Eddie and the Cruisers

Introduction

SHERMAN ALEXIE

Can anybody disappear anymore?

Sure, they can. Think of the airplanes—small, large, jumbo—that have crashed into mountainous forests and have never been found. Think of the children and adults—abducted or misguided or purposefully nomadic—who walked out of their houses and have never been seen again. I remember a special issue of Sports Illustrated that asked the existential question, Where are they now? The magazine featured a team photo of the Bad News Bears—that group of foul-mouthed, untalented, socially inept, and heroic Little League baseball players of 1970s movie fame—and updated the life stories of all of the kid actors. A few of them had remained in show business, but most of the rest had moved into non-Hollywood lives—nine to five jobs, families, children, and sometimes divorce and early death. But one of the kids—now a man in his mid-forties—could not found. How did Sports Illustrated put it? The guy’s whereabouts were unknown. Jesus, if Sports Illustrated, a massive journalistic organization, can’t find a man—can’t find any trace of his current location—it means that man doesn’t want to be found.

And what about that other kid actor, the one who starred in a few major 1980s teen movies, then quit show business a few years later and also chose to disappear? I won’t use his name because he’s hiding in plain sight. Of course, it would be pretty easy to do a Google search and find this guy and his story. I’m sure a few 80’s movie fans have already done that, and they would have learned the kid—always a brilliant and eccentric actor—has become a brilliant and eccentric college professor teaching highly esoteric subjects. I found him in seconds. And I’ve read Where are they now? interviews with him where he seems to be both fond and rueful of his Hollywood life. If I were a more aggressive writer (or, frankly, a rude bastard), I’d call up the professor and ask him what it feels like to disappear. I’d ask him if he’s ever read P.F. Kluge’s novel, Eddie and the Cruisers.

And I’m sure he’d tell me that, no, he hasn’t read the novel, but he’s seen the movie. Or at least heard of the movie. I’m sure the professor would say, Wasn’t that the one about the rock star who disappears? Or drives his car off a bridge and dies? I’ve seen parts of it on cable, I think. And I’d have to tell him that he’s more likely seen parts of Eddie and the Cruisers 2: Eddie Lives! And that he shouldn’t judge the first film or the novel on the quality of the sequel, which is one of most inert and awful films ever made. But let’s not get sidetracked by sequels. Let’s focus on the original Eddie and the Cruisers, both the film and novel.

The film flopped when it was released into theatres in 1983, but it became one of the first such films to achieve cult status when it was released and rediscovered on cable television and home video. I first saw the film on VHS while I was in high school, along with a bunch of my basketball teammates, and most of them hated it. It was too romantic and nostalgic for most teenage boys (Why would a rock star kill himself? Or even stupider, pretend to kill himself and disappear?), and the music was too mainstream rock for a bunch of farm kids who either listened entirely to Hank Williams, Jr. and Alabama or to Judas Priest and Black Sabbath. But a few of us quietly loved the flick. My best friend Steve and I became obsessed with it.

First of all, Steve and I had more diverse music tastes than our friends did. We made a point of reading music magazines to search for new bands and to ask music store employees for recommendations. So the New Jersey rock of Eddie and the Cruisers, as performed by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, was a revelation to us. Of course, Bruce Springsteen is the most famous and talented New Jersey rock star, but he hadn’t yet taken over the world when Steve and I first heard Eddie and the Cruisers. In a way, Eddie and the Cruisers was our gateway drug into the three-chord heroin that is Springsteen. And if there is one word to describe Springsteen, Eddie and the Cruisers, and New Jersey rock, it is loneliness. Yes, it’s often loneliness that you can dance to, but it’s a dance filled with shame, rage, romance, torrid sex, heartbreak, isolation, and the ruined cities of Jersey.

And since Steve and I were also reservation kids, we were well versed in another kind of loneliness, with the genetic dread of being Indian, of being poor, of being forgotten. We were also intimately familiar with suicide and young and tragic death. The fictional rock star, Eddie Wilson, had, in a fit of rage and loneliness and thwarted ambition, had driven his car off a bridge and died. And Steve and I knew a dozen reservation kids who’d also killed themselves, who’d essentially died of broken hearts. I mean, if you’ve ever been lying in your bed at one in the morning, and heard that tribal 4/4 drum beat ripping through the powwow sky, then you know that Indians were at least partially responsible for inventing the blues.

So, okay, Steve and I were in love with a movie that turned loneliness into a series of Top Forty hits, On the Dark Side and Tender Years being two of the biggest.

But what about the novel? What about the author, P.F. Kluge?

Well, I’m ashamed to admit that, for many years, I didn’t know the movie was based on a book. And though I was a bookish teenager, I’m not sure I would have much cared about reading the novel, especially a literary novel that had ambitions and secrets and qualities far beyond that of the mainstream film it inspired. It was only a few years ago, after I had become a successful literary writer myself, that I learned the film was based on P.F. Kluge’s novel. But it had gone out of print not long after it was published and had never been published in paperback format outside of a special edition printed by Kluge’s alma mater and employer, Kenyon College. I am doubly ashamed to admit that I was curious about the novel but had never actively tried to obtain a copy.

Much like its protagonist, Eddie Wilson, the novel had disappeared.

But then, a couple years back, while browsing the shelves of a local used bookstore, I found a battered copy of Eddie and the Cruisers. I excitedly bought it, took it home, sat on my couch, and read it straight through in one sitting. I know people say that all the time about great books. But just because it’s a cliché; doesn’t make it any less true. I read the book, happily noticing the plot and character similarities with the movie, but found myself increasingly stunned—more like shattered—by the novel’s far darker and disturbing tone.

To get Springsteenian, if the film, Eddie and the Cruisers, is an abandoned hotel on the Atlantic City boardwalk, then the novel, Eddie and the Cruisers, is that same hotel with a wrecking ball shattering its walls, windows, and foundation.

There is death in this book. Yes, this is a rock and roll novel about death. The death of humans, certainly. But also the death of dreams. The death of ambition. The death of art. The death of hope. Sometimes it feels like P.F. Kluge must have written this while working part-time in an abattoir with a great jukebox. And a great selection or porn. Check out the description of a seminal Eddie and the Cruisers concert:

We played for nearly two hours, no breaks, no patter, no tuning or stalling, Eddie rushing from one song to another, and the way he pounced on the songs, the way he explored, prolonged, teased, reprised, exhausted them, you had to think—and I later confirmed this with some other people—that he was fucking the songs.

Or how about this description of why Eddie and the Cruisers, after being off the charts and out of mind for decades, suddenly matter again:

Eddie never figured he was writing classics. His songs were the offsprings of moods: a knockout girl in Cape May, a hangover in Absecon. He tossed them off and the met their fates in the most transient of trades, a Number Eight or a Number Eighty. An upward curve and the inevitable downward Fall on the Billboard list. And that was it. Nobody Listened to golden oldies back then. We didn’t Get nostalgic about dead singers and disbanded Groups. Russ Colombo? Glenn Miller? We looked Ahead, to tonight, this weekend, next summer. Now, Everybody was looking back. Even the kids. That Was the difference between then and now. Something Had changed in the land, and Eddie’s music was part Of the change.

Jesus, doesn’t that paragraph sound like the mission statement of VH1 and its endless parade of shows featuring washed-up rock stars, actors, and athletes? For a couple of years, VH1 ran a series, Reunited, that sought out the members of long-disbanded and formally successful rock bands, like The Motels and ABC and Berlin, and reunited them live and onstage. Last year, I was boggled out of my mind when my fourteen-year-old niece showed up wearing a Ramones T-shirt.

Do you even know who the Ramones are? I asked.

Yeah, she said. But I like Iggy Pop more.

This is a girl who should be listening to Hannah Montana, and she does and likes it, I think, but she’d much rather dye her hair some strange color and pogo all around an all-ages dance club floor to the roaring (and middle-aged) anarchy of punk.

It would seem that P.F. Kluge was prescient when he wrote Eddie and the Cruisers and detailed the ways in which a long-dead rock star can matter more to us—his listeners—than he did when he was alive.

Kurt Cobain, anyone?

Fourteen years after his suicide, he’s still a major rock star. Our local alternative radio station, 107.8 THE END, still features Cobain and Nirvana on a nightly basis. And many of the businesses in my neighborhood still feature bounced checks from Courtney Love, Cobain’s rock star widow.

And, of course, as with many rock star deaths, there are quite a few conspiracy-minded folks who think Love murdered Cobain, or rather, had him murdered. It’s become an important of recent rock and roll mythology (just as it was part of Jim Morrison’s supposedly suspicious death). More relevant, there are plenty of folks who think Cobain, Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Elvis are still alive and are physically walking the earth.

And in P.F. Kluge’s fictional world, there are people who think Eddie Wilson is still alive. Oh, why do they need him to be alive? Because music never dies, and yet there are so many dead men and women’s voices roaring, so alive, out of our radios and IPods. It’s tough to live with that particular contradiction. We need our dead rock stars to be alive because we want them to create new music.

And there’s the thing—the MacGuffin—that motivates and advances this story: it’s Eddie Wilson’s lost music, the mythical album called Leaves of Grass, the title borrowed from Walt Whitman, of course. It’s rumored to be a work of genius—an instant classic—that will sell millions of copies and make millions of dollars. And there is somebody—maybe even Eddie Wilson himself or one of his former band mates—who wants possession of that lost music and will do anything—including murder—to obtain it.

But here’s the strangest thing about the novel—the most improbable, gorgeous, and mythical part—the album, Leaves of Grass, is actually the recording of a legendary studio session featuring Eddie Wilson and—well, I don’t want to say too much so let’s just say that Walt Whitman would have been extremely excited to be sitting in the recording booth that night.

Okay, so yes, near the end of this introduction, you’re probably thinking, But isn’t this just a rock and roll novel? And isn’t it an early novel by a young man that is filled with hyperbole, awkward writing, and some poetic pretensions? And, yes, I’d have to be honest and say, This novel does have serious problems—foundational issues—but it’s also a gorgeous and achingly painful song of the soul. It’s not just a rock and roll novel. It is something more.

But, damn it, I have struggled to write more exactly about that something more. So perhaps I’ll let P.F. Kluge do it for me. This is Frank Ridgeway, keyboardist and lyricist for the Cruisers, and English Literature major, describing how he first came to be part of the band:

Well, there’s this phrase that Eddie sings: ‘Come on, baby … baby, come on!!’ Now Sal wanted him to sing it like it was prose, with no break and no emphasis on the repetition. ‘Come on, baby, baby, come on.’ ‘Nice and steady, like it’s a damn hula!’ Eddie said. Sal pictured dance tunes, and nobody should lose the beat, miss a step. Eddie wanted the pause and he wanted to hit the repetition hard, so that what was first heard as an invitation returned as a … scream … Then (Eddie) asked me what did I think. Should he sing it straight through, like Sal wanted? Or should he pause? You know what I said? It’s embarrassing now. I said, ‘I like the caesura.’

Yes, P.F. Kluge, that brave and crazy bastard, pauses in the middle of a rock and roll novel to invoke that poetic idea, the caesura, which is a timely pause, a kind of strategic silence. It’s not dictated by meter or beat, but by the meaning of what you’re trying to get across. But here’s the ballsiest thing: After Ridgeway invokes the caesura, Eddie Wilson fucking embraces the concept and makes it his own.

Yes, this is a novel about sex, drugs, rock and roll, murder, and the caesura. How could one not love it?

Writers and would-be writers—I put myself in the second group—are always carrying on about how they need an ideal place to work: a lighthouse, a forester’s cottage, a garret or a gatehouse. I’m laboring in much less picturesque surroundings: a rented trailer in a mobile-home park in Melbourne, Florida. I’ve been here two weeks already, and I’ll need at least another month.

It’s August down here now, and no matter what you’ve read about Florida being an all-year vacationland, the airconditioners are running round the clock, the grass—except where the airconditioners drip down—is adobe brown, and the tourists are pointed back to New Jersey, where I belong. Florida, this patch of it, is restored to the senior citizens.

I live a very regulated life. I’m like some of my neighbors, those morbid humorists who call themselves the purple hearts. A cardiac or two behind them, and not much they can do about the next one but watch their step, save their strength, live carefully to stretch out what little time they have.

The alarm rings at five. I plug in the coffee pot and walk through the trailer camp while it’s still dark and cool and safe. If there’s a new car parked outside a trailer, or an unfamiliar stranger strolling through the scrub pine, a light on that’s usually out, a radio off that’s usually on, I notice it. I know who sleeps late and who sleeps light, who gets company and who lives alone, who plays records, who plays cards. I know, approximately, what they’ve got and how long they have. Like the purple hearts, I want every day to be just like the one before it, no more, no less.

A lot of the old-timers are up at dawn. It’s as if, by establishing an early foothold, they improve their chances of lasting through the whole day. It’s a sentiment I’ve come to share, though I’m only in my mid-thirties. So I’m out there first thing, nodding to Walt Schumacher, who likes to walk a little before cooking breakfast for his wife, Minnie, who had a stroke. There’s Ed Riley, who goes through life hating the Yankees and that s.o.b. Billy Martin. And Al Ferraro, lame as his dog, Speed, and Martha Darmstadter, who mainly wants to advertise that she’s tired of being a widow: Two Social Security checks can live as cheaply as one. There’s not much conversation on the dawn patrol. Evenings are different—nervous, nosey, garrulous.

By nine o’clock, everybody’s behind their airconditioners. I stay indoors till dark. I’m either working or napping—restless, unsatisfying naps with all my clothes on, from which I awake feeling smothered and guilty about writing not done.

Early evenings, I’ve decided, are the time to relax, move around a little, take chances. So, in the hour of barbecues and garden hoses, I emerge with my lies: I am someone named Frank Dayton; I am divorced; I am recovering from an operation which everyone assumes uncovered a hopelessly metastasized cancer. All I had to do was mention the name of the hospital, a famous institution of last resort. Herman Biedermann hinted he could line up laetrile. I asked, instead, for an occasional lift to the I.G.A. store. Since I ditched my car to make my trail harder to follow, Herman is my supermarket connection. He drives, I carry the groceries.

I fit right in here. With remarkably few questions they’ve accepted me into this melancholy little commune, assuming that I am waiting for the same dread call that they’re expecting. In this, of course, they are dead right. No one asks how much time I have, but I know they’ve discussed it among themselves, and the answer has to be: not much.

1

It began on a Sunday morning.

Not in church. It was at the Safeway supermarket.

We do all our food-shopping on Sundays, before the churches let out, and it’s become something of a ritual in itself. Bringing home the bacon, bringing in the sheaves.

Do you remember an old daytime TV show called Supermarket Sweep? A half-dozen contestants line up at the checkout counter of one of those huge suburban stores where the aisles go on for miles; the cookies alone take up a hundred yards. At the buzzer, the competitors rush out the starting gate and race up and down the aisles, heaving one item after another into their shopping carts. They have five minutes to rampage through the store, and the winner is the one who makes it back to the cash registers with the most expensive load.

That’s my family.

While they cruise the aisles, I sit near the door, atop a pile of twenty-five-pound dog-food bags. Sometimes I flip through People magazine, or chat with my students’ parents, or smile and wave at my family: buy this not that, get the big size not the little.

On other Sundays, bad-mood Sundays, I just think. This was one of those. I watched my wife and two daughters moving around on the other side of the cash registers. I felt like an outsider, a spectator. They weren’t mine, they had nothing to do with me. As I watched them proceed from meats to vegetables, I realized for the first time that more than laziness or mere habit kept me from joining them: something inside me was keeping a distance. Something always had.

What would I have made of this, on my own? Probably nothing. I had grown used to being the man I was and had no idea how to go about changing. I’m sure my perching exile atop the dog-food bags would have become just another habit, like my scary little trick of driving with the headlights off on moonlit nights.

That’s when it all began.

I heard a radio playing music, rather loud. A group of checkout clerks and bag-boys were standing around somebody’s portable radio, listening to music and moving to the beat. They must have liked it. They turned it up again, and this time it was way too loud. The manager popped up behind his glass-walled cubbyhole, cast me an apologetic glance, and shouted for them to turn that damn thing down or they’d have to turn it off. The kids looked over at the manager. They’d heard him, but there was an irritating ten seconds of noncompliance while they waited for the music to end. By the time the manager was ready for a second warning, the song was over.

Doris and the girls reached the cash register just then, so there was nothing I could do right off. But the kid who helped carry our bags to the car—actually, all he did was push the cart through the parking lot and lift the bags into the trunk—had been in the group around the radio. I knew him from school. He was one of my students, a soon-to-be high school graduate who wasn’t college material and wasn’t worrying about it.

How are you doing, Anthony? I asked.

Fine, Mr. Ridgeway. Could you call me Tony? He asked politely, but in a way that told me he knew my control over him was ending. He was going to be a high school graduate. Named Tony.

Sure, Tony. Hey, I wanted to ask you about that song.

What song?

On the radio at the checkout counter. A bunch of you were listening. The manager broke it up.

Oh yeah … that song.

Yes.

Well … what about it?

Is it a new hit?

I guess so.

What’s it called?

I don’t know.

Who’s it by?

Got me. Some group. Sounded like a bunch of guys.

You like that sound?

Well … He backed off a little, abashed by the older generation’s curiosity. A little annoyed. He’d already spent so many mornings scrambling for answers to my questions, and they