WLT (19 page)

One day, Leo was on the radio talking bravely about the value of determination and how many impossible deeds had been achieved by people simply because they refused to quit, and a moment later he was flopped on the couch and complaining to Gene the engineer that Little Buddy had spit seeds in the studio and they stuck to Leo's pants.

“The little shit, somebody ought to drop a rock on him,” said Leo. “He's spoiled rotten. The kid sits and eats grapes by the bagful and sprays the seeds in all directions. Then he gets the runs and goes fills up the toilet and doesn't even flush it! What you gonna do with a kid like that? I'd say, drop him off the roof and be done with it.”

“Kinda sours a person on children in general,” said the engineer.

“Even his own father hates him,” said Leo.

Francis did not know Little Buddy Graves personally, only as a voice on
Friendly Neighbor
with his father Slim, singing “I Heard My Mother Call from Heaven” and “Little Bob the Newsboy,” and then later on their own show on Monday nights at 7:30. Slim strummed guitar and sang along, but Little Buddy, of course, was the star. He sang songs about sickly children with drunken fathers who lay dying in the snow. The show closed with Little Buddy kneeling at his radio bedside in prayer, asking God to bless his dad and his mother and his brothers Bobby and Billy and “all of the dear children listening tonight,” and when he chirped “Good-night, Daddy,” it made Francis think about his own daddy coming in to kiss him good night.

“I'm not kidding,” said Leo, lowering his voice. “I believe the kid is a midget. Check him out sometime. Follow him into the men's room and stand next to him and take a glance at his gonads. I bet you'll find that he's in his twenties and a little small for his age. Yank his hair while you're at it, five bucks says it's a rug.”

Francis had seen Little Buddy's picture, of course, in the souvenir songbook: he was short and plump and had long dangly golden ringlets.

“Naw, he's a kid,” said the engineer. “You can tell by the way he's scared of his old man. I've never seen a man rag on a kid like Slim does, he's on that little bugger about every little damn thing. Other day, he yells, ‘Don't look at me so dumb, ya look just like yer photographs, ya cheesehead.' He stands over him and makes him sign the autographs and makes sure the kid writes big and loopy. The kid gets so spooked, he starts forgetting the words or singing off-key and then—you never saw anybody chew out a kid like Slim does.” The engineer stiffened and glared and hissed, “Shape up ya little dipshit—ya keep slowing down, yer gonna put everbody to sleep—so quit farting around and
stay on the beat
or I'll kick your fanny out of here and get somebody else and nobody'll know the difference except it'll be better!” And then the engineer smiled warmly and said, “Welcome back, friends and neighbors, and now it's hymn time. Isn't it, Buddy? Yes, Buddy asked me last night, after he said his prayers, if we couldn't do ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus' on the broadcast today, so here it is. Son?” And the engineer whispered in a little high-pitched voice, “This is for all the little children, especially the ones who don't have enough food to eat.” And the engineer sang, in Little Buddy's voice,

And then he piped, “Bye, everybody, and see you reeeaal soon!”

Leo laughed. “By God, Gene, if it wasn't for the gin on your breath, I'd've thought it was the little shit himself.”

Gene smiled. “I've got him down pretty good.”

“That Christmas song? The one about the kid in the depot? They stole that song off a drunk in a dive on Hennepin Avenue.”

“I thought Slim wrote that.”

“Hell he did. He rolled a drunk for that song. Some poor guy, the bartender told him that Slim was on the radio, the guy comes up and says, I got this song, do you think it's any good? Slim read it, he said, Naw, that's nothin', but here, I'll give you a quart of Four Roses for it, so he wound up with the song and the guy winds up dead in the gutter and Slim takes the song and has the little shit record it and they earned
four thousand dollars
off it! That's right! Four grand!”

The engineer shook his head. “That's pretty dirty.”

“And those lyrics—that was a true story. The drunken guy was the little kid.”

“Little Jim?”

“Himself. He'd scrawled out the lyrics with carpenter's pencil on the back of an envelope. Slim had to ask Lily Dale to decipher the last verse. He told her the whole story. The guy's name was Jim, he was the kid, and the story was all true except that he hadn't gotten to heaven yet. He needed the Four Roses to put him over the top. He gave Slim his song and drank the whiskey and collapsed on the floor and Slim left him lying there and brought the song over to the studio and never even bothered getting the man's last name or his address.”

“His lucky day, I guess.”

Leo got up and poured another cup of coffee. He was getting warmed up to the subject. He didn't notice Francis sitting behind the Coke. Francis was studying the holes in the ceiling, counting them.

“Christmas in the Depot,” the song Slim stole from the drunken Jim, was what got Buddy and Slim the
Cottage Home Show
, six days a week, at $350 a week, said Leo. Mr. Dameron, the president of Cottage Home Cottage Cheese, heard Little Buddy sing it and had to pull his car over to the side of Highway 12 and sit and weep. He didn't know Slim had swiped it off a dying man. Mr. Dameron's mother was ill in Des Moines. He had just turned fifty. Cottage Home stock was down to 2.28, due to lagging sales. He had had harsh words with an employee that morning and had fired the man on the spot. He had left work early, feeling depressed, to return to his mansion, Brearley, on Lake Minnetonka and there perhaps to take his own life. To Mr. Dameron, “Christmas in the Depot” was a call to action. He rehired the man, visited his mother, hired Little Buddy and Slim, and sales of Cottage Home almost doubled. Mr. Dameron said, “Nothing sold more cottage cheese than when Little Buddy said,
oh boy
.”

Francis had heard the Cottage Home commercials, of course. Everybody knew them. Kids at West High would say, “Oh boy!” in a high-pitched voice and everybody laughed.

Leo said the commercial took away his appetite for cottage cheese forever, but what could you do? They were a big hit. The little shit's face appeared on the front of the carton, “Little Buddy's Cottage Home Songbook” was published and then a storybook and then a coloring book, and Dameron paid WLT a bonus to expand the show to a half-hour and then signed a two-year contract at double the existing rate—evidently, the little shit was going over big with the friends and neighbors.

“The man must be a pederast to pay $350 a week for a so-called child to mince around like that. So what does that make us—pimps, I guess,” said Leo. Francis did not know what a pederast and a pimp were, but he could guess. Leo snorted. “If that kid's a kid, then I'm Greta Garbo. I keep seeing razor nicks on the little nipper's cheeks, don't you?”

Gene said he thought that Little Buddy was no more than ten years old.

“Some hermaphrodites do not experience the change of voice until their late twenties,” said Leo. “They have only one gonad, like John Wilkes Booth. A famous case. Booth had a piping soprano voice and played women's roles until he was thirty. Had no lead in his pencil. That's why he shot Lincoln. Another was Typhoid Harry, the Georgia farm boy who milked his father's cows day and night and spread the deadly disease that almost wiped out Atlanta. Another hermaphrodite. An accident of nature, but the pattern for these little fellas is not cheery.” Leo put two cubes of sugar in his coffee. “Think about it. Little Buddy going berserk with a handgun. Don't laugh. A child is more than capable of handling firearms, especially if he's in his early twenties and a freak of nature. Even hermaphrodites
want
a woman, you know. The desire is even more pronounced with the lack of apparatus. That's why the little shit is such a winner with the women, they can hear that sob in his voice.” Leo sipped his coffee. “A real man's man can no more sing than a dog can read books. Singing,
any
kind of performance: it's pure frustration that causes it. Blue balls. Yes. It's true. Men who can get it up don't need to prance around and lay it on like show people do, that's a fact. All that la-di-da and the costumes and the big grins, that's hermaphrodism talking. The same, by the way, is not true of women.” He leaned forward and pointed a finger into his own chest. “I,” he said, “have no talent for performance whatsoever, nor any desire to have any. I am quite happy to be normal.”

A
ll the radio stars trooped through the Green Room; Francis saw them all—kindly Dad Benson and sweet Alma Melting and Miss Lily Dale in her wheelchair, the Norsk Nightingale who (surprise) didn't talk with an accent at all and his name wasn't Jens but Jon, a big rangy bald fellow who sang like Gene Austin when he donned a black mask and became The Masked Balladeer on
The Calhoun Club
, and Faith and Dale Snelling, a husband and wife who hardly acknowledged each other, and Little Becky. She was the only one who noticed Francis.

“You waiting for somebody?” she said once. Yes, he was waiting to talk to certain people. He was writing a term paper about radio's role in the war.

“You sure you're not just hanging around hoping to see my tits?”

No, he assured her that he was not.

She snorted and leaned over him. “But you wouldn't mind seeing them.”

He didn't know how to answer this. He didn't want to insult her, but on the other hand, she looked to him like one of those persons whose tits he definitely would
not
care to see.

“Well, maybe someday I'll let you have a little peek,” she said. She turned away and knocked an ashtray off the table and a hundred butts shot all over the room, ashes drifting down like snow. “Oh shit!” she said. Francis immediately started gathering butts off the rug but then suddenly sprang forward head-first into the wall when she goosed him. It was a deep goose, a serious grab with her thumb up his bunghole, and he banged his face on the wall molding and landed on his head and shoulder, scrunched up by the couch. She shrieked with joy. “What a clyde you are!” Just then a kid in short pants and a Navy jumper rushed into the room, a boy with golden ringlets bouncing—Francis recognized Little Buddy, though the boy looked glum. “Didja get him?” he cried. “You promised I could see!”

“You're too late. I already drilled him.” She looked at Francis. “Didn't I?”

Francis shook his head. “I don't know what she's talking about,” he told the boy. Little Buddy looked up at Little Becky. “You didn't goose him, you big fat liar!” He kicked her in the ankle and ran and hid behind the couch, chuckling to himself. But Little Becky was after Francis. She approached him, eyes narrowed, and shoved him. He shoved back.

“I did so goose you and I'm gonna take your pants down and prove it to you,” she sneered. “C'mere, Buddy, and have a look at his rosy-red rectum.” She made a ferocious dive for Francis's good corduroys and he stepped back and brought up his knee and cracked her a good one. She plopped down, hands to her face, and moaned. Her hands came away bright red with blood.

“You asswipe,” she muttered, rising slowly to her feet. Little Buddy snickered as she reached for the ashtray. Francis grabbed her wrist, and they struggled, her spitting in his face and trying to butt him, but he threw her down, just as Dad and Leo and Gene strolled in.

Little Becky burst into tears. “He punched me!” she cried, running to Leo with open arms, but Leo side-stepped her. “It's about time,” he said. “I wish it had been me.”

Dad told her to go wash her face and she turned and glared at Francis and fled from the room. Little Buddy came out from behind the couch. “She didn't goose him,” he said, gravely. “He hit her in the nose.”

“Look out or he'll do it to you,” said Leo.

The child shook his little ringlets. “If he does, I'll shoot him with a gun.”

“If you do,” said Leo, “you'll go to the electric chair and they'll fry you until your hair turns straight and your eyes fall out.”

“Leo—” said Dad, but all three of them were laughing. Leo turned to Francis.

“I'm sorry,” said Francis. “I didn't mean to hurt her.”

Leo said it was nothing to apologize for. “You ought to get a medal,” he said. And the next day, he gave Francis a coffee cup of his own, on which he had written, “The Man Who Handled the Monster.” Leo showed him where to hang it, over the sink, in the white cabinet where all the stars kept their coffee cups, and every day when Francis came around he got down his cup. After awhile he even developed a taste for coffee.