This is the second part of my nano-novel about the great, fictional, Eddie Wilson, a character created in and told about in the two movies Eddie and the Cruisers and Eddie and the Cruiser 2: Eddie Lives. The first 10,000 words of this story are on a previous post, which at some point I will ink to but for now I want to start writing the story, as there are two days left and nearly 40,000 words left to write.

Word Count so far: 10,572

—- Saturday, November 29, 2008 1:54 PM CST — and now, it continues. – 89 words.


5. Eddie Goes Viral

Eddie was sort of right, the next morning, I woke up, and my headache was about all that was left of the energizing feeling I’d felt before. Still, I was very removed from it’s source, and too aware that I do not have the talent to do anything Eddie did last night to let myself get caught up in it too much. He’d been amazing, the way he worked the crowd, and to belittle something like that still seemed obscene to me, even if it were coming from the source itself. I truly believed that if people didn’t have that euphoria lingering the next day, they at least remember what it felt like, at the show, dancing, listening to the band, enjoying it with everyone else.

As a veteran of a few concerts, I can attest to only getting ‘involved’ like that a few times, and though the adrenaline rush was gone, the memory lingered, probably forever. Luckily, I had a few more things going in favor of my reliving it, for one, I had used my phone frequently to record video of the performance, and though it was not the best quality, it was surely better than much of what you see on YouTube, and I thought it captured the energy very well, especially the clip of the entire ‘On the Dark Side’ song.

I also was pumped up enough when I got in the night before that I wrote it up in a blog post, which I will share below:

An Evening with Eddie Wilson

I was never old enough to appreciate what Eddie Wilson did, what he brought to the table, until last night(well, a few hours ago, really), and now I begin to understand why people just wouldn’t let him die, or slip away into obscurity, and why so many people read my last post about Eddie’s performance with the Tennessee bar band, “The Tennessee Six.”

Apparently, more than a few read, and reacted to my last post, because the crowd at this last gig was noticeably different, with a lot of readers showing up, more than I and Eddie thought would be there. (btw: quick shout out to Phil from Harpersburg, thanks for the shots dude, you officially get credit for all my typos!).

It as a little awe-inspiring seeing all the strange vehicles in the parking lot coming in, and the stranger faces in the bar. The idiot who kept chanting, “On the Dark Side,” can pass up the show next time. Dude, find some class, you damn near pissed Eddie off, and though I haven’t seen him do it, I’d bet he would have spent the third set playing the same country songs you were sort of heckling if it wasn’t for the rest of the crowd showing they actually had a clue.

And seriously, though I really enjoyed the first two sets, despite the fact that I F**KING HATE country music, the third set was worth the whole night itself. <you tube link to On the Dark Side > , especially that song. I’d heard it before, on the radio, and on the jukebox, but hearing it live, with him adding the new guitar riffs, well, just go to the link and listen. Anyone else that was recording some of it too, and I saw a few, feel fre to link up in the comments area, because I am no kind of professional cameraman and my phone camera really doesn’t completely do it justice. I’m not afraid to admit you probably all did better.

The set was pretty good, starting out with “On the Dark Side,” and ending on a mellow note, with one of the songs he wrote while he was living in Seattle. In between, there were a lot of rock anthems, if I were being cynical, I’d say he did the song list from “Anthem Rock,” like every song they highlight on the scroll after the run it down the screen, but that wasn’t accurate and this was better than any of that scratchy, archive video footage they use in that commercial.

One of the funnier moments was the beginning, where the other guitar player in “The Tennessee Six,” sorry dude, never did get the last name, but his first name is “Ray”, put on a little act about the then-obvious fact that his guitar player might not actually be “Joe West,” when the band started up. <video link of Ray’s opening lines> I really think they always knew that this wasn’t just guy that wasn’t someone who walked in from his garage, but I also doubt they cared either way.

Their next gig is this coming Thursday night, same place, but they don’t start until 9:30PM that night because it’s “Spaghetti Night,” and they need to get cleaned up before the band starts. The owner asked me to please post that he is going to ask any early comers to wait outside unless they are eating, and he won’t put up with any bullshit, but he’d be happy to have anyone that feels like coming, whether eating or just listening to music.

Anyways, the buzz and the adrenaline are starting to wear off so I’m closing this up for now. I’m really looking forward to hearing what everyone else thought, so make sure you reply below. Let me add one last nugget before I go. I asked Charlie why his band was named “The Tennessee Six.”

  • Did one of the other band members come up with the name? No, they all agreed to it, but it was at Charlie’s suggestion.
  • Was it because he loved Tennessee so much these days ? Nope, pretty much despise Tennessee, still, and always.
  • Were there originally six members? Hence the “Six”? Nope, I pretty much hate math too.
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end of my Blog Post.

I put that up at around 4AM, along with the videos, and crashed hard. By the time I woke up that next morning, it’s not like I was still completely in the moment, adrenaline and alcohol effects are obviously temporary, with the adrenaline being a little more temporary than the adrenaline but far past it’s enjoyable phase. I was out of the shower, changed, and halfway into a can of Monster by the time I remembered the blog post I’d put up the night before, and I mostly checked it to see if I wrote it like a complete drunken buffoon, and wow. Sometime early that morning, and continuing right on past thru the rest of the weekend, Eddie WIlson went viral.

I would have known sooner if I’d just answered my phone, or checked my voice mail, or email, or one of the other nine ways the server company made me give them when I signed up for my low-end, introductory offer account. Apparently, they started calling me around 10 AM, inquiring as to whether I knew that i was receiving an inordinate amount of traffic on my blog. ‘Inordinate’ in my case would mean more than a dozen. When I finally did answer, after realizing the intraceable number was the server company, I was given an oral version of the disclaimer I’d had to scroll trhough about my bandwidth use as an introductory customer, to which I reminded them that the contract said “Unlimited Bandwidth,” usage, and to which they began to plead that although they said that, they did not expect it to be used at the current rate in which it was being used, and increasing by the minute at that.

On my blog, the last Eddie post had more than100 responses, weeded down to about 77 after half an hour of reading and “managing” the spam out. Ten were from people who’d been there, several of them were ‘back and forths’ from a few of those people that apparently hadn’t slept since the show had ended. I had trackbacks all the way to some TV stations and three Diggs before I even put up a Digg link. I spent the afternoon fine-tuning the post and the ads around it, ansering some of the responses, and figuring out how I would follow up the next day despite telling the dweeb at the server comapny that I would let it ride for a little while.

I also used the return email address for the post that I was positive came from Eddie on the previous posts to send him a link. Later that day, I wrote him a message:

Eddie,

Last night was something else, and my web site has the hits to prove it.

Do you think maybe you could write something for mt blog, just a hello, because a lot of people are asking about you these days.

D

In the meantime, my YouTube numbers were going crazy, I was up there with the laughing baby and the fake bigfoot for a while. I have to admit, I got a little carried away with it all, using the hits to boost up my Plurk Karma, My Linked In profile, and my Twitter followers. It had been so long since I posted anything on Digg and Stumbleupon that I had to have my passwords reset, but I got the links up and running nicely by Saturday night. I didn’t really think I’d make any money off the deal, but truth be told, I enjoyed the attention.

I had just enough time to check my email before I went down to the bar for my late shift, which ahd a bunch of notifications of site signups from people leaving comments, but nothing back from Eddie. Pulling into the bar parking lot, for the first time ever besides the times I’d ridden in it, was Eddie’s car, parked right out front with all the others. Now, let me be clear, there’s a good chance I had simply missed it before, but there is an even better chance that I would have noticed it.

I nearly had to climb up over the hood to get into the bar this time, he was parked so close to the front of the building, I absolutely would have noticed THAT if it had happened before. Walking inside, I thought we might have some carry over fans from the night before, even though I’d never mentioned the name of the bar I worked in and met Eddie in my posts. A few strangers were hanging around at the front of the horseshoe bar, and in the middle of them, Eddie was holding court.

He was a sloppy mess. I took my time making my way over to him after taking over from the afternoon girl, who’d raised her eyebrows at me. “Take him out, let him get all hyped up over his new band, and then get him wasted? Nice job, Danny.”

I patted my co-worker on the shoulder, a little of the afterglow of the previous night probably breaking through, “Yeah, well, if you’d been there, you’d know it was worth it. You wouldn’t believe..”

She stopped me with a finger over my lips. “Oh, I believe it, don’t care, never want to hear about it again. Have fun with your new best friend, and good luck.”

His eyes were wide and squinted at the same time by the time  made my way over to him. Greezy’s is not a large place, but it is possible to keep your distance if need be, and though I was not trying to avoid him, I was making sure I had time to talk before I opened conversation.

Right away I new I’d been being too careful, Eddie was well inside the rails at the point I started my shift, but far enough along the way to have enjoyed yanking my co-workers chain, short and as easily manageable as it was. He curled his lip and looked up at me from his elbows on the bar, “Looks like someone went and got some sleep, how about that?”

“Just a little, also did some writing. You didn’t happen  to notice the email I sent you, did you, Eddie?”

He mini-belched, ” e-mail. pffft.”

It turned into one of those conversation over the evening, as Eddie seemed to level out at just barely coherent through the early part of my shift.

“I actually left you two emails, you can read them now, if you want, I’ll bring them up on my phone.”

“You might have noticed, I’m not really into the email thing.”

“What, did it say?”

“What did what say?”

“The emails, what did they say?”

“Wanted to know if you’d write something, that I could put up. People are asking about you. I think it’d be cool if you gave them a few words.”

“What’do they care what I have to say? I’m yesterday’s news kid. I’m not even ‘B’ List, I’m ‘F’ list. ” He caught his train of thought after saying it out loud and raised his hand to one of his cronies at the bar. “Yeah, ‘F’ troop, Group ‘W’, that’s me these days. Don’t matter what I ave t say abut anything.”

“Eddie, I posted videos of last night on the web when I got home this morning, and you went viral.”

“Went what? I don’t feel sick.” He laughed for antoher round of high fives with his pals around the horseshoe, and I went off to tend to mother people.

We had a decent late rush, so I got to talk to him for briefer moments as the night went on, and I was losing him to the rounds of shots that I kept bringing back to him and his court. Though I never found out for sure, I think at least one of them WAS a holdover from the night before, the guy that helped him carry his amp out to the car. Around midnight, he lost his drinking buddies, all of them finally falling to the wayside, I called taxi’s for two of the three people that had been there with him, the other two had slipped out without being properly checked out for transportation.

I came back, with the bar quieting down and him there on the end of the horsehoe, to Eddie, all alone. I got eye contact and said, Looks like you won, Eddie. Two superb nights in a row, eh?”

Then looking him over, a near puddle, I decided to rephrase it. “Well, win may not be the right term, at least for tonight.”

He shook his head. “More alike than you think, kid. More alike than you think.”

Raising my eyebrows, “Really? Not from this viewpoint.”

He sighed, ” Well, you were a lot closer to winning last night than I am now, but let’s just say. It’s in the team picture, for fooling yourself, if even momentarily. And by the way, I actually DO have something for you to put up on your blog, something to share.”

He started digging into his pockets, I thought he was going to fall off the stool doing so, but he didn’t. After a few minutes, I left and came back as he was unfolding a pice of paper on the bar, looking like some folded bill that had gone through the wash, but the paper was thick and durable, and the writing still dark and hardly bleeding on the page. He smoothed it out on the bar and spun it around to face me.

“Can you put this up? This is what I want to ‘Post’. Can you read it? Out. Loud. Now.” He’d nearly bitten his tongue getting the sentence out.

I laughed and looked him straight in the eye. “Eddie, you want me to call you a cab?”

“No, I was thinking maybe you could drive me home. I don’t want to leave ‘him’ here. ” He nodded his head towards the front door, and I instantly knew he meant the car.

I didn’t think twice about it, I’d been wanting to drive that car since O saw it, and I could get the guy that came in to help me clean up to follow me and bring me back to my own car. I wouldn’t want that car left here either. “No problem, I can do that. Can I get you to drink a cup of coffee in the meantime until we leave?”

I brought him back a cup of coffee and he took it with no fight.

“Good, now, read this.” He tapped the unfolded piece of paper with his finger again.

“I will when I get back.”

By the time I got back, I’d gotten everyone taken care of except one other hard core regular who might have his own set of keys to the place, and the owner, who came in infrequently at night sometimes to ‘help’ close up, and skim a little off the till for who knows what he had going on elsewhere.

Eddie still had the paper unfolded on the bar. “Now, read it.”

I took it and held it up for better light.

Now recently, when I found myself ready to croak! I thought to seek the key to the banquet of old, where I might find an appetite again.

That key is Charity. – This idea proves I was dreaming!

Arthur Rimbaud -Once, if my memory serves me well.

http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Once.html

I finished, and looked at Eddie, who was wearing a self satisfied, smug look, that might have been subdued had he not been sitting at the bar all day and night, in control of his faculties. The rest of the late night crowd had stopped and listened to me as well, with many of them nodding to themselves. The owner spoke out loud, “Now that’s some deep shit.”

“Rimbaud? Of course.” I folded it up and put it in my pocket.

Eddies lost his smugness, “What? You don’t like it, kid?”

I shook my head, “Not saying that, Eddie, it’s perfect. I’ll post it for you tomorrow, and the guys that have been coming around, your old fans, well they’ll eat it up. For chrissake, I think there are a few Rimbaud quotes in the responses, but, not this one. I’ll put it up, promise.”

“You’re wealth of compliments, kid, thanks a lot. “

I went back about the business of closing down the bar, and Eddie kept drinking my coffee, the slight stir caused by my reading Eddie’s quote, and his not appreciating my reaction to it, was nothing by the time I got the cash drawer open and started counting my drawer. By the time I was done, I was in an even better mood because my tips were more than twice their usual, and everyone was making a point of helping me get the place cleaned up and get out of there, not something to be taken for granted.

By the time I was grabbing my jacket and heading for the door, Eddie was starting to look a little sleepy. I didn’t actually help him get up and ut to his car, but he probably could have used it. It sure would have sped things up a little. My return ride was getting impatient as we made out way out to the car, waiting out in the parking lot.

As I said, I’d been wanting to drive that boat since I’d first seen it, and it was everything I thought it would be. It was like revving up a pack elephant, but one with cushy shocks and a couch to sit on. You could really fel the power beneath the hood as you drove it. I was enjoying driving so much that for a while I forgot about Eddie, or that I was at the simplest form, still working by driving a customer home after they had too much to drink.

For his part, Eddie was a lot less talkative on this ride home than he’d been the night before, when he was driving, or even the last time I dropped him of, for that matter. I’m pretty sure he slept at least a little bit on the way, but I didn’t have to wake him up when we got there.

Once I got home, with the sun starting to show around the edges of the horizon, I was too tired to do much but post Eddie’s quote like I’d promised him. I noticed that there were at least a 100 more responses on the web page, but that was the extent of it. I only had the fact that the techies hadn’t started calling me again to gauge whether it was had taken on another growth burst.

The next morning, early, my cell phone started going off again, and until around 11, I ignored it, on the weekends my sleep schedule adjusts itself that way, noon is my weekend’s wakeup time, and any time before that, I’m just asleep. I learned very quickly that I can’t call anyone else at 3 in the morning, and so my sleeping tmes should be respected as well, I come by them honestly.

Still, curiosity about whether it was the server techies again got me to at least to get out of bed and look at the caler ID. It wasn’t the same number the techies had used the morning before, and it was local, but not one that I had programmed. Acting, only for myself, enormously inconvenienced, I took the phone of the charger and checked voice mail, it was Eddie.

I hit redial on the last call, and he picked up before the second ring.

“Bout time you got up, ya lazy fuck.”

“Don’t you have a couple days work to catch up on, old man?”

“Only good thing about getting old, kid, is that you begin to have less and less use for sleep. Your body doesn’t need the rejuvenation time, and doesn’t care if you like the dream time.”

“In case you didn’t notice, I’m not old.”

“Old enough to get your ass up and come over. I want you to show me what you meant last night, when you said that I went ‘virus’.”

“Viral.”

“Okay then, viral, I want to see what you meant. You know where I live. Bring your laptop.”

I didn’t even check anything out before I packed it up and so I found out the new developments sitting at Eddie’s kitchen table, tethering my laptop to my phone, drinking some of the blackest, darkest cofee I’d ever tasted, with Eddie hovering over my shoulder wanting to know what was taking so long.

“Holy SHit, it’s gone through the roof. We’re on the front pages of Google News, YouTube search, and Digg, unbelievable.”

“Front page of ‘Digg’? What the hell does that mean?”

“That means that my server is either going to go down or that I’m going to get some more customer service calls about ‘not abusing my bandwidth’. And that you’ve probably sold a few albums out of the bargain bins at the dollar store. Hell, they may be digging them out of the bins and putting them back on a shelf.”

“Seriously? What kind of video did you take? I thought all the crap that got popular on the internet was porn, like that one that ‘Bait’ showed me at the bar on his phone, the ‘Two in one cup’ thing, that shit was gross. “

I laughed, shook my head. “Two in one cup? Yeah, something like that, but it’s mpt all garbage like that, just a little weird.

I showed him a couple pages where I was actually on the list, “An Eveing with Eddie Wilson, live video of lost Rokker.” was what the tag read, from some screen name I had never heard of, who had put us up on Stumbleupon. Eddie had pointed to the Digg page when it came up and scoffed.

“Nice job kid, more people are reading about an Iphone ring -  tone – app? than about me. Kids!”

“Take it easy, old-timer. Look here, we’re linked on the Entertainment pages of Yahoo, Google, and CNN, un-fricking-believable.”

“Great, so some corporate fat cats are getting rich off my ass again, eh, kid. Got news for you, they’ve been doing that way before the internet came along, except now they apparently get ot do it before we even sign a contract.”

I turned around and looked at him, harsh, “WHO do you think is getting rich off of you?”

“Them big corporations, Google, Tahoo, they’re the ones making all the money now, right?”

“Wel, sort of, but it’s not like they’re riding you for a million dollars Eddie, they’re just pointing to what’s popular, and right now, you are definitely one of the popular things going on around the world. One of the thousands, but nobody is getting rich off you. On the other hand, publicity like this is priceless. If that’s what you want, I’d give my agent a call, if you still have one.”

‘Yeah, I’ve got one of those, just to make sure my residual checks make it to the bank, but what’s he going to do for me, book some shows. Coulda’ been doing that already, but I get very tired of being the dancing monkey, and it quickly becomes that.”

“A dancing monkey? How? Touring the world, playing your music, nice hotels, hot women, big cahs, what’s that got to do with dancing monkeys?”

“Sooner or later kid, you’re just a dancing monkey.”

“At first, they do everything they can to make sure you don’t realize it. The hotels, the chicks, the limo’s, the cash they throw at you, but after a while, the hotels are dives, the chicks are a long line of skanks that line up for every act that comes through town. As soon as they know you love it, they start cutting more of their share out of it, and when it starts paying at the premium rate, you’re gone for the next guy.”

“After you make a bajillion dollars or two, right?”

“Yeah, you can make some bucks, and if you’re smart, you hold on to it, but still, you’re just their dancing monkey. “

“Doesn’t look like it to me, you do what you want, play where you want.”

He nods, “Yeah, for now, but with all of this,” he gestured towards the screen. “I’ve probably got about one show left before they turn that little gig into a circus.”

“Hey, you’re not mad at me for posting the video’s are you? I ASKED you first.”

“No, kid, I;m not mad at all. I knew what could happen, maybe I even wanted this to happen, but like I said, knowing it’s coming and looking forward to it are two different things.”