The Fame Game (26 page)

“Worms?”

“You heard me. Worms. I found them. What’s the matter with you?”

“Who asked you to go through my things?”

“I was only putting away the clean laundry.”

“You don’t have to do that. My dresser is my property. I can put away my own laundry.”

“A mother can’t do anything right,” her mother complained. “I try to be nice to my child and you scream at me.”

“I put the worms there so you’d keep out of my drawer.”

“If you want me to keep out of your drawer then there must be something there you don’t want me to find.”

“There’s nothing.”

“What don’t you want me to find?”

“Why don’t you trust me?” Barrie screamed.

“Stop screaming!”

“Why can’t you leave me alone?”

“A mousetrap. I found a mousetrap last week. You certainly are a silly child. Why can’t you grow up?”

“Why won’t you let me grow up?”

“All those pictures of that actor in your room. It’s sickening. You should be going out with boys.”

“I’m fourteen years old!”

“You’re old enough to grow up.”

“I won’t grow up till you stop spying on me!”

“I’m your
mother
.”

What did that mean? A mother had a right to do anything reprehensible, anything lousy and sneaky and rotten, because she was a mother? Mother meant rat? No wonder the black boys at school called everybody “Mother.” A mother was the worst thing you could be.

But she didn’t hate her mother, not really. Her mother hardly existed, except when she insisted on intruding. It was just that she kept intruding so much, except when you really wanted her. For instance, you couldn’t just sit down and have an intelligent conversation with your mother about politics or the war in Vietnam or the draft or anything. Her mother was an arch-conservative. She thought people who went on protest marches were all hoodlums, even the priests and nuns and rabbis who went. The Hoodlum Priest. Her father was even worse. He liked Nixon.

To tell the truth, Barrie wasn’t vitally interested in world affairs, but she did have some opinions on them, and she thought the proper kind of conversation to have with your parents would be a dignified discussion about world affairs, not some silly argument about morals or sex or boys. But parents seemed to think that they were on this earth to instruct and forbid, and you couldn’t have an intelligent, cool conversation with them about anything without them taking sides and getting all excited. Which was a shame, Barrie thought, because parents were older and ought to be better informed than kids, and they would be very useful if they weren’t so bigoted and emotional. They absolutely refused to get on her level or let her get on theirs. You just had to avoid them whenever possible.

She didn’t discuss world affairs with her friends. Friends were to talk about feelings with, because they had the same feelings and they understood. You needed friends to make you feel less afraid and alone about things. She missed Donna and Michelle a lot now that they talked about their steadies all the time.

There was one other thing they talked about a lot, and that was the girl who’d been killed one night right in their neighborhood with a whole lot of neighbors looking on and doing nothing. That story haunted them all, and they went back to it again and again.

“You just can’t expect anybody to help you in this world,” Michelle said. “You’ve got to have a boyfriend with you all the time to protect you, because if you go out alone you can get killed. I’m glad I have Johnny.”

“A midget like that?” Barrie said.

“Oh yeah? Well, Johnny bought a switchblade knife at some store on Forty-second Street and I want you to know if anybody ever tried to rape me he would use it.”

“Yeah?” the other two girls breathed in awe.

“And he’s taking karate after school. He’s little but he’s no fool.”

“Herb believes in nonviolence,” Donna said. “Next year when he’s eighteen he’s going to burn his draft card.”

The girls were impressed. Burning your draft card was braver than carrying a knife or learning karate.

“What would Herb do if anyone jumped on you in a dark street?” Michelle asked.

Donna was stumped. “Run?”

“That’s pretty low,” Barrie said.

“I guess he’d fight to protect me,” Donna said. “He wouldn’t fight a cop, but he’d fight a murderer or a mugger.”

“Mad Daddy would protect me,” Barrie said.

“Oh, Mad Daddy, Mad Daddy,” Donna said. “Mad Daddy doesn’t
exist
. He’s just a star. Why don’t you get a real boyfriend?”

“I hate walking the two blocks home from the bus,” Barrie said to change the subject. She hated it when the girls were unsympathetic. “Those two blocks are just where that girl got killed. I just hate it.”

“Get a boyfriend,” said Michelle.

“I’d be just as scared of the boyfriend as a real mugger,” Barrie admitted.

“Why?” Donna asked. “You don’t have to go to bed with him. I don’t go to bed with Herb and he doesn’t expect me to. I’m going to wait until I’m at least twenty-one.”

“Do you think you can?” Michelle asked.

“Sure.”

“Well, I don’t do anything with Johnny because I don’t really love him, but if I loved him as much as you love Herb I don’t think I could wait that long.”

“I don’t really care about making out that much, one way or the other,” Donna said. “I like it, but I don’t want to sleep with him, I really don’t.”

The talk turned to one of the girls in their class who had done it with a boy and then told her best friend who was the biggest gossip in the school. Of course everyone found out about it. They all agreed it was embarrassing, especially since the boy wasn’t in love with her and she had only done it with him because
she
was in love with
him
. The boy really had to be in love with you if you were going to risk doing it with him. Otherwise you’d make a fool of yourself. And one of the teachers had told that girl’s mother that if she didn’t watch out her daughter was going to go bad. How sick! Imagine having the teacher talk to your mother as if you were a mental case! How gross!

“A girl can’t win,” Barrie said. “If you go out with a boy, he wants to make out, and if you’re all alone, who’s going to protect you coming home from school?”

“Why don’t you just get your brother to wait for you at the bus stop?” Donna said.

“Rusty? Are you kidding? He never thinks about anybody but himself and that pig he goes with.”

Nobody suggested she ask her father to wait for her. You didn’t do something like that. Having your father wait for you at the bus stop in front of all your friends was even worse than getting killed by an imaginary rapist.

“Besides, I can’t imagine anybody ever trying to rape you,” Michelle said, looking at Barrie’s underdeveloped form objectively.

The girls started pawing through the latest hairdo magazines, but Barrie’s mind was on serious things. The world was so full of violence! People getting killed in the streets, cops beating up kids on peaceful protest marches, the war, babies getting bombed and burned, that nut who set himself on fire outside the UN, kids not much older than they were committing suicide because they were getting bad marks at college, those hippies getting mutilated and murdered in the Village last year, all those assassinations, one after the other, police dogs, Mace, fire hoses, people with blood running down their faces … everybody was nuts. This was the world everybody was in such a hurry to make her grow up into.

Why didn’t everybody just let her alone? What was such a groove about growing up anyway? Who wanted to be a part of that violent, stupid world? If only life could always be like the Mad Daddy Show, with his innocent little creatures and his wonderful, kind, loving, sexy self: the best, most beautiful man in the world. She felt so helpless. Sure, she wanted a boyfriend … but it would have to be Mad Daddy. She loved and trusted him so much. With him life would be just like it ought to be, peaceful and loving and happy and fun. She’d find some way to meet him someday. Every day she was getting older, and soon she’d be the kind of a girl a man might look at without turning right away as if she wasn’t there. She felt so lonely and so sad. All her big talk about defending herself was just bravado. She didn’t want to be alone. She was so little. Sometimes she just wanted to spend the rest of her life in front of that screen, living in her fantasy of Mad Daddy forever. And other times, like now, she wanted to grow out of her fantasy, to actually meet him, to face him with her love and her need.

She looked at the slightly gross faces of her two best friends, Donna and Michelle, bent over the hairdo magazine. All that time they spent on their hair and their faces, and they were still only slightly pimply teen-aged girls. They looked like a hundred other girls. Everybody looked alike whom they knew. Only she was different. She was
interesting
-looking. She’d spent hours in front of the mirror and she knew she was interesting-looking. Maybe if he ever met her, Mad Daddy would like her. Nobody had ever said he was married. Oh, maybe all her dreams would come true!

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sam Leo Libra detested summer because it was hot and you sweated. You could shower five times a day and still you felt unclean. He rented an air-conditioned chauffeured limousine for the summer months and managed to keep his time in the actual hot, filthy street down to about twelve minutes all told, getting in and out of the car on his various rounds, but still he wished the summer would be over.

Arnie Gurney was in Reno at a new club, and Libra had managed with very little difficulty to talk Lizzie into going there for ten days as his emissary. She liked lying in the sun. Elaine Fellin and the kid were going with her. He suspected that Elaine was going there to case the joint in the event that she decided to stay for six weeks and divorce Mad Daddy. The hostility between Elaine and Daddy was becoming so bad that Libra was afraid it would affect Daddy’s work, and so he had put the idea into Lizzie’s head that she take her best friend along and stay longer than ten days if she felt like it. He also gave Lizzie five thousand dollars to gamble with. That ought to keep her there for a year. Although Libra hated gambling (except in business), he had a profound respect for Lizzie’s gambling ability—she knew just what she was doing and never lost. Lizzie was one of the greatest crap shooters on the East or West Coast.

Good riddance to Lizzie! Good riddance to Elaine! Happy, peaceful bachelorhood! Now he could work twenty hours a day. The Mad Daddy Show had started the midnight slot as a summer replacement, and if it went, which he knew it would, it would continue in the fall. Since it was being taped in the afternoon as always because Mad Daddy was used to that, Elaine had not felt herself rejected at not being asked to stay around for the première. It really was the same show, except that it was reviewed again as a night show. The reviews, as Libra had expected, were raves. Adults found it winsome and sharply satirical; a perfect balm for the summer doldrums.

Reports from the Coast said that Sylvia Polydor’s hatchet-murderess film was going to be a big money-maker. Libra had already lined up a sequel for her, and although he had heard some disturbing reports about her drinking, a few long-distance calls reassured him that she was her same intelligent self and the drinking reports were greatly exaggerated. He didn’t blame her for hitting the sauce on the set in a dog like that, but she knew as well as he did that these pictures were the only thing she could do right now and she had as healthy a respect for money as any woman alive.

The Marilyn Monroe Story
part had fallen through for Bonnie, which was a disappointment, but those were the breaks. The kid had taken it with surprising equanimity. She was a good kid. Libra had grown rather fond of her. She behaved herself well, with dignity and discretion, and staying with Gerry had done worlds of good for her. He congratulated himself again for his instincts. He was busy reading other scripts that might be right for her, and he knew that before the first of the year he would find a starring vehicle which would really put Bonnie Parker on the map. Bonnie was applying herself to her private acting lessons and had learned how to pitch her voice better. You could never tell it was a guy. Her throaty voice was excellent; it reminded him somewhat of early June Allyson.

Silky Morgan was doing well at acting class, Simon Budapest reported, and she had just signed for the hoped-for musical,
Mavis!
, the story of a black girl from the slums who becomes a congresswoman, running on the Love Ticket. The show was a piece of shit, but Dick Devere would direct it with all the psychedelic know-how he had brought to his television shows and it would be as fresh and new as today.

Silky and the Satins continued to be a real money-maker, so Silky would continue to cut records with the group even though she was in the show. You never knew with a show; it could have everything and still be a flop—and if it was a hit it could only help the group. The Satins had hysterics when they learned Silky had been singled out for the lead in a Broadway show and they had been left behind, but a few well-placed threats from Libra put them back in line and they finally accepted it. They were all rich now. They had brought their relatives in to New York for a vacation, all two million of them, dressed in sequins and feathers and diamond pins on mink stoles—enough to make you fall on the floor laughing. They went to all the night clubs and had a hell of a time. Now that they were running around like oil-rich Indians, there were requests from charities for money, requests which were greeted by blank stares of disbelief.

“What charity?” Tamara had said, as spokesman for the other girls. “We ain’t finished sending all our brothers and sisters to school yet. We our
own
charity, man.”

“You can’t blame them,” Silky had told Libra. “We had nothing, and now we’re making it up to ourselves. When we get our whole families fixed up decently,
then
we can worry about strangers. Who ever gave
us
charity when we had nothing?”

Franco’s Gilda collection had gone into production, and it was even more grotesque and wonderful than anyone had dreamed. It would change the entire face of fashion for the fall, and Franco was ecstatic. Fred, in Gilda wig and shoulder pads, was set for the October cover of
Vogue
, and somehow exquisite Fred managed to make the gag look really almost like something every woman would seriously want for herself. Fred could wear a barrel and make it look like what every woman needed. Libra had never really gotten over not getting his hands on Fred, but at least he owed Bonnie to her and he was not angry, only a bit nostalgic and disappointed.