Too bad children can’t all grow up and visit their foreign homelands. For in coming to grips with the Lebanese, I had come to grips with myself. I was Bill Blatty, Citizen of Space, and people were people were people—anywhere.
Anywhere? What about back in the States? How would things work out for me there? Would I still be “Biblical Bill”?… There was one truly definitive battleground for that pugnacious question: Hollywood. And I had a battle plan which, I hasten to assure you, had nothing to do with camels. It had to do with becoming a prince. And the time had come to implement it, for the hot, sweaty hand of August was tapping the Blattys on the shoulder, and we looked around and saw that we must say our good-byes to Lebanon. The normal tour of duty with USIA was two years, and at the end of this term all personnel were required to spend a three-month leave in the United States before reassignment to another foreign post, or perhaps a return to the same one. Without the enforced home leave, too many foreign service officers were prone to forget the name of their employer, which in this case was Sam, and which in any case was why we were now leaving Lebanon.
ii
A rare and colorful group gathered to see us off at the airport. All our friends were there. Honeysuckle Epstein presented us with a bottle of champagne, which I cloaked greedily, and she was also about to give us an Egyptian scarab, but Hassan was there, and when she saw him watching she changed her mind and plunged the scarab back into her purse. Mahmoud was there, too, and even Afif the Thief, who asked me to say hello to a few friends of his in New York. “Greek girls,” he explained.
Ali, with Fuad in tow, had come with Bikhazi, and I was tempted to ask the two of them to go through the mock-beating scene for us, just for old times’ sake, but I wasn’t sure anyone else would appreciate it. I slipped Ali a farewell tip of a few leera, and he slipped me a piece of news: he had placed his name on the United States refugee quota.
“You—you be sponsor for me?” he asked softly in English. I looked him in the fez fondly, and said: “You bet, Ali. But when you get to America, remember—we may be a little hard to understand.”
“I make try,” he grinned, and “Okay, Fuad?” I asked, looking down at the little fellow. “Hokey-dokey!” the boy smiled hugely.
I gave him a last look. “See you next year—in the States!” Then I took Peg by the arm and got out of there before I did something ridiculous.
As we boarded the plane, Moona came forward and gave Peggy an armful of daisies. Then she kissed the children. And cried. So did Peggy.
Then we were on the plane.
We waved to our friends. We taxied out. We were gone.
The daisies had come from that same rare pasture, but Peggy held on to them all the way to Washington. I was glad.
THE LAST STRAW: FOUND IN THE THRONE ROOM
25. You Tell Me Your Dream
IF I EVER go crazy I hope it won’t be because I’ve lost my mind. I think that would be more than I could bear. I had some shaky moments, though, when I finally got back to Washington and checked in with the Agency.
After three days and eight de-briefing sessions, I was trundled into the Civil Service Medical Center for a complete physical. I wound up getting a mental.
“Mark an X,” said the form, “indicating whether or not you have ever experienced any of the following phenomena.” I had nothing personal against marks, or even against engles, so I marked. Mostly I marked in the NO boxes. But sometimes I marked in the YES. Like, “Have you ever suffered from insomnia?” Insomnia? Except during lectures, I had gone sleepless through an entire year of college! “Have you ever had wild nightmares?” I’d had them. What with earthquake nights and Shakespearean dog fantasies, I’d had them! “Have you any nervous, chronic twitches?” Twitches, indeed! Between my scenes with Bikhazi and leading a riot in the streets of Beirut, I had cultivated a marvelous wiggling of the ears! I pressed in my X’s with heavy, bold lines.
To a desk-bound nurse I handed my completed form and she read the first part of it rather peremptorily. But on turning it over and reading the back page—the section with all the X’s—she suddenly looked up at me with a disquietingly custodial air and pressed a buzzer at the side of her desk. Immediately, a grizzle-headed, stocky man in a white coat appeared, and after a nod to me, took the form out of the nurse’s hand. “Hmmm,” he muttered, reading the back page thoughtfully. Finally he looked up at me. “I’m Dr. Sylvester Tchwow,” he said, “chief of physical medicine. Mr. Blatty, I’d like you to come back here tomorrow morning for an interview with one of the other doctors.”
“I’m sorry,” I hemmed, a little trick I have when I don’t feel up to hawing, “I’m sorry, but I’ve already made plans for the morning.”
“You’ll have to change them,” said Tchwow rather grimly.
“Is it important?”
“Mr. Blatty, it’s most important,” he said, rising on his toes a little and looking me dead in the eye. “Most important.” It seemed to be important.
“Well—since it’s most important,” I relented, “okay. But what kind of a doctor is this?”
“He’s a psychiatrist, Mr. Blatty, a psychiatrist!” he boomed unexpectedly in a tone of voice that God must have used when He asked Cain the whereabouts of Abel. It set me to thinking, I can tell you, and mostly about my upcoming interview.
My interviewer was a Dr. Rodney Finortny, a middle-aged, quiet-spoken little Irishman with eyes like wayward moths; they brushed you lightly and then avoided you thereafter. “Mr. Blatty,” he soothed paternally, “you mustn’t be alarmed by this interview,” and if I wasn’t alarmed before, I certainly was alarmed now! “Many of our foreign service personnel return from overseas suffering from—cultural shock. It’s rarely serious, but we like to put them through a routine check. As in this case. Now then…” And here he squinted through thick-lensed glasses at a printed form on his desk. It was filled with X’s and appeared to be mine. “Now then—what about these nightmares? Is there just one that keeps recurring?”
“Yes,” I said. “Mostly it involves dogs playing Hamlet.”
He was staring at the wall just back of me now, and there was a lengthy pause before he said quietly: “It’s—always dogs playing Hamlet?”
“Well—not always,” I replied. “Sometimes it’s Twelfth Night.”
“I see.” There was another pause. “What about this nervous twitch? What sort of a twitch is it?”
“My ears wiggle.” They were wiggling right then as a matter of fact.
“Do they—wiggle—a great deal?”
“It varies,” I said, beginning to feel vaguely uncomfortable.
“When did you first notice this wiggling?” asked Finortny.
“I didn’t.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t?” he squealed, losing a little of his calm.
“Well, I could never see it,” I answered. “My daughter did. She was sitting back of me in church.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he said, removing his glasses and polishing them with a handkerchief. “Well—have you any theories or opinions of your own as to what may have produced this wiggle? Were you beset, at the time, by any severe anxieties, problems, worries?”
I mulled for a moment. “Well,” I said finally, “I guess it had a lot to do with the building moving.” He stopped cleaning his glasses. “Building moving?” he echoed slowly, not looking up at me.
“Yes. Our apartment building in Beirut. It moved during the night. Hardly anybody believed me, but there’s no doubt about it; I made the measurements myself the next morning.” He looked up and stared straight at me for the first time. “Did it move very much?”
“What’s the difference,” I said. “It moved. But if you’re looking for the first thing that upset me over there, I don’t think that was it.”
“What was—it?”
“The ram in the elevator shaft.”
He put on his glasses. “Ram in the elevator shaft?”
“Yeah. A skinned ram. It was supposed
to prevent elevator malfunctions. Didn’t do a bad job, at that.”
“Where was this elevator shaft, Mr. Blatty?”
“In the apartment building.”
“The building that moved in the night?” Something about his attitude was beginning to annoy me, and “Yeah,” I said, “that building.”
“I see.” He opened a large, looseleaf notebook and began making annotations. “Now then, let’s clarify one point, Mr. Blatty. Did you dream that there was a skinned ram in the elevator shaft?”
“Whaddya mean, dream?” I blurted. “It was there!”
“Just wanted to be sure,” he said quietly, still writing. “Now—what else might have contributed to this—ear wiggling?”
“Well—that business with the camels, I guess.”
“Camels?”
“Yeah—I had to fake a night club act featuring camel copulation. That’s enough to make anyone’s ears wiggle. It was pretty complicated.”
“Complicated?” he said, looking up with a gleam of interest in his eyes.
“Yeah,” I said. “Complicated.” He sat there waiting for me to continue, I guess, but even if I knew what he wanted me to say, I don’t think I would have said it.
“Would you care to describe it?” he prodded finally.
“Describe what?”
“What you were talking about.” We looked at each other for a moment.
“Well—the whole thing was kind of confusing,” I said.
“Yes—yes, I’m sure it would be,” he murmured.
I didn’t want to go through the details of the Festoon plot, so I changed the subject. “There was something else that kind of upset me over there,” I volunteered.
“Yes?”
“Yeah. It was that Arab time sense. You see, after a while you were never sure what the hell time it was, or what day. With the Arabs, tomorrow could mean next week, next month, or maybe even next year. Although sometimes it really meant tomorrow. Not always, though. Sometimes tomorrow was the day after tomorrow; or two days. And sometimes there was no tomorrow. It was all kind of mixed up. Know what I mean?”
“It’s certainly worth thinking about,” he said hollowly. Then he put down his pencil. “Now—was there anything else?”
“No. No, I guess that’s all.”
He began staring at the wall in back of me again, and he put his fingertips together like Ed Wynn. He just sat like that for a while. Then at last he said, “Mr. Blatty—are you thinking of returning to Beirut for another tour?”
“I’ve done my job,” I said. “I was a test case and I made it by accident. I’m not going back and take a chance on fouling things up over there. I’ve made my point in Lebanon. Now I’d like to make a few over here. I’m going to check out some job possibilities in Los Angeles,” I said. “It’s kind of nice out there. Lots of mountains, beautiful scenery.”
“Yes, mountains and scenery would be ideal!” he said warmly, and I wasn’t too sure what he meant by that, so I just looked at him sidewise and said, “Yeah. I’ll be off to L.A. tomorrow. If things work out, I’ll come right back and resign. Anyway, I haven’t seen my mother yet, so in any case I’ll have to come back.”
“This Los Angeles job—is it of the utmost importance to you at the moment?”
“Well, pretty important.”
“Are you—experiencing some anxiety over it? That is, do you think that if you don’t find work out there you might undergo severe emotional stress?”
I stared at him warily. “Should I?”
“No, no,” he snapped, again losing that veneer of calm. I was getting a little worried about him, then, because some of the things he was saying didn’t make sense. “Anyway, the main reason I’m going to California is to prove a point, to settle a score with Hollywood,” I said.
Finortny looked up at me slyly. “Settle a score?”
“Yeah. I’m going to show that town a thing or two.”
“Why? Do you feel that Hollywood has been—persecuting you?”
“Well—kind of,” I said, squirming a little in my chair.
“Have they—threatened you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you afraid they’re trying to kill you?”
I was getting a little alarmed now, and, “No,” I said. “No.”
“I see. But do you feel that anyone else is persecuting you?”
“Who did you have in mind?” I asked cautiously.
He blinked at me through the thick lenses. “No one in particular,” he said. “I thought you might know of someone.” I picked at my tie a little nervously. “Afraid I can’t help you there,” I offered. “I’d certainly tell you if I knew, though.”
He merely scruted me for a while. Then he got up, walked around his desk and came over to me. He looked down into my eyes. “Mr. Blatty,” he said, “have you ever considered having an analysis?”
“I’ve already had one,” I said. “It’s all right.”
“What’s all right?”
“My urine.”
He blinked two or three times, rapidly. “Mr. Blatty,” he said after a pause, “I hope you get that job in Los Angeles. But if you don’t—if you don’t, I’d like you to come and see me again on the—” He looked over at a wall calendar—“on the thirteenth of September.”
“Is it important?” I asked.
“Most important,” he answered, “most important.” Then a sudden idea struck him and he squinted at me intently. “Does it bother you, Mr. Blatty, that September thirteenth is Friday the thirteenth?”
“No—no, it doesn’t. But if it bothers you, we can change it. I don’t mind.”
He turned his back to me, and seemed to be contemplating the floor. “No,” he said in an oddly muffled voice, “the thirteenth will be fine.”
“Okay,” I said. “The thirteenth. Only maybe not. On account of I might get to thinking that the thirteenth really means the sixteenth. Or maybe the week after. Know what I mean?”
He whirled around and stared at me wildly, and that’s when I left. I was sorry I didn’t get a chance to tell him about his ears. Toward the end, there, they were wiggling pretty violently.
26. My Favorite Prince Is Me
IN LOS ANGELES, I got my job. And I finally laid my complexes to rest. But I had to become a prince to do it.
Peggy, during this period, had the children in tow and was visiting her parents in Pennsylvania. I, for my part, was visiting with one of the vice presidents of the University of Southern California. My fluency in Arab convinced him that he should appoint me campus publicity director and, I can assure you, this pleased me. But it would be a month before I took over, and in Hollywood there was a thing that needed doing. Happily, there was someone to help me do it.
Los Angeles had in its possession at that time the American equivalent of Mahmoud and Afif the Thief—a man who could play a part. A madcap buddy of Georgetown days, he was an ex-FBI agent named Frank Hanrahan. Frank looked stern. Frank looked distinguished. Frank had never been known to play a practical joke since coming to Los Angeles. This was important, as you’ll soon see.
“Frank,” I began as I sat in his Hollywood bachelor’s apartment sharing a bottle of Old Sayonara, “Frank, when I was out here three years ago I tried to make it as an actor, but couldn’t. And you know why?”
“Cause you couldn’t act?”
I shook my head sadly. “You haven’t changed a bit, have you, Frank. Still the same old wise-ass.”
“Okay, so tell me—why did they turn you down?”
“Because I wasn’t ‘The Type.’”
“The Type? What’s the type?”
“It’s in the glands,” I said, and was chagrined in the extreme when Frank didn’t clutch at his pancreas, or at the least, his gallstone. “I don’t get it,” he murmured.
“‘The Type’ means looking and acting like the All-American boy. And if you look and act like the All-American boy, the box office loves you. Everybody loves you. You’re ‘in
’!”
“But that’s not true, Billsey,” Frank interrupted.
“Never mind, Frank,” I answered. “I think it’s true and that’s what matters. I’m sick. I’ve got a complex. I gotta have a catharsis!”
“Whaddya mean?”
“I’ve got a big fat scar on my id from that time Hollywood rejected me. Now I’ve got to make them accept me. I want to be ‘in’! Only I have no intention of undergoing plastic surgery and looking like the All-American boy. It’s Will-yam the Arab I want them to dig.”
“You got a plan?”
“That’s right, smart guy—I’ve got a plan. It’s a bit wild, but I figure that if I want this to work in a kooky town like Hollywood I’ve got to try something that’s dramatic and even ridiculous.”
“You? Ridiculous?” Frank snorted, and I silenced him by seizing the bottle of Old Sayonara and thrusting it under my jacket. “You gonna listen to me?”
“I’m listening,” he said soberly, which is rather ironic when you come to think of it, but then maybe you’d better not think about it.
“Frank,” I began at last, for he seemed to like that name, “Frank, I’ve been around a lot of Arab royalty, and, daddy, what could be more acceptable to this nobility-happy town than a prince?”
“A king?”
I eyed him severely. “You gonna stop?” He nodded mutely.
“Okay,” I said, and donned a pair of dark glasses. Then I leaned forward intently: “Frank—do you think I could pass for an Arab prince?”
Frank stared at me. “Say something in prince,” he said finally.
“Yesss—sank you—verry—mush,” I hissed haltingly.
Frank’s unblinking gaze brushed over my face with light, inscrutable fingertips. “We’re in,” he said. And we joyously rubbed our muzzles in our Old Sayonara.
ii
In a frightening collaboration unmatched since the teaming of Igor with Frankenstein’s monster, Frank and I whole-clothed the complete life history of a fictitious Saudi Arabian prince to be known as “Khairallah el Aswad el Xeer, black sheep son of King Saud of Saudi Arabia.” Since Saud had about thirty sons anyway, we didn’t much figure he’d mind another—know what I mean? Our eventual aim was to spring the prince on Hollywood notables. But we decided it might be best to try a test run. Hum. Meaning who? And where? A problem.