I was a very rich man. “Al and Sal,” the sitcom I had created twelve years earlier, was the top-grossing TV sitcom of all time. Worldwide it had earned over a billion dollars, nearly a third of which was mine; “Al and Sal” was far and away the most popular show in syndication on the world market, with another billion dollars in earnings projected over the coming decade.
So, not only was I very successful, I also had a lot of money. In the particular world in which I became successful—the world of entertainment, or, to be precise, the world of television—no illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won’t start.
The maxim, the Golden Rule, the first motto of the world in which I achieved my success is: All Things Are Supposed to Work Instantly.
If they don’t, then what’s it all for? The fact that you might have to wait ten minutes to get your car jump-started, like any ordinary slob, calls a whole value system into question. If you don’t have total immunity, then why bother?
“He’s gonna have a fit,” Gladys said. “I can tell by the way he’s twitching.”
Wearily I tried the ignition key one more time. There was no click.
“I’m not twitching and I’ve never had a fit in my life,” I said honestly. “I produced that stupid sitcom for almost nine years, and no one who worked on it can claim they ever saw me have a fit. I don’t know how to have fits, Gladys. I often wish I did.”
“I know, but there’s always a first time,” Gladys said. “You’ve been saving up fits all your life, if you ask me. I just hope I’m on vacation when you finally have one.”
“Perhaps we’d best just call the filling station,” Godwin said. “They’re quite efficient. I’m sure they’ll get over here fast.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m going to call Wichita Falls and have them bring me a Cadillac. They should be able to get one here while I’m shaving. I don’t like my Mercedes anymore.”
“You’re not serious,” Godwin said. “It’s almost brand-new. You just let it sit too long and the battery’s down.”
“I’m perfectly serious,” I said. “You want to buy this car? It’s yours for five thousand dollars. Buy it. Then you won’t have to ride in that semen-encrusted Volkswagen anymore.”
“If he don’t want it can I buy it?” Gladys asked. She was quicker than Godwin to seize a good opportunity.
The thought of Gladys tootling around in a Mercedes almost cheered me up.
“Where would you get five thousand dollars?” I asked, amused. “Where would either of you get five thousand dollars, for that matter?”
“Spoiled, spoiled, spoiled!” Godwin said. “You aren’t remotely ready to go to Houston. You’re still in your caftan. You look like Yves Saint Laurent might look if he were fat. Why not just let the filling station come and start the car while you attempt to make yourself presentable for your daughter?”
“So who gets the car?” Gladys asked, her eyes firmly fixed on the main chance. “I could take over the yard work and pay it off in a summer or two. That old Mexican don’t have no business doing yard work at his age.”
She was referring to old Pedro, an ancient person who lived in a little adobe hut he had built for himself on the western edge of my hill. Pedro was the oldest person any of us had ever known. I had found him standing by the road near Deming, New Mexico, several years earlier, on one of my drives from California. I had passed him without thought and driven for another ten miles before it occurred to me that I had just passed a very, very old, very small man. Pedro was about the height of a large sheepdog.
I rarely pick up hitchhikers—that’s Godwin’s sport—but after some thought I turned, went back, and picked up Pedro, a tiny man who looked as ancient as the rocks. He had no possessions at all, just himself. He spoke a little English, but the drift of his thoughts was cryptic, to say the least.
“I am just traveling along now,” he said, when I asked him where he wanted to be taken. “My family died before I did. Just take me where you want to go.”
So I took him home and never regretted it. The fact that my huge house was made of adobe pleased him, although he was highly critical of the workmanship itself and spent his first year or two with us correcting a number of major flaws.
Then he built his own little hut on the edge of my hill. Every day he would walk up and do a little yard work; we got our water from a windmill, which Pedro kept in fine repair. There was an old barn on the property, filled with dusty, rat-nibbled saddlery and harness. Pedro killed the rats, and, over the years, repaired and polished the saddles and the harness.
“I believe he eats them rats,” Gladys reported one day, nearly in shock at the thought. “I seen him carrying five or six dead ones down to that hut of his.”
Whatever the truth of that, Pedro mainly lived on frijoles, tortillas, and Budweiser beer. He was very fond of Budweiser and would appear in the kitchen once a day to appropriate a six-pack.
“Okay, the Mercedes is yours,” I said to Gladys. “Godwin doesn’t seem to want it.”
“I don’t want it,” Godwin said petulantly. “I don’t want your absurd favors.”
“Does that mean I start doing the yard work?” Gladys asked.
“No, Pedro likes to do the yard work,” I said. “When my grandkids get here you can pay out the Mercedes by being their nanny.”
“Their nanny? Her?” Godwin said. He gargled hysterically for several minutes under our disapproving eyes. I got out of the Mercedes for the last time and slammed its expensive door.
“That’s like a baby-sitter, right?” Gladys asked.
“No,” Godwin said. “Not at all. A nanny is responsible for her young charges’ moral instruction. Nannies should be women of impeccable character.”
“That’s why I’m giving the job to Gladys,” I said. “Her character’s perfect.”
It wasn’t, but what the hell. Gladys could rip around Thalia telling everyone she had been promoted to nanny. Her status, already high, might rise even higher.
“I had a very proper nanny myself—her name was Mrs. Frazier,” Godwin said. I could tell by his voice that he was about to make one of his abrupt dives into sentiment. If we weren’t careful he would soon be in tears. The thought of her appearance made Gladys cry; memories of his very proper Yorkshire childhood had the same effect on Godwin.
“The sainted Mrs. Frazier, whatever I’ve become I owe to her,” he said in thickening tones.
The man, after all, was an old friend. I should have been more tolerant; I should have bitten my tongue. But the sight of him standing there, hairless, toothless, spavined, wearing only an old green bathing suit and a pair of Nepalese sandals that his mountain-climbing friend had sent him a day or two before dropping into the crevasse, smoking marijuana as a prelude to his daily intake of methamphetamines, cocaine, hash, or anything he could get, and sure to set off in an hour or two in pursuit of comely young hitchhikers, while building up to a cry about his old nanny, was too much for my resistance.
“If the sainted Mrs. Frazier could see you now, I’m not sure she’d want you on her resumé,” I said with surprising forbearance. After all, the man was an idiot, a drug addict, and an orgiast. What self-respecting nanny would want to claim him as her best work?
Gladys headed for the house. “If you two are going to start saying ugly things to one another I’m leaving,” she said.
Godwin maintained an air of studied calm. “The pot should think twice before addressing the kettle,” he said.
“The pot did think twice,” I assured him.
“That’s a terrible first sentence you’ve written,” he said. “It’s as bad a first sentence as I’ve ever heard.”
This thrust took me slightly off guard.
“Godwin, it hasn’t taken its final form,” I said, before trudging into the house to order a Cadillac.
12
The sentence Godwin didn’t like—t
he first sentence of my new novel—read something like this:
“True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends’ boyfriends—and he accepts it.”
I had been tinkering with the sentence for nearly three months. A character, as yet unnamed but not unlike me, speaks it to another character, also unnamed but somewhat resembling Godwin Lloyd-Jons.
I had never been pleased with the sentence. The sentiment, or opinion, it expressed was perfect for the novel I planned to write, but the words had not yet been put in a satisfying or compelling order. I had written the sentence at least two hundred times, rearranging the words, and sometimes the punctuation. For instance, I tried using a semicolon rather than a dash; but after a few dozen tries with the semicolon I went back to the more emphatic dash.
For, after all, the sentence contained two assertions, both of which were sure to be questioned: that a man would at some point become a father figure to his girlfriends’ boyfriends; and that emotional maturity is only reached when the man accepts this development.
In the course of the three months I had read many variants of the sentence to Godwin, and he had sneered at them all.
“What a ridiculous utterance,” he scoffed. “I certainly have no intention of being a father figure to my girlfriends’ boyfriends.”
“Of course, I might be prepared to be a boyfriend to some of them,” he added. “Although, to be frank, myself excepted, my girlfriends have not exactly been distinguished for their taste in males.”
“Godwin, it’s the first sentence of a novel,” I said. “For all I know the novel will refute the sentence. I was just trying to start with a broad generality. Think of the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, or the first sentence of Anna Karenina”
“Never read either of them,” he said in an ill-tempered tone. “You might recall that I had a classical education.”
Gladys had heard my first sentence a few times too. Her reaction was if anything more discouraging than Godwin’s.
“I get downhearted every time I hear it,” she said. “What makes you want to write books anyway? You’re rich enough.”
“Gladys, I just want to,” I said. “I was a writer, you know, before I got into television.”
“That was a long time ago, maybe you ain’t one anymore,” she said unsentimentally.
“It’s just a sentence,” I said. “Why does it make you downhearted?”
“’Cause it makes me realize I wasted my best years,” Gladys said. “I ain’t never had no boyfriends—just Chuck, and he’s a heel.”
“Chuck is not a heel,” I said. “He may slip from the narrow path of virtue once in a while, but we all do that.”
“I don’t, because who would want to slip with an old hag like me?” Gladys said.
“Well, Frank would want to slip with you,” I reminded her.
Frank was the mailman; my house was the last stop on his route. He arrived about noon every day, his tiny pickup laden with magazines, newspapers, videos, and books, all for me. I subscribed to thirty or forty continental magazines, which I hunted through obsessively, hoping to find pictures of various aging actresses who had once sort of been my girlfriends—I had had a long Grade B continental period before I hit it big with “Al and Sal.”
Any mention of Yorkshire made Godwin nostalgic for his old nanny; in the same way the slick, shiny European magazines made me nostalgic for the Mediterranean littoral, along much of which I had traveled in the late sixties and early seventies, accompanied by a sprightly and vivid string of minor European actresses, Italian, French, and German, many of them vulgar and tacky on the screen, but alert, fastidious, and exacting in real life. How I missed them!
Frank Lucketts, the mailman, couldn’t believe any one person read so many magazines and newspapers.
“My eyes would wear out from all that reading, if it was me,” he said, dropping a bale of magazines on my table.
Then, since his working day had just officially ended, he would retire to the kitchen, have a beer, and flirt with Gladys, with whom he had been hopelessly in love for several years.
“Frank’s sweet, but he’s a loser,” Gladys said when I made inquiries about their nascent romance. “I don’t need to get mixed up with no more losers, I already got Chuck.”
“I could be considered a loser myself,” I said. “I’ve worked for three months on one sentence and neither of my housemates likes it. I think I’ll go read it to Pedro, maybe he’ll like it.”
“That old man’s lost in his own thoughts,” Gladys said. “He don’t say two words a month. At least Frank talks. He don’t make sense, but he does make noise. Chuck used to buy me flowers, but he don’t no more. He and that old Mexican could trade places and I’d never know the difference.”
“I may have to give up on this first sentence,” I admitted. “I don’t really like it myself.”
13
My Cadillac turned out to be maroon. It was the size of a young whale. At the sight of it my spirits rose, and when I sat in it they rose even further. The seats, also in a soft maroon leather, smelled good—new and expensive and good.
Godwin, still in his green bathing trunks, and still smoking dope, sneered at me when I got behind the wheel, but I didn’t care.
“I should have bought a Cadillac long ago,” I said. “I’m a Texan, after all. I like big cars. Why was I driving a Mercedes anyway? Am I a European?”
“No, but at least you were trying to be one,” he said. “Now you’ve reverted to barbarism, just as I always knew you would.”
“You’re a boring little dope addict, leave me alone,” I said. “I doubt if you can even read Greek anymore.”
The salesman who brought the Cadillac was what is now called a hunk. He was in his mid-twenties, not very good-looking but still a hunk. Godwin offered him several varieties of drugs, all of which he refused. Godwin stared at him appraisingly, but the young man was rather stolid and may not have realized he was being appraised. A bored mechanic in a pickup was waiting to take the young salesman back to the Cadillac agency. It was clear he didn’t like Godwin, who hadn’t offered him any drugs.
I gave the young man a check, he gave me a receipt, and the good-smelling car was mine.
“Have a good day,” the young man said as he left. Godwin had tried to make eye contact with him but the young man wasn’t into eye contact.
“You’re as spoiled as a pig,” Godwin said to me. “Besides that, you’re irresponsible. Gladys will probably kill herself in that Mercedes.”
A dust cloud came pouring up the road from the south. At the head of it was Gladys; she had called the filling station, got the Mercedes started, and was now practicing driving in her new car. She sped by the house, going about eighty; the dust cloud engulfed Godwin before following Gladys on north.
“She seems to have got the hang of it,” I said. “As for you, you’re lucky that mechanic didn’t run over you. I don’t think your charm worked on that mechanic.”
“I rarely waste my charm on aging laborers,” he said archly. “Perhaps I should accompany you on this fatherly errand. I might overlook your rudeness and accompany you. It could well be that you’ll need my charm when you locate the young lady.”
“Why would I? She’s my daughter,” I said. “Anyway your appearance more than offsets your charm. One look at you and she’d probably want a restraining order of some kind to keep me away from my own grandkids.”
Actually, I was tempted to take him. I was still pretty apprehensive at the thought of meeting my daughter. Godwin was strange, but on the other hand a known quantity. Having him along to bicker with might keep me from getting too nervous on the drive down.
Then, abruptly, I rejected the notion—a gutless notion at best. She was my daughter—I had spent many miserable years hoping against hope that I’d someday get a chance to meet her. Now the chance had come. Providing myself with a buffer before I even laid eyes on her would be the act of an emotio
nal coward.
I was an emotional coward, more or less, but in this case, if ever, I knew that I had better try to transcend my cowardly instincts. I wanted that girl to like me, not Godwin.
“You better stay here and look after Gladys,” I said. “What if she did have a wreck?”
“You’re just greedy,” he said. “You don’t want to share your daughter with me. You probably won’t even bring her home. Pig that you are, you’ll take her somewhere where you can have her all to yourself.”
“The thought hadn’t occurred to me,” I said. “But now that you mention it, maybe I will. I wonder if she has a passport.”
I was getting a little tired of the reclusive life in Hardtop County, if the truth were known. I had begun to dream Mediterranean dreams, and to miss the girls of those golden shores: Claudia Cardinale and Melissa Mell, Ingrid Pitt, Senta Berger, Françoise Dorléac, Romy Schneider—all my continental dreamgirls. Maybe I’d take a house in Rome, get to know my daughter in a European setting—the grandkids could grow up bilingual.
Godwin had known me long enough to quickly sniff the drift of my thoughts.
“She works in a Dairy Queen,” he reminded me. “I hardly think she’d have a passport.”
“A Mr. Burger,” I corrected. “A Mr. Burger, not a Dairy Queen.”
“There may be a difference,” Godwin said, “but I doubt if that means she’s much of an internationalist.”
I got out of the Cadillac and went to get my bags.
“God, you’re tiresome,” I said. “If I don’t leave, I’ll be too tired to drive, just from arguing with you.”
“Look, I’m an experienced dad,” he said. “I’ve got nine children to your one. You may well find yourself in need of my expertise.”
“Godwin, not this time,” I said, stiffening my spine. “This is something I want to do alone.”
14
“Self-parody is the first portent of age,” I said to myself as I cruised through Jacksboro, the first town on my route south. Jacksboro was distinguished among the small towns of the region for having kept intact a block of old limestone buildings; the buildings were in no way appealing, but they were consistent in an area where few things were, architecturally speaking. The stone buildings of Jacksboro looked as if they’d all crack to bits and fall down if you whacked them a time or two with a big sledgehammer.