Riot Act (53 page)

I have a nodding acquaintance with guilty consciences.

When Andy Warhol predicted that everyone in the future would be famous for fifteen minutes, he was probably thinking about something like YouTube. What a concept: hundreds of thousands of deservedly anonymous people made shaky, blurry videotapes of their pets and their feet and each other lip-synching to horrible music, and somebody bought it for a trillion dollars. But then all this idea-free content developed a kind of mass that attracted a million or so clips that actually
had
some interest value, especially to those of us who occasionally like to lift a corner of the social fabric and peer beneath it.

Vincent DiGaudio
Interview
popped onto my screen in the oddly saturated colour, heavy toward the carrot end of the spectrum, that identifies TV film from the seventies. Since I was going to meet DiGaudio in about forty minutes, I took a good look at him. In 1975, he'd been a beefy, ethnic-looking guy with a couple of chins and a third on the way, and a plump little mouth that he kept pursing as though he had Tourette's Syndrome and was fighting an outbreak of profanity. His eyes were the most interesting things in his face. They were long, with heavy, almost immobile lids that sloped down toward the outer corners at about a thirty-degree angle, the angle of a roof. His gaze bounced nervously between the interviewer and the camera lens.

Vincent DiGaudio had a liar's eyes.

As the clip began, the camera was on the interviewer, a famished woman with a tangerine-coloured face, blond hair bobbed so brutally it looked like it had been cut with a broken bottle, and so much gold hanging around her neck she wouldn't have floated in the Great Salt Lake. “. . . define your talent?” she was saying when the editor cut in.

“I don't know if it was a talent,” DiGaudio said, and then smiled in a way that suggested that it was, indeed, a talent, and he was a deeply modest man. “I seen a vacuum, that's all. I always think that's the main thing, seeing in between the stuff that's already there, like it's a dotted line, and figuring out what could fill in the blanks, you know?” He held his hands up, about two feet apart, presumably indicating a blank. “So you had Elvis and the other one, uh, Jerry Lee Lewis, and then you had Little Richard, and they were all like on one end, you know? Too raw, too downtown for nice kids. And then you had over on the other end, you had Pat Boone, and he was like Mr. Good Tooth, you know, like in a kids' dental hygiene movie, there's always this tooth that's so white you gotta squint at it. So he was way over there. And in the middle, I seen a lot of room for kids who were handsome like Elvis but not so, you know, so . . .”

“Talented?” the interviewer asked.

“That's funny,” DiGaudio said solemnly. “Not so dangerous. Good-looking kids, but kids the girls could take home to meet Mom. Kids who look like they went to church.”

“Elvis went to church,” the interviewer said.

DiGaudio's smile this time made the interviewer sit back a couple of inches. “My kids went to a
white
church. Probably Catholic, since they were all Italian, but, you know, might have been some Episcopalians in there. And they didn't sing about a man on a fuzzy tree or all that shorthand about getting – can I say getting laid?”

“You just did.”

“Yeah, well that. My kids sang about first kisses and lucky stars, and if they sang about a sweater it was a sweater with a high school letter on it, not a sweater stretched over a big pair of – of – inappropriate body parts.” He sat back and let his right knee jiggle up and down, body language that suggested he'd rather be anywhere else in the world. “It's all in the book,” he said. “My book. Remember my book?”

“Of course.” The interviewer held it up for the camera. “
The Philly Miracle
,” she said.

“And the rest of it?” Di Gaudio demanded.

“Sorry.
The Philly Miracle: How Vincent DiGaudio Reinvented Rock and Roll.
”

“Bet your ass,” DiGaudio said. “Whoops.”

“So your – your
discoveries
– were sort of Elvis with mayo?”

“We're not getting along much, are we? My kids weren't animals. I mean lookit what Elvis was doing on the stage. All that stuff with his, you know, his – getting the little girls all crazy.”

The interviewer shook her head. “They screamed for your boys, too.”

He made her wait a second while he stared at her. “And? I mean, what's your point? Girls been screaming and fainting at singers since forever. But you knew if a girl fainted around one of my kids he wouldn't take advantage of it. He'd just keep singing, or maybe get first aid or something.”

She rapped her knuckles on the book's cover. “There were a lot of them, weren't there?”

DiGaudio's face darkened. “Lot of what?”

“Your kids, your singers. Some people called it the production line.”

“Yeah, well, some people can bite me. People who talk like that, they don't know, they don't know kids. These were
crushes
, not love affairs. The girls weren't going to marry my guys, they were going to buy magazines with their pictures on the front and write the guys' names all over everything, and fifteen minutes later they were going to get a crush on the next one. So there had to be a next one. Like junior high, but with better looking boys. Girl that age, she's a crush machine, or at least they were back then. These days, who knows? Not much innocence around now, but that's what my kids were. They were innocence. They were, like, dreams. They were never gonna knock the girls up, or marry them and drink too much and kick them around, or turn out to be as gay as a lamb chop, or anything like guys do in real life. They were dreams, you know? They came out, they looked great, they sang for two and a half minutes, and then they went away.”

“And they did go away. Most of them vanished without a trace. Are you still in touch with any of them?”

It didn't seem like a rough question, but DiGaudio's eyes bounced all over the room. He filled his cheeks with air and blew it out in an exasperated puff. “That ain't true. Some of them, they're still working. Frankie does lounges in Vegas. Eddie and Fabio, they tour all over the place with a pickup band, call themselves Faces of the Fifties or something like that. They're around, some of them.”

“And Bobby? Bobby Angel?”

“Nobody knows what happened to Bobby. Somebody must of told you that, even if you didn't bother to read the book. Bobby disappeared.”

“Do you ever think about Giorgio?”

The fat little mouth pulled in until it was as round as a carnation. “Giorgio,” he finally said. He sounded like he wanted to spit. “Giorgio was different. He didn't like it, you know? Even when he was a big star. Didn't think he belonged up there.”

“A lot of people agreed with him.”

DiGaudio leaned forward. “What is this, the Cheap Shot Hour? Even somebody like you, after what happened to that poor kid, even someone like you ought to think a couple times before piling on. Who are you, anyway? Some local talent on a TV station in some two gas-station market. I mean, look at this set, looks like a bunch of second-graders coloured it—”

“This is obviously a touchy topic for—”

“You know, I came on this show to talk about a book, to tell a story about music and Philadelphia, about when your audience was young, about a different kind of time, and what do I get? Miss Snide of 1927, with your
bleep
ing jack o'lantern makeup and that lawn-mower hair—”

“So, if I can get an answer, what are your thoughts about Giorgio?”

DiGaudio reached out and covered the camera lens with his hand. There were a couple of heavily bleeped remarks, and then the screen went to black.

“My, my,” I said. “Touchy guy.” I glanced at my watch. DiGaudio lived in Studio City, way south of Ventura Boulevard, in the richest, whitest part of the Valley. I had another thirty-five minutes, and the trip would only take fifteen. I typed in
Giorgio Lucky Star
.

And found myself looking at fifties black-and-white, the fuzzy kinescope that's all we have of so much early television, just a movie camera aimed at a TV screen, the crude archival footage that the cameraman's union insisted on. Without that clause in their contract, almost all the live television of the fifties would be radiating out into space, the laugh tracks of the long-dead provoking slack-jawed amazement among aliens fifty light years away, but completely lost here on earth.

Even viewed through pixels the size of thumbtacks, Giorgio was a beautiful kid. And Rina was right: he couldn't do anything. He stood there as though he'd been told he'd be shot if he moved, and mouthed his way through two minutes of pre-recorded early sixties crap-rock. Since the face was everything and he wasn't doing anything with the rest of himself anyway, the cameras pretty much stayed in closeups, just fading from one shot to another. No matter where they put the camera, he looked good. He had the same classical beauty as Presley. Like Presley, if you'd covered his face in white greasepaint and taken a still closeup, you'd have had a classical statue, a cousin of Michaelangelo's
David
.

But unlike the sculpted David, who stares into his future with the calm certainty of someone who knows that God is holding his team's pom-poms on the sidelines, Giorgio had the look you see in a crooked politician who's just been asked the one question he'd been promised he wouldn't be asked, in the athlete who's been told he has to take the drug test he knows he's going to fail.

Giorgio was terrified.