Best to Laugh: A Novel

  “—Win Baker. He lives in the apartment below me.”

  “Well, when he asked me if I was Charlotte Fields’s cousin—see, her real last name is Fjeldsman—it kind of took me by surprise, and I guess I thought, ‘Hey, I’m going to make up a stage name, too.’ So I said Ohi.”

  “Are you an actress?”

  “No, but I—”

  There was an explosion of water and those in its wake voiced their complaints to its creator.

  “Maeve Mullman,” said Ed, as the woman’s white-blonde head emerged from the water. “Our neighborhood weightlifter.”

  “She lives in my building,” I said. “She told me the cup of sugar I was trying to borrow was poison.”

  “I didn’t know people borrowed sugar anymore.”

  “I wanted to bake a cake, plus I thought it’d be a good way to introduce myself to my neighbors.”

  “What kind of cake?”

  “Yellow, with my famous fudge frosting.”

  A sudden shadow loomed over us.

  “Stickley,” said a raspy, accusative voice. “You busy for dinner tonight? I’ve got two steaks thawing out in my fridge, and you could definitely use the protein.”

  Holding his hand to form an awning over his eyes, Ed looked up at the imposing body that was the bodybuilder’s.

  “Sorry, Maeve, I’ve got a date. But I appreciate the invitation.”

  “Like hell you do!” said Maeve, her eyebrows, nearly plucked into nonexistence, furrowing.

  She took a step backwards, turned around, and dove into the pool.

  “You’re a popular guy,” I said, watching the water churn under Maeve’s Australian crawl.

  “I’m straight,” said Ed, “plus I’m not in showbiz, which believe it or not, acts as an aphrodisiac—or at least a relief—to a lot of women. I think they like to be reminded of what it is to be normal.”

  A single apartment, built above the garages and the laundry room, looked over the pool, and the sound of an alarm clock jangled through its open windows.

  “Billy Gray Green,” said Ed. “Greeting the late afternoon. He’s a bartender down at the Toy Tiger.” Looking at his watch, he stifled a big, jaw-cracking yawn.

  “Was it something I said?”

  Ed laughed. “I really do have a date.” Collecting his book and his cooler, he stood up and said, “Pleasure to have made your acquaintance, Candy, and I hope soon to make the acquaintance of your yellow cake with the famous fudge frosting.”

  4

  TECHNICALLY, I lived in the upper half of the duplex with my dad, but because he worked nights at the Ford Plant, I was most often downstairs at my grandma’s, taking over her guest room as my own.

  Tired of repeating “Lights out!” to someone who was a natural night owl, Grandma became lax in policing a bedtime she knew I wasn’t tired enough to obey, and by the time I was nine all attempts at enforcement had been thrown out the window and the two of us had a regular date on the couch with Johnny Carson.

  We both loved The Tonight Show and its host—loved watching Johnny play Carnac the Magnificent or Aunt Blabby; loved his looks of understated alarm as marsupials from the San Diego Zoo inspected his hair for nits or snakes slithered up his arm; loved the polite conversations he’d have with the old lady who collected mushrooms that looked like presidential profiles or with the condescending ten-year-old genius who had sold a patent to NASA, all the while winking at the camera to let us know he couldn’t see Millard Fillmore in that particular piece of fungi either, and that this kid (the little twerp) was way over his head, too.

  We liked the opera singers, the drum soloists, the authors and artists he’d have on, but boy oh boy, we loved the comedians.

  During the commercials, I’d jump up and re-create their acts, the throw rug by the fireplace serving as my stage.

  “I tell ya, when I was a kid, all I knew was rejection,” I’d say, adjusting an imaginary tie à la Rodney Dangerfield. “My yo-yo, it never came back.”

  Doing Joan Rivers, I’d grouse, “I hate to do housework. You make the beds, you wash the dishes, and six months later you have to start all over again.”

  My grandmother’s laughter was like gold to King Midas and greed pushed me to want more, more, more.

  When she explained that the comics were professionals and that they, like Johnny, were paid to make people laugh, a light—a spotlight—clicked on.

  “I want a job like that,” I said.

  “Oh, kid,” she said, using her all-purpose expression. “You’d be so good at it.”

  ONE EVENING MY DAD WAS HOME—IT must have been a holiday—and decided to indulge in a rarity around our household: a little family time.

  The three of us were on the couch, our hands dipping into the stainless steel bowls of popcorn on our laps. I was an emotional tuning fork, thrumming with happiness, excitement, and an uncommon sense of security.

  Don Rickles was calling Johnny Carson a hockey puck and any number of insults, and Johnny was both laughing and getting laughs of his own.

  “Can’t you just see Candy there?” said my grandmother. “Up there sitting with Johnny Carson?”

  “Candy?” said my father, surprised. “Why could you see Candy sitting with Johnny Carson?”

  His words cut me, and his confused expression sent the knife in deeper.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said my grandmother. “Because she’s such a performer. Because she’s so funny.”

  “Candy?”

  “Of course! Candy, do Phyllis Diller for your dad. Or be Johnny doing Art Fern!”

  The look on my dad’s face showed me he didn’t know a thing about me, that he didn’t recognize what I thought was most essential about me.

  Didn’t he remember my very first foray into show business when at a recital I had willingly turned the Patty Cake Party dance routine into a slapstick free-for-all? And what about the huge laugh I got playing the turkey in my fourth grade Thanksgiving play, when instead of delivering my “Gobble-gobble” line, I ad-libbed, “How’s about we all go out for burgers?” And had he forgotten the recent schoolwide speech competition when Mr. Meyers had cast me to deliver a Huck Finn monologue because none of the boys could do his lines justice, and I had taken home the Best Comedic Performance certificate?

  True, he had witnessed few of my triumphs on school stages because they occurred during his work hours (or the hours during which he slept), but that was little solace, reinforcing my belief that he had deliberately chosen the swing shift to avoid interaction with me.

  “I’d like to see one of those impressions,’” my dad said now.

  Fighting back a swell of hurt and rage, I pointed to the TV and trying to keep my voice light, I said, “Oh, man, look at that crazy hat Doc Severinsen’s wearing.”

  AS I GREW, so did my father’s basic obliviousness toward me. Was he leading the standing ovation when I took my bows as one of the Pigeon sisters in our high school production of The Odd Couple? Nope. Or as the social worker in A Thousand Clowns? Nada.

  Okay, so maybe he wasn’t the theater type—maybe he felt more comfortable cheering me on in a gym, or better yet, a pool, considering I had broken two school records and was nominated swim team co-captain as a junior? Uh-uh.

  GRANDMA EXPENDED A LOT OF ENERGY figuring out ways to help the merry laughing little girl outrun the shadow of her mother’s death, and when I was in second grade she had brought me to the YWCA for swimming lessons.

  “It’s something your mom would have wanted for you,” she told me as we rode the bus downtown. “Do you remember how she’d take you down to the kiddie pool practically every sunny day of summer?”

  “Sort of,” I said, trying desperately to add details to the vague picture of her in a skirted swimsuit, sitting on the concrete ledge of the pool.

  “Well, she always said you took to the water like a fish. She said you were a born swimmer.”

  Swimming was good for me; I could beat the water with my arms, kick it with my
legs, and rather than being punished my aggression was rewarded with breaking records and earning titles. I took up diving, too, practicing over and over reverse and inward pikes, finding, in that space between the final bounce and the entry into the water, flight.

  IN MY JUNIOR year, while I was at swim practice, Arne Pekkala’s atrophied heart finally gave out. Having done what my coach called the prettiest one-and-a-half somersault tuck she had ever seen and clocking my best time ever in the two-hundred-meter butterfly, I had no idea that it would be the last time I’d climb out of the pool and peel off my swim cap, feeling that odd exhilarating exhaustion; the last time I’d goof around with my teammates as we headed toward the locker room, accusing one another of being responsible for the warm spots in the pool or the extra bubbles.

  THE NIGHT AFTER MY DAD WAS BURIED, Karen Schaeffer, a girl in my art class, came clumping down the basement steps.

  “Nice pad,” she said of the former storage area my grandmother had allowed me to appropriate as my bedroom, letting me paint it black and red and helping me rig up a clothesline around the bed and hang gauzy curtain panels from it.

  “Thanks,” I said, and, exhausted from the events of the past few days, my voice expressed none of the surprise I felt over Karen’s presence. She traveled in circles that didn’t overlap mine, and the only social exchanges I had with her were in the art room.

  “I’m sorry about your dad,” she said, and her hand darted into her jeans jacket pocket. A second later she lit a thinly rolled joint with a yellow Bic lighter and held it out to me. “This might help.”

  It did.

  As much as my father was physically and emotionally absent in much of my life, his death knocked me down, hard. Like a trapped moth, one question frantically batted around in my feelings of shock and grief: What did I do so wrong to deserve this? and that question, after a few tokes, was muted. That weekend I huddled on a matted square of carpet on the floor of a Dodge van, sharing a pipe and a bottle of Boone’s Farm apple wine with Karen and two guys she worked with at the Red Barn. That helped, too.

  On Monday I quit the swim team. I had already been cast as the dentist’s receptionist in Cactus Flower (“You’ll be hilarious,” the drama club advisor had told me), but before the first rehearsal I told Mrs. Freeburg that I was no longer interested. No extracurricular activities were going to get in the way of my newfound priority, which was to get high.

  Swimming and theater had given me a distinction, a special identity, but after I quit both, I was back to being the only “Oriental” (or at least “Oriental-looking”) kid in a school whose student body looked like a reunion of the Von Trapp Family Singers. And having both a mother and father die—whoa!—that shoved me into a whole new category of weirdness. I was someone people felt both apart from and sorry for, and if that wouldn’t compel you to buy a nickel bag or guzzle wine that tasted like fruit-flavored petrol, I salute your strength.

  5

  ALTHOUGH SHE HELD A NIGHTLY COCKTAIL PARTY for herself, my grandmother didn’t set an example of medication by alcohol. She strictly enforced a one-drink-only rule, and while she was prudent with portions, she was lavish with ingenuity and ingredients. Monday she might shake up a martini, Tuesday stir a Manhattan, but what put her into the realm of a true mixologist were her invented drinks. A nippy autumn evening inspired Liquid Apple Crisp, a hot drink combining apple schnapps, rum, and a cinnamon stick; one humid summer night she blended what she dubbed a Banana Sangria Slush.

  It was 5:30 when I returned from the pool, which meant it was 7:30 back home and Grandma would be mixing up her latest. I had an impulse to call and ask about her newest libation, but my grandmother was old-fashioned and had a slight antipathy/fear of the telephone, especially when long-distance charges were incurred, so instead of bothering the bartender, I changed out of my swimsuit and did what we both promised to do at least weekly: write.

  September 1, 1978

  7267 Hollywood Blvd., #3

  Hollywood, CA 90067

  Dear Grandma,

  Just to get you situated: Peyton Hall is on the corner and shares a long block with several apartment buildings, one house, and a vacant lot. It’s on the residential part of Hollywood Boulevard; the “razzle-dazzle” part starts a couple blocks to the east. I took a stroll down the Walk of Fame yesterday (thinking of you every time I passed the star of one of your favorites—hello, Ray Milland, hello, Tyrone Power!). A woman wearing a stained turban that slid over one eyebrow asked me for a quarter, and when I gave it to her she yelled, “Cheapskate!” and I had to sidestep this tall, blank-eyed guy who motored by like a purposeful zombie. Twice at street corners I smelled “eau de piddle”—not my idea of a Hollywood Boulevard perfume!

  But Charlotte’s apartment is really cool. There are embossed palm trees on the dining room walls (painted over by some lout, but the shapes are still visible) and a rattan wallpaper covers the ceiling, making me feel like I’ve taken shelter in a Tiki hut. There’re all sorts of 8x10 pictures of Charlotte on the wall, and enough mirrors to make you think you’re in some low-budget psychological thriller. Plus all the clothes she didn’t take with her she left on the floor. (And no, I’m not tattling; just reporting . . .)

  My intention to write a nice chatty two-or-three-pager was stopped by the increasingly loud and snarly growls of my empty stomach. On my way to the kitchen, I remembered that the eggs I’d fried for breakfast had emptied my cousin’s refrigerator of anything that might be made into dinner, unless I could whip up something tasty with an almost empty box of raisins, a murky jar of pickles, and a couple packets of soy sauce.

  ALONG WITH SEVERAL INSTRUCTIONS about her car and a bill-paying reminder, Charlotte had left a roughly drawn map indicating necessary businesses like “bank” and “cheap manicures.” Under a big X she had written “Ralphs Supermarket.”

  It was to that Roman numeral I headed, and after stocking up on essentials, I bought from the store’s deli case something I had never before tasted—a ham and cheese croissant—and ate it sitting on the low concrete wall that faced Sunset Boulevard.

  Sunset Boulevard! Having discovered that the famous boulevards—Hollywood and Sunset—were just blocks apart and that they ran parallel to one another, I felt the little flare of confidence that comes when you start getting your bearings in a new place.

  “Whew!” said a woman whose shiny clothing might be considered skimpy if there’d been a little more of it. Her hoops-within-hoops earrings jangled as she half-sat against the wall near me. “You wouldn’t have a soda in there, would you?”

  Looking down at the grocery bag at my feet, I shook my head.

  “Coke, Pepsi, I don’t care.”

  “Sorry, I don’t—”

  “—starving, too,” she said, staring at the cars driving by. “Maybe I should run across the street and get a piece of pizza. Or some of that Pioneer Chicken. Nah, pizza’s easier to eat. I remember when pizza was sort of—how do you call it?” She snapped her gum; it sounded like a popgun. “Erotic.”

  She was talking more to herself than me, but I couldn’t help correcting her.

  “You mean ‘exotic’?”

  The woman chortled. “Yeah, yeah. Exotic. Course nowadays you can go just about anywhere and find pizza.”

  I nodded and agreed that, yes, you could go just about anywhere and find pizza, and when a navy blue Volkswagen swerved to the side of the curb, the woman next to me sighed and pushed herself off the wall.

  “Been real,” she said, offering a little flutter of her fingers as she sauntered to the car. She leaned into the open passenger-side window, exposing a view only the shortest of shorts can offer. After a moment, she stood up and ambled toward me, her hips moving with a definite attitude.

  “He’s asking for you.”

  I pointed to my chest. “Me?”

  The woman snapped her gum. “That’s what I said.”

  With a flick of her long black curls, she strutted east and I, grabbing my grocery bag, lo
ped toward the car.

  “Hey!” I said, seeing the driver was my neighbor.

  “You want a ride home?” said Ed. “Or are you too busy working?”

  IT SEEMS NAÏVE that I didn’t know what trade the sociable woman in the shiny red hot pants and metallic silver tube top was plying, but as I told my neighbor, “I never met a prostitute before.” (I didn’t add, of course, that there were some people—most especially my Aunt Lorraine—who at one time thought otherwise.)

  Ed nodded, as if considering my point. “Still, weren’t her clothes sort of a giveaway?”

  “I just thought she was dressed up. This is Hollywood, after all.”

  He dropped me off in front of my apartment, and after I threw my perishables in the fridge, we met as planned in the back garage stalls.

  “What’s that smell?” I asked.

  “Night blooming jasmine,” said Ed, sniffing deeply. “And eucalyptus.”

  We passed the pool on our way to his apartment, making plans to crack open a Scrabble board and the bottle of wine he’d intended to present to his date, had his date not stood him up.

  “There I was in Silver Lake,” he said, “banging on the door until a guy from across the hall sticks his head out the door and says, ‘Hey buddy, ain’t it obvious she bailed on you?’”

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “Tit for tat!” came a raspy voice.

  “Jeez, Maeve!” said Ed as the bodybuilder sprung from the shadows of shrubbery. “Don’t jump out at people like that.”

  “I wasn’t jumping out. I was just taking a little air—is that a crime?” She turned toward me, the scorn in her voice matching the scorn on her face. “So, I see it didn’t take you long to impress our Mr. Stickley.”

  “Beg your pardon?” I asked.

  Ed sighed. “She thinks we’re on a date, Candy.”

  “Well, you’re together and you’re holding a bottle of wine,” said Maeve. “Isn’t that a reasonable assumption?”