Rich and Famous (3 page)

“Give us a little personality.”

“Oh,” I said. What they wanted me to do was to start talking about something with a lot of gestures and some big phony smiles. You know, say something like, “Well, Mr. Superman, I certainly appreciate this opportunity, wait till I tell the rest of the kids that I actually met you,” and stuff like that. Some kids can do that, just walk up to a grown-up and talk to him and tell stories. I can't. They were staring at me, so rapidly I tried to think of something interesting to say. But my mind was blank, and finally I blurted out, “I guess I don't have much personality. I'm just an ordinary kid.”

“Hmm,” Superman said.

“See, that's his schtick,” Woody said. “Just your plain ordinary kid who happens to have all this talent falling out of his ears. The boy next door. Modest. Bashful.”

“Hmm,” Superman said.

“The kind of kid who's happiest walking down a country road, munching on an apple, or
fishing
in a creek with a bamboo pole and a bent pin.”

“Hmm,” Superman said. “Hmm.”

“Milking the cows and pitching the hay,” Woody said. “Camelot Records' hot new star, George Stable, The Boy Next Door.”

“Hmm,” Superman said. “Maybe.”

“Swinging on a grape vine.”

“That's too much Tarzan-time,” Superman said. “What we want is Vermont-time.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” Woody said. “Sledding down this old country road with scarf and earmuffs flying.”

They went on this way for awhile, still pretending that I was a poodle at a dog show and couldn't understand anything they were saying. I just stood there listening and wondering what Superman went to jail for, and if Woody would buy me a coke the way he sometimes did. Finally, Superman told Woody to get some test pictures made and we went out of the office and down the elevator. All the way down Woody kept saying, “We're home, baby. I've never seen Superman so excited.”

“He didn't seem too excited to me, Woody. All he said was „Hmm.'”

“You don't know Superman, baby. All he usually ever says is „Hmm.' But today he was really talking—I mean using actual words.”

“Something might come out of it this time, you mean?”

“Well look, Georgie, I don't want to make any promises. Everything in this business is a spin of the dice, but I could tell that he loved the concept—George Stable, The Boy Next Door.”

“Did you just think that up on the spur of the moment?”

“I had to do something, Georgie, the way you were coming on like a block of wood.”

I blushed. “What kind of act would it be?”

“Oh, I'll figure something out.” We had got down to the street and were standing there. I was wondering if he would buy me a coke. Woody took out a cigarette and flicked his lighter at it. Woody is the greatest man in New York at cigarette lighters. He just sort of flicks his wrist and there's the lighter in his hand as if he had dealt it out of his shirtsleeve.

“Listen, Woody,” I said. “What did Superman go to jail for?”

“God, Georgie, don't ever bring that up with him.”

“No, but I mean what was he in for?”

“
Drugs. He was some kind of big dealer. At least that's the story. He did about three years. But for God's sake, don't bring it up.”

“I won't,” I said.

“You just worry about the singing, I'll worry about Superman.”

“Maybe I won't be good enough,” I said.

“Confidence, baby,
con-fee-dence.
We'll get you some shy-type, down-home songs to do. All you'll have to do is stand around and look bashful and stutter.”

“That doesn't sound very interesting to me,” I said.

He slapped me on the shoulder. “Stay loose, baby. Let me do the worrying. Now go on home. I'll call you when we get the photographer set up.”

I was disappointed that he didn't buy me a coke. I walked over to Sixth Avenue and took the IND subway home. I didn't know what to believe. On one hand, I'd heard all that stuff before—about
con-fee-dence
and somebody liking the concept and so forth. It had never worked out before, so why should it work out now? On the other hand, it seemed to me that if you tried often enough, sooner or later something was bound to work out. The one thing I'd learned about show business was that the dumber the plan sounded, the better a chance it had that somebody would do it. If you went to some record company and said, “Hey, I've got an idea, let's get a really good group together and record a lot of really great songs,” everybody would look at you as if you were an idiot and ought to be ashamed of yourself. But if you came up with something really nuts, like recording some group on a hayride in an airplane or something, why everybody would say it was terrific. It was a million dollar idea which would make show business history.

Well, the idea of George Stable, The Boy Next Door, fit right in with that for dumbness. I mean I'd spent the whole of my life in the least country place in America: Greenwich Village, the nut center of New York City. I never saw a hen until one time I visited Sinclair when I was eight. It surprised me how big they were—I thought they were more the size of pigeons which was the only kind of bird I'd ever paid any attention to. In fact, I probably knew less about the country than practically anybody in America because we hardly ever went to the country, even for vacations—Pop was always too broke. Frankly, I didn't mind. I never thought the country was so groovy, there was never anything to do except get beaten at chess by Cousin Sinclair. I guess I'm not the kind of person who gets turned on by trees.

Anyway, because I was exactly the wrong type of person to be George Stable, The Boy
Next
Door, I figured there was a good chance it would happen. And that meant one thing for sure: I couldn't afford to spend the summer upstate watching Cousin Sinclair be perfect.

Chapter

You might have read about me in a book called The Teddy Bear Habit,
which I wrote when I was twelve. You probably think it's pretty nutty for a twelve-year-old kid to write a book, and I guess it is. What happened was, because of my own dumbness, I got into a terrible mess with some criminals and almost got killed. I mean really, I almost got killed, but fortunately I got saved at the last minute. A lot of it had to do with this teddy bear I had. I was sort of hung up on it. I mean I would carry it around with me, especially when I had to do something that made me nervous. In the end the teddy bear got burned up by one of the criminals. To be perfectly honest, I'm sort of ashamed of that book,
The Teddy Bear Habit.
Not ashamed of the book so much, but of exposing to everybody that I carried a teddy bear around with me when I was twelve. Of course I got over that when my teddy bear was burned up. Although, to tell the truth, I still have a teddy bear key chain that my Pop gave to me, just a little fuzzy bear on a chain. He felt sorry about my teddy bear being burned up, and he gave me the key chain. I kind of like having it. Of course, since I got over my teddy bear habit I don't carry the key chain around with me all the time. Carrying around a thing that big in your pocket is a pain. I keep it on my bureau; I just like to look at it sometimes.

Anyway, you probably haven't read that book, so I'd better tell you something about me. The first thing is that I live in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian part of New York, which is just a fancy way of saying that it's full of nuts and whackos. There are lots of painters and writers and actors and so forth who don't have to be nuts, but usually are. Then there are the leftover hippies, who live in these little stores and spend most of their time out on the sidewalk. Honest, they sleep out there and eat their meals out there and play chess there—little kids and mothers and fathers and everybody. Sometimes I go over and talk to them. They're pretty interesting, but to be frank about it, it doesn't appeal to me too much to see them eating out there on the sidewalk with the flies all around and these dirty dogs and cats they have hanging around.

Then we have around the Village people who are
totally
out to lunch. I mean guys wearing witches' hats and carrying shepherds' poles, people who walk backward, and ones who
give
long speeches in the park to midair. And the drug addicts. And then of course all the normal people.

I count Pop and me as normal people, but maybe I shouldn't be so sure about Pop. We live on West Fourth Street near where it meets with Cornelia Street and Sixth Avenue. We've lived there all my life. My mother died when I was a baby, just practically born, and my father's had to raise me by himself. I hear a lot about that. He says, “I'm trying to be a father and a mother to you, George, and it isn't easy.” To be honest, for him it seems to be impossible. Sometimes he's a good mother and gets up and makes me scrambled eggs or pancakes or something for breakfast, but a lot of the times he just lies there in bed—he sleeps on a daybed in the living room— and shouts out that it's almost eight o'clock and if I don't get up immediately I'll be late for school, which never struck me as a big enough disaster to go shouting around about. And sometimes he gets over to the laundromat on Monday the way he says he's going to, but about half the time he doesn't, so by Wednesday morning I don't have any clean underwear or socks and my jeans are beginning to look pretty bad, although I admit it would help if I didn't wipe my hands on them so often. So I say, „Pop, I haven't got any clean underpants,” and he says, “Oh hell,” which isn't a very good explanation, and I say, “What'll I wear?” and he says, “You have to remind me of these things, George. I can't keep a lot of petty details in my head when I'm trying to make a living, and besides it seems to me that you're old enough to wash out a few things in the sink for yourself.” And I say, “Well I would have, except that you said you were going to the laundromat on Monday,” and he says, “Next time when you take a bath throw a few things into the tub with you and let them soak,” and I say, “I never take baths, I take showers, do you want me to go into the shower with my underwear and socks on?” And he says, “I don't want to get into a big wrangle about this, I have a lot of things on my mind this morning,” so I go to school with used socks on. I tell you, it isn't much fun having a father for a mother. Who wants to have his father take him up to Gimbels to buy pajamas?

The thing Pop does for a living that keeps his head from being filled up with petty details is draw comic books. His most important cartoon used to be a superhero called Garbage Man, where this mild-mannered advertising executive turned himself into Garbage Man when trouble impended and burned holes in the bad guys with his super smell. Pop still does
Garbage Man,
but now he's more interested in a new one, called
Frankens-Teen.
It's all about a teenager who can turn into a Frankenstein monster whenever he drinks this potent astral fluid which he carries
around
with him. The minute he drinks it he goes all shuddery and turns into an indestructible monster with stitches all over his face, determined to wreck vengeance on some bad guys. Pop says that sooner or later somebody is bound to buy
Frankens-Teen
for the movies and pay him a million dollars or something, but frankly, I'm not counting on it.

Actually, Pop doesn't want to be a comic strip artist. What he really wants to be is a famous painter like Jackson Pollock or Andy Warhol. Jackson Pollock is dead. He made his pictures by dripping whole cans of paint over huge canvases. They didn't look like anything real, but they weren't supposed to—they were supposed to look like the inside of his mind. Frankly, if my mind were that disorganized I wouldn't let anybody know about it. The pictures Andy Warhol makes look like ordinary things—tomato soup cans and Brillo boxes. Pop used to paint like Jackson Pollock. He used to snap paint on his pictures with a spoon, the way kids snap peas at each other. Now he's changed more over to the Warhol style. For example, he'll paint a picture of a picture. Once he painted this picture of the cover of his own
Frankens-Teen
comic books. It was exactly identical—the same size and color, with the titles and the name of the publisher, just the way they were on the printed one. You could hardly tell them apart. I said, “You mean you painted a picture of a picture you'd already painted?”

“Why not?” he said. “People paint pictures of trees, don't they? Well that comic book cover is just as real as a tree. It's part of our lives.”

“Why didn't you just paste the comic book cover onto the canvas? You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble.”

“Aha,” he said. “That's the whole point. It's a scathing indictment of contemporary morality. Social commentary in the form of a joke.”