One Day You'll Leave Me, page 4
5
The sound of the doorbell woke me only five hours later. Followed by pounding on the door, then more ringing, and more pounding.
“Okay,” I mumbled to myself. Getting up off the couch was an ordeal, maybe hunching over a laptop for eleven hours wasn’t the greatest of ideas. Nor was sleeping on the couch.
Ring, ring, ring.
“Yes?” I asked, opening my front door with one hand, my other hand rubbing at the small of my back.
The tall pudgy guy standing before me looked, there’s no other way to put it, slovenly. Large loose black concert t-shirt, red shiny shorts that went down well past his chubby knees, and clunky dirty sneakers without socks. Not that I should be judging anyone on their looks at the moment. My own hair was a scraggly mess, I was still wearing the wrinkled silk shirt I’d worn to work the previous day, and even though I couldn’t see them, I’m sure my eyes were puffy and red, I could feel it. They felt gritty.
The guy took me in, head to foot, then shook his head. Had three or four too many martinis last night didjya? But he went on with his spiel anyway.
“Hey, me and my buddy,” he said, pointing with his thumb behind him, “are cutting lawns, wanted to know if you need yours cut.” At the curb in front of my house was a large shiny grey pick-up truck with another guy, this one not pudgy, just plain fat, sitting in the passenger seat puffing away at a vaping device. The white billowing clouds he was aiming out of the window were being pushed in my direction by the breeze and I could tell by the slight scent that he was puffing on something fruit flavored. Watermelon? Mango? The debate was still out on whether vaping was safer than cigarettes or not but I could tell you definitively, that the smell was better, by a mile.
“Not at the moment,” I answered, rubbing at my eyes, “but eventually, yes. Do you have a card, or a website, so I can check rates, make an appointment?” Now that my eyes had adjusted to the brightness of the morning I could see that the young man in front of me couldn’t be past his teens, eighteen at most. My lawn was cut every week during the summer at the same time and by the same company I’d been using for years but if I could help out a neighborhood kid who was starting up a business, I was more than happy to.
“Nah, nothing like that yet, we’re just going around asking people. So should I come back in a few days then?” he asked, looking antsy to leave now that he wasn’t going to be put to work immediately.
“I don’t know, what are your rates?”
“Ninety dollars.”
Next door, Mr. Peters, wearing his usual Bermuda shorts and flip-flops, was eyeing the stranger at my door while he unraveled his garden hose.
“And that’s for...”
A heavy sigh. “Cutting the lawn.”
“Yes, I understand that, but does that include trimming and...”
“No, that’s just for cutting.”
“Uh huh.” Ninety dollars. Ten dollars more than what I was used to paying, but again, I thought it was worth it. “And I’m assuming that’s for the front and the back?”
“No, just the front. The back,” he said, and looked past my shoulder, as if he could see through walls and into my back yard, “is another ninety. If it’s the same size.”
“You do realize that’s over twice what I pay the company that does it now and they do trimming and...”
“Whatever,” he said, and turned to walk away. Nice.
Halfway down my walkway he addressed Mr. Peters. “What about you pops? You need your lawn cut?”
Mr. Peters waved him away with a flick of his hand. He twisted the outdoor spigot and water gushed from the hose.
“Fucking old people,” I heard the budding entrepreneur mumble to his friend before he hopped in behind the wheel of his truck and they drove away.
“Great customer service,” I shouted to Mr. Peters, and chuckled. I thought it was funny.
“What’s that?” he yelled, cupping his hand to his ear.
“I...nothing,” I shouted back.
“What?”
He’s not that old. Can’t be past his early sixties. Surely you don’t start losing your hearing that early do you? I tried to smooth down both the back of my hair and my shirt as best I could before making my way across my lawn toward him. It’s worth a shot, can’t hurt to ask.
“Good morning Mr. Peters.”
“Good morning Ms. Stephens, not watering today?”
I had to stop and think why he’d be asking me that for a second. Over his shoulder, down the street was another one of my neighbors out watering his lawn and two houses down from that another, a woman, was watering hers. The water restrictions, that’s it. Watering only by hand, only on certain days, and only at certain times of the day. What’s next, breathing only every three minutes? Conserve oxygen?
“No sir, I think my lawn will survive.”
“Once I’m done here, I’ll do yours.” He said it cordially enough, but I could hear an undertone of “silly women, think green grass just grows on its own” in his voice. Mr. Peters was what you’d call a bit ornery. Not mean, he wasn’t mean, just one of those people who think society, culture, kids, music, grocery and gas prices, and, well, just about everything has been going down the crapper since the mid-seventies.
“That’s not necessary Mr. Peters, it’s fine.”
He dismissed that with another flick of his hand just as he’d done with the kid.
“I’m doing mine, won’t take much longer to do yours.” I could do without the gruff dismissive tone, but I decided it was best just to let it go.
“Mr. Peters, do you know who Judy Paige was?”
It was like flipping a switch.
“Judy Paige?” he asked. Someone should have been here to film it. It could have sold millions of those youth-in-a-bottle snake oil serums. His back straightened, his chest puffed out, his knitted eyebrows smoothed out and lifted, the crease that normally existed between them was gone, and his smile, which I rarely saw, was so genuine it made me smile back at him. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see hair start growing out of the top of his shiny pink balding head.
“I haven’t heard that name in decades! Why do you ask?”
“No particular reason, I just heard her song on a commercial and it drew my interest.” And now I want to know every single little thing about her. But I’m not insane. Really, I’m not.
“Is that right? A commercial for what?”
“An Alzheimer’s drug, I don’t remember the name.” I did, but that wasn’t the important thing here, was it?
“Was it Aricept?” he asked, his shoulders beginning to droop once more.
“No, no I don’t think so.”
“Cognex?”
“Mr. Peters.” I may have raised my voice a little but at least I stopped myself from clapping my hands in front of his face. “Judy Paige?”
“Oh yes, yes,” he said, and his shoulders perked right back up, “oh my, I had the biggest crush on her when I was, oh, twelve years old? Heck, every boy in my school had a crush on her. It was the eyes. Clearest green I’ve ever seen. You know we all fantasized about asking her out?” He threw his head back and laughed, which turned into a coughing fit. I leaned back an inch or two, until the hacking and flying spittle stopped.
“Ah, the innocent dreams of adolescent boys huh? Not that any of us stood a chance in hell. She was a young lady at the time, we were all scrawny school kids with freckles and crew cuts.”
“And,” I added, “she was, well, she wasn’t interested in...”
He waited for me to continue with a puzzled look on his face.
“Nothing,” I said, waving my hand, “please, go on.” He didn’t know. No need to break the man’s heart. He’d probably seen the same pictures I’d seen. Judy out on the town with more than just a couple of men. Actors and singers. Her arms wrapped around their waists, theirs around her shoulders, both smiling brilliant smiles. It really must have been one of those late awakenings for her. Unless. It was all for show? Hey, look at me, boy crazy, just like all the rest of them. I imagine it would have been career suicide to say otherwise.
“I had it so bad I used to sneak my sister’s teen magazines out of her room so I could see if there were any pictures of Judy in them. Waded through pages of silly stuff like how to sleep comfortably with rollers in your hair, how to talk to boys, and how to politely but firmly dissuade them from getting fresh by trying to hold your hand in a dark movie theater.”
He burst out laughing again but this time, thankfully, he skipped the hacking.
“You know,” he said, he lowered his voice and tucked his chin to his chest as if he’d reverted back to his twelve-year-old self, complete with flushing skin. “They once had a sort of contest, where you could vote for what kind of hairstyle Judy should go with next. One of those silly things from the past. You’d snip out a little section of the page with your choice and send it in to the magazine.”
“Yes! I saw that very article!” Why I was excited about this, I don’t know. Maybe because it felt like time travel - here I was talking to a man that had read something, held something in his hand almost fifty years ago that I’d read just the previous day. I somehow felt connected to that time, to her.
“Alright,” he said, perplexed at my reaction. “Well, I couldn’t say anything, it wasn’t boy’s business, of course, but oh was I mad at my sister for voting for short hair. I swore if Judy cut her hair I would never talk to her again.”
“So what happened?” I asked, although I already knew, she never had short hair.
“She went with the long hair,” he said, with a satisfactory smile and a wiggle of his bushy grey eyebrows.
“Lucky you.”
“Oh yeah, yeah.” He looked down to the ground and switched the hose from one hand to the other, there was a puddle forming at our feet.
“Did it last long? Your crush?”
“What?” Mr. Peters looked back up as if from a daze. “Oh yeah, it did. A couple of years at least, but then the Judy Paige hysteria died down, she sort of just faded away. It’s a shame. As for me, I mourned for a bit, then Grace Slick came along and I forgot all about Judy. Which was a mistake,” he said. “Shoulda stuck with Judy, she stayed a wholesome girl-next-door beauty. Grace Slick was part of the hippie movement. We all know how that ended. Shoulda stuck with Judy. But by that time I was nearing sixteen, hormones, and all that. Started listening to that earbleed music, can’t hear a damned thing now. Nope,” he said again, shaking his head mournfully. “Shoulda stuck with Judy.”
He slipped back into a haze for a second and his grip on the water hose loosened. It went from watering the grass to watering my foot.
“Oh, sorry, sorry about that.”
“No problem, Mr. Peters, it’s just a flip-flop,” I said, shaking my foot and sending water droplets flying.
“You know, I should look her up, on that computer thing. See what she’s up to these days.”
Not much. She’s a little bit dead.
“Maybe that’s not a good idea, she’d be much older now, wouldn’t she? Not the young lady you remember. I think you should keep that memory instead.”
He turned his mouth down and tilted his head. “Eh.”
After a few more minutes of conversation, of my trying to steer him onto another topic, I thanked him for sharing his memories and for the offer to water my lawn and left him to it. Hopefully I’d veered him off the subject enough that by the time he turned off the water and wound up the hose he’d have forgotten all about Judy and his long ago crush.
I walked back to my door and into my house both happy to have learned a little more about this woman but also deeply envious of Mr. Peters. He was there to witness it, to hear her songs on the radio for the first time when they were new and fresh. What that must have been like, I could only imagine.
Inside, I managed to shower, change, and eat a banana before my laptop called me back.
I’d spent eleven hours the day before watching the same seven or eight videos over and over again. I had listened to songs that were so obscure Mr. Peters probably hadn’t even heard them. Unreleased songs, bits of jingles she’d done for commercials, covers she’d done of famous songs. Anything and everything, but only up to a certain time period.
I had an aversion to reading anything or watching any videos of her past a certain time. And it wasn’t just a vague feeling of uncomfortableness, of not wanting to see her past her prime, I literally averted my eyes from pictures of her past a certain age when they popped up alongside the black and white ones taken at the start of her career. It wasn’t even that hard, because there seemed to be a gap of time in which there were very few pictures taken of her, or fewer, I should say. There weren’t that many to begin with. So that it seemed as if she jumped from her mid-twenties straight into her late thirties or early forties. But that probably wasn’t just me, I think anyone would feel for the woman. On top of the world one minute and then within a space of a few years, reduced to singing her old songs over and over again at small venues and oldie’s shows. That couldn’t have been a good feeling.
But I was running out of options. I’d read everything there was to read, I’d seen every video, seen every picture. Of her youth, that was.
The newer articles, the newer pictures and videos were all I had left if I really wanted to learn more about her.
So I forced myself to look, to read, to watch.
But I really wish I hadn’t.
Because what I found just gutted me.
6
Something bad happened to her. Something devastating. Had to have.
The first video I clicked on was of an interview. Just her and a local small time reporter. No thrills, no frills, this was a couple of years after she’d had a hit on the radio. It wasn’t even on YouTube, I had to scrounge around for it on a website that looked old and defunct. It didn’t even look complete, as if the designer took a break midway through designing it and then just decided to hell with it. But the video at least had a description to it. Along with the date. November 1970.
It’s a quick two minute long interview in what looks like a small nightclub. There’s people milling around in the background, not paying her any mind. It’s a small town on the edge of Illinois, and not even they’re impressed with her. But even though clearly this was a huge step down from what she once used to do she seemed happy to do it. She’s just as beautiful as ever, maybe even more so. Older, yes, from the nineteen year old superstar she once was but still only twenty-five, and still with those same crystal clear eyes and vibrant smile. She’d updated her hair, the sixties makeup was gone, and Mr. Peters was right, she hadn’t gone the hippie route. She was wearing a tasteful blue and yellow sweater. If she were wearing bellbottoms, I couldn’t tell, the video only shows her from the waist up. But that was enough for me to see that she looked content. Even with her career already pretty much over she doesn’t seem at all down about it. She isn’t morose, she doesn’t look put out, that she’s being interviewed by a man who looks old enough to be her grandfather and, by his own admission, did not care for pop music and had never heard any of her songs. Instead she smiles warmly at him while she answers his dull questions, she smiles at the camera, she even makes him laugh at the end of the clip. As if this new low-key life, out of the spotlight, is something she has embraced, and is even enjoying.
The next video I found was filmed only two years later.
I had to watch it in increments. It was too painful to watch all in one go.
It was one of those old variety shows. Magic acts, a juggler or two, someone spinning plates on sticks, that was considered entertainment, apparently, once upon a time. A comedian. And her.
My first thought, after I instinctively covered my mouth with my hand and tears sprang to my eyes, was that she was ill. She must have been battling an aggressive form of cancer. It’s the only thing I could think of, the only illness that would cause such a dramatic change in her appearance. She was skeletal. When, years before, those articles had cited her as weighing 108 pounds I knew that couldn’t be correct, that was too thin, but now, what I was seeing, was far beyond that. She didn’t even weigh a hundred pounds, maybe not even ninety. At 5’4”, that’s probably not even very survivable. Her eyes were glazed over and dull, her smile was gone. She sang, she sang that same moving song again but so flatly she could have been singing the words to a recipe for bland food. There was no strength in her voice, none of the passion she had as a nineteen or twenty year old. The audience felt it as much as I did, the applause when she finished was lukewarm at best. She looked as if she wanted to be anywhere but under those lights and in front of that camera. But she managed to get through it, she sang her song, looking haunted and lost.
Immediately I tried to find out what happened in her life because obviously something had. Something life-changing. I was sure I’d find out she did indeed have a debilitating disease or that maybe she really was despondent about her career not being what it once was and had turned to alcohol or drugs. On second thought, no, not alcohol, not even alcoholism could change you in the way she was changed. Not that fast. Drugs though, hard addictive drugs could do it. It didn’t seem like something she’d do but videos don’t lie. She was in a bad way. A very bad way.
Of course I didn’t have any luck. Fifty thousand videos, pictures, coffee mugs, and t-shirts of a grumpy looking cat but nothing about her. I couldn’t find a thing. Either she didn’t make it public, what it was she was dealing with, or there was no longer anyone around who cared. It was heartbreaking. Everyone had moved on, like Mr. Peters said. Seduced by edgier music and women starting to show some skin on stage.
I found three more videos that were just as painful to watch as the first. It was difficult to believe it was the same person. What could possibly have happened to her in such a short amount of time to change her so drastically? Whatever it was, it took years of her life. From what I could gather, from the information I could piece together, from the scant videos and pictures of her during the time, she suffered for nearly nine years before she seemed to recover. Starting in the early eighties, she gained the weight back plus a couple of extra pounds, her hair thickened back up, the shine in her eyes reappeared along with her smile. And her voice. That amazing powerful voice had regained its strength. She became a songwriter, writing for other musicians or for television and movies. She was never very successful, but, to me, she seemed happy. And while she did write songs for herself, she mostly still sang those few songs that had been hits way back in her heyday, because that’s what the audience always wanted to hear.
