3
Like Lorraine told you, I really am very handsome and do have fabulous eyes. But that doesn’t get me much, except perhaps with Miss King, this English teacher I’m going to tell you about. I think she really goes for me the way she always laughs a little when she talks to me and says I’m such a card. A card she calls me, which sounds ridiculous coming out of the mouth of an old-maid English teacher who’s practically fifty years old. I really hate it when a teacher has to show that she isn’t behind the times by using some expression which sounds so up-to-date you know for sure she’s behind the times. Besides, card really isn’t up-to-date anymore, which makes it even more annoying. In fact, the thing Lorraine and I liked best about the Pigman was that he didn’t go around saying we were cards or jazzy or cool or hip. He said we were delightful, and if there’s one way to show how much you’re not trying to make believe you’re not behind the times, it’s to go around saying people are delightful.
I had forgotten that stuff about paranoia in that magazine Lorraine gave me to read about seven months ago. She’s always reading about eyes exploding and nutty people and beehives and things. The only part that impressed me out of the whole article was about the crazy lady in the sanitarium who hoarded food and sheets and towels and bathrobes—the one that used to wear all the bathrobes at one time. They said at one point she had hoarded 39 sheets, 42 towels, 93 English muffins—and she was wearing 8 bathrobes. Her big problem was she didn’t feel secure. So they let her pick out as much as she wanted, and she ended up with 320 towels, 2,633 sheets, and 9,000 English muffins. Nine thousand English muffins!
But that’s how it always is. Lorraine remembers the big words, and I remember the action. Which sort of makes sense when you stop to think that Lorraine is going to be a famous writer and I’m going to be a great actor. Lorraine thinks she could be an actress, but I keep telling her she’d have to be a character actress, which means playing washwomen on TV detective shows all the time. And I don’t mean that as a distortion, like she always says I do. If anyone distorts, it’s that mother of hers. The way her old lady talks you’d think Lorraine needed internal plastic surgery and seventeen body braces, but if you ask me, all she needs is a little confidence. She’s got very interesting green eyes that scan like nervous radar—that is they used to until the Pigman died. Ever since then her eyes have become absolutely still, except when we work on this memorial epic. Her eyes come to life the second we talk about it. Her wanting to be a writer is part of it, I guess, but I think we’re both a little anxious to get all that happened in place and try to understand why we did the crazy things we did.
I suppose it all started when Lorraine and I and these two amoebae called Dennis Kobin and Norton Kelly were hot on those phone gags last September. We did the usual ones like dialing any number out of the book and asking “Is your refrigerator running?”
“Yes.”
“Go catch it then.”
And we called every drugstore.
“Do you have Prince Albert in a can?”
“Yes.”
“Then let him out.”
But then we made up a new game in which the object was to keep a stranger talking on the phone as long as possible. At least twice a week we’d meet for a telephone marathon. Wednesday afternoons we’d have it at Dennis’ house because his mother goes shopping at the supermarket and his father doesn’t get home from work until after six P.M., even when he’s sober. And on Sundays we’d do it at Norton’s because his father plays golf and his mother is so retarded she doesn’t know what’s coming off anyway, but at least they didn’t mind if their kids used the house. Mine and Lorraine’s we can’t even go to. We couldn’t use the phone at Lorraine’s anyway because her mother doesn’t have unlimited service, and at my house my mother is a disinfectant fanatic. She would have gotten too nervous over all of us using her purified instrument. Another difficulty there is that my father, whom I warmly refer to as Bore, put a lock on our phone—one of those round locks you put in the first dialhole so you can’t dial. He put it on because of a little exchange we had when he called from work.
“Do you realize I’ve been trying to get your mother for an hour and a half and the line’s been busy?” Bore bellowed.
“Those things happen. I was talking to a friend.”
“If you don’t use the phone properly, I’m going to put a lock on it.”
“Yeah? No kidding?”
Now it was just the way I said yeah that set him off, and that night when he got home, he just put the lock on the phone and didn’t say a word. But I’m used to it. Bore and I have been having a lot of trouble communicating lately as it is, and sometimes I go a little crazy when I feel I’m being picked on or not being trusted. That’s why I finally put airplane glue in the keyhole of the lock so nobody could use the telephone, key or no key.
Anyway, the idea of the telephone marathon was you had to close your eyes and stick your finger on a number in the directory and then call it up to see how long you could keep whoever answered talking on the phone. I wasn’t too good at this because I used to burst out laughing. The only thing I could do that kept them talking awhile before they hung up was to tell them I was calling from TV Quiz and that they had won a prize. That was always good for three and a half minutes before they caught on.
The longest anyone ever lasted was Dennis, because he picked out this old woman who lived alone and was desperate to talk to anyone. Dennis is really not very bright. In fact, he talks so slowly some people think he has brain damage. But he told this woman he had called her number because he had heard she gave good advice and his problem was that he was about to die from a hideous skin disease because a rat had bitten off his nose when he was a baby and the skin grafts didn’t take. He kept her on the phone for two hours and twenty-six minutes. That was the record!
Now Lorraine can blame all the other things on me, but she was the one who picked out the Pigman’s phone number. If you ask me, I think he would have died anyway. Maybe we speeded things up a little, but you really can’t say we murdered him.
Not murdered him.
4
John told you about Dennis and Norton, but I don’t think he got across how really disturbed those two boys are. Norton has eyes like a mean mouse, and he’s the type of kid who thinks everyone’s trying to throw rusty beer cans at him. And he’s pretty big, even bigger than John, and the two of them hate each other.
Actually, Norton is a social outcast. He’s been a social outcast since his freshman year in high school when he got caught stealing a bag of marshmallows from the supermarket. He never recovered from that because they put his name in the newspaper and mentioned that the entire loot was a bag of marshmallows, and ever since then everybody calls him The Marshmallow Kid.
“How’s The Marshmallow Kid today?”
Anyway, he’s the one who started cheating in the telephone marathons we were having. After Dennis had rung up that staggering record about having his nose bitten off, Norton started getting smart, and when it was his turn to pick out a phone number, he’d peek a little and try to make his finger land on a woman’s number rather than a man’s. You could always make a woman talk twice as long as a man. I used to ignore it because in his case it didn’t matter whom he spoke to on the phone. They all hung up.
But this one time I decided to peek myself. When it was my turn, I made believe I had covered my eyes with my left hand, then thumbed through the pages, and as I moved my finger down a column I happened to spot the words “Howard Avenue.” Now, Howard Avenue is just a few blocks from where I live, so I could pretend I belonged to the Howard Avenue Civic League or some other fictitious philanthropy.
There it was:
Pignati Angelo 190 Howard Av.…. YU1-6994
When this man answered, my voice was rather quivery because John was watching with his X-ray eyes and I think he knew I had cheated a bit. When he is an actor, I know he’ll be able to project those glaring eyes clear up to the second balcon
y.
“Hello,” this jolly voice said as I cleared my throat.
“Hello. Is this Mr. Angelo Pignati?”
“It sure is,” came the bubbling voice again.
“This is Miss Truman of the Howard Avenue Charities. Perhaps you’ve heard of us and our good work?”
“My wife isn’t home just now.”
“I didn’t call to speak with your wife, Mr. Pignati,” I assured him. I changed to a very British accent. “I distinctly called to speak to you and summon you to our cause. You see, my organization is interested in receiving small donations from people just like you—good-hearted people, Mr. Pignati—we depend on lovely people just like you and your wife—”
“What did you say the name of your charity was?” the voice asked.
Suddenly I couldn’t control myself anymore, and I burst into laughter right into the phone.
“Is something funny?”
“No… there’s nothing funny, Mr. Pignati… it’s just that one of the girls… here at the office has just told me a joke, and it was very funny.” I bit my tongue. “But back to serious business, Mr. Pignati. You asked the name of our charity—the name of it is—”
“The Lorraine and John Fund!”
“The name of it is—”
“The Lorraine and John Fund,” John repeated.
“Shut up,” I said, covering the mouthpiece and then uncovering it. “The name of our charity is the L & J Fund, Mr. Pignati, and we’d like to know if you’d care to contribute to it? It would really be a very nice gesture, Mr. Pignati.”
There was a pause.
“What was the joke the girl told you?” he finally said. “I know a lot of jokes, but my wife’s the only one who laughs at them. Ha, ha.”
“Is that so?”
“She really did laugh at them. She liked a good joke, she did, and I miss her. She’s taken a little trip.”
“Oh, did she?”
“Yep. She’s out in California with my sister.”
“Isn’t that marvelous!”
“Her favorite was the one about the best get-well cards to get. Did you ever hear that one—what’d you say your name was?”
“Miss Truman.”
“Well, Miss Truman, did you ever hear that one, the one about what the best get-well cards you can get are?”
“No, Mr. Pignati—”
“It was my wife’s favorite joke, that one was. She’d make me tell it a lot of times….”
There was something about his voice that made me feel sorry for him, and I began to wish I had never bothered him. He just went on talking and talking, and the receiver started to hurt my ear. By this time Dennis and Norton had gone into the living room and started to watch TV, but right where they could keep an eye on timing the phone call. John stayed next to me, pushing his ear close to the receiver every once in awhile, and I could see the wheels in his head spinning.
“Yes, Miss Truman, the best get-well cards to get are four aces! Ha, ha, ha! Isn’t that funny?”
He let out this wild laugh, as though he hadn’t known the end of his own joke.
“Do you get it, Miss Truman? Four aces… the best get-well cards you can get—”
“Yes, Mr. Pignati—”
“You know, in poker?”
“Yes, Mr. Pignati.”
He sounded like such a nice old man, but terribly lonely. He was just dying to talk. When he started another joke I looked at John’s face and began to realize it was he who had started me telling all these prevarications.
John has made an art out of it. He prevaricates just for prevaricating’s sake. It’s what they call a compensation syndrome. His own life is so boring when measured against his daydreams that he can’t stand it, so he makes up things to pretend it’s exciting. Of course, when he gets caught in a lie, then he makes believe he was only telling the lie to make fun of whomever he was telling it to, but I think there’s more to it than meets the eye. He can get so involved in a fib that you can tell he believes it enough to enjoy it. Maybe that’s how all actors start. I don’t know.
One time last term Miss King asked him what happened to the book report he was supposed to hand in on Johnny Tremain, and he told her that he had spilled some coffee on it the night before, and when the coffee dried, there was still sugar on the paper and so cockroaches ate the book report. You might also be interested in knowing that the only part of Johnny Tremain that John did end up reading was page forty-three—where the poor guy spills the molten metal on his hand and cripples it for life. That was the part he finally did his book report on—just page forty-three—and he got a ninety on it! I only got eighty-five, and I read the whole thing. Of course, writing book reports is not exactly the kind of writing I want to do. I don’t want to report. I want to make things up. In a way I guess that’s lying too, except I think you can tell the real truth with that kind of lying.
And John lies to his mother and father. He told them one time that he was hearing voices from outer space, and he thought creatures were going to come for him some night, so if they heard any strange noises coming from his room would they please call the police.
“Don’t be silly,” his mother told him and laughed it off with just the slightest bit of discomfort. His parents don’t know quite what to make of him because neither of them has the imagination he has, and in a way they sort of respect it. Actually, I think they’re a little frightened of it. But they’re just as bad as he is when it comes to lying, and that may be the real reason they can’t help John the way they should. From what I’ve seen of them, they don’t seem to know what’s true and what isn’t true anymore. His father goes around bragging how he phonied up a car-insurance claim to get a hundred dollars to replace a piece of aluminum on their new car, which he had really replaced himself. Mrs. Conlan goes to the store and tells the clerk he forgot to give her Green Stamps the last time she was in, and she knows very well she’s lying. It’s a kind of subconscious, schizophrenic fibbing, if you ask me, and if those parents don’t have guilt complexes, I don’t know who has. I only hope I won’t be that kind of adult.
“I don’t know where you get that from, John!”
I do.
“Miss Truman, are you still there?”
“Yes, Mr. Pignati,” I muttered.
“Well, did you get that joke? I didn’t hear you laugh.”
“No, I’m sorry I didn’t get that joke.”
“I didn’t think you did. I said, ‘In many states a hunting license entitles you to one deer and no more. Just like a marriage license.’ Ha, ha, ha!”
“That’s very funny, Mr. Pignati. That is very funny.”
I must have sounded uncomfortable because he said, “I’m sorry if I’m taking up too much of your time, Miss Truman. You wanted a donation, did you say—for what charity?”
“The L & J Fund, Mr. Pignati.” I bit my lip.
“I’ll be glad to send you ten dollars, Miss Truman. Where do I send it?”
John bolted upright from his ridiculous position of pressing an ear against the receiver.
“Tell him to send it to your house.”
“I will not!”
“Let me talk to him,” John demanded, taking the phone right out of my hand. Just from the look in his eyes I knew what was going to happen. You just have to know how John does things, and you’ll know one thing will always happen. He’ll end up complicating everything.
5
You have to know how demented Dennis and Norton are to understand that when I told them Angelo Pignati caught on Lorraine was a phony and hung up, they believed it. I could tell them I went alligator hunting in St. Patrick’s Cathedral last night, and they’d believe it. I just didn’t want them to know Mr. Pignati had invited us over to his house the next day to give us the ten bucks for the L & J Fund. Especially Norton. If he knew about it, he’d try to hustle in on the deal, and he’d never stop at ten dollars. I didn’t want anyone really to take advantage of the old man. Some people might think that’s
what I was doing, but not the way Norton would have. In fact, if Lorraine felt like saying one of us murdered Mr. Pignati, she should have blamed Norton. He’s the one who finally caused all the trouble.
The next day Lorraine chickened out and said she wouldn’t go with me to collect the money.
“Give me one good reason,” I demanded.
“Because it’s wrong to take money from an old man, that’s why.”
“All through history artists have survived by taking money from old men. There’s nothing wrong with having a patron.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Don’t you know anything?”
“I said I don’t—”
“We can tell him the L & J Fund is intended to subsidize writers and actors if you want.”
“You’re crazy.”
I decided not to push the matter, but I did need a dollar and a quarter for a six-pack, so when I got home I asked my Old Lady for it.
“No, no, no,” she said in her best grating voice, all the while shining the coffee table in our sparkling living room, which sparkles because nobody’s allowed to live in it. She’s got plastic covers on everything. I mean, I like my Mom and all that, but she runs around like a chicken with its head cut off.
“Your father says you’re not to have another penny until he speaks to you!”
“What did I do now?”
“You know very well what you did.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, you just ask your father.”
“I’m not asking him, I’m asking you.”
“Kenneth never gave us any trouble,” she just had to add, neatly folding the polishing rag.
“You just never caught him.”
Kenneth is my older brother who’s married and carries an attaché case to Wall Street every day. He’s eleven years older than me.
“Get yourself a glass of milk, but rinse out the glass,” she babbled, darting up the stairs. I could tell she just got back from the beauty parlor because her hair was frizzed like she had just rammed her fingers into an electric socket.