Not only was it the truth, but the issue had just come out: we’d picked up a copy at a pharmacy that very afternoon. And, it was lying on the front seat of the car. I convinced the gendarmes to allow me, covered every step of the way, to open the door and produce the magazine. Voilà! They surveyed the article, a three-page feature, as meticulously as if it were a crime scene, comparing the photos to my in-person countenance and the name in the story to my personal ID. Finally, with what seemed like genuine disappointment (I almost felt sorry for them), they lowered their guns.
At no time, however, did they apologize for needlessly endangering our lives (one slip of a trigger finger . . .), although they did grow rather jocular once the cops-and-robbers game was over. “We saw Uncle Milty earlier this evening,” announced one, referring to Milton Berle and what for him was now a two-celebrity shift; not bad for a patrolman who’d missed out on the Beverly Hills and Malibu beats.
I have friends and acquaintances who sneer at People magazine, ridiculing the sensationalized attention the publication pays to the heartbreaks and high jinks of film starlets and television actors: the comely, the callow, the craven, and the confused. Perhaps, but People has not only been kind to me and my books, it saved me from a still more prolonged interaction with gunmen of the LAPD, a most direful prospect already proven to offer none of the romantic nor transcendental rewards one receives when outrunning angry hippos or bedding down amidst a herd of wild elephants.
There are highlights and low points in the book-flogging arena, as well. An example of the high was the day I was mobbed by teenage girls in Sydney, Australia. Of the low: the night I laid an egg on the Jon Stewart show.
More of my novels are sold in Australia (Villa Incognito was number one on the bestseller list there) than in any country outside of the U.S., including Canada. My impression is that the Australian sensibility is generally more Americanized than is Canada’s, which, if true, must suit Canadians just fine. At any rate, I’d been dispatched Down Under (where the sesame seeds are all on the other side of the crackers), and one of my reading and signing events was a midday affair at the main branch of the Sydney Public Library. There was a girls’ school nearby and a contingent of thirty or forty juniors and seniors with a chaperone or two showed up to hear me read.
After the reading, I was escorted to a somewhat smaller first-floor room at the rear of the library and seated behind a long, very heavy wooden table. My mission there was to wallop with my barbaric scribble the flyleaves of purchased copies of my oeuvre. Normally, readers wishing signatures will line up and approach the author one or two at a time. These girls, however, were as wild as dingos. They rushed the table in a disorganized pack, waving books in the air like Meryl Streep’s Outback baby. It was hectic but rather entertaining in its way, and it went well enough until my handler from Bantam signaled that I needed to depart for the radio station where she’d scheduled an “important” interview. There was, in fact, a taxi, its motor running, waiting for me right outside the back door.
When I stood and the girls realized that I was preparing to leave them, all hell broke loose. Waving unsigned books or autograph pads in the air -- some had nothing to sign and seemed only to want to touch me -- they surged forward with such force that I was literally pinned to the wall by that hefty table. It felt as if the table edge was obstructing my air supply and cutting me in half. I glanced around the room for help, but none was forthcoming. Even Alexa, my loving wife, only grinned and rolled her eyes. Well, I thought, there are worse ways to die.
Summoning all my strength, I managed to shove back the table far enough so that I could wriggle up onto it, where I stood for an instant before taking a deep breath and jumping down into the roiling mass of girl flesh. Grabbing first one girl and then another, I kissed them (sometimes on the cheek, sometimes on the nose, sometimes on the top of the head: it was all very scattershot); and hugging and kissing, made my way to the door and escaped to the taxi. As we pulled away, I waved good-bye, then sat back in a daze. I felt as if I’d awakened from a particularly crazy, bed-rumpling dream. I felt like a Beatle. I felt like the Beatles, all five of them, including Mr. Epstein. I felt like the luckiest writer in the world.
The Jon Stewart show was, as the saying goes, a horse of a different feather, although there was nobody and nothing to blame but me and my naïveté. In my foolish innocence, I hadn’t realized that the banter between hosts and guests on late-night TV -- all late-night TV -- is to some degree scripted. The day prior to my appearance on the show, its producer had interviewed me for nearly ninety minutes via telephone in my New York hotel room. Mainly, she quizzed me about my LSD experiences and, as also reported in USA Today that week, my “habit” of buying tattoos for female acquaintances. (True, I’d purchased tattoos for several women including an Olympic athlete, but this was before tattoos had become so trendy that every girl next door and her baby sister were inked up like Chinese scrolls; and besides, I was only encouraging their rebellious spirit, not branding them.) My misguided impression was that the producer was just feeling me out, trying to get a sense of my style and personality.
The next night, I went on the show percolating with uncharacteristic confidence. Man, I was feeling it! I was loaded for the proverbial bear, ready to match Stewart ad lib for ad lib, wit for wit. And, of course, to talk at some length about my new novel. This was the old Jon Stewart show, the one on CBS, the network that had recently canceled Pee-wee’s Playhouse and fired its star for the sort of intimate in-the-dark activity that no child alive would fail to identify with or understand. A fan of Mr. Herman, I, as soon as I walked onstage, embarked on a monologue defending Pee-wee and lightheartedly scolding CBS. It got a good laugh from the studio audience, but Jon Stewart, a celebrated iconoclast, looked a trifle perplexed.
Once I was seated in the hot seat, Stewart commenced to question me. He asked about my LSD experiences. He asked about tattooing girls. Hello? The questions obviously had been fed to him by the producer. I answered briefly, almost tersely, hoping to move right along to a discussion of my novel, which was, as far as I was concerned, my reason for being on the show. Well, it never happened. Dissatisfied (and who can blame them?) with my short, less than pithy responses, they not only politely ushered me off the set at the next commercial break, they never paid me the modest union minimum stipend that all guests customarily receive for appearing on shows of this type.
Friends who have appeared on David Letterman and The Tonight Show tell me it’s standard procedure for a TV host to be briefed in some detail by his producers regarding topics for on-air conversation. It makes sense, I see that now, but it’s a little late. I’m not likely to turn up on another such program. Unless, maybe, it’s hosted by teenage girls from Australia.
37
it’s a small world
Cuba, fine. Sumatra, fine. Namibia, Tanzania, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, fine. But what about Disneyland?
I’ve journeyed through Mexico and Guatemala with the esteemed scholar Joseph Campbell, exploring ancient ceremonial sites by day, and at night sipping gin-and-tonics on the verandas of tropical hotels while Campbell took what we’d learned that day in the field and weaved it into the whole glorious, fantastic tapestry of world history and mythology. I’ve traveled in Greece and Sicily with the laureate of the labyrinth and gladly grim Grimm Brothers gadfly Robert Bly, visiting the ruined temples of the gods and finding in the godly stories revealing insights into familiar human affairs. For sheer fulfillment, however, neither of those enlightening trips surpassed taking my son Fleetwood to Disneyland.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware that the Mickey Mouse myth is just that, mickey mouse. And the Magic Kingdom is to the Pyramid of the Magicians at Uxmal what Kool-Aid is to French champagne: deficient in cosmological sparkle and psychological depth. Seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old, Disneyland does present a vibrant, fanciful contrast to the mundane monotonies of everyday existence, and some of the rides are undeniably fun, yet even young Fle
et became quickly aware that the trumped-up wonders inside the theme park paled beside the genuine working miracle to which he was introduced in our nearby hotel. I’m referring here to room service.
It might not surpass the wheel, the matchstick, kissing, or quantum physics, but room service definitely ranks near the top of the list of humankind’s greatest inventions; and while Fleetwood was hardly immune to the thrill of Space Mountain and the dizzy charm of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party ride, hotel room service was the white rabbit that led his imagination into fabulous new territory. We’d arrived in Anaheim late in the day, so I’d ordered dinner sent to our room. So enthralled was he at how that process worked, I let him call in our breakfast order. After that, we took all of our meals in the room and Fleet did the ordering. He always ordered far too much and none too healthily, but what the hell? We were on vacation.
By the third day, he had waiters knocking at our door every half hour or so, and our room was a wasteland of half-eaten cheeseburgers and melting chocolate sundaes. On our last day (though unintentional, I suppose it was his grand finale), two waiters showed up at our door with an extra-large cart and began setting out so many silver-domed plates and platters it resembled an aerial view of an old Russian city. Uncovered, the vast assortment of dips and canapés could have quelled the munchie madness of eight or nine stoners after a night at a hemp fest. Fleet had unwittingly ordered the hospitality menu, meant for in-room meetings or private parties during conventions.
Needless to say, the two of us made not a furrow in that fulgent field of finger food, and Fleet, eventually bored with the largess, elected to put pieces of it to a more captivating purpose. Playing bombardier, he began with much delight to drop pieces of the banquet on people in the parking lot below. Since we were on the eighth floor, I quickly drew the line at cheese balls and ice cubes, but didn’t restrain him from discharging peanuts or olives, and shared in his glee when he scored the infrequent direct hit. A victim’s reaction, in its bewilderment, topped any expression we’d observed in Disneyland proper, including at the Haunted Castle. The high point occurred when he bounced a slice of dill pickle off the yarmulke of a dark-bearded gentleman, who, after picking up the pickle that had struck him, stared skyward for what seemed like several minutes, and while from that distance his words were not exactly clear, I could swear he exclaimed, “Nosh from heaven!”
Ah, but the fun wasn’t quite over. The following morning, our last there, we were joined by a young woman with whom I’d been corresponding but had never met. Katherine was a pine-tree heiress and gifted psychic from East Texas, who was living in England (where a year later she would guide Fleet and me on a tour of Stonehenge, Silbury Hill, the Avebury Circle, and other Anglo-astro landmarks of the pre-Arthurian occult) but was back in the U.S. visiting family. After our farewell swing through the Magic Kingdom, I, flush with my Woodpecker advance, bought her a ticket so she could accompany us on our flight home. For better or for worse, I was done with hitchhiking and the Greyhound bus (and there really was a lingering sense of loss, the loss of a special brand of freedom, a freedom never known by the materially ambitious or those to the manor born).
Down in the Caribbean I once heard a guy proclaim, “Lookin’ good is da main ting, mon,” and we were looking pretty good when we boarded that Seattle-bound plane: Fleetwood sporting a spotless white T-shirt and his new Mickey Mouse wristwatch, advising us of the time every six or eight minutes; Katherine in a billowy summer dress of polar white, me in the white linen suit I’d worn in Havana, the three of us radiating such an aura of dove-down whiteness we might have been created on the spot by God’s own breath (though that watch, like all timepieces, was surely the Devil’s doing).
In the air, we petitioned the flight attendant for a deck of cards, which we put to use in a three-handed round of crazy eights, a favorite of Fleet’s as well as a diversion made all the more pleasant for us adults by the readily refillable glasses of red wine. It was an idyllic scene (Katherine in the window seat, me on the aisle, Fleet in the middle) that, were it not for the vino, it might have made a commercial for a family-oriented travel agency, and who would have noticed that neither Katherine nor I wore wedding rings? Now, crazy eights is not a game that demands a hefty expenditure of intellectual capital, but there is a wee bit of strategy involved and any game worth a tick of one’s time, including croquet and Scrabble, is worth playing with fervor, so each of us made a serious if manufactured effort to beat the pants off the others.
The first game went down to the wire, with Katherine eventually prevailing. Luck was on my side in game two. In the third game, Fleet dominated all the way -- until the end, when with the very last card I beat him out. Yes, I know, I should have just let my young son win, but as reported, we were playing as if the personal stakes were high and my competitive spirit momentarily trumped my paternal fidelity.
In disappointment and disgust at losing by what in basketball would have been termed a “buzzer beater,” Fleet smacked the folding tray, our card table, with his fist. As everybody knows, those airline trays are rickety. Most of the cards stayed on the tray but Katherine’s recently filled glass of red wine flew off and emptied itself up and down her Easter-white dress, while the other glass and its entire contents landed with a small but portentous splash in my lap.
We sat there momentarily stunned, Katherine and me, soaked with a mediocre merlot, until a flight attendant, after surveying in horror what must have looked like the aftermath of an ax attack, hurried back with a comforting smile -- and four bottles (two for each of us) of club soda. Speaking from experience, she assured us that if we immediately doused our garments with the soda water, the wine would not leave a stain. Taking her at her word and having no real alternative, we hustled with the bottles of seltzer to the toilet at the rear of the plane and, squeezing in together, set about resoaking ourselves, skeptically but with determination. And it worked.
It worked. The seltzer actually absorbed the merlot and did it far more quickly than an old wino’s liver might, but it still took a long time. By Fleet’s Mickey Mouse watch, we were jammed in that compartment, scrubbing, for at least twenty minutes. Meanwhile, a line had formed outside the toilet, for it was at that stage in a flight when all the passengers’ bladders seemed to reach flood stage in unison, a renal symphony in P sharp. People began first to sheepishly rap, then to bang with some urgency, on the door.
Imagine the looks on their faces when the toilet door finally opened and out stepped two people, a well-dressed man and woman, both sopping wet, especially below the waist. It makes me smile even now to recall their expressions (children bewildered, adults outraged or maybe envious) as they tried to picture -- or tried not to picture -- what sort of kinky business might have just transpired in that cramped cubbyhole of a public loo (aware, if only intuitively, that Eros, though a plump little bugger, has been known to unfold his salty wings in some very tight quarters); and wondering if it would be hygienic, or even morally permissible to go in there now.
38
russia with love
Although I’d found my first three books to be generally satisfying from an artistic perspective, and though they’d attracted a loyal following among readers who’d discovered a slice of Tibetan peach pie to be their just dessert after far too many predictable potlucks of good old meat-and-potatoes American social realism (how many protagonists can one watch come painfully of age, how many bad marriages resolve or dissolve; and after a while who really gives a damn if the butler did it?); despite those early successes, I don’t think I hit my stride as a novelist until Jitterbug Perfume. Published in 1984, it remains, aside from Still Life With Woodpecker, my most popular novel, perhaps because it explores from a fresh perspective the pervasive human yearning to somehow nullify that death sentence that each of us is handed at birth, and dramatizes without sentimentality the possibility of an eternal romantic love.
Jitterbug Perfume was followed in 1990 by Skinny Legs and All, a novel inspired not
by the Joe Tex tune from which I took the title but by a fascination with the biblical bad girls: Delilah, Jezebel, Bathsheba, Lot’s horny daughters, and most especially Salome, upon whose so-called Dance of the Seven Veils the book is systematically structured, the dropping of each veil signifying the casting off of one of the illusions that limit human advancement. Set in modern times against a backdrop of the New York art world, Skinny Legs and All explores the Jewish/Arab conflict from both an interpersonal and a mythological perspective, and shoves so many pies in the collective face of fundamentalist/apocalyptic Christianity that, considering the violent nature of some true believers, I thought it might be a good idea to accept the invitation I received that June to travel to Moscow with a high school marching band.
The opportunity was provided by my friend Lee Frederick, a basketball star at Bradley University who went on to coach in college and with the Detroit Pistons. Lee had given up coaching to form Sports Tours International, a specialized travel company that organizes tournaments and takes U.S. collegiate sports teams to play and soak up a little culture in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe. His clients are mostly basketball and volleyball programs, but he once organized an overseas tour for a chess team, and now he’d been hired to take to Russia a champion high school marching band from New Richmond, Wisconsin. He wondered if I’d like to come along. Well, yeah.
Lee and I hooked up in Amsterdam, where I sometimes go to take the waters, and flew to Moscow together on Aeroflot. His staff had been in Russia for some weeks and everything was organized. The Wisconsin group arrived in Moscow the same day as Lee and I, and all of us were quartered at a quite large and quite bleak (Soviet chic) hotel on the outskirts of the city. That evening, in a dining room nearly the size of Stalin’s paranoia, Lee spoke to the assembly and introduced his staff to the band, its directors, and its entourage: there were seventy-five kids in the New Richmond Marching Tigers and it seemed as if every other one of them had a chaperone. At one point, I stood and was introduced simply as “an American writer” with no hint that I might be on the run from Jerry Falwell.