“And so what are you writing?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s a boxing thing. Kid Galahad. It’s for Elvis.”
My brow wrinkled up. I said, “For who?”
Oh, well, I guess you can imagine how both of us were flummoxed when I said that my script was for Elvis too. It got even worse when we started asking around and it turned out that because of his packed fixed-concert schedule and the need to be sure that by a “date certain” there’d be a screenplay that both MGM and Elvis liked, in addition to me and Bill Faye there were three other Elvis screenplay writers!
And this, my dear children, is how El Bueno lost his strut.
And learned to walk very slowly.
Meantime, as almost every detective in a British TV series is constantly saying, “May I have a word?” You think American movies are worse now than ever and getting worse every year? Okay, they stink to high heaven. The old-time studio chiefs loved movies. Harry Cohn said he kissed the feet of talent, whereas today most studio executives don’t even like movies—the only thing that excites them is “the deal.” Except for that, though, the suits behind the choices being made these days are the same as back then, except they’re forty to fifty years younger. Nurse Bloor isn’t out of the mainstream. Fling a Frisbee out a second-floor movie studio window and I promise you that one out of two will hit somebody just like Sam Kaddish, the oldster who once ran Kaddish Studios. He hired me to write a screenplay based on an idea I had pitched and which he liked, but when I’d finished it he called me into his office and told me that he wanted some major changes made in accordance with specific ideas that he had, or that maybe his niece or his granddaughter had, and when he’d finished I just sat there and thought for a while, and then I told him that the changes he’d proposed would be ruinous. “You’re telling me you refuse to make the changes?” he huffed, and then hoping to win him over with diplomacy, and pretty much oozing a sympathetic and complete understanding of his views, I said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Kaddish, really very very sorry, but I just can’t be a party to the mindless destruction of this material.” I was fired, and if the grounds were for stupidity, justly. Another writer was hired, a very good one in fact, but unfortunately highly obedient, and he rendered unto Kaddish every change, every scene, every ditsy line of dialogue he wanted and the picture was made and released and lost more money than any other studio film ever made. About nine years later my agent H. N. Swanson, or “Swanny” as he was called, went to see Kaddish, who was looking for a writer to adapt a big bestselling novel for the screen. Swanny had a little black book that he carried around in a jacket vest pocket to remind him of the names of the writers he represented and how much in commissions he was owed on the King James Bible, and he hauled it out now, flipped through some pages, and then looked up and said, “How about Joseph El Bueno?”
Kaddish’s eyebrows sickled up in horror and he leaned back aghast, his manicured fingertips gripping the edge of his desktop tightly and his knuckles turning white as, “El Bueno?” he thundered. “El Bueno? Don’t even mention his name in these premises! That phony bullshit artist was connected with the biggest disaster of my professional career!” That’s the world I was living in, dear hearts, and while I’m really not sure what that says about me, I not only survived but did well: married a wonderful girl, a set designer; had a house in Encino with a view, and pretty much kept my head down and tried to be good, not exactly a breeze in the movie business with all those gorgeous starlets running around on the loose. But to help me there was prayer of both kinds, Pop’s and Jane’s, and somehow I managed to skate past the abyss.
Barely.
But a win is still a win.
17
“Okay, Hemingway, here’s the problem.”
I looked up and saw Bloor. She was standing in front of me, a little paper cup filled with water in one hand, and a cup with a medication capsule in the other. I’d been so lost in what I was writing I didn’t hear the dreaded click-click-click of the stilettos, or maybe she’d glued rubber to the tips. Does it matter?
I said, “What? What problem?”
“Take your meds first,” she said. I did. She relieved me of the empty cups, tossed them into a wastebasket and breathing out, “Two!” slid a chair over facing mine, sat down and bent her head way forward. She looked troubled. “The story’s great,” she said with passionate earnestness. “I mean our movie. Really. I’m sincere. But now I’m asking myself if it’s really believable.”
I had to tighten my facial muscles.
“What is it that’s so hard to believe?” I asked her.
“Hitler’s brain in another body?”
“No problem.”
“No problem?”
“No. We just open the picture with a shot of him squatting over a Turkish airport toilet, which is basically nothing but a hole in the ground.”
“You getting smart again?”
“No,” I said. “Really. It’s the hot new movie realism thing. ‘Duty shots,’ they call them. They’re even thinking of doing it on the History Channel. You know people are so cynical these days, they don’t know who or what they ought to believe. This takes care of that.”
“Really?”
“No question! For example, if you’re about to play a scene of the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, first you show her on the toilet. Then the audience will know the beheading really happened.”
Bloor leaned her head back, appraising me with admiration. “You take my breath away,” she said.
“Oh, well.” I shyly lowered my gaze.
“I mean, really. Boy, you’ve sure got all the answers.”
“No, not always,” I murmured. “Not always”
“Listen, level with me, now.”
I looked up and said, “Of course. I always do. What is it?”
“My Hitler movie idea.”
I said, “Yes?”
“You think it’s really got a chance?”
“You never know.”
“Oh, thanks! I was afraid you were just being kind!”
She looked down at my laptop.
“You still working on that book?”
“Yes, I am. It’s almost finished.”
“That so? Congratulations. Bet you’re plenty relieved.”
“Pretty much.”
“You’re sure a wild one,” she said, thus revealing that she’d not only read my chart but also the report of the attending psychiatrist.
I looked down, faintly smiling and nodding.
“Yeah,” I said. “‘Wild as the wind in Oregon.’”
“You know, you’re really okay,” Bloor told me, leaning back and appraising me with her patented Little Caesar, arms akimbo, cocky stance and with her head slightly tilted to the side. “A little attitude at times. Maybe a lot. I pick it up. It’s my thing. Like my mother said, ‘Rose, you’ve got the gift: you can always tell bullshit from a pile of dunked Oreos.’ But now, you—underneath all the guff you’re kind of sweet. You’ve got a heart. You’re okay.”
I said, “So are you, Rose.”
“I know. So will you help me write my movie?”
I nodded.
“You’re a goddamn jewel! I mean, that makes us collaborators, right? What a hoot! So, incidentally, when you finish the book can I read it? I mean, I might have some suggestions. You know, tips. You never know.”
“You never know.”
“A second opinion.”
This coaxed a faint smile to my lips and I nodded.
“Yeah, sure, you can read it, but not until after I die.”
Which left out a word at the end.
Again.
“Listen, nobody dies here, Joey. They complain. Mind if I call you that? Joey?”
“No, I wouldn’t. In fact it would be nice.”
“Then good.”
She turned away to leave. “Until then,” she said.
This used to be a threat.
18
Lourdes died. My wife died. I hated Holl
ywood. It hated me back. I was old, which for the new breed of studio suits meant anyone over the age of thirty. (“How would these geezers know what teenagers want?”) I’d never done the party scene or made more than a couple of really true friends out there, at least none who were still alive, so at eighty I packed it in and moved back to New York, where I was shocked to see sunlight falling on sidewalks that once had known only shadow and dust beneath the Second and Third Avenue els. They had now been torn down, so that the streets looked like the Champs Elysées with delicatessens. Other things had changed, although not to the good, and I fell into a deep and quite possibly borderline paranoid interest in newspaper ads for a “Walking Stick for the Elderly New Yorker” that at the press of a conveniently located button turned it into a sword cane fitted with a blade at its end that had been tipped with the venom of the Boston Harbor blowfish, the same one that they said had killed Einstein. I bought two, one with a dark oak finish and the other in a light bamboo, and thus equipped I filled most of my days with jaunty doddering around the old nabes. The park and the handball courts were still there on 37th and First, but when I went looking for 469 Second Avenue—where Foley and his family used to live in a top-floor walk-up and I used to yell up at him to “Come on down!”—there was no such address, a sprawling supermarket now taking up the whole block. St. Stephen’s was different too: it was now called the Church of Our Lady of the Scapular, the even bigger difference being that weekdays and Saturday the doors to the church were now locked, as were the tall black iron gates to the school yard—not only during the summers but also both before and right after school hours. Amazingly, the Madame Monique Arrigo fortune-telling shop was still there, although now with the name “Your Future Told” and, of course, different personnel, and one day for the fun of it, for the insouciant je ne sais quoi of it, I walked slowly and carefully up those old brownstone steps and then into the shop to have my palm read by a pretty young blonde wearing heavy eye shadow and golden earrings. She told me that I still had a “very long life” ahead of me in which I could pursue my “true gift,” which she said was “accounting.” True enough, I suppose. Of course I spent a lot of hours sitting alone on a bench along the East River walkway and remembering things.
Very nice. Very sad as well. But cheap.
One winter’s day I took the BMT to Coney Island. Most things were boarded up, of course, the rides still, the boardwalk empty, and the ocean darkly biding its time. I found the bench where Not Nathan’s used to be and sat down and stuffed my hands into the pockets of my coat. It was cold. The sky was cloudy and looking like it wanted to rain. Good fishing weather. The gulls and the pelicans knew it; they were circling very quietly, as if they were planning a sneak attack. My thoughts drifted for an hour or so until I saw a huge four-masted sailing ship silently and gracefully crossing the horizon as if it had slipped through a crack in time. I knew some big historical maritime event was coming up, and thought maybe it was headed to the gathering site, or even to some motion picture filming location. Just then a patch of sky opened up in the clouds so that a narrow shaft of sunlight caught the ship’s sails, softly washing them in gold and vermilion, and though my lips barely moved and I didn’t at all mean to speak, I could hear myself murmuring almost inaudibly:
“‘Oh, Lucia, what we’ve missed!’”
19
It happened on a freezing day in December, and though I’m not certain it had anything to do with what was to come, I had just read a notice in Weekly Variety about the coming relocation from Off Broadway to Broadway of a daring production of Hamlet in which the “To be or not to be” soliloquy was staged with Prince Hamlet standing at a urinal with senile old Polonius eavesdropping on him from hiding in a toilet stall. I stared blankly at the print for a while, then decided to get up, put on a thick wool sweater, cap and coat, selected the “away” message on my computer, warning that messages containing the words “elderly” or “spry” would be blocked, left my twentieth-floor condo overlooking the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge and slowly shuffled to Second Avenue and the new supermarket where Foley’s apartment used to be. Foley got Parkinson’s and died in the charity hospital on Welfare Island. A light, fluttering snow had begun to fall and I cupped my hands to my mouth and yelled up at the ghost of Foley’s front window, “Hey, Tommmmmyyyyyy! It’s El Bueno! Come on down! Let’s play handball and then dunk at Kip’s Bay!” People walked past me in both directions. No one looked at me. This was New York. The swirling snowflakes grew thicker, some landing on my eyes and making me blink as I kept squinting up with longing for the childhood I wanted back, and when I lifted my hands for another shout, suddenly my arms felt so weak I had to let them drop. Light-headed. Trouble breathing. And now a numbness in my arm, my left side, pins and needles, and then this pain in my chest. I took a wobbly step forward, then another, and the next thing I was aware of was hearing a distant voice—a paramedic’s, I was told—saying quietly, “I think he’s dead,” and the very next second I was speeding through a narrow, pitch-black tunnel toward this brilliant white light—so much brighter than anything I’d ever seen—at the end of it, just like I’d read in a bunch of books in the “El Bueno Supernatural Book Club,” which said also that as soon as I got to the light my whole past life was going to flash before me—every good thing, every bad thing—in just a few seconds and that I was going to be judged, but then someone must have put on the brakes because before that could happen I was waking up in Bellevue’s Intensive Care ward looking dumber and even more confused than my wont. The rest I guess you’ve pretty much heard, except I really had died and been resuscitated, no biggie, then was moved to a ward deemed far more friendly to my at-times unusual statements and behavior. Another ride on the Cyclone.
Now we plunge.
20
On Christmas morning, the day after my rapprochement with Bloor, for the first time ever there was fresh-squeezed orange juice with breakfast instead of the usual powdered mix. I had it in my room, in fact in bed, as I was feeling a bit strange. Just a mood. Outside it was raining and I spent half the morning in bed with the computer bringing my memoirs up to date, which was also the reason that I’d passed on the Christmas Eve party in the Day Room the evening before. Well, mostly the reason. I would sometimes get moody at Christmas. It was childish, I know, even petulant, but I’d grown up without ever getting a Christmas present. Oh, well, maybe once or twice when Lourdes would sneak out to the five-and-dime and buy one of those red mesh Christmas stockings stuffed with bubblegum and candy and things like an eraser or a miniature pencil sharpener and stuff and she’d put it by my pillow while I slept so I’d see it when I woke up on Christmas morning. Poor old wonderful, big-hearted Pop: he just didn’t seem to know or even care about traditions like Christmas gifts and buying me a suit every Easter. No biggie, correct? I mean, who really really cared? Not me. In the meantime, I had my book to finish and no time for aimless small talk and punchless punch, so I sat up and typed, but then I stopped as this sudden strong feeling overcame me that I ought to go visit with Baloqui. I tried putting it aside but I couldn’t, so I got up out of bed and with the sound of my slippers scuffing against a floor that had been trained to forget whatever it saw or heard in this place, I tentatively slow-stepped into the Day Room where Baloqui was sitting alone at a card table, glassily staring while robotically shuffling a deck of playing cards. For a while I just watched him, feeling sadder than hell, then I went over and sat down with the guy. That ebony head of hair was now shockingly white but the high-cheekboned profile was as chiseled and dramatic as ever, and if only Wuthering Heights were to be remade and set in Spain, I was thinking, what a Heathcliff he still would make!
“How’s it going, Baloqui? How’re you feeling?”
The card movements stopped and he turned his head to look at me, his carriage erect and with his chin at its old haughty angle as his black eyes glittered with suspicion.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“You don’t kno
w me?”
Baloqui’s eyebrows bristled inward and he glared.
“If I knew you, why in freak would I ask who you are?” he rumbled threateningly. “What do you want? What’s your business? Jehovah’s Witness? Drugs? Spit it out!”
Dear God, he’s deteriorated badly, I thought.
I shook my head and said, “Nothing. No, no business at all.”
“Then why are you bothering me?” he snarled. “Who sent you? Carreras? Yeah, it figures. Well, you go back to him, see, and you tell him I said he can take his whole Plaza del Toros and shove it! I’m finished! I am killing no more bulls for that bastard! I don’t care what he says they’ve done!”
I just stared at him sadly, almost wanting to cry, when all of asudden he burst into laughter. “You big dummy, El Bueno! You still believe practically anything I tell you?” His eyes bright and smiley, he kept on laughing and I started to laugh just as hard. We had a great old time, then, remembering this and going over that for at least an hour, maybe two, and he caught me up on a couple of things, like Miss Comiskey and Eddie Arrigo got married and Miss Doyle had died and he’d gone to her funeral Mass where the hymns she’d requested in a parting note included “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind, “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
“Got to finish up something,” I told him at last, and I got up and we hugged, with me holding him tightly for a pretty long time.
“So long, Johnny,” I said into his shoulder.
“Maybe Hearts tonight?” he asked.
I said, “Sure.”
I pulled back and looked into his eyes for a little, then I turned and slowly made my way back to my room, where I got into bed and went back to my book. A little later, about a sentence away from bringing my “Diary of a Madman in Total Denial of His True Rotten Self” up to date, I heard someone clearing their throat from close by. I looked up and saw this woman sitting in a chair at the side of my bed and smiling pleasantly at me. She wore the usual candy-striped uniform and hat of the hospital’s nurse’s aides.