Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales

  It was the dream of every aspiring writer to make the cover of Story (where the contents were boldly listed). Its Intercollegiate Short Story Contest gave me my chance. One of the winners was “Passport to Nowhere,” now included here. Since it fell into a fancy category Story liked to call “novellas,” it earned the mighty sum of fifty dollars. That I had to wait eleven months for my check in no way dimmed my exultation. Acceptance by Story was the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for neophyte writers. Thanks to a combination of nepotism and early promise, while still in college I had a job lined up as a reader and junior writer with David O. Selznick, the ebullient producer of Gone With the Wind, who had been my old man’s assistant at Paramount, and for whom I had done a little film-writing the summer before I left for Dartmouth. That I could report to D.O.S. as a published short-story writer (in a few other “little” magazines besides the Story breakthrough) helped check my sensitivity to the nepotism issue, for I had been openly critical of the family favoritism practiced at Universal, MGM and other major studios.

  But back to Saroyan in Story: The first time I read his “Seventy Thousand Assyrians” and “Aspirin Is a Member of the NRA,” I knew I had discovered a new voice. I don’t mean I had discovered him for the world, I mean for myself. Yes, there were beginnings, middles and ends, but they were beautifully hidden in a style all his own. Since my father was a movie producer as well as someone with a taste for good prose, I showed him Saroyan’s stories. He urged me to find him and offer him a job as a dialogue writer. I tracked Bill down in San Francisco and offered him B.P.’s two hundred fifty a week. Story wasn’t even covering Bill’s two-dollar racetrack bets, so he grabbed the job. Soon he was writing movie scenes by day and his own stuff by night.

  In Hollywood, Stanley Rose, who owned our favorite bookstore, had a small printing press, and he and I got the idea (well before Random House brought out The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze) of publishing a collection, the first, of Bill’s short stories. (Bill wrote at least three pieces a day. I call them “pieces” advisedly because some were stories, some little sketches, some of them merely creative doodling.) I thought I had separated wheat from chaff, worked up a table of contents, and Stanley and I were ready to go—when Bill dumped at least two dozen more pieces on us. I went through them, selected and discarded, drew up a revised table of contents, and—you guessed it. It kept happening, more and more from Bill Saroyan: now and then a little gem of a story or a poignant tale, but mixed in with his very own, original style of rambling. The master storyteller could also be a master rambler and the trouble was, he never knew the difference.

  Bottom line: Our book, which would have been the first Saroyan, never got to press. A lot of what I took out, Bill later poured into Inhale and Exhale, a short-story volume that our long-suffering Random House editor, Saxe Commins, tried in vain to pare in half.

  For Bill Saroyan, an enfant terrible writer all his life, even in half-defeated, half-defiant old age, inhaling and exhaling was all the stimulus he needed to start writing whatever popped into his fanciful head. This writer was always slower and needed more, first the faces, then what Fitzgerald wisely equated with plot: characters in action; finally that good old beginning, middle and end. And beyond the structure that holds it all together, there should be something more, the reason you’re telling this tale. If characters-in-action equals plot, then plot-to-a-purpose equals theme. Take the theme away and we’re just out there juggling for the hell of it.

  Meanwhile, end of the overture, up with the curtain, on with the juggling—only in this case, instead of barbells or bottles, we’re using people we know, in places we’ve been.

  Or, as the late and too-soon-forgotten “Wild Bill” Saroyan would put it, “Love, here is my hat.”

  Budd Schulberg

  Brookside

  Quiogue, Long Island

  N.Y. May 16, 1989

  SAY

  GOOD NIGHT

  TO OWL

  “Read me Owl,” the little boy said.

  “Benjy, I just finished reading you Owl,” his father tried to reason with him.

  Benjy was four, and not easy to convince. He began pressing his lips together, threatening to cry. It was a bit of emotional blackmail he had learned how to perform before he was two. In the past year he had developed the Benjy Pout, as Carl called it, into a fine art. Carl could never bear to see his little boy curl his lip that way. He hated to see him cry.

  Carl’s own father had been very firm with him and had smacked him if he didn’t hop into bed on time; his father had even smacked him for forgetting to say his prayers. Carl had grown up not particularly liking his father and not at all convinced that a strong arm directed against one’s small, trembling backside builds character. He worked all day in an advertising office, where he made a great deal of money but did not like the people he worked with or the work he had to do. He had signed up with Belgore, Bristow and Ryan right out of college because he had thought the copywriting position would give him enough money to write his novel. The novel had been rejected by thirteen publishers, and Carl had accepted this as a sign pointing to his resignation from novel-writing.

  Meanwhile Mr. Ryan, the only partner still active, had called him into the big office for a drink, the crowning B.B.&R. accolade, and told him he had “the making of one helluva copywriter.” That was fifteen years ago, and now Carl was only a year or so away from tacking his last name to the end of the formidable chain.

  To be honest with himself, Carl hated Belgore, Bristow and Ryan, individually and collectively. He hated his suburban house—a disturbingly expensive split-level—even with its full acre of gardens and lawns. It was almost an estate. It was almost in the country. That’s what he used to tell his clients when they asked where he lived—way out, beyond Scarsdale, almost in the country.

  “Read me Owl, Da-da,” his son was saying, blinking his eyes as if to cry.

  Of the many books Benjy had, Owl was his favorite. His mother wanted him to be a reader. Already she had dreams of his becoming the writer Carl had wanted to be. She bought him a new picture book almost every day. Benjy would like the one about taffy clouds one week and about the peppermint tiger another week, but all summer long, to their amazement—yes, and pride—he had been faithful to Owl. It was about a baby owl, round as a dumpling, not at all a solemn owl but one with a big, happy, infectious smile on its face. Peg liked to dabble in children’s books. She drew quite well, and often thought she could make a better book than the one she was buying. But she had to admit that Owl was a stroke of child-book genius. “He’s so completely owl; everything about him is owl,” she would say to Carl.

  The surprising thing was that Benjy agreed. He became owl-minded and finally was owl-obsessed. His mother bought him rubber owls and pictures of owls and plates and glasses with an owl motif. The first sounds Benjy made every morning were “Hoo-hoo-hoo …” With variations he could keep this up contentedly until his parents awakened. And at night he would hoo-hoo-hoo himself to sleep. Carl and Peg would tiptoe up to his bedroom and look at each other with soft smiles as this slumber music died away. It had become an evening ritual.

  So now when Benjy begged once again to hear the Owl book that already had been read to him three times that evening, Carl said, “Benjy, wait till you see the great big surprise Mommy and Daddy have for you. We’re going to leave this house and move out to a better house, a real farmhouse. We’re going to have pigs and chickens and there’s a great big old barn. And, Benjy, the main reason I’m buying the place is—guess who lives in the barn.”

  “Owl?” Benjy said.

  “Owl,” Carl said. “Not just a little book owl, but an honest-to-goodness friendly barn owl for you to talk to. You can say, ‘Good night, Owl,’ and he’ll answer back, ‘Hoo-hoo, Benjy, hoo-hoo-hoo’—which is friendly owl talk for ‘Nighty-night, see you in the morning.’ So off to sleep you go now.…” Carl tucked the little boy in and kissed him on the forehead.

  ?
??Maybe sometime the friendly owl can come in my bed and sleep with me,” Benjy said.

  “Maybe, if you’re very nice and gentle with him,” his father said.

  “I’ll make a nice nest for him in my pillow,” Benjy said, and he began to hoo-hoo-hoo himself to sleep.

  The idea of moving from the lower Westchester suburbs to the remote wilds of upper Westchester had come to Carl quite suddenly one Sunday afternoon when he and Peg were visiting a college friend, a playwright who lived beyond Katonah.

  “George is so mad about his new tractor I’m afraid he’s going to give up his typewriter,” the playwright’s wife had said, to make easy visiting conversation.

  George had tapped tobacco into his pipe and looked thoughtful. “Well, not quite. But, Carl, they may laugh at us intellectual country boys, but when I’ve plowed a ten-acre field and I look back at that lovely turned-over earth, fresh and waiting for the seed, I feel I’ve done something—not just written another scene those bloody actors will probably louse up a few months from now, but done something with my own hands.”

  The wives had tried to turn off the rather solemn pronouncement with politely mocking repartee, but Carl had become just as serious. “I know exactly what George means. Look at my life. Everything so clean, so antiseptic. Everything is done for me—aluminum foil and garbage disposals …”

  “Oh, we have aluminum foil and a garbage disposal,” said the playwright’s wife. “I mean, we didn’t exactly come out here in a covered wagon.”

  “Yes, I see the station wagon—it’s a beauty,” Carl said. “But I also see the tractor and the Jeep. If you were snowbound, you could live from your own corn and tomatoes, your own eggs every morning. I think that’s what living was meant to be. I don’t mean full time—I’m not a romantic.”

  “Oh, but you are, hopelessly—always have been,” Peg said.

  “Well, I mean … not losing our ties with our old roots … our hold, I mean—” George had been using a heavy hand on the sour-mash bourbon and Carl was feeling not exactly drunk but a little loose, a little wild, a little angry at—what? What does a successful advertising executive happy with his second wife and crazy about his four-year-old kid (his first son; the girls were with their mother) have to be angry at?

  “Carl, I’ll get you a windbreaker and we’ll go for a walk,” George suggested.

  Conspiratorially they stopped for another shot of the sour mash in George’s rustic bar off the big Early American living room. “I know what you’re trying to say,” George assured his long-time but not really close friend. “Modern life is a crock. You do great at it and what have you got? We’ve lost something. Even if we never find it, at least the searching is a positive act of faith. Out here in the real country you feel as if your soul has room to search and stretch.”

  Benjy ran toward them, twitchy with excitement. “Da-da, look, look!” He opened his hand, moist with discovery. Nesting there was a small, uneven egg.

  “That’s an egg from a young hen,” George explained. “That’s the way they lay them at first—small and uneven.”

  “You see, even a chicken has to learn to make eggs.” Carl took delight in instructing his four-year-old. Suddenly a warm, undersized, uneven egg was a symbol of escape from their overcivilized world.

  “Can I save it, Da-da? Can I?”

  “If you put a pin in it and suck out the inside,” George answered for Carl. “Take it into the kitchen. Mrs. Enright will show you.”

  Benjy hurried off, with the egg held out importantly in front of him. “Careful you don’t drop it,” his father called after him.

  The kitchen door swung shut behind Benjy. A moment later they heard piercing howls of anguish. The men found Benjy disconsolate in the pantry, the crushed egg leaking through his fingers.

  “That’s all right—there are lots more,” George consoled him. “You see, Benjy, eggs from these new little hens still have very soft shells.”

  “There are so many things to learn on a farm, aren’t there, Benjy?” Carl kept at his educational approach, kissing his son’s damp cheek.

  “Read me Owl,” Benjy said.

  “Uncle George and I are going for a walk. Maybe Mommy will read you Owl.”

  The two men followed a winding dirt road that led through a pasture where sleek, well-fed Holsteins were grazing. The sun was low, but would linger for another half hour. The breeze was soft and the air was a sweet mixture of clover and cow dung and fresh-cut hay.

  “Mmmm, the air smells like—perfume,” Carl said.

  George smiled. “You advertising fellers,” he chided him. “Got to improve on everything. To me the air smells like good country air.”

  “Wish I could bottle it and take it back to the office,” Carl said, breathing in and out with exaggerated heartiness.

  “You might have a new product there,” George said. “Fresh air in the new container with the easy-open, snap-off top.”

  They were approaching the sprawling ruin of a barn that long ago had been painted red. Now it was faded to weathered rust. The big door was off its hinges, the windows were broken and the barnyard was fenced in by an eccentric collection of bedsprings, ramshackle boards, gnarled barbed wire—whatever the owner could patch together. In the barn doorway appeared a tall, unshaven, unkempt figure that impressed Carl as an apparition haunting the place from some previous century. It was difficult to describe just what the man was wearing as a shirt—“tatters” would probably say it best—strips of limp gray cloth that hung down like worn skins. His shapeless pants were tucked into torn high rubber boots. Under the wild beard and the grime Carl could detect a long-boned, noble head and dark, intelligent, angry eyes.

  “That’s Mr. Bassey,” George told him, and called out as a greeting, “Bassey?”

  The big countryman gave a grunt of recognition, an animal throating that sounded like “Hmmmmmp.”

  “Friendly cuss,” Carl said.

  George nodded proudly. “A real character. I’m seriously thinking of doing a play about him.” Then in his special gruff, country voice he called, “How you doing, Bassey?”

  “Can’t complain,” Bassey barked at them. From a large, dirty pail he tossed the slops to his pigs.

  “Bassey, this is an old friend of mine, Mr. Aarons,” George said.

  “Hmmmmmpf,” Bassey said, taking a stick to swing out the very last of the slops to the pigs. “What line of work you in?”

  “I’m in advertising,” Carl said.

  The hulking countryman shrugged and his lips parted in a kind of malevolent grin. Then he said, “Craaw,” or something that sounded like a crow’s mirthful but humorless laugh. “Reason I ask, I write up a colyum for the weekly paper, the Hoopville Sentinel. Thought maybe I’d put you in it. Don’t have too much to write about out here.”

  Carl and his playwright friend walked on. George was smoking his pipe and swinging his walking stick with what seemed to Carl ostentatious contentment. They were approaching a once beautiful but now dilapidated story-and-a-half stone house.

  “Seventeen forty-seven,” Carl said in awe as he read the chimney date stone.

  “That’s when the original Bassey built the place,” George said. “Captain Bassey. This character’s great-great-great-grandfather. They called him Captain Bassey because he organized a local militia in the Rebellion—that’s what this Bassey still calls the Revolutionary War. In the country’s first depression, 1786—I get my local American history straight from Bassey—when veterans like Captain Bassey were desperate for paper money to save their farms, he raised a little army of destitute farmers and tried to overthrow the governor. Sort of a local Shays’ Rebellion. In fact, Captain Bassey and Daniel Shays were friends. I’ve actually seen the letters. Bassey’s got some stuff in that cluttered farmhouse of his that belongs in a museum. A fascinating character, Bassey. Looking at him, would you ever believe that he’s a college man? He knows Latin and Greek, and that funny column of his sounds right out of a Jeffersonian Repu
blican paper. Bassey knows more about Jefferson than What’s-his-name at Princeton. And with it all, I don’t think he ever takes his clothes off or takes a bath—”

  George stopped. Bassey was right behind them. Somehow, high boots and all, he had crept up within hearing distance.

  “You want to buy the Bassey house?”

  Carl stared at the man. “What makes you think so?”

  “I was watchin’ how you looked at the sign.”

  Carl tried to fit a word to the look in Bassey’s eyes. Craven? Mendacious? Country-shrewd? In the unkempt yard in front of the house was a faded “For Sale” sign.

  “Are you moving away?” Carl asked.

  “Craaw,” came the harsh laughter. “Us Basseys got our own cemetery up there on the hill. Cheapest funeral I could possibly get, so I’m aimin’ to use it. Not right away, though.”

  Carl wondered if he ever could get to like Bassey.

  “Bassey sleeps in the old carriage house,” George said. “There are four separate houses here at Basseydale, as the old estate used to be called. But this is the earliest one.”

  “Oldest house in the county,” Bassey said. “I’ve got the original deed.”

  From the dark silhouette of the barn behind the house, in the dying light of sunset’s final minutes, came a hoarse hoo-wah, like a snoring man choking out a cry in a troubled dream. Hoo-wah, hoo-wah …

  “What on earth is that?” Carl asked.

  “Barn owls,” Bassey said. “Got a whole family of ’em in the barn.”

  “Are they friendly?” Carl asked.

  Bassey looked at him. “Well, sure, I guess you could call ’em that. As friendly as any of us.”

  “I’ve never seen an owl,” Carl said.

  “Well, they go with the place,” Bassey said. “No extra charge.”

  Carl would never admit it, not even to his wife Peg, but it was the owls that persuaded him to buy the place. That’s why, when Benjy had asked him to read Owl once again, Carl put him off by letting him in on the surprise—a farmhouse of their own with their very own Owl.