Homeward Bound (8 page)

Highlighted by hand claps, a popping snare drum, fast-walking bass, and “Rock Around the Clock”–style guitar arpeggios, “True or False” features Paul hiccup-singing in a faux-southern drawl to the girl who may or may not adore him above all others. To put her on the spot, the jiving swain presents her with a pop quiz.

You lahk to call me on-hawn the telephone, bay-buh

Please answer “true-hoo” or “false.”

More questions follow. Does she like to turn the lights off when they're alone? Would she be sad if he went away? Can she not wait until they make a date? And what of this other fellow he sees her with when they go to parties? It's hard to know, since Paul's hillbilly gurgle often veers into the unintelligible. But the girl in question is supposed to offer simple true-or-false responses, which the singer will score the moment she drops her pencil.

Weeel, I'm a-checkin' on your answers so I can plainly see

If my bay-bee's true or fah-halse to me!

The pop quiz conceit is a bit more pedagogic than you'd expect from a rock 'n' roll song, but Louis Simon's “True or False” has a goofball charm that Paul's unhinged performance nearly suits. Paul's self-composed B-side, a by-the-numbers ballad called “Teenage Fool,” falls the other way. Tracing the stock doo-wop chords that Louis taught Paul just a few years before, the tune is set to tinkling piano and a doleful saxophone, with a moaning, sighing vocal that vanishes from memory (thankfully) once the needle hits the playout groove. Still, the far bouncier “True or False” was the A-side, and now that “Schoolgirl” had broken through, who knew what else was possible?

Eventually, Paul told Artie about “True or False” and the side deal he'd struck with Prosen. He'd kept it a secret from his best friend for nearly two months but, amazingly, he still wasn't all that apologetic. It was his dad's tune, he said. It wasn't that big a deal. And even if it became a hit, what difference would it make? He and Artie were having their chance to be the Everly Brothers, and he had decided he wanted a shot at being Elvis. What was so wrong with that? A
lot
, Artie pointed out; or maybe he shouted it. Whatever the scenario, it was not a happy moment for either of them.
We're a team. You went behind my back. You
lied
to me!
This was double-dealing bullshit, and Paul knew it. It only got worse when Artie told his parents what was going on. They were furious, too, not just at Paul but at Louis and also Prosen. What kind of people behave like that? It's not as if the Garfunkels were entirely naïve. Jack was a salesman; Rose worked as a court stenographer. They knew all about negotiations and contracts, and how easy it was to get screwed if you didn't read the fine print. But to be screwed by your neighbors, people you've been friendly with for years?

Paul shrugged it all off—at least until his copies of Big Records No. 614, “True or False”/“Teenage Fool,” arrived at his house in Queens. Now it was Paul's turn to be furious. Only a few weeks earlier, he, Prosen, and Louis had agreed that his solo records would be released under his new pop pseudonym, Jerry Landis. But Prosen, without telling Paul or Louis, had decided to credit the record to True Taylor.
True Taylor
? Who the hell was that? Even worse, Prosen had ignored their agreement that the composer of “Teenage Fool” also be listed as Jerry Landis. Instead, the executive had written in “by Paul Simon,” thereby confusing the matter all the more. The first thing they had agreed upon when they met was that the Simon and Garfunkel names weren't going to be a part of their pop star identities. They were Tom and Jerry, high schoolers from Anytown, USA, not Paul and Artie from the most Jewish high school in the most Jewish section of Queens, New York.

Paul and Louis demanded that Prosen recall the records he'd printed and reissue them with corrected labels, but the executive wasn't having any of that. The record was already in the shops. Pulling it now would destroy its commercial momentum. And of course it was Prosen's call in the end. But “commercial momentum”?
What
commercial momentum? “True or False” received none of the publicity Prosen had generated for “Hey, Schoolgirl,” and the new record's sales statistics showed it. In fact, if it sold anything beyond a small scattering of discs, Paul never heard about it. Thrown into the same marketplace that had embraced Tom and Jerry, poor old True Taylor found no love whatsoever. He and his song evaporated the moment they came into being.

Artie wasn't what you'd call broken up by his friend's failed attempt to carve out his own chunk of pop glory. But Tom and Jerry's next single, “Our Song,” a chipper breakup song inspired by the Kentucky end of the Everly Brothers' catalogue, also vanished without a trace, in early February, as did “Pretty Baby,” in May. At least there was still demand for Tom and Jerry to play at sock hops and concerts on the teenage circuit around New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Prosen shipped them to Chicago in early May to perform alongside Jimmie Rodgers, Connie Francis, and Mahalia Jackson at the Music Operators of America convention at the battleship-size Morrison Hotel, which would have seemed like a greater show of faith in the “Hey, Schoolgirl” duo if it hadn't taken place just as Prosen was preparing to release a “Tom and Jerry” single that had been recorded by two different Queens-raised singers. Indeed, “Baby Talk,” the A-side of Big Records No. 621, was the work of two fellows whom Prosen had dubbed Tom Layton and Jerry Darcey, in the hope of launching them as a kind of Tom and Jerry 2.0. Prosen slapped the already released Paul and Artie–performed “Two Teenagers” on the B-side, but given the dismal performance of the two “Schoolgirl” follow-ups, Prosen had already moved on.
*

So had Paul and Artie. They still played a few shows as Tom and Jerry, mostly for school functions or group-billed sock hops in either the city or one of the nearby suburbs, but their brief spasm of success, and the selfishness Paul displayed once it started, had webbed their friendship with cracks. They could still talk about music and their friends and get excited about the sock hop or school dance they were booked to play at the end of the week. Also, they teamed up to file a lawsuit against Sid Prosen for royalties he owed them, and would share their happiness when they received fifteen hundred dollars from him at the end of the school year. Still, the tenderness between them had faded. You can still love someone who shoves you aside, but you can no longer trust him in quite the same way.

They found other things to keep them busy. Paul had never made the varsity baseball team under Coach George Lapp, but Lapp's successor, Chester Gusick, brought the pint-size sixteen-year-old onto the squad and was impressed by the kid's speed and springlike bat. “He was a little fella, and he could draw walks, run fast, and steal bases,” Gusick says. “And he was a pretty good hitter, too.” When the season began, Gusick installed Paul as his starting right fielder and lead-off batter, and kept him there all season. It was a rainy spring, and Forest Hills lost more than a few games to the weather, but Paul played well, and the team battled its way to the top of its division. His most heroic moment came on May 13, when he stole home base in a hard-fought game against Grover Cleveland High School. Paul finished that season among the leaders in the final Public Schools Athletic League averages, with twenty-seven at bats, twelve runs, eight hits, and a .296 batting average—not spectacular numbers, but good enough to earn him an honorable mention for the All-Queens squad at the end of the season.

Paul invested most of his share of the fifteen-hundred-dollar “Hey, Schoolgirl” royalties in a sporty red Chevrolet Impala, a hard-top convertible with triple carbs, twin headlights, chrome edging, a lunging front end, and a long winged rear end. The interior was spacious, the bench seats trimmed in shiny red leatherette. It was the perfect ride for a graduating honor student with a hit single in his past and his entire future lying just beyond the end of summer vacation. He and Artie would continue on their independent roads, with Artie headed to upper Manhattan to attend the city's Ivy League Columbia University and Paul staying in the neighborhood to attend Queens College, the most elite institution in New York's City College system.

The former partners wouldn't speak again for five years. At least, that's how they told their story later. Others would recall that period quite differently. Still, there was no arguing the fate of Paul's sparkling Impala, that cherry red symbol of his run as a teenage idol. Driving home through Kew Gardens Hills one evening, he was within a block or two of his parents' house when he smelled smoke. Flames leaped from the hood, and it was all he could do to pull over and jump out before the gleaming beast was filled with fire, the upholstery ablaze, a dense black curtain rising from its every crease and crack. A fire engine came, but by then it was too late. The car was a wreck, its windows smashed, its glamorous white wall tires reduced to puddles. Paul watched glumly while the firefighters picked the wreckage apart, sprayed it down with foam, and made sure there was nothing left to burn. It was his entire share of “Hey, Schoolgirl,” he realized, burned, smashed, and ruined in the gutter. When there was nothing left to see, he looked up and realized he was on Seventy-Second Avenue, a short walk from his parents' house, and within sight of the Garfunkels' front door.

 

CHAPTER 5

TWO TEENAGERS

Paul got to Queens College in September 1958, an undergraduate in a dark V-neck sweater, a neatly tucked button-up shirt, jeans, and Adler elevator shoes. Maybe his dark hair was piled higher than the average undergrad, but not so much that you'd look twice. It was a faint signifier, a hint that there was a bit more going on here than met the eye. He didn't talk about his other life, not at first. If some people remembered hearing “Hey, Schoolgirl” or reading one of the newspaper stories about Tom and Jerry eight months earlier, virtually none of them connected their serious new schoolmate to the chipper teen they would have recognized from the pop song. Paul would mention it to a friend here or there, but when he perched on the stairs somewhere to strum his guitar, “Hey, Schoolgirl” was not part of his repertoire.

Queens College wasn't Columbia University, as Artie's excited talk about his new school reminded Paul. The campus was a mile from the Simons' house, an easy walk down Seventieth Road to Kissena Avenue and a short walk to what is definitely an urban campus, its grassy quad, compact plazas, and scattering of office and classroom buildings only a few blocks from the new Long Island Expressway. Still, Queens College had a grandeur of its own, as an elite kind of Roosevelt-era utopian society where the children of garbage men, maids, truck drivers, and tool-and-die operators could learn the secrets of the universe that came tumbling off the tongues of some of the nation's greatest thinkers. Admissions were strictly meritocratic. Tuition cost nothing. The usual collegiate accouterment, the gilded halls and ivy-cloaked brick, didn't factor. Most of the buildings were new and the caretakers too conscious of the mortar-crumbling damage the vines could inflict to indulge such ivory tower sentiment.

The Queens College of the late 1950s sparked with the pent energy of the young and the unleashed. Progressive idealism filled the classrooms, dissent rang from the student publications, and civil disobedience fomented in the cafeteria and campus quad. Civil rights activists were a constant presence on campus, as were labor organizers, antinuclear petitioners, and the pioneering women's libbers—all that and so much more for an incoming freshman to wrap himself around: classes and professors and pretty girls and figuring out who was who and why they mattered. Pick up the college's
Rampart
newspaper and you'd start to recognize names and faces: the president of this, the featured speaker at the rally against that, the profs who wrote the fieriest letters about the administration and its sins against thought, speech, and students' rights. You really only had to skim the thing to sense the mounting frustration. Paul kept his distance. He was there to be a student, so he focused on the classroom. He signed up for the freshman usuals and talked about following a prelaw path, but connected most with his English classes, reading widely and developing lifetime attachments to writers ranging from James Joyce to John Updike, from the modernist poet Wallace Stevens to the Jewish-American writer Saul Bellow. Paul scanned poetry with care, and when he found a line he liked, he'd copy it into his notebook and look for ways to work its words or feeling into his own writing. When spring arrived he took measure of the fraternities and pledged Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish house known for its control over the student government and for having, as its rush advertisements read, the “Best Men on Campus.” Paul pledged, survived the indignities of Hell Night, and was delighted to be tapped.

He was even more delighted when he started going to the parties and the dances, hoisting a beer and goofing with the guys and chatting up the girls. He could be enormously charming and was obviously bright, so the AEPi guys put him on the fast track to leadership, a position he used in both serious and less serious ways as he started taking on authority during his sophomore year. Sometimes he'd lead off-campus romps to the beach, where he'd show the gang which fence they could climb to avoid paying the user's fee. Friends also recall his leadership the night he and another frat house head conducted a few younger AEPi brethren to Harlem, where they engaged a couple of prostitutes to relieve the younger men of their virginities.

Paul loved the typical frat boy antics, but once he soaked up the high-democratic atmosphere of the school, he made a point of introducing a more enlightened attitude to the fraternity. Appointed rush chair during his sophomore year, he persuaded his brothers to eliminate the physical abuses of hazing in favor of a Dostoyevskian panel of inquisitors who grilled the pledges on their beliefs, ethics, morals, and their philosophies on the meaning of life. He orchestrated campaigns to tap pledges from tougher, poorer, or culturally diverse backgrounds. Given the force field of his charisma, Paul's frat brothers fell easily under his influence, developing new interests in philosophy and, not surprisingly, the internal dynamics of the songs on the radio. Paul could talk you through the whole Top 40 with astonishing detail, describing why this one song was a stiff and why this other one was so fucking brilliant. In his car with a few brothers one night, he turned the radio to one of the obscure stations only he knew about and suddenly ordered everyone to stop talking: “You gotta hear this!” It was a hypnotic groove by Olatunji from his album
Drums of Passion
. It was so mesmerizing that the car went perfectly silent, and Paul pulled over so they could all absorb the African rhythm together.