Rich and Famous (11 page)

They all stared at me. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Damon Damon give me another wink. That encouraged me, and I decided the heck with it, if they wanted to make somebody else The Boy Next Door, that was okay, I'd just as soon go back to Sinclair State Pen as be a complete phony all the time. So I said, “I realize that you all know a lot more about the music business than I do, but since it's my life that's going to be messed up, I think I ought to have some say in it.”

Then I stopped and sat there. They stared at me some more, waiting to hear what Mr. Fenderbase said before they opened their mouths. He put his hands behind his distinguished gray hair and stared at the ceiling for awhile. Then he began to whistle. Finally he said, “That's straightforward enough, George. I'm glad to discover that you're not just a stuffed doll.” He tore his eyes away from the ceiling and looked around the room at everybody, drumming on the table. Then he said, “All right, Superman, let's get on with it.”

He
stood and everybody else stood and there was a hubbub all around the room. Woody put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. Damon Damon the Button King winked at me, and finally, when Fenderbase had got himself hubbubed out of the room, Superman himself came over on his crutches and patted my shoulder, which made me sore. “Woody, get him up to publicity and see what kind of a concept the boys can work up.” Then he said, “George, come on down to the office with me. I want to talk to you for a minute.”

He turned and began to swing himself out of the room on his crutches, and I followed along behind him. The truth is, I didn't like him. I guess it wasn't fair not to like him, him being a cripple and all, but there was something about him that struck me wrong—that completely bald head and those popped out blue eyes without any eyebrows. I just didn't want to have very much to do with him.

We got to his office and he swung down into the chair behind his desk. He didn't ask me to sit down. I stood in front of the desk. Out the window behind him I could see a tiny airplane coming in to land at LaGuardia Airport.

He lit a cigar and blew smoke all over me, staring at me out of those blue eyes. I waited. He took the cigar out of his mouth and rolled it a bit in his fingers. Then he said, “George, do you use drugs?”

It stopped me, coming out bluntly with it like that. “Well,” I said.

“Better tell me the truth now.”

I couldn't figure out why I should, with all the lying everybody else had been doing. But he scared me and I was afraid to lie. “I smoke a little sometimes.”

“Just pot? Nothing else?”

“Well, I tried some downers a couple of times. But not for awhile.” That was true. When you live around Greenwich Village you're always seeing addicts on the nod on park benches or in doorways. Usually they're pretty dirty, or maybe snot running out of their noses. It doesn't turn you on about drugs too much when you see people like that—especially some woman nodding out on a bench with her bare feet all filthy and her hair messed up. He rolled the cigar around some more. “No hard stuff?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“
I think we'd better get this straight, George. If The Boy Next Door gets busted for drugs, he isn't The Boy Next Door anymore. The Moms of America aren't going to buy a Boy Next Door who's stoned half the time, right?”

“Right.”

“Now get this in your head. Camelot Records is about to sink a quarter of a million dollars into George Stable, and that's just to get the balloon off the ground. We aren't going to blow that kind of money just because you want to turn on some Saturday night. From now on, you're the cleanest-living kid in America. Right?”

I didn't like being bossed around like that, but he scared me. He was tough, that was for sure, and I was afraid to cross him. “Right.” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “There's honey money in this for you as well as us, George. Keep it in mind. You can end up a millionaire if you handle yourself right. Got it? You start working with Damon Damon on Monday. I want to cut the demo record within a week. And if that goes, we're off and running.” I started to turn to go, and then he said, “Oh yeah, I haven't forgotten about getting you up to my place for a chat one of these days. We'll have to schedule that soon.”

Chapter

Of course the meeting only took an hour, and
there I was, with about three hours to kill. I wished I'd told Uncle Ned that the hours for the tutoring school were earlier, but if I'd done that the meeting would have gone on all day, and Uncle Ned would have wanted to have known why I was late for dinner. Not that I was in any rush to get back to sit around admiring Sinclair's perfectness; but in New York I didn't have any place to be, I just had to hang around. I went over to Sam Goody's on Third Avenue, which isn't too far from Grand Central, and looked at records for awhile, and then I decided to go down to the Village again, to see if I could get into a game on the West Fourth Street courts. But nobody I knew was playing, so I watched for awhile, and then I just sort of stood there, trying to decide what to do next. And I was standing there, when I saw the woman who was subletting our apartment come down West Fourth Street onto Sixth Avenue, and go into the liquor store.

I was kind of sore at her. I knew it was unfair, she couldn't help it if she sublet our apartment, and I guess if she was paying for it she was entitled to mess it up if she wanted. The thing that bothered me most was my little teddy bear key chain. I had a funny feeling about that, her just sort of taking it over the way she had. I mean it didn't bother me she was using our towels or our plates and forks and stuff, but that teddy bear key chain was my special thing, it was mine, and I didn't want anybody else having it for their thing, even though it didn't really hurt me anyway. I'll admit it, I didn't pay a lot of attention to it when I was home. I didn't carry it around, or put my own house keys on it, because it was too big to have in my pocket all the time. But even if I ignored it a lot, it was still mine, and I didn't like her messing with it.

And all of a sudden I realized that I could easily go upstairs and get it. I had my keys with me. It wouldn't be any problem at all. Of course there was no telling how long she'd be gone. She might be gone for the rest of the day, or she might be coming right back from the liquor store. But it would only take me about two minutes to get up to the fourth floor, and another minute to grab the key chain and get out again. Even if I met her when I was coming back down the stairs she wouldn't think anything of it. I was supposed to be George Scampi, I belonged in
the
building.

She still hadn't come out of the liquor store. I crossed Sixth Avenue and trotted up West Fourth to our apartment, and looked around again. She wasn't in sight.

Quickly I opened the front door, and began to run up the stairs. I'd done that often enough. When I reached our door I unlocked it, and dashed into the room. I didn't bother to shut the door, because I was going right out again.

But I didn't go right out again, because the teddy bear key chain wasn't hanging on Pop's lamp anymore. It was gone. I stood there, thinking. Maybe she'd put it back in the bedroom. I ran in there and looked, but it wasn't on the bureau. I pulled open a couple of drawers, but it wasn't there either. I went into the kitchen to see if she'd put it there. And suddenly from behind me came her voice saying, “Okay kid, don't move.”

I turned slowly around. She was standing there holding Pop's pallet knife out toward me. “Hey,” I said.

“I mean it,” she said. “If you move, I'll run you through.”

I began to sweat and get red. “Listen, I can explain.”

“I guess you'd better,” she said. “You might begin by explaining what you were doing around here yesterday.”

“Honest, there was a leak—”

“The heck there was. I went down to the Scampis last night to see if everything was okay and they told me there wasn't any leak, and there wasn't any George Scampi, either.”

“Oh,” I said. I really felt like a complete fool. “Well, I can explain anyway. I'm George Stable. This is our apartment.”

She blinked. “George Stable? Sam Stable's son?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why should I believe that? I think I'd better just call the cops.”

“No, no.” I said.

“So tell me the truth, then.”

“It's the truth. I'm George Stable. See, look, here's my subway pass.” I took out my wallet and showed her my pass.

“How do I know you didn't steal this?”

“There are some pictures of me in my bedroom. In the bottom drawer. My friend took
them.
He has a hobby of photography.”

She stared at me. Then she said, “You hold it right there, kid.” She backed up, keeping her eyes on me all the time, and backed into my bedroom. In a minute she returned with a pile of pictures that Stanky had taken of me. She looked at them and then she looked at me, and finally she said, “Well, it's you all right. So you're Sam Stable's son. What are you doing, haunting the place?”

I didn't know what to say. I'd told so many people so many different stories I hardly knew what the truth was anymore. “I'll be honest,” I said. “I got sort of homesick to see the old place.”

“Homesick? You've only been away from here two weeks.”

“Well, I know,” I said. “I guess I was sort of curious to know who was living here.”

“Well, you found that out before. What did you come back for today?”

I got red and hot. “Well, I wanted my key chain.”

“Key chain?”

“With the teddy bear on it.” It seems kind of silly to go to all that trouble for a key chain.

She took it out of her pocket. It had her keys on it. “You mean this?”

“It's sort of a good luck charm for me.”

She laughed. “You mean you were willing to risk a breaking and entering charge just to get this?”

“I didn't think of it that way.” I said. “It's our apartment, you can't get arrested for breaking into your own apartment, can you?”

“You sure can, kid, when I'm subletting it. Don't forget it.” She took her keys off it and handed it to me. “Here,” she said. “And don't break in any more.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I knew Sam Stable had a kid, but I didn't think you'd be as screwy as he is.”

“Do you know Pop?”

“Sure. I'm doing some work for Smash Comics. That's how we met. I used to be a great fan of
Garbage Man
when I was a kid. I thought it was terrific when mild mannered advertising executive Rick Martin turned into a garbage man and burned holes in things with his smell.”

She seemed pretty nice after all. “Do you draw a comic strip?”

“I'm doing some coloring.” I knew about that: the main artist usually draws the pictures
in
pen and ink and then they have some lesser ones to put in the colors. “I thought it was terrific the first time I got to color
Garbage Man.”

“How come you decided to sublet our apartment?”

“The lease on my old place ran out, and I took this to give me time to find another place. It's pretty tough finding places—your Pop will be back in two more weeks and I still haven't got anything.”

“Maybe you can live with us for awhile.”

“I don't think Denise would like it.”

“I guess not,” I said. Although I couldn't think why not.

“Listen, George,” she said, “I've got some work to do. But if you feel homesick again, stop by if you like.”

“Thanks,” I said. And I left.

Uncle Ned didn't say anything to me about school that night. It was beginning to worry me. I'd been up at Sinclair's for about two weeks, and it had already been ten days since he'd written Pop a letter about me. It seemed to me that the letter should be coming back any day now, and then what would I do? My big hope was to sweat it out for two more weeks. I didn't figure that Pop would come out to Pawling to get me—he'd just call up and ask how things were and tell me to come home on the train. And hopefully Uncle Ned wouldn't bring up anything about the tutoring school. But maybe he would; there were a lot of worries in the whole thing, but all I could do was tell myself not to worry about them.

Anyway, I didn't have much time for worrying. George Stable, The Boy Next Door, was on fire at Camelot. We were getting ready to cut the test records, and there were meetings and conferences going on all the time. A lot of it was just a big waste of time. Woody would tell me to be somewhere at ten and I'd get there a quarter of ten just to be on the safe side, and then Woody would show up at ten-fifteen. We'd sit around until nearly eleven and by that time somebody would have changed his plans and we were supposed to come back after lunch. After awhile I got the idea and brought along a S-F book to read. And a couple of times I went down to our old apartment and talked to the woman who was subletting it. Her name was Barbara Feinberg. She was pretty nice; she didn't seem to mind it when I came down and talked to her.