Finally, he did the only thing he could do. He walked away, the sound of his footsteps softly splashing through the fetid water.
He kept trying not to cry; kept trying.
False Idols
Fans sometimes begin to despise the very people they profess to idolize. I once heard, for example, a rude and rather shallow mystery fan reveal some very harsh and nasty things about another mystery writer she had long corresponded with. “She's so pathetic,” the fan said, “and she doesn't even know it.” Here is the story that resulted from my overhearing those remarks.
On the way over to the reception I had to stop three times. Twice so Buddy could run into gas stations and pee and once so Buddy could duck into an alley and puke. That’s how nervous he was about this morning.
I’m talking here about the Buddy Knoeller. That’s right, the guy whose 1962 single on the SLAM label (SL755961) went gold the same month “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys and “Telstar” by the Tornados did likewise. “Baby Mine” was the name of the record and you probably saw Buddy lip-synch it several times on American Bandstand and perform it live when he did the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars tour.
When Buddy got back to the car after throwing up, he looked pretty bad, his thinning brown hair sticky from sweat and his blue eyes beagle-sad. The shirt I’d bought him at K-Mart was splattered and his white plastic shoes were scuffed from rocks in the alley. Worst of all, his hands were twitching. Some people say he’s a spaz but it’s really the booze. He sticks to beer, he’s middling okay, but when he reaches for the Old Grandad, you’ve got to watch yourself. And watch Buddy.
One night in a blue collar bar we sometimes drank in — Buddy coasting on maybe a dozen bourbons — he got crazy and started screaming he was a star. Before the bartender had time to get his ballbat and run around and collar him, Buddy had time to pick up a chair and throw it through the window. The cops came and hauled Buddy away. I went to the station and pleaded with them not to press charges, to keep the whole thing quiet, considering Buddy’s status. All they said was what status. He’s just some unemployed rummy. Yeah, I said, but he did the Caravan of Stars tour with Frankie Avalon and the Ventures, among others, and got third billing. They just looked at me and smirked and tossed Buddy in the drunk tank and sure enough in the paper the next day there was a story about Buddy being arrested for drunk and disorderly. At least they referred to him as “former rock star Buddy Knoeller.” The “star” was important to a man of Buddy’s status.
“Take me back, man,” Buddy said when he got himself arranged in the car again, a Merit between his lips (frankly, his teeth could use some work, I mean given who he is), his hands clawing the dashboard for steadiness.
“We gotta go to the reception, Buddy,” I said. “We promised. They’ve got everything ready.”
“You promised, man, I didn’t promise.” He ripped the gold chain from around his neck and threw it on the floor.
“Open the glove compartment,” I said.
Buddy shook his head. Without the gold chain he looked pretty much like any other forty-year-old man in this factory town where we’d both been raised, a little false-pregnancy beer belly, dirty nails and razor nicks on his chin. “Screw yourself,” he said.
“Open it, Buddy. You gotta. You need it.”
“Shit.”
But I could hear him weakening.
“Please, Buddy.”
“You think I need it? That what you think?”
“I don’t think you need it, Buddy. I think you deserve it. All the pressure you’re under, Buddy. All the pressure.”
He kind of slumped in the seat a moment, his eyes closed, his hands twitching really crazy, and then he sighed and when he sighed I knew he’d do it.
He opened the glove compartment and took out the pint of Old Grandad I keep in there just for him. Buddy had his drink and we went on to the reception.
One thing I have to say for Howard Farr. He’s a promoter. When we wheeled in to the parking lot of FARR OUT, which is Howard’s name for his nostalgia store, sixty people were standing outside, enjoying the warm June morning, paper cups of Howard’s inevitable punch (Hawaiian stuff heavily dosed with cheap vodka) in their hands.
The next few minutes were just like a movie.
Buddy and I got out of the car. Buddy’s shakes were almost gone from the three hits he’d had, and everybody started swarming around us and applauding.
From a speaker mounted above the door of the crumbling storefront (Howard was smart enough, and cheap enough, to put his store near a university, where deterioration is considered chic) came the sounds of “Baby Mine,” Buddy’s gold record. In the display window was a Caravan of Stars poster that Howard had found somewhere. It showed Buddy — a rail-thin, healthy, grinning, twenty-three-year-old Buddy — standing between Dick Clark and Frankie Avalon.
Buddy couldn’t help himself. Tears filled his eyes and he started smiling with no thought to the dental work he needed.
“This is for you, Buddy,” I said. “This is your day because we all think you’re one of the great rock and rollers.”
I said this loud enough for everybody to hear. A cheer went up. Buddy let the tears roll. He didn’t even seem embarrassed.
While most of the other people stayed outside to talk with Buddy, got him to sign their battered copies of his record jacket and tell him how happy they were to see he was making public appearances again (between his drinking and his moods, mostly Buddy stayed in his tiny apartment, living off occasional royalty checks and food stamps). While all this was going on I went inside and looked for Howard.
There was a time when FARR OUT was my favorite place in the city. It was like time traveling, the bookshelves filled with pulp magazines, the walls covered with original art by illustrators like Virgil Finlay, John Allen St. John, and Roy Krenkel, the record racks jammed with 45s by Chuck Berry and The Moonglows and Bobby Darin. There was a special dust that rolled on the air and lightly covered everything, a decades-old, dust from the era when you could stroll up to a newsstand and buy a brand-new copy of Dime Detective and Thrilling Wonder Stories.
For a long time, going to FARR OUT had given me the same satisfaction that going to church had as a boy. The place had seen me through two wives — neither of whom understood nor shared my passion for collecting, neither of whom believed that collecting nostalgia was the best way to be part of the human continuum — two wives I scarcely remembered now. But then it stopped, the reverence I felt for the place, the sense of well-being and total escape it had given me.
Now, thanks to an inheritance that allowed me to buy anything I wanted, I owned everything that FARR OUT and all the other similar places throughout the country had to offer. My otherwise thoroughly respectable home was a museum of pulps, rare records and artwork. The range of my collection far exceeded Howard’s. Far exceeded.
Howard had, over the years, chuckled about my impending jadedness, predicted it would happen, just as it had happened to him. “You get to the point where you don’t even read the stuff, or listen to the stuff, or look at the stuff anymore,” Howard had said. “You just want to own it for the sake of owning it, my friend. And you’ll do anything, anything you can to get it; the rarer the better.”
Now, Howard stood in the back of the store, in the corner where the once-magic dust was thickest, smiling at me. Howard is not the type you’d expect to find in the nostalgia business — too many of whom compensate for physical or mental or spiritual deformities by burying reality in the musty smell of pulp paper — but rather a bankerish sort with razor-cut gray hair and a body kept trim by handball.