Rich and Famous (13 page)

“Let's see what your address book says.”

Slowly I went upstairs and into Sinclair's room. He was sitting at his desk working out some math problems. He stopped when I came in. “Boy, are you in trouble, George. What did you do?”

“None of your business, Sinclair,” I said.

“My father said, „Sinclair, George has been lying to us about his activities. I hope you haven't been involved.' Naturally I told him I wouldn't lie to my own family, „You only hurt
yourself
when you do that.'”

“Go jump up and bite your tail, Sinclair.” I found the piece of paper with Pop's address written on it, and slowly I went back downstairs and out onto the porch. Uncle Ned took the piece of paper. Then from his pocket he took out the address book that sat by the telephone. He opened the book, and compared the addresses. “Quite different, aren't they, George.”

“Gee,” I said, scratching my head. “I wonder how that could have happened?”

“If you look closely you can see that somebody erased the old address and put in a new one.”

I scratched my head, but I didn't say anything more, just stood there feeling hot and red and beginning to sweat.

“George, I'm not even going to ask you what you've been doing these past three weeks. Your father will be home in a week and he can deal with it. All I can say is that I'm terribly disappointed in your behavior. It is not something we normally encounter in this family. I believe Sinclair said to me himself, „You only hurt yourself when you deceive people.' I'm going to ask you not to leave the house or the grounds until your father comes for you. If you can't be trusted like an adult, George, you'll have to be kept home like a baby.”

I went up to Sinclair's room and lay down on my bed.

“What did he say?” Sinclair said. “What kind of punishment did he give you?”

“Shut up, Sinclair, or I'll beat the crap out of you.”

They told me I could come down for supper, but I didn't feel like seeing any of them, so I read for awhile and then I went to bed.

The next day everybody treated me as if I were sick or dying or something. I mean I was in real disgrace. Aunt Cynthia and Uncle Ned spoke to me in low voices, just stuff like “Please pass the butter,” but you'd think they were pronouncing the death sentence on me from their tone of voice. They way they were carrying on you'd think that nobody in the family had ever lied to anyone before. You'd have thought I'd been responsible for starting a typhoid epidemic or making a big crack in the world.

Sinclair wasn't so gloomy about it, though. He was just plain curious. He'd never done anything bad in his whole life and it seemed to him that I was pretty unique. It was pretty interesting to him to actually be able to associate with a criminal, although we weren't doing much associating. I didn't have any reason to be polite anymore, so that morning when he asked
me
to help him with his computer I told him to get stuffed. I thought he would go away and leave me alone when I said that, but instead he just hung around, begging me to tell him what I had done wrong. But I wouldn't give him the satisfaction. He could ask his father if he was so damn curious.

By lunch time I was getting pretty fed up with it all. Uncle Ned took Sinclair off water skiing, but he didn't ask me to go. I knew he was doing it just to teach me a lesson—he hadn't taken us water skiing for a week. It made me sore, but there wasn't anything I could do about it. So I went up into Sinclair's room and read. I'll admit it, I had an inclination to mess up Sinclair's room—really mess it up, heave all of his chess sets around and throw his clothes on the floor and so forth, but I didn't. I just lay there for around a half an hour, and then I heard Aunt Cynthia's car start up and go down the driveway.

I was alone. I lay there for awhile trying to think of what I could do to get even with everybody. I couldn't think of anything, though, except to start smashing stuff. I would have liked to have done that, but I didn't have the guts. I didn't see how I could last out there for another week and I knew it was going to be worse when Pop got home. He'd really give it to me for everything I'd done, like trying to be rich and famous, but at least Pop wouldn't treat me like I'd caused the death of some saint. He'd rant and rave and ground me until I was practically ninety, but about a week later he'd forget about it and we'd go back to normal. Of course, if I was still trying to be rich and famous the whole thing would be pretty hard to forget about. I wondered what Pop was going to do about that?

Or what was
I
going to do about that? I was supposed to be in New York for some conference the next day. What could I do, just call up Woody and tell him to forget about the whole thing, Uncle Ned had grounded me and they'd have to get another Boy Next Door? And then about three months later I'd see this other Boy Next Door on television being rich and famous, and I'd just have to sit there being jealous. I thought about that for a minute, and suddenly I realized that I couldn't take any of this stuff anymore. I got up and searched around in Sinclair's closet until I found my suitcase. I quickly flung all of my clothes into it that I could find. A lot of them were missing. I figured that Aunt Cynthia had some of them in the laundry. Then I shoved a couple of S-F books into the suitcase, and took off out of the house and down to the railroad station. I didn't go right to the station, though. There was about an hour until the next train into New York, and I knew that Uncle Ned and Sinclair might come home from water
skiing.
Once they realized that I was gone, they'd go right to the railroad station looking for me. So I went over to the next street and kind of hung around there until I heard the train whistle blowing. Then I ran back to the station, keeping a sharp lookout for Uncle Ned's car. He wasn't around, and I figured he was still water skiing. The train pulled in and I jumped on. And two hours later I was in New York.

There was only one place to go—down to our own place in Greenwich Village. I didn't know if Barbara Feinberg would let me stay there. Probably she wouldn't. But I had a good reason for going there, which was, if Uncle Ned called the cops, he couldn't say I was running away from home, because I was home. So I went down there and knocked on the door and Barbara let me in. “What's up, kid?” she said.

I took a deep breath. “Barbara, I just ran away. I need some place to stay.”

“Ran away?”

“Yeah, I got into trouble with Uncle Ned. I can't stand staying there anymore.”

She sort of sighed. “Well, come in.” I came in and put my suitcase down. “How about a coke?” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

She got me the coke and I sat down on Pop's daybed and drank it.

“So tell me what happened.”

“Nothing,” I said. “I mean they got on my back about something.”

“That's nothing new, George. Grown-ups are always getting on kids' backs about things.”

“Yeah, well I can't stand it anymore.”

She lit a cigarette and stared at me for a moment. Then she said, “Look, it isn't any of my business, but my advice is to go back. Just pick up your suitcase and go back. Running away from home isn't as groovy as it sounds. I know. I did it.”

“You're doing okay.”

“For a long time I wasn't. I ran away because my parents wouldn't send me to art school. They wanted me to go to some fancy college they'd picked out. Was that dumb. I could have studied art at the college, but now look at me, I'm working nights as a waitress at some cockroach restaurant in order to pay for art school and I'm about four years behind everybody else.”

“
Why didn't you go home before?”

She shrugged. “I don't know, after awhile it gets to be too late for things. I was sixteen when I took off and came here. Of course I was scared to death for about a month, and then I began to meet some people, and after awhile I started living with this guy, and it all seemed pretty groovy for a couple of years. But then he got busted for drugs, and they nearly nailed me too, and I began to get another look at the thing and wonder where I was going and where I'd be in another ten years. And I started thinking about art school.”

“Why didn't you go home then?”

“By this time they weren't speaking to me, I couldn't go home. I mean maybe I could have if I'd come crawling back and kissed their feet, but I wasn't about to do that.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Some little place in Ohio you never heard of. That's another part of the trouble, everybody out there knew I'd run off and was living in a pad in Greenwich Village. Naturally that was a big disgrace and it made it hard for my parents to forgive me for disgracing them.”

“You don't even write them letters?”

“I do now. In the past couple of years I got straight with them, more or less. My old man came to New York about a year ago and we talked about it. I call them up about once a month, or whenever somebody has a birthday or something. So let me tell you, Georgie, I know what I'm talking about.”

“But your life is more interesting than just going to college,” I said.

“The hell it is. Waitressing in a cockroach restaurant isn't more interesting than anything. Take my word for it, Georgie. Go home. Tell your Uncle Ned you've learned your lesson and go home.”

She lit a cigarette and I looked at her. Finally I said, “There's a reason why I can't go home. I'm supposed to be in New York getting rich and famous.” And I told her the whole story—about Pop and Denise going to Europe and Sinclair's computer and Woody and Superman and Mr. Fenderbase and all the rest of it. And she stared at me and smoked and shook her head at the interesting parts. Finally when I got finished, she said, “Are you standing there telling me that you're on the verge of being a millionaire?”

I got kind of embarrassed. “Well, I don't know if it would be that much.”

“You're serious? This whole story is true?”

“
Yes,” I said.

“Wow. How'd you like to be my boyfriend, George?”

I grinned. She was kidding, but I was glad she liked me. “Sure,” I said.

“Well, listen, we can't fool around with money like that. You better move in with me for a few days until we can figure out what to do.”

So that's what I did. And the next day I went up to Camelot to work with Damon Damon. They were going to make the test record in a couple of days. The song they had settled on was pretty silly. They had had it specially written. It was some crap about a girl who was in love with the boy next door, and at the end of the song it turned out, naturally that I was the boy next door. The melody wasn't too bad, nothing special, but not too bad. It was the words that were awful. But Superman said it was right, and Damon Damon agreed. “Of course, the lyrics are simply beyond belief, dear boy, but it's commercial.”

And we were working about on this song, “The Boy Next Door,” when Woody came in with these two public relations guys, the tall, sad one and the short, round one.

“Hold up a minute, Damon,” Woody said. “We got a little something we want to work out.” He turned to me. “Georgie, we want to go up to this hometown of yours and do a little shooting.”

“We've got to get some crap organized for the fan magazines,” the round one said.

“Right,” said the tall, skinny one who looked as if he were going to cry. “Some photographs of The Boy Next Door at his house next door. This cousin of yours—he'll let us use his house for background, right?”

“Sinclair?” I croaked out.

“Sinclair?” the round one said. “That's the name of a gas company. What does he think he is, a gas station?”

“It's an old family name,” I said. “From Uncle Ned's family.”

“Uncle Ned?” The round one slapped his thigh. “That's beautiful, that's real down-home time.”

“It sings,” the skinny one said. “It couldn't be better if I'd made it up myself.”

I was thinking fast. “Well, gee, I think they've gone away. They go up to Maine fishing a lot. I mean for vacation. So I guess that won't work out.”

“Sure it will,” the round one said. “Better not to have them hanging around anyway.
They'
ll just get underfoot asking for your autograph.”

I began to really worry. “Well, see I guess I should explain, the reason why they went up to Maine was because they had a fire there at the house. It burned the whole porch and part of the kitchen, and there are carpenters all over the place now.”

The skinny one shrugged. “We don't care about the house, all we need is the barn—a few shots of you pitching the horses or whatever they do.”

“That's what I was going to say,” I said. “The fire started in the barn.”

“Why does this always happen to me?” the skinny one said.

“Because you're a high school drop-out, dummy,” the round one said. “If you'd finished high school, you could have been a big time executive like Woodward. Come on, Woody, what's the story?”

Woody sighed. “Now George,” he said patiently, “I know you've been under a lot of pressure, but this isn't any big deal. These guys are pros, they'll go up there with you. They'll find the backgrounds they need. Just relax and do what they tell you. We want to do it in a couple of days.”

“Well, gee—”

Woody put up his hand. “Please don't argue with me, George. We've got to get some stuff going for the fan magazines. You want to be in the fan magazines, don't you?
Vocal Star Magazine, Teen Hits,
those ones.”

The skinny one nodded. “Modest, unassuming George Stable, The Boy Next Door, still does his share of chores around the home, despite his new found fame. In the picture at left, he shovels the hay out of his father's barn. At right, helping Mom wash the dishes.”