I drove on to Decatur, reflecting cheerfully that there wasn’t a single man-made structure within one hundred miles of my house that wasn’t ugly. The Kimball Museum in Fort Worth, which happens to be precisely one hundred miles from my front door, is the first appealing building one can hope to encounter in any direction, if one starts from my house.
“Self-parody is the first portent of age” was not some little personal warning I was issuing to myself; it was an alternative first sentence to my novel.
“The first portent of age is self-parody,” I said, to see if changing the word order would help things along. It seemed to me from what I could remember of novel writing, an activity I had unfortunately let lapse for nearly twenty years, that the first sentence of a book was of critical, even crucial, importance. If you could think of a good one, all the other sentences might follow after it obediently. They might just come marching briskly out of your brain, like well-drilled soldiers.
It was apparent to me that my girlfriends’ boyfriends sentence wasn’t working, although I had set my heart on it. Certainly it was an accurate reflection of my life, and though I’m odd, in the end I may not be all that odd. Several of my girlfriends now had boyfriends who looked to me for fatherly counsel. I spent a good many hours each week dispensing advice to the bewildered young men who—often to their intense surprise—had been adopted as the boyfriends of my older, but still perplexing, girlfriends. It was ironic, of course, that fatherly counsel was what I had been called on to provide—after all, I had never even seen my own child, and as yet had given her no counsel—but, if ironic, it might also be paradigmatic.
More odd, if possible, was the fact that I rarely spoke directly to these lucky young men. I relayed my counsel through the often cloudy medium of the girlfriends. I might say to Jeanie Vertus, “Why don’t you tell Carver this? You could just mention that I mentioned it.”
Or I might say to Nema Remington, “I think A.B. ought to consider such-and-such.” Nema, never one to let the grass grow under a useful thought, would promptly call her husband and demand that he consider such-and-such.
In that way, life proceeded. The process reminded me a little of a teen-age party game, popular in the fifties, of passing Life Savers from boy to girl on the ends of toothpicks. It was a game that suggested kissing, yet a sharp object stood between you and the kiss. Sharp objects also stood between the boyfriends and me—i.e., the girlfriends. That the girlfriends were sharp was fine with me. Their sharp behavior was what had got me interested in the girlfriends in the first place; life is too short to waste on dull women, of which there are far too many—most of them employed in the television industry, or so I had once thought.
One or two of my girlfriends’ boyfriends were actually young in age—Marella Miracola’s, for example—but the ones who seemed to need the most counseling were merely young in mind.
“He’s a child, you see,” my girlfriends were always saying to me gravely in the wake of some particularly messy bit of behavior on the part of a boyfriend.
“He’s never grown up,” was another sentiment often heard in these conversations.
“He’s like a giant four-year-old,” Jeanie said of one lover. Jeanie often put things brilliantly.
By contrast with their lovers, I was, in the view of most of my old girlfriends, thoroughly grown up. The consensus was that I was not only grown up, I was too grown up. None of them had ever met Pedro, but they knew about him and seemed to feel that in ways that counted with them I was not much his junior. Chronologically I was three or four decades his junior, but chronology meant little to my girlfriends. All of them were firm subscribers to the nonsensical theory that you’re only as old as you think you are.
My own position was more realistic. I think I’m as old as I am, and I am fifty-one. At forty-eight, I was a different man; at forty-five, I was more different still. But fifty-one seemed to be the age at which one was most likely to cross the threshold of self-parody—which is why I was thinking of changing my first sentence.
15
The courthouse in Decatur looked as if it belonged in Bavaria. It was built of red granite and was topped by a grotesque tower with a clock in it. The clock had been stopped for several years—and the same could be said for the town over which the courthouse towered. Decatur was a stopped clock of sorts, but its citizens were very proud of their courthouse and kept spotlights trained on it all night. To me it resembled one of the lesser castles of the mad King Ludwig II. If the Danube had been flowing past it, the courthouse might have looked appropriate, but unfortunately the only thing that flowed past it was Highway 287, a bleak asphalt river that carried one north to Amarillo and the drear Oklahoma panhandle.
I sometimes whiled away my drives by directing what I liked to think was a sharp eye at the many nondescript little communities through which I passed. There was obviously no guarantee I was going to make it as a novelist—I had left my imagination in mothballs too long. Travel writing might have to be my fallback position. My mind was not entirely gone, but it had acquired a tendency to drift. It seemed to me I might make a virtue of necessity and drift along with my mind. I had a friend named Jack McGriff, an antiques scout. Jack spent his life on the highways of America finding wonderful things wherever he went. During the nine years when I had been chained to a sound stage in Culver City, I had envied no one so much as Jack. He seemed to have the perfect life, going where he pleased, and—more importantly from my immediate point of view—not going where he didn’t please.
“I spend very little time in Gary, Indiana,” he remarked to me once. In the trade he was known as “Cadillac Jack,” due to his penchant for cars just like the one I was presently driving through Decatur.
While Jack McGriff was enjoying some of the best scenery in America, I was spending fourteen hours a day amid some of the worst, i.e., Culver City, the Gary of the entertainment industry. During my years there, I must have averaged at least two confrontations an hour. I had confrontations with writers, confrontations with actors, confrontations with light men, sound men, camera men, prop men, and—worst of all—network men.
Network men are a much-maligned species, and they deserve to be much maligned. They usually have glue for brains, and can only be communicated with through the medium of the screaming match. Day after day I screamed myself hoarse trying to stir their gluey thought processes a little; often I failed utterly, and it was on those days that I most envied Jack McGriff. Why was I wasting my life screaming at glue-brained shits in twelve-hundred-dollar suits?
The answer was that my show was Number One in the ratings: six years straight, Number One, an unprecedented thing. My inventions, Al and Sal, were a normal middle-class family living in Reseda, California, with their three normal middle-class kids, Bert, Betsy, and little Bobby. They experienced the normal strains, the normal delights, the normal tragedies of American life, and, to my surprise, eighty or ninety million Americans chose each week to experience these same strains, delights, and tragedies with Al and Sal and their children.
When I wrote the pilot for “Al and Sal” I was living in one room in a motel in Blythe, California. I was a loner and a loser who had pretty much failed at everything: at the novel, at screenwriting, at marriage, and, over and over again, at romance. I had never enjoyed one day of normal domestic life, and I knew perfectly well I probably never would. Then, inexplicably, as a last throw of the dice, I produced from my fantasies of what domestic life could be a sitcom that not only had held America in thrall for nine years, but that was even now causing people who actually had domestic lives in places as far flung as Pakistan, Finland, and Brazil to neglect their own perfectly normal domesticities in order to watch a series that had been born of my own despairing fantasies.
One doesn’t easily stop being El Primo, even in television, where almost everyone’s daily fantasy is that some happy morning he’ll wake up and not be working in television anymore. I had hoped it every day for nine years, but Number One is n
ot something you just casually walk away from; even in our last year, when the show was barely still in the top forty and I was worth hundreds of millions, I didn’t find it easy to leave.
I departed in stately stages, first to a palace on the cliffs at Laguna, then across the hills to another palace in Rancho Mirage, then to a spacious hacienda in Patagonia, Arizona, where I had the distinction to be the first gringo millionaire to be robbed by the famous cross-border Robin Hood, Vega Vega, about whose career I produced a pilot for a series that died after four episodes: my public, if I still had one, wanted a newer, fresher, more yuppified Al and Sal, not some absurdist comedy about a Mexican bandit. “Cheech without Chong” was how one callous reviewer described it.
In removing myself in slow removes to Laguna Beach, Rancho Mirage, and Patagonia, I was duplicating, in high style, a self-removal I had undertaken in the sixties, in low style; in that instance I had drifted out of L.A., from cheap motel to cheap motel, East Hollywood to Azusa, Azusa to San Dimas, San Dimas to Calimesa, Calimesa to Banning, Banning to Indio, and, finally, Indio to Blythe, where, on the very edge of California, I wrote the immortal pilot to “Al and Sal.”
Once, in early life—the day after my daughter was born, in fact—I had drowned the manuscript of my failed second novel in the muddy Rio Grande near Roma, Texas. I had been in the mood to drown myself with it, but that had only been a mood, and when I imagined how horrible it would be to actually have water in my lungs I changed my mind, walked out of the river, hitchhiked to L.A., and took the Hanna-Barbera test—first step on the ladder to screenwriting stardom—passed it, and spent three years writing dialogue for cartoons.
In Blythe, ten years after I walked out of the Rio Grande, I came to another borderland defined by a river—in this case the green Colorado. I arrived in a low, almost despairing, state. The Colorado soothed me, as the Rio Grande had soothed me long before. I felt horrible, but I didn’t want to die, and I had no reason to think that I would feel any better if I crossed the flowing border into some kind of exile.
The Colorado, like all great rivers, has force as well as beauty. I walked beside it, watched it flow, skipped rocks in it, meanwhile fantasizing about recovering one or two of the relationships that I had fucked up during my decline.
The rest of my days and nights were spent in a dingy desert night stop called the Old Palm Inn, named for the one moldering old palm tree that stood in its courtyard. There I wrote the pilot which, a mere eight months later, soared into the entertainment empyrean, to become the highest flying eagle of the ratings. Once that happened I became far too busy to walk in sadness by rivers, though I lived for a time in a riverbank condo in Studio City and from my window could see the concrete viaduct through which the Los Angeles river flows, looking like an irrigation canal that had somehow strayed into a metroplex.
When the nine years passed and “Al and Sal” ceased production and I removed myself all the way to Patagonia, Arizona, I soon discovered that the town I had chosen was only the outermost suburb of L.A. Quite a number of the glue-brained executives I had once had screaming matches with, in my imperial days in Culver City, had spacious retreats in Patagonia, too. The more determined of them raised Arabian horses and mingled freely with the fascistic old Republicans who controlled southern Arizona.
Determined to go someplace where Culver City would not be tempted to follow, I moved all the way back to Hardtop County and built Los Dolores, my mansion on a hill. At that time it had just become possible to fly nonstop from Dallas to Paris or London or Frankfurt, and I often did just that, proceeding immediately by airbus to Rome or the Riviera. I went to China, I went to India, I went to Egypt, Argentina, Sweden. The one place I did not go was L.A.
I didn’t go to Austin, Texas, either, but Austin came to me unbidden in the form of Godwin Lloyd-Jons—the university had finally managed to ease him out of the Greek chair. Godwin had never made any bones about the fact that he was in teaching for the fucking. “Boys for summer, girls for winter,” was his motto, as I well knew, my former wife having been one of his winter girls. The University of Texas, well aware that this was a litigious age, no doubt decided that a professor who held such beliefs—and practiced them—was a potential liability it could ill afford.
I hadn’t seen or thought of Godwin for many years until I stumbled on him one day in the customs line at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. Never one to conceal his emotions, he was weeping bitterly over the loss of a young man who had robbed him, beaten him up, and abandoned him in the airport parking lot in Rio, after having promised several times to accompany him back to Texas.
The other passengers in the customs line were horrified at the sight of a weeping man; but I had been twenty-three hours getting home from Cairo and it would have taken an outstanding massacre to raise much emotion in me.
“Godwin, is that you?” I asked—he had cried a lot in his days with Sally, I recalled.
“Why, Daniel, you’re fat now,” he said, wiping his eyes on the sleeve of his Burberry.
“I tend to gain weight when I travel,” I said, though in fact I tend to lose it.
It was an unpromising reunion, but Godwin didn’t notice. The customs line was long. Once Godwin had dried his eyes he launched into a long and detailed account of his lost Brazilian lover’s endowments and proclivities. I wasn’t really listening, but I must have been the only one who wasn’t, because the line immediately grew shorter as people fled from his revelations, and before I knew it we were out into the bright Texas sunlight, blinking like owls.
The last part of any trip through the moonscape of DFW, as that airport is called, is a ride on the rumbling, computer-driven airtrans that takes passengers from terminal to terminal. It also takes returning passengers to remote parking lots, so remote that they seem to be in north Waxahachie, a town some thirty miles south of the airport.
On the lengthy airtrans ride we shared I became slightly paranoid about Godwin’s intentions. I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years, but he followed me in puppylike fashion, as if there were no question but that now we were together. He got in the same airtrans with me, though I doubted very much that he had a vehicle waiting in north Waxahachie.
During the long bumpy ride he regaled me with the sexual highlights of his trip to Rio and Buenos Aires. A hardened priest who had heard a million confessions might still have blanched or blushed at hearing the things Godwin told me. Godwin, the renowned classicist, made no distinction between sexual and textual; he spoke of butt-fucking as lengthily and casually as he might have discussed some emendation of Euripides. I was too tired to mind particularly, but many of the passengers traveling with us had not been deadened by twenty-three hours in an airplane; when the doors of the little train opened at each stop, passengers bolted like rats. After six or eight stops Godwin finally noticed.
“What’s wrong with these people?” he asked. “You’d think we were contagious.”
“Well, Godwin, after what you’ve just been describing, maybe you are,” I suggested, as gently as possible.
“Oh, rot, perfect rot!” he said, glaring at the remaining passengers, all of whom were huddled warily at the far end of the car. At the next stop, South Remote Parking A and Auto Rental, they all converged on the door, obviously planning to bolt the second it opened.
The sight enraged Godwin; he had always had a short fuse. Just before the train stopped he leaped up and began to jerk and twitch, as if he had Saint Vitus’ dance. Then he lurched into the passengers and began to pant in their faces.
“I have a new disease,” he shouted suddenly. “It’s called omniplague. It’s a fungoid disease which combines the worst features of leprosy and lupus. It’s transmitted by human breath—soon whole populations will be wiped out by it. I caught it in the jungles of the Amazon while fucking a monkey.”
He panted at them some more.
“Terribly sorry but we’re all doomed now,” he said, just as the doors opened, allowing the terrified passengers to spil
l out.
One burly passenger, who was wearing Levi’s and a dozer cap and looked as if he had just come off rig duty in the Gulf or perhaps Alaska, didn’t take his doom casually: he swatted Godwin in the face with a small tote bag. The tote bag must have had rolls of silver dollars in it, because it knocked Godwin down and broke his nose. He sprawled on the floor at my feet, bleeding like a stuck hog.
“Omniplague! Omniplague!” Godwin yelled, just as the doors closed. The passengers were safe, but what about me?
“I hope you were just making that up,” I said, offering a handkerchief. “I hope you didn’t really fuck a monkey.”
The whole front of his suit was covered with blood, but his mood was much improved.
“Wouldn’t attempt it, they bite,” Godwin said.
16
Eventually we got to my car. Godwin’s nose was still bleeding freely; his condition was beginning to alarm me. He was weaving around the parking lot in a glassy-eyed fashion, but his mood was euphoric.
“Odd how the flow of blood energizes a man,” he said. “It must have to do with evolution.”
“I think it has to do with insanity,” I said. “I think you’d better take it easy. You’re losing significant amounts of blood.”
“Nonsense, I have quarts and quarts of it,” he said. “Would you like to go to a bar? It’s been decades since we talked.”
Ten seconds later he collapsed on the asphalt. I began to hyperventilate—Godwin always had that effect on me. My memories of first aid methods were sketchy, but I knew I had to do something. Fortunately he was a tiny man, easy to drag. I stretched him out on the little sidewalk in front of my Mercedes and dug a dirty T-shirt out of my luggage. I used the T-shirt to attempt to stanch the flow of blood.