Dark Whispers & Other Stories

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.

“I was beginning to think you couldn’t get him here,” Howard said, the ironic smile remaining on his face.

“I almost didn’t. He threw up and wanted me to take him back to his apartment.”

“His apartment.” Howard shook his head and frowned. “I’d be surprised if even rats wanted to live there. It’s the kind of place a nobody deserves.”

“All your customers seem to like him. To them he’s somebody.”

He scowled. “They aren’t exactly great arbiters of taste. Look at the trash they buy.”

This time I smiled, indicating the over-priced merchandise cramming the store. “And the prices they pay for it.”

He laughed. “And the prices they pay for it.” His good mood vanished abruptly. From inside his suitcoat he took a small prescription bottle and handed it to me. Murky behind the tan plastic were capsules I recognized as Librium.

I hefted the bottle in my hand, then slipped it into my own pocket.

I glanced out the front window. Buddy was still in his glory, signing autographs, laughing with people who found his boozy chatter amusing. In the eight months I’d known him, I’d never seen him happier.

“I’m glad we gave him this reception,” I said. “It makes me feel better about — well, you know.”

Howard did not seem interested in sentiment. “We’re doing him a favor. Look at him. Look at where he lives. He’s a goddamned helpless wretch, is what he is.”

Another glance out the window. I couldn’t really disagree with Howard. We were doing Buddy a favor, ultimately.

“Maybe if he’d had better management, he could have had another hit,” I said, feeling sorry for Buddy again.

“He was lucky to have had the one he did,” Howard said. “He didn’t have much talent.”

I nodded. “All he had was one incredible piece of luck.”

Howard nodded. “The tape.”

“Yes,” I said. “The tape.”

During the three years Buddy had been able to get work on the rock ’n’ roll circuit, one fantastic thing had happened to him. He had talked his manager into cajoling an Allied Artists P.R. man into letting him on to the set of an Elvis movie. For some reason, Elvis had liked Buddy, perhaps saw something of himself in the raw and affecting Buddy Knoeller presence. Whatever. Elvis called Buddy up a few days later and invited him out to his Hollywood mansion. Elvis had been depressed and wanted to talk to somebody who wasn’t a sycophant. Buddy had done something terrible, put a tape recorder inside an acoustic guitar he’d brought along ostensibly to play should Elvis want to sing. Buddy had been the most devout type of Elvis fan. He wasn’t running a scam, thinking he might sell the tape later on. He wanted it for himself, for the satisfaction of knowing that whatever else might happen in his career, he had once had an intimate conversation with Elvis Presley.

When I phoned Buddy that first time eight months ago, I’d simply been inquiring about any memorabilia he owned that he might want to sell. After getting drunk with him a few times, he brought up the existence of the tape. At first I hadn’t believed him, but one night he played me a few minutes of it. It was the real thing. A melancholy Elvis talking about his life, some startling feelings and memories, a whole new perspective on the supposedly “hayseed” singer.

Of course I immediately offered Buddy a great deal of money for the tape. He surprised me by refusing. “It’s all I got to show for all the bullshit and heartache I went through, man,” he’d said. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever owned that was valuable to me.” Buddy even refused my offer to pay several thousand just to make a dub of it. Instead, he put it back in the strongbox he kept under the couch and wouldn’t even talk about it any more. It was his secret, his icon.

When I told Howard about the tape he got excited, too. For several months we talked about ways we might wedge the tape from Buddy. That’s why I’d been hanging around him, listening to his tirades, buying him booze, clothes, medical supplies, but it hadn’t done any good. Buddy liked me and had begun to trust me, but he wouldn’t part with the tape, or let me dub it, under any conditions.

That was when Howard evolved his plan.

The day he’d revealed it to me he’d seemed pleased with himself. “If it was good enough for Nick Adams, Judy Garland and Dorothy Kilgallen, it should be good enough for a nobody like Buddy Knoeller.”

“Looks like the crowd is breaking up,” Howard said now, nodding to the sidewalk outside.

“I’m still glad we gave the reception for him,” I said.

“What a sentimental bastard,” Howard laughed.

I sighed. “Well, it’s been an hour, I suppose I should take him back now.”

“He’s had his thrill,” Howard said. He pointed to the pocket where I had slid the librium. “Just get him plenty drunk and start putting them in his drinks. Nobody will ever know what happened. Just another suicide.”

“I’ll call you when I get the tape,” I said.

Howard glanced at his watch. “I promised my wife lunch today. Get him out of here, will you? I’ve got to close up.”

Outside, Buddy was joking with a fat woman in hair curlers. “Was Dick Clark as nice as he seemed?” she was asking.

“Helluva nice guy,” Buddy said, “helluva nice guy.”

It took ten minutes to get Buddy to the car. The stragglers remained on the sidewalk waving to Buddy as we pulled away, Buddy waving back.

Once we hit the freeway, Buddy reached for the glove compartment, then stopped himself. “You mind if I have a little suck on the tit?”

“Of course not, Buddy,” I said. In my pocket the librium seemed to pulsate.

“Man,” Buddy said, “I owe you. I really fucking owe you. I mean, those people loved me.”

“We all love you, Buddy,” I said, “We all love you.”