Kantor’s deep blue eyes stared down at me and he deluged me with words. “A remarkable young man, Mr. Jason. Remarkable. I can tell he has an intuitive grasp of matters both cosmical and naturalistic from the glint of supernal awareness in his lustrous eyes. Remarkable! A man to watch, indeed, a man to watch.”
Then he passed on, leaving me stunned to the core, and awash in words whose meanings I was only barely able to fathom.
And so it went all that evening. Kantor the monologist, Kantor the financier, Kantor the bon vivant waving his silver-headed walking stick. Amused, bemused, confused and nonplused we sat and listened to his meandering reminiscences of the world in which he had moved, his aspirations, his love of science fiction (and his total unawareness of even the leading writers in the field)…and we waited for the kicker.
Finally, it came. When we were all wasted and spent by the mere effort of listening to him.
“Fellow Solarians,” he blurted, during a three-second lull in what had been entirely his conversation, “and I hope I am of a full-hearted enough nature, borne up with recondite camaraderie and bold effusion for you good people of the stars and the night, to call myself so…fellow Solarians, I am prepared to make you well-known, nay, say responsive to the plucked chords of fickle public sentiment, as you have long adhered to be! Why should men and women of your ilk, your pluck, your boldishness, men and women with so much to give to a world crying out, pleading for light and guidance, be relegated to positions of obscurantivity and idle activity? You, you are the brave new future of this land, and I am prepared—for a small fee—to hoist you by the petards of your own magnificence and—”
We were readers of Startling Stories, where the hell was he getting this saviors of mankind crap from?
Eventually, we told him we would get back in touch with him, watched the variousness of him exeunt flourishing, and fell back as a group, in absolute exhaustion.
Earl Simon it was, who very simply said it, in a quiet voice, as we all slumped there, drained and confused. “Hey, that guy’s a crook.”
No one bothered to disagree. We were too exhausted.
And now, thirteen years later, after I had gone my way, the Solarians had gone theirs, and G. Barney Kantor had, presumably, gone his, I was the recipient of a telegram, like a rainbow voice out of the past, like a many-flavored bird of passage that once every thousand years lights and casts its gay gloom over anyone lucky enough to be around.
I put Kantor and his officious, nonsensical ’gram out of my mind till later that night, when we were at one of the local nightclubs, one of the few left in Cleveland’s now-ghost-towned downtown. I was with Bernice, my sister Beverly and her husband Jerold, the optician, and we had been joined by the headliner of the show (a well-known male singer who prefers I do not use his name), and three girls out of the go-go chorus.
How Kantor came up, I don’t recall now, but I told them of our meeting thirteen years before, when I had been in high school and had not yet written the first book. “And you know, every once in a while,” I told them, “when I’d be downtown, I’d see him on the street. He was a sidewalk photographer most of the time. I suppose that’s where he made his living.”
One of the go-go girls, memory piqued by my comparison of Kantor to Groucho Marx, told me how he had been a sandwich man.
Then my brother-in-law, who is frankly too nice a guy to be married to my sister, added, “You bet your life he remembers you, Walt. When you were in town three years with your book, uh, which one was that—”
“NO MORE FLAMES,” I reminded him, always ready to tout my own work.
“Right. NO MORE FLAMES. Well, when you were at that autograph party at Burrows’, he found the write-up in the Press, with my name in it, and he came around to the shop, and introduced himself. Said he was a good friend, and really came on with me. I managed to get him out of the store, I had a couple of patients, and he was yelling and making an ass of himself.”
I grinned, imagining G. Barney Kantor’s capers in mild, good-natured Jerry’s optical shop.
“But now every time he sees me on the street,” Jerry Rabnick continued, “he follows me for blocks with that damned camera of his, yelling at the top of his lungs, ‘HEY, THERE GOES DOCTOR RAB, THE BROTHER-IN-LAW OF AMERICA’S FINEST NOVELIST! HEY, DOCTOR RAB, HOW GOES IT?’”
Jerry’s voice had climbed in imitation of Kantor’s yowl, and heads were turning toward us in the club. He flushed and fell silent. I found myself laughing, at just the mental picture of that colossal fraud, that monstrous charlatan, G. Barney Kantor.
Then my sister chimed in, “We were having a Temple benefit, and he called me, offering something or other, I don’t remember what it was now, but I called the Better Business Bureau to check on him and so help me, when I mentioned his name, the girl groaned and flashed the switchboard and said, ‘Refer this call to the Kantor Department.’” I broke up completely, then. The singer—who had been listening carefully—also got his jollies, and we sat there for at least a minute till the tears ran down our face, we were laughing so hard.
“He sounds like a real creep,” one of the go-go girls commented. “He musta been in an’ outta jail a million times. He sounds like a real crook.”
I was reminded of Earl Simon’s remark so many years before, and it started the juices flowing. “Perhaps not,” I replied. “Perhaps G. Barney Kantor lives in his little world of pretense and tomfoolery, believing he is a press agent extraordinaire. Perhaps he’s fooled himself into thinking he’s a big man, and these little hangups with the police and people shunning him are just the stupidity of the mass. People who don’t recognize his greatness.”
I thought that was damned perceptive of me.
Then Bernice shook me by saying, “I think he’s pathetic. I feel sorry for him.”
“Now what the hell brought that on?” I said, the big-time writer who was on his way to Hollywood. “You’re the one who wanted to kill him for waking you in the middle of the night.”
“It wasn’t the middle of the night, it was the early morning, and I feel sorry for the poor little guy.”
I snorted. “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, for Christ’s sake. Do you take in stray cats and puff adders, too?”
Bernice stuck her tongue out at me. “You’ve just become too big a deal to remember people like him. Not everybody makes it. This little guy apparently lives a lie, but it’s all he’s got. I think you stink.”
And that was what formed my decision. “All right, Miss Humanitarian, I’ll tell you what let’s do: let’s find out where he lives and go pay him a visit. You’ll see him for himself, as he really is, stripped of all the sadness and tarnished glory. He probably lives in some fleabag hotel on Prospect, with crotch shots out of Playboy on the walls, and a card file on how to fleece suckers like you.”
So we looked it up, and it was in the phone book, but it was an address out on the West Side, in a not too pleasant section of the depressed area. A section getting Poverty Program money.
There were ten of us by the time our cavalcade got to Kantor’s street. We had picked up two of the musicians from the combo that backed the Well-Known Male Singer, and all ten of us, in three cars, had turned it into quite a little party. We were all pretty smashed by the time we got out there and it was four or five in the morning.
The street was dark and the houses were paint-peeling, sad-faced, a bit too grim for us really to laugh much. But so intent were we—all of us except Bernice—on revealing G. Barney Kantor as a fraud and a poltroon, that not even the slim neighborhood could really dampen us.
We found the house, and stopped in front. “Here, let me get a couple of my books out of the glove compartment,” I said. We had brought them along for the tv show earlier in the day, and I’d shoved them in the compartment when the director of the show said he already had them. “I’ll use them to reestablish our ‘friendship.’ After all, it has been thirteen years.” The others in the car all smiled and egged me on. All except Bernice.
We got out of the car and walked up the weed-spotted walk, the tiles of the pavement thrust up and cracked from too many changes in temperature, too few repairs.
I rang the bell and didn’t really pay any attention to the fact that it was five o’clock in the morning and the house was black. A light came on somewhere inside, and after a moment the door opened a trifle. I looked down at a woman’s face. “Yes?” she asked, half-frightened.
“We’re friends of G. Barney Kantor. Is he here?”
I thought it must surely be a rooming house.
The door opened a little wider.
“Barney? No, he’s out this evening. May I help you? I’m Mrs. Kantor.”
She was built like a muffin, and had her hair up around her head in a large braid. She was wearing a faded housecoat and a pair of bedroom slippers from which the fuzz had departed. Another figure, a young girl, came to stand behind the older woman.
I suddenly felt very foolish.
“Well, uh, my name is Walter Innes. I’m a writer, and, uh, a friend of Barney’s; I—uh—I thought I’d drop by to—uh—” I looked around at the nine others, trying to find some help. They had suddenly developed Little Orphan Annie’s Disease: blank eyeballs.
“Oh, Mr. Innes!” the little woman chirped. “Oh, my gosh, yes! Barney has spoken of you many times, won’t you come in, it’s so cold out there.”
She opened the door wide and admonished the young girl to, “Gwen, run and turn on the lights and put on some coffee!”
We came in and she led us into the living room. It was furnished in Early Squalor. I wanted to get out of there very badly.
And yet, at the same time, I was really angry at G. Barney Kantor, really infuriated. Here was his wife and what was apparently his daughter, living in a dump and consigned to a life of poverty, while he ran around Cleveland wasting money sending night letters and playing the poseur. I wanted to tell her what I thought of her blasted husband and his ridiculous antics. I was perhaps a bit too drunk.
“Oh, Mr. Innes, it’s such a pleasure to meet you at last. Barney has told us many times how he gave you your start. I’m just sorry he can’t be here to see you; he’s out on a very big promotion tonight.”
I was too amazed by having learned G. Barney Kantor had given me my start to say anything. But the daughter, Gwen, chimed in, “Daddy always said you were his finest hour. Daddy always talks like that.” Coffee was apparently on.
I nodded dumbly, and beside me I heard Bernice moving up to whisper, “You bastard!” in my ear.
“Well, uh,” I said, apropos of absolutely nothing.
“Please sit down, won’t you all,” G. Barney Kantor’s wife said. I then realized no one had introduced the small army she had let into her living room this wee small hour. As I went around introducing everyone, telling who they were, the two women’s faces lit up. They recognized The Singer, immediately, and when he said, “I’m sorry we missed Barney, Mrs. Kantor. He’s been a great help to me whenever I play Cleveland,” she practically erupted in joy.
Well, it was an agonizing hour and a half. We sat there and heard what a great man G. Barney Kantor was, how this was only a temporary accommodation, how they were going to hit the big time soon, how Barney had connections in Hollywood, how the mayor was thinking of citing him for civic contributions, and on and on and on.
Finally, we made ready to depart. I took out my pen and signed the two books: To my dear friend, G. Barney Kantor, for all his invaluable help and for showing me a special part of the universe. Walter Innes.
I gave them to her, and she stood on tiptoe to kiss my cheek. She said good-bye to us all, and we left.
Bernice didn’t say anything all the way back to the hotel, but when we left the car with the doorman, and he said, “We watched you on tv today, Mr. Innes. You were great,” Bernice snorted and gave me a knowing grin that told me I’d either have to fire her or marry her.
—Cleveland, 1962
NEITHER YOUR JENNY NOR MINE
My first inclination, upon learning Jenny was knocked up, was to go find Roger Gore and auger him into the sidewalk. That was my first inclination; when she called, I lit a cigarette and asked her if my girl Rooney, her roommate, knew about it, and she said yes, Rooney knew and had suggested the call to me. I told her to take a copy of McCall’s and go to the bathroom, that I had to think about it, and would call her back in twenty minutes. She wasn’t crying when she hung up, which was something to be thankful for.
There is a crime in our land more heinous than any other I can think of, right offhand, and yet it goes unpunished. It is the crime of gullibility. People who actually believe the lowballing of used car dealers; people who accept the penciled “2 Drink Minimum” card on their table as law; girls who swallow the line of horse crud a swinger uses to get them in the rack. Like that, yeah. Jenny was a product of that crime wave. She was a typical know-nothing, a little patsy who had been seduced by four-color lithography and dream-images from a million mass media, and she believed the stork brought babies.
In about ninety days her tummy was going to tell her she’d been lied to. And been had.
When I’d started dating Rooney, and had learned that the roommates were two eighteen-year-olds fresh out of nowhere and firmly under Rooney’s wing, it had been a toss-up whether I’d try to make them on the sly, or become Big Brother to the brood. As it turned out, Rooney was enough action for me, and I took the latter route.
We started taking Jenny and Kitten (née Margaret Alice Kirgen, the second roommate) with us when we went out. Parties, movies, schlepping-around sessions in which we put miles on the car and layers on our ennui. Kitten wasn’t bad; she was a reasonably hip kid who was actually six months younger than Jenny, but much more aware of what was going on around her. Jenny was impossible. There was a naïve quality about her that might have been ingenuous, if she hadn’t been so gawdawful stupid along with it. They are two different facets, naïveté and stupidity, and combined they make for a saccharine-sweet dumb that paralyzes as it horrifies.
Why did we allow them to come along with us, to adopt us someway; or rather, let us adopt them? Put it down to my past, which was filled with incomplete memories of deeds I did not care to think about. I can’t remember ever having been young, not really. On my own as far back as I can recall, there was never that innocence of childhood or nature that I longed to see in others. So Jenny and Kitten became my social projects. Not in any elaborate sense, but it pleasured me to see them enjoy the bounties of the young…oh hell, Norman Rockwell and Edgar A. Guest and let’s all pose for a Pepsi ad.
Kenneth Duane Markham, thirty years old and a humanitarian. Let’s send this child to camp (if we can’t roll her in the hay, hey hey!). Call it noble intentions, for all the wrong reasons.
At one of the parties we took Jenny to, I ran across Roger Gore. He was (is) (will be, till I catch his face in my right hand) a good-looking jackpotter with a flair for wearing clothes that would look slovenly on other guys, and a laudable record of having avoided honest labor. His father owned a chain of something or others, and Roger indulged himself by taking jobs as switchman on the railroad, soap salesman door to door, night watchman. He never did any of them for very long; his rationale for taking on such onerous tasks was the same as that of the aspiring novelist. He wanted to be able to say he had done these things. It was all very Robert Ruark and hairy-chested and proletarian. He was a fraud. But a good-looking, smooth fraud with a flair for wearing clothes that would look—but I said that already.
It was one of those parties where some college kid had met a hipster in a downtown black-and-tan club, and had invited him over the following night for “a little get-together.” As a consequence, the room was jammed, half with inept, callow UCLA students, half with sinuous spades wrapped up in color. It was one of those scenes where the gray cats felt a sense of adventure and titillation just being in the same time-zone with Negroes, and the blacks were infra-digging, wasting the white boys
’ Watusi with their own extra-lovely dancing, and mooching as much free juice as possible.
Everybody hated everybody, ’way down deep.
We walked in and I saw Roger first crack out of the bag. He was trying to make the scene with a couple of black dudes I knew from downtown, and they were being indulgent. But they “felt a draft” and Old Rog was about to get frozen out. When they put him down (which could be noted by the way his sappy expression went sour) and he walked away, I took the two girls over and introduced them. To the black guys. Roger would make his own introductions, I had no worries on that score. But the two downtown operators were bad, meaning they were good. One of them was a shipping clerk for a record distributor, and the other was a gopher in an exclusive men’s hair salon. (Gopher: “Go for the coffee, Jerry.” “Go for Mr. Bentley’s shoes, Jerry.” “Go for—”)
“Hey, baby, what’s shakin’?”
“Howya doin’, man, it’s been time I seen yoah ass.”
“Busy.”
“Yeah, sheee-it, man, you always busy one thing’n ’nother.”
“Gotta keep the bread on the table…”
“Got to keep that bread in yoah pocket!”
“True.”
Jenny was standing there, her face open, and as far as she was concerned, where was she? Rooney was digging, as usual, and loving me with her eyes, which was a groove. I pointed each one out to the guys and named:
“Hey, Jerry, Willis, want you to meet Rooney and Jenny.” Kitten had had a date. A CPA from Santa Monica. Wow!
“Very pleased’t meetcha.” Jerry grinned. That cat had the most beautiful mouthful of teeth known to Western Man, he knew it, and he flashed them like the marquee at Grauman’s Chinese. “Very pleased’t meetcha,” Willis said, and I knew he was shucking me, just to make me feel good; he was coming on with Rooney because he knew it would make me feel tall. I gave them each a soft punch on the biceps and we moved off into the crowd. We said our hellos to the host, who was an authentic schlepp, and took the coats into the bedroom. A pair of UCLAmnesiacs were making it among the coats, so we laid ours over the windowseat. It promised to be a bad, dull party. The roar of rhythm&blues was coming out of the living room, meeting the bubble-gum music from the dining room head-on, and canceling each other out in the hallways connecting.