by P. F. Kluge
She wasn’t quite as tough as she sounded. I sensed in her the kind of tension that precedes confession. But she was still plenty tough.
“I keep hearing about Lakehurst,” I started quietly. “I heard about it from Doc. You know what he was after. I heard about it from Sally, who’s still hurt he wasn’t included, and Kenny, who wondered about Eddie calling long-distance, night and day. But Wendell was the one who did me in. He said that Eddie was trying for something big. I want to know what it was. What kind of gamble he was taking.”
“But why?”
“Because I’ve never gambled myself. I maybe should have, but I haven’t. I pulled up short where Eddie went flying over the edge. Well, he used to say he could learn stuff from me, but it’s too late for that. Maybe I can learn from him, though. Even now.”
She pondered that a while. It wasn’t going to be easy.
“Joann!” I pleaded. “What else can I say?!”
“Okay, Wordman.” She got up and walked over to the sink, staring out at the dark like she wanted to pretend she was talking to herself. “You guessed right about Lakehurst. Eddie had this idea of … I don’t know what you’d call it … bringing people together. That trip to Newark? And that time in Camden? It was all pointing toward Lakehurst.”
Her voice trailed off; her back was still turned. Her fingertips drummed on the counter.
“I’ve had it to myself so long,” she said.
“I …”
“Skip it. I’ll get it out. Eddie used his contacts. So did Wendell. They arranged for some people to come out and jam. Big people. You say Wendell called them kings? I guess they were. It was all secret. I mean secret. They never even acknowledged each other. You understand? No names. No introductions, no acknowledgments. They called each other Mr. Black and Mr. White, depending. No names, no pictures, nothing down on paper. They came to play, is all.”
“Did they know they’d be taped?”
“Yeah. But everybody had veto power. They never had to use it though.”
“Because Eddie died?”
“Not just Eddie. About everyone who was there has died. The ones I recognized, at least. They weren’t such a lucky bunch.”
“Joann … who was out there?”
“Eddie, Wendell … and …” She took a deep breath. “And Sam Cooke, for a night or two. Otis Redding. He stayed longer.”
“Who were the Mr. Whites?”
“Buddy Holly. Square-looking glasses and spit-curl. Some others I didn’t know. It was some strange party.”
We sat silent for a while. Her secret was mine now too, and it took time to grow accustomed to joint tenancy. Yet I could tell that despite her reluctance, she was glad she’d told me. From now on, the responsibility for telling or not telling was something we’d be sharing. But I wasn’t worried about that right now. The audacity of Eddie’s concept bowled me over. This time, he’d swung for the fences. Leaves of Grass.
The ground rules for the Lakehurst sessions were strict. In addition to what she’d already told me—no names, no acknowledgments, no publicity, no release of material—they provided that no nonmusicians were permitted inside the quonset while the Mr. Blacks and Mr. Whites were playing. So there was an odd collection of go-fers, girlfriends, bodyguards, and sidekicks in the parking lot. Sometimes the real action seemed to be outside, where there was food and booze, hillbillies and bluesmen rubbing up against each other all night long.
“We were like a collection of left-out kids,” Joann remembered, “pretending we were having the best time. You know? ‘They can keep their silly old music! We’re having more fun anyway!’ But then, by God, when they started playing, we shut up fast. Nonchalant-like, we’d edge over as close as we could without actually putting our ears to the door.”
“What about the music?” I asked.
“Sometimes you’d hear bits and pieces of something kind of familiar. Usually they played old stuff first. But there was lots I didn’t recognize. It was hard to tell though.”
The Mr. Blacks and Mr. Whites took breaks of course, and Joann decided that was the best way of telling how things were going. Sometimes they came out laughing and joking, even imitating each other. One of the Mr. Whites pretended he was Blind Lemon Snodgrass, a Delta blues singer of unmatched obscenity. To which a Mr. Black responded with a devastating impression of the early Presley. Once, they all burst out the door laughing, threw off their clothes as they sprinted across the parking lot, and dove into the river.
But there were other times when they came out separate and sullen, withdrawing to their cars. “One of the white singers came up to Eddie and asked him if he ever heard the joke about the man who mated a jellyfish and a lobster. Know that one? He wanted to breed a lobster without a shell. But he got a jellyfish with a shell. Then the guy who told the joke nodded and left. ‘Nice try, kid.’ He never came back.”
“How did it end? Did he finish what he set out to do?”
“I don’t know. It just kind of stopped. The month was over, everybody was gone, and it was time for the Cruisers to hit the road again.”
“But was he up or down about it? You must have been able to tell.”
“I don’t …” She faltered. “He was hard to read, Wordman. He was up and down, crazy. Sometimes you’d think he’d hit gold. Other times, he said it was all a … you know … a crock. I don’t think he’d decided. Sometimes …”
“Yeah?”
“Well, there was this one day …” She looked up in alarm, like she’d just crashed into a scene that it hurt to remember. I knew the feeling.
“What happened?” I put the question as low-key as I could, but it was still a solid minute before she met my eyes. I’d thought that once she told the Lakehurst story, there wouldn’t be any more obstacles. Everything would be easy and open. But I was wrong. The past was a labyrinth, with no long vistas, no easy turns. You never knew what you’d come up against.
“Did you ever hear,” she finally asked, “of a place called Palace Depression?”
Palace Depression? At first I drew a blank but then, with Joann prodding me, it came back. Not that there was much to recall: a feature story or two and an item in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. I’d never even been there, but I knew that Palace Depression had been an offbeat tourist attraction, like the Margate elephant or the diving horse at the Steel Pier. During the thirties an eccentric hermit in Vineland, New Jersey, had scavenged junkyards and trash heaps for the makings of a home. Not a home, a castle, a hobo’s San Simeon. Part Hooverville, part Disneyland, Palace Depression was an amalgam of discarded appliances, hammered-out cans, empty bottles, junked automobiles. It was an odd place at any time, and an odd place for Joann to mention now, or for Eddie to want to visit, the day they finished at Lakehurst.
“I met him in front of the quonset,” Joann said. “The place was locked up already. He’d called to ask me to pick him up first thing in the morning, before breakfast, and I arrived on time. He was sitting in front, his back against the door, his guitar and suitcase at his side, and I had this uneasy feeling that he’d been sitting there awhile, you know? Like all through the night, maybe.”
Eddie had nodded at her, thrown his things in the back, but he hadn’t said a word. He made her feel like a chauffeur, Joann said, but she sensed that something was wrong, something deep, and she kept quiet. And then, closing the car door, Eddie stepped around to where she was waiting and threw his arms around her. “He didn’t kiss me, I don’t think he wanted me to see his face,” she said, “and he still didn’t talk to me and that was because—I’m pretty sure—he didn’t trust his voice. So we just stood there holding on to each other. It was the kind of hug—you might think I’m saying this now, but it’s what I thought at the time—it was the kind of hug that people give each other at a funeral.”
When they were in the car, driving away from the quonset for the last time, Joann had asked Eddie where to. He told her to head for Vineland, and that unnerved her.
“Edd
ie’s parents lived in Vineland, and he had a wife in Hammonton, which you have to go through on the way,” Joann said. “I guess you never knew about all that.”
“Not until the funeral,” I said. “That’s the first and last I ever saw of Eddie’s wife. Not counting that television show the other night.”
“What did you think of me, when you found out?”
“It didn’t change anything,” I said, but I’m sure she missed my deeper meaning: that I had always wanted her, couldn’t have wanted her any more than I did. And—I knew too well—could not have done any less about it. “I just hoped you were happy. I mean, that you had been happy.”
“It didn’t make me seem … dumb? Tramping around with a rock-and-roll singer who was married? Whose chances of getting a divorce were zero? I know I felt pretty dumb sometimes. The dead-end, no-win, untogether proposition of all time. God!” She laughed. “Talk about hopeless!”
“Then why did you …?”
This time she laughed at me. “Eddie.”
I nodded. The only answer I’d ever get.
“We’re all allowed one or two.”
“Mistakes?” I asked.
“Maybe you could call it that,” she said. She didn’t say what she’d call it, but I knew she had a better word in mind.
“Where were we?” she asked. “I got off the track.”
“Palace Depression …”
“We drove through Vineland like we were in a rush to get to Philadelphia. Eddie didn’t look left or right. You’d’ve never known that this was where he was from. The place was outside town. There were signs pointing to it, but they were old, knocked down. And even when we got there, if Eddie hadn’t been with me, I wouldn’t have known I’d arrived. There was a fence all around, and a ‘Keep Out’ sign that the municipality had posted. But Eddie knew another way to get in, around back.”
It was the back door to a junkyard. Neglected since the death of the owner-builder, raided and vandalized by neighborhood kids, Palace Depression was dying.
“The whole place gave me the creeps,” Joann said. “You could still see that it had been nice once. A kid could find it fascinating and ingenious. A terrific place to play. I mean, there were bathtubs set into the ground for fishponds, and birdbaths made from toilets, and sidewalks lined with upside-down bottles, beer and soda, so when the sun hit them you thought you were walking on stained glass. And the house—the castle, I should call it—was three stories of hubcaps and car hoods and refrigerator doors and I don’t know what all. You could see the old man who built the place had something. I don’t know what you’d call it, a joke, or a goof, or a piece of art …
“But now it was over. The place was falling down. Everything you touched gave way; every step you took, something moved. And whenever the wind came up, even a light wind, something shook or rattled. There were flies and rats, too. You’d better believe, I wondered why Eddie picked this of all days to show me where he used to play.
“There were a couple old barber chairs sitting in front of what was left of the castle. Chipped porcelain, green bronze, cracked leather seats that some kids had stuck their knives in. But Eddie sat me down in one and climbed up in the other, facing me. Then he spoke.
“‘They never decided what to do about this crazy place,’ Eddie said. ‘Even when the old guy was building it, and later, when people came to see it, they didn’t like it so near town. A fire trap. A health hazard. A zoning violation. It was a hot topic around here. I heard my parents talking. But they couldn’t keep me out of here. I hung around so much, the old guy let me be the ticket taker when he stayed inside with a bottle. Other times, I helped with repairs. That tickled my old man. Young Eddie training to be a repairman at a junkyard.’
“He leaned back in the barber chair for a moment.
“‘Now it’s all going back to being what it was. Junk to junk. A year or two from now, you won’t be able to find this place. For sure, this is the last time that I come back.’”
That was when Joann took her chance. Usually she let Eddie tell her things in his own time. But lately he’d had this way of just digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole.
“Why are we here, Eddie? And how are you? And all that?”
“That about covers it,” Eddie said. The way he sat in that barber chair, with wreckage all around him, he reminded Joann of a king at the end of his dynasty. Any minute, they’d come for him. “What I liked about this place was the idea of it. Of taking all this … stuff … and bringing it together. I even thought that would be the title of the album that came out of Lakehurst. Palace Depression. Till I found another title.”
“What was that?”
“Leaves of Grass.”
“And … what about it?”
“What?”
“Did you get it?”
“I got what I had coming to me,” Eddie said.
“Would you do it again?”
“No.” That much Joann could see. There was only one Lakehurst in him. And one had been too many.
Eddie got up out of the barber chair and helped Joann out of hers.
“I don’t know why I came back here,” he remarked.
“That’s when I knew,” Joann said. “See, Eddie and I never made any deals. I want you to know that. We never talked about the future. And I thought the reason we never talked about it was that the present was so fine, why ruin it by planning ahead? Just let each day roll. But that afternoon at Palace Depression I knew there was another reason. I knew it in my bones. There wasn’t going to be any future.”
The phone was ringing. Joann got up, walked to the doorway between the kitchen and living room, lifted the receiver. She listened a second, waved me over, and handed me the phone.
Someone was playing “Far-Away Woman” at the other end. When the song finished, the line went dead.
“Half a dozen times a day, the last few days,” she said. “Last night I thought I heard something. There was a car sitting in the driveway, with the parking lights on. First off, I think it’s some kids, making out. Then I look closer. Know what kind of car it is? A 1951 Ford, like Eddie used to drive! You know what happened then? I’d turned on the lights when I got out of bed, so I was silhouetted against the window. Whoever was out there could see me. And did. And blinked the lights, high and low and high again, just like Eddie used to do. What’s going on, Wordman?”
“They want the tapes.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“You have something to do with that car, Wordman? Did I guess wrong about you?”
“No.”
She wasn’t convinced, I could see.
“Then what do you want?”
“I don’t want the tapes,” I said. “You keep them to yourself, that’s all right. You sell them, that’s fine too. I just want to get the story straight.”
“What makes you think I have the tapes?”
“I’m guessing. Tell me I’m wrong, Joann. Tell me there weren’t any tapes. Tell me you lost them. Tell me they were in the car with Eddie. Whatever’s true … you tell me anything, I’ll believe you. You always had my number.”
“Yeah,” she smiled, “I guess I did. But now?”
“Yes.”
“Still?”
“Still.”
“Then how come I never heard from you, Wordman? I always thought that you’d be coming around. ‘Come see about me.’ Know what else? I would have given it a try with you. You beat hell out of the guy I married. After Eddie, I wasn’t particular. So what ever happened to you?”
“I guess …” She waited, but there was no way I could finish.
“No apologies necessary, at this late date,” she said. “I used to figure it was Eddie got in your way. Even after he was dead, I was still Eddie’s girl to you. But that wasn’t it, was it? It was just … just …”
“Just me.” She had me, from day one, through forever. Maybe that’s why I’d never showed. She had me without half trying. She had me now
.
“Even when I knew it wasn’t in the cards, I used to … I don’t know … root for you. Wherever you were. Hoping that you were up to something good. Something big. Something I might even hear about, if I kept my ears open. Funny, huh? Joann Carlino sitting on a farm, waiting to hear about you on the Academy Awards or something. It didn’t turn out that way, did it?”
“No, it didn’t,” I confessed.
“No more music.”
“No. The music stopped. And the words.”
“Something you needed, you didn’t have.”
“I guess. Sometimes I think it was … you.”
“No, Wordman. ’Cause you could have had me. What you needed was whatever it took to come after me. And now this … this reunion. Kind of a disappointment. Eddie and the tapes. Eddie and the tapes. That’s what you’re into. Oldies but goodies. That’s all you want to talk about.”
“It wasn’t just the tapes,” I protested. “It was you too.”
“Me too?” She got up, collecting the cups and saucers. They clattered in the sink. One of them broke, I think.
“Me too?” She laughed at me. Not the head-tossing jeering she was entitled to, but the quiet chuckle you save for an incorrigible loser, a likable flop.
“I didn’t mean …”
“Save your breath, Wordman. It doesn’t matter. It’s past one. You can stay if you want.”
“Okay.”
“On the couch.”
She switched off the lights and went up the stairs while I stretched out and pulled a blanket over my body. I could hear her walking, opening her dresser, climbing into bed. It was just the sort of corny teenage situation they used to write songs about. I lay awake, trying to put some lines together. What a clever endearing way to redeem an awkward situation, to make up some lyric and serenade her from her front lawn!
You walk up the steps
To sleep alone
I lay awake below
All on my own.
