“Power failures. No danger there the brain would defrost.”
Bloor went on to explain how the scientists are foiled by a CIA agent with telepathic powers and who at the end of the film would be revealed to be “an alien being with Jewish interests.”
“I see the alien as Tom Hanks, by the way,” she finished.
I looked aside, slightly nodding and stroking my chin.
“Yeah, Hanks,” I said. “Hanks could be good, Hanks could do it.”
“Tom Cruise?”
“Scientology problem. Couch jumper.”
“I’d forgotten.”
“Humphrey Bogart?”
“He’s dead.”
“Then John Garfield.”
“So is he. Hey, what century are you living in, bright eyes?”
Good question. I didn’t know the answer.
It didn’t matter.
“Now what’s hanging me up,” Bloor continued, “is where we ought to start the picture. Do we begin with Hitler dying, or do we do that in a flashback so we can start in the Arctic with these weirdos and their ritual thing around the brain? You know, a real grabber like, who are they and why are they worshipping that freezer? What do you think?”
A dangerous moment. First there was that “we.” Very chilling. And then what answer could I give her without finally breaking up? I felt like asking for a last cigarette and a blindfold but then flashed back to a meeting one night with Paul Newman in his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was to star in a film I was writing for him and we met to discuss my first draft in which the character’s flaws and problems with his marriage and his job are laid out at the beginning (Act One), and then he works through them in the middle (Act Two) while he’s shipwrecked on an island, and then at the end (Act Three) he’s rescued and comes back home where he deals with all his Act One problems as a deeply changed man. Paul wanted the movie to start on the island, and as being a movie superstar ensconced in a Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow didn’t mean that housekeeping wouldn’t forget to leave him one or two drinking glasses, we’d been sipping vodka tonics out of a pair of Paul’s shoes so that every time I’d woozily protest that we wouldn’t know the character had changed unless we knew what he was like before then, Paul would lean in his nose about an inch from mine, thus pinning me fast with those icy blues and a Zen like air of unfathomable wisdom while at the same time struggling to hold his head up as he countered, “Who is to say where Act One should begin?” Which not only shut me up for good but also taught me convincingly that if you want to evade a question or bang the door shut on a topic of discussion, this was the line to use, and not that tired old standby, “But then what would Voltaire, or even Montesquieu, think of that?”—this formerly the standard weapon of choice to be mercilessly brandished with impunity since no one will admit they have no clue as to what it might mean. But some exhausted guardian angel ever anxious for my safety must have whispered in my ear that the standard line wouldn’t work with Bloor, and in fact would only baffle and confuse her, thus awakening feelings of inferiority that might even incite her to a murderous rage.
“So come on,” Bloor prodded. “What do you think?”
I said, “Who is to say where Act One should begin?”
Nodding her head just a little, Bloor read me inscrutably, then dubiously and quietly commented, “Yeah. Yeah, I see where you’re going.”
She moved in a step and looked down at my laptop screen.
“That a script you’re writing now?”
“No, not a script. A memoir.”
“You mean like a book, then.”
“Sort of.”
“Is it good? Will it sell?”
The danger being minimal, I couldn’t resist.
“Well, the truth is I think it could wind up a classic.”
“A classic?”
“Who knows? I mean, it worked for James Joyce with Finnegan’s Wake, and so I’m thinking why shouldn’t it work for me?”
“So what’s the trick?”
“The final sentence of the book is going to end with ‘the.’”
She looked surprised. “They let you do that?”
I lowered my head a little, glaring smokily upward like Jack La Rue when the waiter says they’re out of pepperoni for his pizza, then said quietly and dangerously, “Who’s going to stop me?”
Bloor looked at me blankly, very often an unsettling sign and maybe I’d miscalculated, I feared. But the intercom crackled and saved me.
“Nurse Bloor to the desk! Nurse Bloor!”
“Gotta go. So bottom line: you think my movie idea is commercial?”
Making sure that my brow was furrowed, and in an effort to come off like Sigmund Freud asking Jung, “Are you positive these archetypes exist?” I looked off and murmured, “Fascinating. Really. So deep.”
What a wretched elitist phony! I knew very well that executive judgments in the Hollywood studio system were no more well grounded than Bloor’s, and perhaps even worse. I once had a screenwriting gig at Columbia’s Gower Street lot, where for a time it was the custom for favored writers, producers and directors to take lunch at this huge, long conference table with the studio head presiding, and at one of these lunches he brought up the subject of a rival studio’s about-to-be-released motion picture. He had seen its sneak preview the night before at a theater in Sherman Oaks. “Anyone else here see it?” he asked. “No? Well, you’re lucky. The picture’s a disaster. I’m predicting with total one-thousand-percent accuracy that it won’t even earn back its negative cost.”
I don’t know what got into me then; maybe the dry, crummy meat loaf I’d ordered, or a scene I’d written over and over and couldn’t whip, but I spoke up and said, “Sir, what do you base that on? How do you know that?”
The studio head’s bushy gray eyebrows lifted. “How do I know that, you ask? How do I know it? I know it because I’m shifting in my seat the whole picture! I know it from my ass, young man! My ass tells me!” At which Burton Wohl, then working on adapting his novel A Cold Wind in August for the screen, followed up with, “Is it therefore your contention, sir, that yours is the monitor ass of the universe?”
Thirty years later it would be recognized that nobody’s ass was telling anybody anything. But that was then and Nurse Bloor was even “thener.”
“Nurse Bloor to the desk!” blared the intercom again.
Bloor’s eyelids narrowed.
“To be continued,” she said.
I heard the crackling of ice forming in my bloodstream.
As she pivoted to leave, Bloor stopped and turned to me.
“I almost forgot,” she said. “Twyford, Mackey and Baloqui want to know if you’re up for a round of Hearts.”
Yes, that’s right. Baloqui, too, had made it to his eighties, but sadly he’d succumbed to senility and had checked in the week before. I didn’t want to see him like that and stayed away; he’d been too vital a force for such an ending. Fordham Prep had unleashed the latent madman in his soul, most especially in his senior year when in the middle of the night he decided to prowl the corridors of the Hotel Edison where his senior prom had been held, banging hard on guestroom doors and then loudly identifying himself in a voice prematurely deep as “Inspector Cardini of the Vice Squad” before commanding, “Open up! Come on, we know you’ve got a woman in there!” And if a man in the room answered, “But it’s my wife!” he’d come back with, “Sir, your wife is the complainant!” Whoever knew what had been lurking in this Spaniard’s heart! After prep school he enlisted in the Air Force—in his view the most dashing of the military services—flew a fighter jet, and after mustering out began flying for United Airlines. This was back in the “Main Line’s” early days when the door to the pi lot’s compartment was always left open so that the passengers could see that the pi lot wasn’t dead, this having been found, for some reason, to have a calming, reassuring effect upon the passengers. I’d stayed in touch with Baloqui all my life, and wasn’t surprised when he told
me how he’d sought, in those open-door days, to ease the boredom of coast-to-coast red-eye flights. He would bide his time, he said, waiting for weather conditions “to be right,” and when they were he would cap his teeth with these long plastic vampire fangs that he’d bought at the Hollywood Magic Shop in L.A. and then patiently wait for that rare occasion when, with thunder and lightning in the distance, the eerie blue plasma of Saint Elmo’s fire started flashing and dancing around the pi lot’s compartment, which is when he’d turn his head around and hideously smile, fangs bared, at the passengers.
“Sometimes they’d scream,” he’d told me happily.
And now he was here.
“What should I tell them?” Bloor asked.
I said, “Nothing.”
She studied my face, and then turned and started walking away. “Yeah, that’s probably best,” she said. “See you at the Christmas party.”
In the meantime, let’s get this straight: I am not in some kind of “Happydale.” Okay? Sure, it’s Bellevue, but I’m not in their psycho ward. That would make things so easy to explain, now, wouldn’t it? The time jumps. Jane. The whole deal. But this isn’t your standard laughing academy, it’s a halfway house between death and Don Rickles, and the facts of my story, if you’d really like to know, are even more complicated than trying to take dental X-rays of a cobra. You will understand, though.
Finally.
Wait!
12
For the rest of that day at Coney Island I gave Vera Virago as much of the time of her life as a buck and a half and patience could buy. She wasn’t a homely kid, just forbidding. Tall and broad shouldered, very husky, she had a round, ballooning Eskimo face that immediately made you think of blubber, and a long fall of coppery, curly hair framing closeset, beady black eyes that never looked or even stared, they pierced, so that the first time you met her you’d figure that some pretty strong Jesuit missionary had just brought her back from the Amazon following a memorable struggle at dockside there for possession of two of her personal effects: “No, Vera! No! U.S. Customs not allow! Blow gun bad, Vera! No! Machete bad!” There had also been a somewhat disquieting moment on that visit to the Museum of Natural History. While all of the rest of our class had moved on, Virago stood glued with these wide staring eyes looking in at an exhibit about Amazon pygmy headhunters and we had to go back and physically tear her away. She had a heart made of caramel custard, though, but even this could be unnerving to the point of irritation. As I’d mentioned, she was so deeply and neurotically insecure that whatever you did for her, like handing her a Kleenex to wipe catsup off her sneakers, or buying her a nickel paper bag of fries, she’d be totally all scraping and bowing, instantly becoming a Japanese geisha and saying, “Thank you! Oh, thank you so much! You are so kind! You are so very very very very very…!” until you wanted to slap her around a few times, or even push half a grapefruit into her face like Jimmy Cagney does to Mae Clarke in Public Enemy; but then always, by a monumental effort of will, I would see this Kurt Vonnegut guy Jane had mentioned sitting high up in a chair on a golden dais a few feet above me with a wooden leg and made up as Sam Jaffe playing Father Perrault in the movie Lost Horizon saying gently, “Be kind, my son,” although sometimes it wouldn’t be Vonnegut, it would be “Cuddles” Sakall, or even once Humphrey Bogart, though he didn’t say “Be kind” or anything else, he just kept twitching his facial muscles sympathetically.
That day I got home from Coney Island late, but Pop had saved dinner and warmed it up for me and then sat at the table to watch me eat. He said nothing, sort of studying me, as usual, and puffing on his pipe and blowing smoke to the side.
“You have very good time today, Joey?”
“Yeah, I did, Pop.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “I see it in you face.”
Another puff, another blowing out of smoke.
“I think maybe today you make pray with your heart.”
I’d been lifting my fork but stopped to look at him now with little question marks in my eyes. “Yeah, Pop?”
“Yes, I think so.”
Should I tell him about Jane? I wondered.
But the question marks turned into exclamation points: No! He’ll worry and take me to doctors!
I lowered my head and finished dinner.
Late that night I was sitting on the edge of my bed with an elbow on my knee and the side of my head propped against my fist. I was thinking thoughts. You know: Stuff. What Pop said at dinner. Jane. Me finding the nickel and dime on the sidewalk and excitedly running across the street to Woolworth’s, dodging oncoming cars and coming close to getting hit. And then the look on Virago’s face on the subway ride coming back from Coney Island when I gritted my entire body and mind and put my arm around her shoulder for a second and gave it a pat and then a friendly squeeze. “Had a real nice time,” I half yelled in her ear above the roar of the train, and because of the softness of Virago’s voice and the apparently bottomless mercy of God, I didn’t hear even one of her seventy-six emotional thank-yous.
But I saw her incredibly happy smile.
And the glow that it gave me and is giving me now.
I got up and knelt down by the side of the bed.
“Now I lay me down to sleep…”
13
The next day I had my hands around Paulie Farragher’s throat and was squeezing so hard that his face had turned blue, but not blue enough yet to satisfy me. I’d surprised him alone in the office of Joseph Andrews Mortuary, which was right across the street from the St. Stephen’s church rear entrance on 33rd and where he worked a few hours a week and therefore wouldn’t be wearing that moth-eaten oversized coat so he couldn’t do his his weirdo “Dutch Defense.”
“You miserable potato-eating cretin!” I snarled.
I like to think of it as praying with my heart.
We’d gone swimming at the 23rd Street pool—me, Jimmy Connelly, Farragher and Tommy Foley. Ignoring the warning voices in my head that were saying, “Go not to the pool today, Joey,” I went anyway, meeting up with the others at the pool and thinking maybe my hyperalertness against the chance they might again seek to “safety test” the operational limits of my lungs would serve to keep my thoughts away from Jane and the question of my sanity for a while. I stayed clear of the diving pool so nothing happened. It was on the way home that “The Great and Enduring Farragheronian Evil” occurred when the other guys decided on taking a trolley home, they being exhausted, I suppose, from the intense concentration required while targeting me with thought rays intended to lure me to the diving pool and ultimate immersion in the wetness of things, as I’d caught them all staring at me once so intensely that their eyes were almost popping out of their heads while they seemed to be arguing over something, Foley in particular heatedly insisting, “No, it’s got to be the back of his head, the back!” Anyway, I didn’t have the nickel fare and…Okay, okay, I had it but I didn’t want to spend it, so I hitched on the back of the trolley but then had to let go when Farragher decided, it being a nice day, to walk to the trolley’s open back window and shoot a glob of spittle straight into my eye, thus preparing me for future studies of the character Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello and the mystery of utterly unmotivated evil—though for maybe half a second before placing my hands around his throat, I did, in all fairness, weigh and find incredibly wanting his vociferous claim that he’d been aiming at a wasp on my forehead that was crawling toward my eye. I couldn’t decide which was worse: his stupid lie, or his wounded whimper that “No good deed ever goes unpunished,” a lament not entirely unexpected from the future Cardinal Hayes High School valedictorian who thought the names of the Three Musketeers were Orthos, Bathos and Aramis.
Leave off with that smiling. He had to be destroyed.
I’d marched steadily up Third Avenue with blood in my eyes, plus some phlegm, until I got to the mortuary, where I cupped my hands to my eyes and then pressed them against the darkly tinted glass façade and saw only Joe Andrews, the
owner and chief mortician, sitting at his desk against a wall. No Farragher. His father was the superintendent of the building and they lived in the basement apartment, but I knew these were Farragher’s working hours. As I began to look away from Andrews, I saw him start kneading and clasping and unclasping his hands, which was what Farragher once told me he always did when surreptitiously breaking wind, meantime coughing or loudly clearing his throat to cover up any sound from his deadly malefactions whenever a client was sitting in the office, or against the possibility that someone might enter the room so quietly he might be unaware of their presence. I shifted my glance to a door that led to the place where morticians do their thing with the deceased and I wondered whether Andrews coughed and fiddled with his hands while he was farting in the presence of the dead. I suppose we’ll never know. Meantime, Andrews got up from his chair and headed for the door to the street, so I pretended to be reading his “Coming Attractions” sign in the window while he exited the mortuary and walked across the street to a tiny soda, cigarettes and candy store, perhaps to check on the progress of the Milky Way bar that he’d placed atop the block of ice in the soft drinks bin, so I jumped on my chance like a panther and entered the mortuary, where I found and tackled Farragher as he was exiting a viewing room, and after having fun strangling him for a while I had my fist upraised and ready to pound him into jelly, when all of a sudden I just froze with my fist in midair, thinking:
Wait a minute! What would Kurt Vonnegut do?
I’m not sure that’s why I stopped but I did. I mean, I didn’t look down and say, “I love and forgive you, brother Farragher and pray you will amend your evil ways very soon,” or any other lunatic stuff like that inasmuch as I still was steamed as hell. I just got up and started walking out of the place and when I’d reached the front office and opened the door to the street, I bumped into Andrews, who was coming back in. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked me and I vehemently blurted, “Jesus, no!” I walked around for a while, still wondering why I’d pulled my punch, and not getting too much of an answer. I just felt it was wrong, that’s all. It was wrong and it made me feel crummy.