Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (14 page)

“Do I look like I have any cheese crackers?” asked Bud, wiping crumbs from his chin.

“Okay,” said Lou. “Have this cheese cracker, Bud. Because you’re my friend, and I want to share.”

Again, the sound of eating filled the cab.

“Look, Lou. I don’t mind you having all the LifeSavers, but can’t you give me half your cheese cracker?”

Lou puffed out his cheeks while watching the road. “But, Bud! I just gave you
three
cheese crackers!”

“Some friend,” said Bud, looking at the snowbound landscape. “He has a cheese cracker and won’t share with his only friend.”

“Okay! Okay!” said Lou. “Take half this cheese cracker! Take it!”

He drove on.

“Boy . . . ,” said Bud.

Lou took the whole roll of LifeSavers and stuffed them in his mouth, paper and all. He began to choke.

Bud began beating him on the back. The truck swerved across the road, then back on. They continued toward Cedar Oaks, Iowa.

* * *

There were giants in the
All-Star Caravan
. Donny Bottoms, from Amarillo, Texas; his backup group, the Mosquitoes, most from Amarillo Cooper High School, his old classmates. Then there was Val Ritchie, who’d had one fantastic hit song, which had a beat and created a world all the teenagers wanted to escape to.

The third act, biggest among many more, was a middle-aged man, calling himself The Large Charge. His act was strange, even among that set. He performed with a guitar and a telephone. He pretended to be talking to a girl on the other end of the line. It was billed as a comedy act. Everybody knew what was really involved—The Large Charge was rock ’n’ roll’s first dirty old man. His real name was Elmo Simpson and he came from Bridge City, Texas.

Others on the bill included the Pipettes, three guys and two girls from Stuttgart, Arkansas, who up until three months ago had sung only at church socials; Jimmy Wailon, who was having a hard time deciding whether to sing “Blue Suede Shoes” for the hundredth time, or strike out into country music where the real money was. Plus the Champagnes, who’d had a hit song three years before, and Rip Dover, the show’s M.C.

The
All-Star Caravan
was the biggest thing that had happened to Cedar Oaks since Bill Haley and the Comets came through a year and a half ago, and one of Haley’s roadmen had been arrested for DWI.

* * *

“What’s-a matter us?” asked Leonard for the fiftieth time that morning. “We really no talka like dis! We was-a grown up mens, with jobs and-a everything.”

Whonka whonka
went Arthur sadly, as they walked through the town of Friedersville, Idaho.

Arthur stopped dead, then put his hands in his pockets and began whistling. There was a police car at the corner. It turned onto the road where they walked. And slowed.

Leonard nonchalantly tipped his pointy felt hat forward and put his hands in his pockets.

The cop car stopped.

The two ran into the nearest store.
Hadley’s Music Shop
.

Arthur ran around behind a set of drums and hid. Leonard sat down at a piano and began to play with one finger, “You’ve Taught Me a New Kind of Love.”

The store manager came from the back room and leaned against the doorjamb, listening.

Arthur saw a harp in the corner, ran to it and began to play. He joined in the song with Leonard.

The two cops came in and watched them play. Leonard was playing with his foot and nose. Arthur was plucking the harp strings with his teeth.

The police shrugged and left.

“Boy, I’m-a tellin’ you,” said Leonard, as he waited for the cops to turn the corner. “Quackenbush, he’s-a messed up dis-a time! Why we gots to do this?” With one hand he was wiping his face, and with the other he was playing as he never had before.

* * *

Donny Bottoms was a scrawny-looking kid from West Texas. He didn’t stand out in a crowd, unless you knew where to look. He had a long neck and an Adam’s apple that stuck out of his collar. He was twenty-four years old and still had acne. But he was one of the hottest new singers around, and the
All-Star Caravan
was going to be his last road tour for a while. He’d just married his high school sweetheart, a girl named Dottie, and he had not really wanted to come on the tour without her. But she was finishing nurse’s training and could not leave. At two in the afternoon, he and the other members of the
Caravan
were trying the sound in the Municipal Auditorium.

He and the Mosquitoes ran through a couple of their numbers. Bottoms’ style was unique, even in a field as wild and novelty-eating as rock ’n’ roll. It had a good boogie beat, but Bottoms worked hard with the music, and the Mosquitoes were really good. They turned out a good synthesis of primitive and sophisticated styles.

The main thing they had for them was Donny’s voice. It was high and nasal when he talked, but, singing, that all went away. He had a good range, and he did strange things with his throat.

A critic once said that he dry-humped every syllable till it begged for mercy.

* * *

Val Ritchie had one thing he did well, exactly one: that was a song called “Los Niños.” He’d taken an old Mexican folk song, got a drummer to beat hell out of a conga, and yelled the words over his own screaming guitar.

It was all he did well. He did some of other people’s standards, and some Everly Brothers’ stuff by himself, but he always finished his set with “Los Niños” and it always brought the house down and had them dancing in the aisles.

He was the next-to-last act before Bottoms and the Mosquitoes.

He was a tough act to follow.

But he was always on right before The Large Charge, and
he
was the toughest act in rock ’n’ roll.

* * *

They had turned the auditorium upside down and had finally found a church key to open a beer for The Large Charge.

Elmo Simpson was dressed, at the sound rehearsal, in a pair of baggy pants, a checked cowboy shirt, and a string tie with a Texas-shaped tie clasp. Tonight, on stage, he would be wearing the same thing.

Elmo’s sound rehearsal consisted of chinging away a few chords, doing the first two bars of “Jailhouse Rock” and then going into his dirty-old-man voice.

His song was called “Hello, Baby!” and he used a prop telephone. He ran through the first two verses, which were him talking in a cultured, decadent, nasty voice, and he had the soundman rolling in his control chair before he finished.

Elmo sweated like a hog. He’d been doing this act for two years; he’d even had to lip-synch it on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” a couple of times. He was still nervous, though he could do the routine in his sleep. He was always nervous. He was in his late thirties. Fame had come late to him, and he couldn’t believe it. So he was still nervous.

* * *

Bud and Lou were hurrying west in the panel truck, through snow slides, slush, and stalled cars.

Stan and Ollie had hitched a ride on a Mayflower moving van, against all that company’s policies, and were speeding toward Cedar Oaks from the south-southeast.

Leonard and Arthur, alias Rampolini and Bagatelle, were leaving an Idaho airport in a converted crop duster which hadn’t been flown since the end of the Korean War. It happened like this.

* * *

“We gots to find us a pilot-a to fly us where the Boss wants us,” said Leonard, as they ran onto a small municipal field.

Whonk?
asked Arthur.

“We’s gots to find us a pilot, pilot.”

Arthur pulled a saber from the fold of his coat, and putting a black poker chip over his eye, began sword fighting his shadow.

“Notta pirate. Pilot! A man whatsa flies in the aeroplanes,” said Leonard.

A man in coveralls, wearing a WWII surplus aviator’s cloth helmet, walked from the operations room.

“There’s-a one now!” said Leonard. “What’s about we gets him?”

Without a honk, Arthur ran and tackled the flyer.

“What the hell’s the matter with him?” asked the man as Arthur grinned and smiled and pointed.

“You gots to-a excuse him,” said Leonard, pulling his top-hatted brother off him. “He’s-a taken too many vitsamins.”

“Well, keep him away from me!” said the flyer.

“We’s-a gots you a prepositions,” said Leonard, conspiratorially.

“What?”

“A prepositions. You fly-a us to Iowa, anda we no break-a you arms.”

“What’s going on? Is this some kind of gag?”

“No, it’s-a my brother. He’s a very dangerous man. Show him how dangerous you are, Bagatelle.”

Arthur popped his eyes out, squinted his face up into a million rolls of flesh, flared his nostrils, and snorted at each breath.

“Keep him away from me!” said the man. “You oughtn’t to let him out on the streets.”

“He’s-a no listen to me, Bagatelle. Get tough with him.”

Arthur hunched his shoulders, intensified his breathing, stepped up into the pilot’s face.

“No, that’s-a no tough enough. Get really tough with him.”

Arthur squnched over, stood on tiptoe, flared his nostrils until they filled all his face except for the eyes, panted, and passed out for lack of breath.

The pilot ran across the field and into a hangar.

“Hey, wake-a up!” said Leonard. “He’s-a getting the plane ready. Let’s-a go.”

When they got there, the pilot was warming the crop duster up for a preflight check.

Arthur climbed in the aft cockpit, grabbed the stick, started jumping up and down.

“Hey! Get outta there!” yelled the pilot. “I’m gonna call the cops!”

“Hey, Bagatelle. Get-a tough with him again!”

Leonard was climbing into the forward cockpit. Arthur started to get up. His knees hit the controls. The plane lurched.

Leonard fell into the cockpit head first, his feet sticking out.

Arthur sat back down and laughed. He pulled the throttle. The pilot just had time to open the hangar door before the plane roared out, plowed through a snowbank, ricocheted back onto the field, and took off.

It was heading east toward Iowa.

* * *

At three in the afternoon, the rehearsals over, most of the entertainers were back in their rooms at the Holiday Inn. Already the hotel detective had had to chase out several dozen girls and boys who had been roaming up and down the halls looking for members of the
All-Star Caravan
.

Some of them found Jimmy Wailon in the corridor and were getting his autograph. He had been on the way down the hall, going to meet one of the lady reservation clerks.

“Two of yours is worth one Large Charge,” said one of the girls as he signed her scrapbook.

“What’s that?” he asked, his eyes twinkling. He pushed his cowlick out of his eyes.

“Two of your autographs are worth one of Donny’s,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. “That’s nice.” He scribbled his usual “With Best Wishes to My Friend . . . ,” then asked, “What’s the name, honey?”

“Sarah Sue,” she said. “And please put the date.”

“Sure will, baby. How old are you?”

“I’m eighteen!” she said. All her friends giggled.

“Sure,” he said. “There go!”

He hurried off to the room the lady reservation clerk had gotten for them.

“Did you hear that?” the girl asked behind him as he disappeared around the corner. “He called me ‘honey.’ ”

Jimmy Wailon was smiling long before he got to Room 112.

* * *

Elmo was sitting in Donny’s room with three of the Mosquitoes. Donny had gone to a phone booth to call his wife collect rather than put up with the noise in the room.

“Have another beer, Elmo?” asked Skeeter, the head Mosquito.

“Naw, thanks, Skeeter,” he said. “I won’t be worth a diddly-shit if I do.” Already, Elmo was sweating profusely at the thought of another performance.

“I’ll sure be glad when we get on that tour,” he continued, after a pause. “Though it’ll be colder than a monkey’s ass.”

“Yeh,” said Skeeter. They were watching television.
The Millionaire
, the daytime reruns, and John Beresford Tipton was telling Mike what to do with the money with his usual corncob-up-the-butt humor. Skeeter was highly interested in the show. He’d had arguments with people many times about whether the show was real or not, or based on some real person. He was sure somewhere there was a John Beresford Tipton, and a Silverstone, and that one of those checks had his name on it.

“Look at that, will you?” asked Skeeter a few minutes later. “He’s giving it to a guy whose kid is dying.”

But Elmo Simpson, The Large Charge, from Bridge City, Texas, was lying on his back, fast asleep. Snores began to form inside his mouth, and every few minutes, one would escape.

* * *

Donny talked to his wife over the phone out in the motel lobby. They told each other how much they missed each other, and Donny asked about the new record of his coming out this week, and Dottie said she wished he’d come home soon rather than going on the tour, and they told each other they loved each other, and he hung up.

Val Ritchie was sitting in a drugstore just down the street, eating a chocolate sundae and wishing he were home, instead of going to do a show tonight, then fly with one or another load of musicians off to Alaska for two weeks for the USO.

He was wearing some of his old clothes and looked out of place in the booth. He thought most northern people overdressed anyway, even kids going to school.
I mean, like they were all ready for church or Uncle Fred’s funeral.

He hadn’t been recognized yet, and wouldn’t be. He always looked like a twenty-year-old garage mechanic on a coffee break.

* * *

Bud and Lou swerved to avoid a snowdrift. They had turned onto the giant highway a few miles back and had it almost to themselves. Ice glistened everywhere in the late afternoon sun, blindingly. Soon the sun would fall and it would become pitch black outside.

“How much further is it, Bud?” asked Lou. His stomach was growling.

“I don’t know. It’s around here somewhere. I’m just following what’s-his-name’s orders.”

“Why doesn’t he give better orders, Bud?”

“Because he never worked for Universal.”

* * *

Stan and Ollie did not know what was happening when the doors of the moving van opened and carpets started dropping off the tops of the racks.