Дональд Уэстлейк - Baby, Would I Lie?

“I admit I dropped out of high school, which I don’t recommend to any kids out there that might see this, but my excuse is, I didn’t do it until I had a place to go. Me and my best friend, Cal Denny, and I’m proud to say he’s still my best friend to this day, we put together a tape — you know, the old reel-to-reel tape; I’m talkin years ago here — we put together a tape of me on guitar and Cal on drums, except we didn’t have drums, just had Cal with some sticks, hittin everything in sight, and the two of us singin, and we did our own versions of Eddy Arnold songs and Hank Williams songs and sent the tape off to a record company in Florida, and they wrote us and said if we’d come down sometime they’d audition us, no promises. So we quit school right then and there, the both of us, and hitchhiked on down to Tallahassee, and that was how it all got started.

“Of course, I still got kin in and around Troutman, and I get back there as often as I can, which isn’t often enough, but when I can. Because, you know, Lynn, the one thing for sure for all of us in this business, in this show business, is, you got to remember where you come from. You got to remember who you are, or you’ll go nuts. You got to keep in touch with your roots.”

A lot of that bushwah was true, more or less, but it wasn’t anywhere near what you could call the whole truth. What it left out, mostly, was Ray Jones himself and how he learned to deal with the world.

Ray started as the runt of the litter, fourth of nine kids, not late enough to be the baby, not cute enough to be the pet, not big enough or strong enough to fight his own battles. A scrawny, undernourished little weed, he learned early on that his choice in life was a simple one: Be smart or be tromped. He was never going to get what he wanted just by reaching for it, like the big guys, so he had to find some other way to satisfy himself. Or else stop wanting things.

Never. Born hungry, Ray was hungry his entire life, but he’d never let the hunger show. He was hungry for food, for love, for success, for ease, for safety, for money, for women. He was born hungry for everything . Fortunately, he’d also been born smart.

Indirection. Guile. Use your brains. Use the other guy’s strength. Get what you want without anybody noticing you wanted it, or they’ll take it away from you.

He perfected his survival techniques in that grammar school with the famous old guitar, which really did exist, in a janitor’s closet, though nobody connected with the school gave a damn about it or him or ever encouraged him toward music or any other damn thing except to show up every day and keep his mouth shut unless asked a direct question. He’d borrow that guitar when nobody was looking, practice where nobody could hear, and slip it back when nobody was around. He was his own encouragement.

The main thing Ray learned in school was how to use his brains as an asset rather than a liability. If he did homework for the big dumb guys, they’d be on his side in case of trouble. At the same time, his own homework was sloppy and uncaring, and usually got a lower mark than the same assignment he’d done for somebody else. That way, he never got a reputation as a brain , which in a poor hick school is the worst thing that can happen. Only the big dumb guys he was helping could have known he was actually sharp as a winter wind; but the whole point about them was that they couldn’t put two and two together, wasn’t it?

Later, in the consolidated central high school, there was always somebody else he could convince to lead the way, whenever there was a chance somebody might get burnt. Most people like to lead, or to think they’re leading, and Ray was happy to encourage this leadership belief in those he was putting into danger. Sometimes it was Cal Denny who opened the door or stole the bottle or whatever it might be, but usually somebody else; from early on, Ray had a warm spot for Cal, who was big and dumb without being mean, and so Ray wouldn’t use him as a foil or a battering ram unless there just wasn’t anybody else available.

Ray’s leaving school and hitching to Florida in search of a music career did have some truth in it, though not much. He and Cal actually did make the tape he talked about, on a tape recorder Cal had stolen — while Ray stood watch from a safe distance — from the high school music department, a section of the school devoted exclusively to the marching band. (Ray wasn’t a member of the marching band, they having no use for a guitar and he having no use for them.)

But music wasn’t the main reason Ray left town all of a sudden in the middle of his sixteenth year, dragging Cal along for protection. The main reason was a girl, the first great love of his life. He doesn’t mention her now, partly because it ended badly but also because he can no longer remember her name; not that he tries hard.

This girl had a regular boyfriend, one of the few rich kids in town, son of the drugstore owner. He it was who took her to the movies, bought her sodas, necked with her in his father’s car. But it was Ray who got her pregnant.

Whoops. It wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t lied to him, another lesson he carried with him from his high school years. She’d lied because she wanted to get away from her home, and the only way she could think of to do that was get married. She wanted to marry Ray because she thought he’d be more fun than the drugstore boy, so she lied, and then she pretended she was surprised and scared and helpless.

At that time, Ray’d had the letter from the record company for about four months but hadn’t done anything about it because he found their manner tepid, not even offering him bus fare for the audition. But now he pulled out this letter, showed it to the girl while holding his thumb over the date, and said, “I’m not gonna marry you. See this letter? These music people want me. I’m goin to Florida and I’m not comin back. My advice is, get into the backseat of that drugstore car and get yourself knocked up all over again.”

Which is what she did, being smarter than he’d thought. And that’s why Ray went off to Florida to find the life that was waiting for him, originally as a sideman on extremely minor-league session dates, playing other people’s music in other people’s groups, but learning, every single day.

The following year — they were in Nashville by then — somebody told Cal the baby’d been born, so Ray’s got a kid out there someplace, grown up now — boy or girl, he never did ask. Be funny if the kid was in the audience some night, neither of them knowing. A song in that? Nah.

Actually, the birth of the baby had led to Ray’s first set of original lyrics. Some impulse had driven him to buy one of those comic Nashville postcards and send it to the girl c/o the drugstore, writing on it: “I’ll remember you, always, and think of you real often with a smile. I hope you’ll be forever happy and learn to live without me after a while.”

Binx Radwell sat hunched on the folding chair in the rental house, elbows on the folding rental table, frightened eyes blinking at the maps taped and stapled and nailed to the paneled wall, and tried to ignore the cold sweat pouring from his body like condensation on a porcelain toilet, tried to ignore the volcano-like rumblings in his intestine, and listened to the words buzzing up along the phone lines from Galaxy headquarters in Florida. This was the voice of one of Binx’s many lords and masters, new lords and masters since the change of ownership of the newspaper had bared Binx’s vulnerable flesh to colder winds than even he had heretofore known possible.

It was at field headquarters that Binx was undergoing this latest episode in the perpetual slow flaying that was the story of his life. Whenever the Weekly Galaxy went out into the world on a major story — celebrity scandal, child in well, celebrity death, religious fruitcake sex or religious fruitcake violence scandal — the first thing it did was rent a house in the local area, rent a lot of office furniture and office machinery to fill that house, bung in a bunch of phone lines, staff the place with reporters and photographers and editors from the main headquarters down in Florida, plus whatever local stringers they might have available, and start boppin. In long-con terms — and the Weekly Galaxy is nothing if it’s not a long con — this is the store, and its purpose is the same as it was for Yellow Kid Weil and the other long-con experts of yore: to pretend to be what it isn’t.