’t worry about it, Eddie. They’ll eat us up.”

  “You sure? Who else they have on these dance weekends? Who
’d they have last year?”

  “They brought in Woody Herman for the dance.”

  “Oh, no! A big band?”

  “That’s for Saturday night. Saturday night is like a prom. Dressy. We’re doing the Friday-night dance. That’s the wild one.”

  “Yeah? Who’d they have for that?”

  “Bo Diddley. He tore it up. You should’ve been there. The dean of the college, when he was introduced, he said, ‘It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Diddley.’ Mr. Diddley! That cracked us up.”

  Eddie gave Joann an oh-what-have-I-gotten-into look. To me, he remarked about how hard it was to compete with a black act.

  Through the old railroad tunnels along the turnpike, past Pittsburgh, through the grim mill town of Weirton and on into Ohio, where we overnighted just across the state line, I kept chattering about the college, working hard to make it interesting. I was all full of it: eccentric professors, brilliant put-downs, famous pranks, notorious alumni. Now I realize that, almost as much as I wanted to cut an interesting figure back at college, I wanted to impress Eddie and the Cruisers. And—to tell the belated truth—I wanted to fascinate Joann Carlino, the same way I’d wanted to fascinate her when I sat holding a poetry anthology at Vince’s Boardwalk Bar.

  Considering how it turned out, it’s easy for me to reproach myself. I was using people to make myself look good. I was using a decent-enough college as a backdrop for a homecoming fantasy: the prodigal dropout returns. Worse yet, I was using the Cruisers to authenticate my adventures in the outside world. Most of all, I was using Joann Carlino.

  That’s what it came down to when I pictured it. I didn’t visualize myself performing onstage to wild applause. I knew better than that. No, all I wanted was to walk into the dining hall on a Friday night with the unprecedented Joann Carlino on my arm. Was that so much to ask? There’d be six hundred men in there, sitting at tables covered with fried fish and french fries, bug juice and Jell-O molds, and we’d stroll through, Frank Ridgeway and Sophia Loren, and that one moment, that charged, gaping, incredible tableau, would mean that the dropout who became a drifter who became a Cruiser was a winner! It was impossible, I knew, and it was false: she was Eddie’s girl. Still, I pictured it.

  Now you know what was in it for me. It’s a fantasy that reflects no credit on me, nor does the nightmare it turned out to be. The memories of that weekend still make me sweat and tremble, and it doesn’t do any good, knowing how long ago it was, or that Eddie’s dead, or that everybody else who was there has probably forgotten. I remember—and that’s enough. And yet, one final point before getting on with it. As bad as it was, I sometimes think that in bringing the Cruisers to that college, in putting Eddie up onstage beneath the dark oil paintings of dead Episcopalians, in picturing Joann Carlino in Pierce Hall, I was struggling to bring two worlds together. I was trying to complete myself, to become full and whole. It didn’t work, but that’s what I was trying. And it was something I never tried again.

  We came up the Hill in midafternoon, Friday, eight hours before we had to play. Usually, we showed up with twenty minutes to spare, and if we’d pushed it, we could have made the whole trip in one long day. But I’d told them not to try it. The extra time was my doing.

  Dance weekend was well under way. The first women—“eager beavers”—arrived on Thursday, sitting in the back of lecture halls while their dates prayed they wouldn’t be called on. They kept dribbling in, in time to witness last-minute preparations. There was a “pig pool” for the guy who landed the ugliest blind date, and voting for the “asshole of the year” cup at a clandestine ceremony in the cornfields at dawn, and there were the usual training meals: eating a stick of butter which would line your stomach and protect you from getting drunk.

  Still, on first sight it was beautiful. Guys promenaded their dates around campus, politely pointing out the chapel, the president’s residence, and the new library, so tentative and polite they might have been leading a walking tour through some historic neighborhood. They introduced dates to each other, like gentry on a promenade, and they carried their ladies’ suitcases—one round blue suitcase, one square blue suitcase—into spare faculty bedrooms and vacated dormitories.

  Yet the spring madness was already stirring. Music blasted out of open windows, and beer kegs were rolled out onto the grass. Beer, music, and—now I sensed it—privilege. I pointed out the beer and music. The Cruisers sensed the privilege. Gothic architecture and sloping lawns intimidated them, like they were high school seniors with bad grades.

  “Hey, Wordman.” Sally approached me as we checked into the college guest house, which I’d never noticed was such a genteel, Molly Pitcher–Whitman-sampler place. “This shindig tonight, how we supposed to dress? I mean, what should we look like for these people?”

  I’d never seen Sally so shaky. Wendell was Wendell, black for every occasion, and Hopkins had his eye out for “fraternity girls.” Sex was his equalizer. But Sally was lost, Joann was rattled, and Eddie wasn’t helping.

  “Eddie decides what we wear,” I said. “You know that. Why should this be any different?”

  “I can’t suit up like no Bo Diddley,” Sally groused. “I can’t juggle the mike or boogie round the stage, I guarantee you that. Eddie, how we dress tonight?”

  “Put a sock in your crotch,” Eddie answered, gloomier than ever. “It’s your college, Wordman. What’s the dress code?”

  “Wait a minute!” I protested. “Why is this suddenly such a big issue? We’ve played colleges before.”

  “Sure we have,” Eddie retorted. “We played Saint Something down in Delaware, where the dropouts from barber school get scholarships, and Fairly Ridiculous up in Madison, where you go if the army won’t take you, but we never played this kind of finishing school!”

  He looked at Joann, regretting the outburst, as if he’d broken a promise not to say something. Then he faced me.

  “This was a mistake. They’re different here. These aren’t our people.”

  I couldn’t miss the implication. I wasn’t their people, either, if I were part of this. From where I stood, quitting college and joining the Cruisers was a rebellion, a nifty adventure. From where Eddie stood, it looked like I was slumming.

  “They’re kids, college kids, is all,” I said. “They’re no better than you, they just—”

  “I didn’t say they were better!” Eddie shouted. He surprised himself, shouting. Next he spoke quietly. “I said different. You want to remember that.”

  We all went to our rooms then. Sally never did find out what he was supposed to wear.

  That afternoon, alone, I walked around the campus. Already, the return was a failure. I’d wanted to stroll with Eddie and the rest of them through libraries and classrooms, turning heads. But now I meandered by myself, at loose ends, like some pathetic alumnus who returns with a straw hat and a hip flask, searching for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s party. I greeted people here and there, professors and students, but none of them knew I was a Cruiser. They all guessed I’d come back for the weekend, as usual without a date.

  The campus had a special loveliness in springtime, when violets dappled the grass and bright forsythia exploded onto sunlit walks, and balmy afternoons stretched into mellow evenings. That’s what I’d wanted them to see, but the Cruisers weren’t budging from the guest house. Sally was wretched because where there was usually a television in his room, there was a Colonial spinning wheel!

  What was familiar to me was alien to them. And, I had to admit, I liked this green, peaceful, secure world. I was glad I’d escaped, but at the same time I realized that someday, inevitably, I’d return. I knew I wouldn’t be a Cruiser forever.

  They embarrassed me, just now. It was that bad. I was like some smooth student whose callus-handed father and ungrammatical mom had dropped by for an unexpected visit. I wanted the Cruisers to be gone at the same time that I hated myself for bringing them. How could I have gotten them into this? Had I forgotten what it was like? Tonight, the college wanted
raunchy music, a gross group, the blacker the better. They wanted double entendres, tits and ass; they wanted to get drunk and vomit and brag about it.

  “What’s a Beta?” Joann asked. “A fraternity house?”

  “Yes. Jocks.”

  I found her on the porch of the college guest house, pretending to read a magazine. Actually, she was checking out the dance-weekend traffic. Late-arriving college girls crowded the lobby, running upstairs and down. They had the routine down cold, these migrant croppers on the hand-job circuit. They traveled from college to college like journey-man boxers who fought in one tank town after another, never expecting a fair decision or an honest count: Wabash to Muskingum to Oberlin to Kenyon, a campaign of losing battles.

  “And a smoker?”

  “That’s a party they have before the dance—a cocktail party in a fraternity lounge.”

  “I’ve been asked to a couple of smokers.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. “Where’s Eddie?”

  “He’s upstairs.” She stopped and thought. “He feels this was a mistake, Wordman.”

  “What do you think?”

  “What do I think?” She folded her arms in front of her, laughed nervously, and glanced around as if someone might be listening in. “I’m scared to death!”

  “Oh hell, Joann!” They’d never seen the likes of Joann Carlino on this campus, yet she was intimidated by the coed bustle all around her. To her a college dance weekend was high culture, halls of ivy, reception lines, and punch bowls. Those little blowaway blondes in madras skirts and Oxford shirts were an elite race—clever, sophisticated, well-read. They humbled her.

  “They told me I wasn’t college material,” Joann said quietly, like I was her confessor. “You know? The guidance counselor? Sophomore year, he’d already decided about me. Not college material.”

  “Joann, those guidance counselors are creeps, snobs, they—”

  “I asked my guidance counselor what he figured I should do. He talked about being a beautician or a typist—did that appeal to me? Or maybe a secretary, working in some big office, with lots of men around. Or a nurse, but that was already reaching for the moon. That’s what he said. But all the time he was checking me out, and he wasn’t looking at my eyes. There’s a ripe one. Tight sweater, crucifix, the works. Doesn’t matter what kind of job you get, because in a year you’ll be married and pregnant with the first of six, and they won’t be college material any more than you are, cookie. Case closed.”