Eddie and the Cruisers

by P. F. Kluge

  “Wherever we were,” Wendell said, “we went into colored neighborhoods. Clubs, bars, whatever we could find, driving for hours to hear Jimmy Reed or Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf. That was some Cruise! You never knew, did you? And it was all leading up to Lakehurst. That was our top-secret project!”

  He laughed at that, laughed nervously, and then—I swear it—he nodded, as if he were saying good-bye now, the time had come for parting. He looked at me, looked away, fidgeted and trembled.

  “That crazy Eddie,” he sighed, and started humming something. He put his head in his hands, nodding back and forth, forgetting I was there. I was losing him.

  “Wendell?”

  He kept humming. Nothing I recognized, words and notes mixed up, like one of those endless improvised songs that kids sing in the back of cars.

  “Wendell?”

  He glanced up at me, squinting, as if there were already a distance between us. And yet, I remember wondering why this was happening, why now. Had I done something to Wendell? Or was Wendell doing something to me? Did the very mention of Lakehurst force him into incoherence? Was he avoiding the truth? Or ducking out on a lie?

  “What were you doing there?” I shouted, as if the problem was his hearing. He heard me fine.

  “We pulled it off … me and crazy Eddie … Mr. White and Mr. Black … kings were there … and nobody knew!”

  “What did you pull off?”

  “Leaves of grass, Wordman. Leaves of grass.”

  He reached out and grabbed my hand, holding tight while the rest of him dropped away, humming and singing. He swayed and nodded and held my hand, or I held his, till I was quite sure he was gone. Then I called over a guard, who removed my hand and helped Wendell back inside.

  “They tell me he’s kicked off again,” Deputy Warden Sanders said. “Singing and all.”

  “It’s happened before?”

  “Hell, yes. We’ll keep him for a day or two. If it doesn’t stop, we’ll ship him down to Matawan.”

  “I thought it was my fault.”

  “No. Don’t blame yourself. It’s just Wendell. Three months, six months at a stretch, and he’s perfectly okay, fiddling in the library with his goddamned Dewey Decimal System. Did he …”

  “I heard all about it.”

  “Then, someday, he blows a fuse. Just sits in his cell, rocking back and forth, drooling music. We ship him down South Jersey. Few weeks, they ship him back.”

  “How long will it go on like this?”

  “I’m a warden, Mr. Ridgeway, not a fortune-teller.”

  “What’s he in for? And how long?”

  “That’s right, you asked about his record. I was wrong. He’s in for B and E this time, but the first occasion he stayed with us, it was manslaughter. That was 1963.”

  “Wendell killed someone!?”

  “His old lady. Female, white, and dead. Served five out of fifteen, spent a year on the streets, came back in 1970. Been in and out ever since.”

  “And nobody visits?”

  “It’s all here on the outside of the folder. Let’s see …” Sanders ran a finger over the manila folder, then threw it down. “Not my day. I was wrong. Just lately, Wendell’s gotten popular. You’re the fifth this month. Not bad, considering …”

  “Considering what?”

  “Well, Wendell’s been hard to catch. He’s been in and out.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We don’t advertise it, because the newspapers would climb all over us. But we have a small furlough program whereby some of our better risks can be signed out for two to five days in the custody of a responsible sponsor. Wendell’s been out twice lately.”

  “Who’s the sponsor?”

  “That’s confidential. So’s the list of visitors.”

  “I’d like to see that list.”

  “Can’t show it to you. Cost me my job, someone found out.”

  “You’d be doing me a favor.”

  “What about him?”

  “There’s not much I can do for him, is there?”

  “You could come back. Take an interest. You could care. He won’t be in here forever. He could’ve had parole last time he was up, if there’d been anyone on the outside. Place to stay, promise of employment, financial support, that kind of thing. You his friend?”

  “I used to be.”

  “You still his friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll be back?”

  “I’ll be back.”

  He tossed the folder on the edge of the desk, swiveled around in his chair, and looked out his window at the exercise yard.

  I picked up the folder and scanned the list of authorized visitors for Wendell Newton—names, addresses, dates of visits.

  It was a revelation. A regular oldies-but-goodies reunion for the Parkway Cruisers.

  The Reverend Kenneth Hopkins had brought the word of God over from Mountainside, New Jersey, on more than one occasion. And it was he who’d furloughed Wendell out of prison. I guessed it made sense, entrusting Wendell to a clergyman like Kenny. But I wondered why he hadn’t mentioned it, why neither one had said a word to me. It was out of character for both of them. Why so quiet about the good deed?

  There were other surprises.

  A potential employer, Mr. Salvatore Amato, had stopped by for an interview, right after he’d wowed the young-at-heart in Ohio.

  Mr. Elliot Mannheim, writer, of New York City, had stopped by. Purpose: research. I wondered if he’d delivered my message to Wendell: life turning out to be longer than expected.

  And one visit a year, ever since Wendell came inside, from Joann Carlino of Toms River, New Jersey, right down the road from Lakehurst.

  13

  Half a mile from the prison, I found a phone booth, dialed Joann Carlino’s number, and after half a life-time, heard her voice.

  The tape said, “I’m not at home now. If you like, leave a message when you hear the beep. I’ll be back soon.” She didn’t give her name.

  “Joann,” I said, “this is Frank Ridgeway, from the Parkway Cruisers. Remember? I’ve been looking into some things that might involve you. I can’t be more specific over the phone. I think we ought to talk, the sooner the better. I’m driving down today, and I’ll call you when I’m in the neighborhood.”

  The parkway was hopeless by the time I headed south. I used to be part of the bumper-to-bumper crowd. I loved it all—the traffic, the pitch-and-putt golf courses, the surf-and-turf restaurants, the bars and beaches, the very idea that this was the lowest, commonest vacation on earth. If you could find enjoyment this way, you could be happy anywhere, I used to think. Have fun in New Jersey—that’s an accomplishment. Make music out of New Jersey—that’s a miracle, straight out of Whitman.

  Leaves of grass.

  I crossed the Raritan Bridge. How proud we used to be that this was the world’s most polluted river, where nothing lived, and hell, you even got your feet wet, you could die!

  After Perth Amboy, I pulled off the parkway and decided to try the old shore road, Route 9. We used to like the old highway. Cluttered and littered, it ran from Newark to Atlantic City, connecting the toughest city in America to its tiredest resort. It was New Jersey all the way: nothing planned, nothing pretty, one business after another lining the road, crowding traffic like pigs at a feeding trough. Spend a buck, make a buck. But beyond the suburbs there were some surprises. There were Colonial-looking farming towns, rundown fishing villages, swamps and fields, and pine barrens. And strange people. Black crop-workers, Jewish poultry farmers, Methodist teetotalers. Once a wrong turn brought Eddie Wilson and the Parkway Cruisers into a Tolstoyan Russian community, with Cyrillic signs and an onion-steeple church. You never knew. In the summer, we used to feast along the road, at stands that sold blueberries and peaches, clams and crabs, and beefsteak tomatoes you couldn’t match anywhere outside of New Jersey.

  There’s something glorious in piling into a car when you’re young and driving twenty,
fifty, a hundred miles for a hoagie sandwich, or hot pretzels, or strawberry-rhubarb pie. It’s the one thing the Cruisers had in common: a lust for the grub we found along the road. We were always making discoveries and returning, to make sure our discoveries hadn’t changed. We called it “foraging,” and the foraging title changed hands weekly. I remember the sausage-and-peppers place in Plainfield that Eddie claimed, and Kenny staking out a beer-and-bratwurst spot in Union, and Joann finding a chowder stand just in from the Long Branch pier. My contribution was a hamburger place with great onion rings and a sign I couldn’t resist: “We grind our own meat.” And Wendell! That was something. When it came Wendell’s turn, we all expected soul food. Sally was elated: at last, a connection for barbecued ribs and smoked pork, greens and beans and sweet-potato pie. “Hey, Wendell, just make sure it’s a carry-out place, okay? You get the food, the rest of us’ll watch the car.” So where did Wendell take us? An ice cream parlor, an 1890’s ice cream parlor, in Red Bank. “Would you believe it?” Sally whispered later. “An ice cream joint. Good ice cream, cute, and I didn’t have to break out semaphore flags to snag a second cup of coffee. But Jesus! And did you see what he ordered?” I hadn’t noticed. Ice cream? “Yeah, but what flavor?” What? “Vanilla.” No doubt about it, Sally thought, Wendell was strange.

  There were good times, all along the road. As soon as I thought of one, I remembered another. They just kept coming. I remembered the talks we used to have and how we enjoyed each other’s company, the funny arguments we got into. It was my job to start the argument. I still remember some of our debates: Would rock and roll ever be concert music? If the Russians occupied America, coast-to-coast, what were the chances for a long-term guerrilla movement? If the nation elected a bachelor president, what, if any, sex life would he manage while in the White House? Then there was the time I opened a discussion on sexual positions. That was a setup. Kenny Hopkins had continued to roast me about my inexperience, so we all dumbfounded him by claiming that there was nothing quite like making love on the hood of a car. Ah, the feeling of engine-warm metal beneath your bodies, the slight buckling of the hood as you pumped away, holding onto windshield wipers with your hands and bracing your feet against the hood ornament. So much better than wrangling around inside, cramped by steering wheel and gearshift. That weekend, we—the Cruisers and half the clientele of Vince’s Boardwalk Bar—caught Hopkins on top of a Nash.

  Of all our foraging expeditions, the one I most remembered was to a place that Sally discovered, an Italian restaurant in Pennsville, just across the bridge from Delaware. The meal was a blowout. To the rest of us, pasta was spaghetti, and it usually came out of a can, cold and orange, with meatballs attached. What you couldn’t finish, you gave your dog. Sally straightened us out about pasta. Tortellini, fettucini, linguini, spiedini—it sounded like an aria. And Sally was in his glory. For once he was the leader, host, boss, the center of attention. It made me feel good, seeing him so happy.

  “Hey, Sally,” I said, “I was just wondering …”

  “Oh no, give me a break!” Sally groaned. The others joined him. “I was just wondering” was the ritual opening. “Not another one of them knuckle-headed questions!”

  “Can’t we ever have a peaceful meal,” Kenny protested. But he was smiling.

  “Hey, what’s the matter?” Doc Robbins asked. He wasn’t usually with us, so he could pretend he didn’t know what was coming. “The bookworm’s got a question. Something’s bothering him.”

  “Oh Lord,” Wendell sighed.

  “Hey,” Doc said, defending me. “This is one sweet kid. How many times has he come to our rescue with a timely piece of information, an obscure fact, a fragment of little known lore? If it weren’t for him, would we know that the Mason-Dixon line cuts through South Jersey? No. We’da missed out on that. Or that Leon Trotsky, leader of the Red Army, once worked backstage at Minsky’s Newark? Remember?”

  “It’s a wonder we made it so far without him,” Sally said.

  “These are things that keep me up nights,” Hopkins added, “tossing and …”

  “Just stay off the hood of …”

  Doc cut Sally short. “Ladies present,” he said, gesturing at Joann. It was curious, how her being there never stopped any of us from saying what was on our minds, but if I told you it was as if she wasn’t there at all, I’d be lying. Because when she was absent, we missed her, our conversations went flat. We needed to know that she was there, next to Eddie, drinking her club soda and watching over all of us.

  “Okay, Wordman,” Doc said. “What’s on your mind? What’s troubling you, my boy?”

  “Well, I was wondering, Sally …”

  “Why me!” Sally pleaded. “How come I have to bear the brunt?”

  “Because this was some great meal you put together. Half these things aren’t on the menu. You have to know what you’re doing to put a feed like this together, and since you obviously do know, I was just wondering …”

  “Here we go …” Hopkins said.

  “I was wondering what has given you the most pleasure in life. If you had to choose, I mean, between food and … sex?”

  Sally’s answer was what we called a “King Farouk.” He put his head into the plate, face down, as if he suffered a postprandial coronary.

  “Sally passed,” I said. “Okay, Doc, which way would you go?”

  “If it came to giving up ginch or starving to death? I don’t know, nobody ever died doin’ without …”

  “But it’s not a question of need,” I clarified. “It’s a question of pleasure.”

  “Yeah, I see.” Doc seemed genuinely perplexed. And even a little embarrassed. “I never had to give up either one. I’ve taken what’s around, meals and tail. Never been a picky eater. Never gone out of my way neither …”

  “So?”

  “I couldn’t say and—you know what? I wish I could.” He stared down at the table, as if considering one alternative. Next he looked at Joann. “Hi babe,” he said, pretending to leer. But he was still stumped.

  “Food and sex. Food or sex.” He mulled it over. “That’s what it’s all about, I guess. Supposed to be. But … I don’t know, kid … I must be playing another kind of game.”

  “What game might that be?” Sally asked. He couldn’t pass up taking a shot at Doc.

  “Beats me,” Doc confessed.

  That was one odd moment! It was like we’d all glimpsed a part of Doc we weren’t supposed to see. An empty part, perhaps, but that didn’t make it any less revealing.

  After that the conversation settled into normal patterns, Kenny carrying on about carnal delights while Sally—emphatically no fag, he made clear—pointed out the regular merits of three squares a day. He even worked it out. Assuming twenty-one meals a week (“we ain’t even talkin’ about snacks”), and three fornications, a sexual coupling had to be more pleasant than seven meals combined!

  “You eat like I eat,” Sally said, gesturing at the pantheon of pasta, “it’s a hard question.” He allowed that other people, blacks and other non-Italians, might have an easy time choosing sex. But, as for him, his pleasantest memories of his mother were in the kitchen. “And my old man would probably say the same thing.”

  “Eddie?” I usually didn’t call on Eddie. I used Wendell as a tie-breaker. But there was something about Eddie that day, a rare, outgoing mood, as if he were delighted that we were all living up to his best expectations of us.

  “Some dumb-ass question you fed us for dessert,” he began. “Might as well ask what tastes better in the air, hydrogen or oxygen. Take away either one, it ain’t air. Or which eyeball you see more out of. Answer’s obvious if you ain’t half blind. Anyway, Doc had it pegged from the beginning.”

  “I did?”

  “Sure. The question wasn’t food or sex, pick one. Not originally. It was what gives you the most pleasure. Am I right?”

  “Yes,” I acknowledged. “But if it’s not …”

  “Doc said there must be some ot
her game? Right?”

  “I certainly did.”

  “Well, speaking for myself now, and no criticism intended, I’d pick music.”

  Sally’s mouth dropped open. Crazy Eddie had done it again! He shook his head at him, as if he were sad to see how they were growing apart. “Hell of a thing for a guy to say in front of his girlfriend.”

  We all turned to Joann. Even Eddie seemed concerned—he hadn’t intended to say the wrong thing—but now it bothered him.

  “I vote for music too,” she said. “I also vote for the musicians. How about you, Wendell?”

  “Music.”

  “I guess that settles it,” I said.

  A moment later, we were on the road again, the same highway I was traveling this afternoon headed for my meeting with Joann. I hadn’t been back along this road in years—no reason to go—but now it came back to me: how we loved New Jersey the way you love an old shirt or a baseball mitt that’s broken in. And none of us, now that I thought of it, had gotten very far away: a journeyman musician, a high school teacher, a convict, and a parson. Nor had Joann Carlino of Toms River. She’d traveled least of all …

  Leaves of grass, Wendell said.

  Right. Mostly right.

  Make it Leaves of Grass.

  A couple weeks after the Regency, Eddie, Joann, and I were driving around through South Jersey. It was a proper cruise—no timetable, no purpose, no fixed destination. It could last for twenty minutes or three hundred miles. Often, we’d make lots of stops: an Italian sausage place, a fruit stand, a junkyard. We even read historical markers. Other times, we stayed in the car from Cape May to the Delaware Water Gap and back again.

  These days it takes an effort to remember how emotionally important driving was to us. People recall the fifties and they picture drag-races, playing “chicken,” hot rods, and submarine races. That’s easy. But there was more to it than that. A lot of my best memories of Eddie concern our “cruises,” the things we found and the things that found us. Some mornings we’d wake up and take off, hurling ourselves across the landscape like young horses galloping across a green meadow. And there were nighttime drives down piney roads, through darkness that our headlights barely penetrated, and we were like kids around a campfire, scaring each other with ghost stories. I remember stopping on country lanes where we’d get caught by a storm, the rain drumming on the car roof, and it felt like we were sitting out a typhoon in a tin-roofed hut. Or some nights we’d drive up to the Watchung Hills and scan the miles of lights below: the decorous gridlike suburbs, the shopping centers where klieg lights poked up into the sky, the streaming highways and bridges, and on the very edge, the vast glow of New York City. On rare nights, you could just spot the tops of Manhattan’s tallest buildings. That excited us.