A Fan's Notes

  Falling very rapidly and straight down, whissshhh and carruuummp, he broke his nose on the davenport’s spine; no sooner had he come to a face-up rest on the floor than the nose, already distended to cover a great area of his face, loosed a torrent of blood. Seeing it, Mr. Blue also loosed an effeminate, spine-chilling shriek. Guffawing and sneering her venom, Deborah cracked her thigh and walked round back of the davenport to where I already stood over him. Looking wildly up at us, Mr. Blue moaned, and then wept, not so much in pain, I thought, as at the humiliation of his aborted feat. Attempting to bring his right hand up to wipe away the blood and embarrassing tears, he got it only part way, gave it up, let it fall back to the carpet, and then closed his eyes, or rather his eyes closed. He had passed out cold. Disgustedly reaching down and placing her hands in Mr. Blue’s armpits, Deborah raised him up to where she could prop him against her lowered thighs, got a firm grip on him, picked him up, threw him over her shoulder, carried him into the bedroom, and flung him on the bed. After that Deborah and I stood over him, while I wrung my hands and like a quack medico murmured clinical notions. Finally I offered what I thought an inspired remedy. “You think we ought to wash the blood off?” Deborah guffawed again. “To hell with his blood, the little weasel!” she cried, and thundered, floor creaking, out of the room.

  Having washed him thoroughly with hot soapy towels, fool ishly stuck three Band-Aids on his nose, stripped him, and tucked him in, I was putting his mussed and bloody clothes on hangers and hanging them in the closet when Deborah, having re-entered the room unseen, demanded to know what I was doing. Believing she had been for some time behind me and had seen me take from Mr. Blue’s trousers the five-dollar bill for the cab, I smiled sheepishly and said, “It’s just a loan till tomorrow—one Mr. Blue promised me for a taxi.” With something quite else on her mind, she had no idea what I was talking about. “Get him out of here,” she said. “You certainly don’t think he’s going to stay here, do you?” I was standing there, open-mouthed with bewilderment, holding Mr. Blue’s jacket on a hanger. Quickly surveying the closet’s contents, I confirmed a sudden doubt. Mr. Blue had—thank God!—told me the truth: his clothes were hanging there among Deborah’s. “Aw, be reasonable,” I said. “Your personal life’s your own business. You don’t think I’d say anything about—about all—” Here I nonchalantly wafted my arm over the closet’s contents. Deborah was standing right beside me now, her jaw thrust furiously at me. “I don’t care what that bastard told you! He doesn’t stay here!” Snatching Mr. Blue’s jacket from my hand, she threw it crazily to the floor. There upon she removed, item by item, all his clothes from the closet, flung them on top of the jacket, and started jumping insanely up and down on that mountain of Mr. Blue’s ward robe. When she finished, she was sweating profusely, her hands were settled in a posture of defiance on her hips, and her jaw was thrust even closer to me, as though to say, “How’d you like a little of the same?” Unable to resist it, and smiling as I did so, I threw my best punch. A sucker punch, it caught her flush on that monument of a blue jaw; and with nary a muffled syllable she went ever so slowly down and lay flat out, spread-eagled on the mattress of the bloodied clothing.

  By the time I had reached the street, hailed a cab, and settled comfortably into the back seat, I found that I was whistling. In my sporadic and undistinguished pugilistic career over the years, the U.S.S. Deborah was my first kayo. And I was inordinately, whistlingly proud.

  Mr. Blue’s mysterious relationship with the Counselor turned out to be more mysterious than I had imagined: it was nonexistent. Though I was sure Mr. Blue wouldn’t come for me the next day, I was equally certain, knowing what an appreciative audience I was, that after he’d found a new canvasser and got his business humming, he’d stop by to entertain me, perhaps even thank me for decking Deborah. But when a week had come and gone, and he still had neither appeared nor telephoned, I began to grow morose. For me Mr. Blue had become the real and vivid world, and the other habitués of the apartment merely penumbral, incorporeal dross. Worse, without his riotous stimulation, lying on the davenport, I began to detect that I was becoming perilously logy, not only in capable of a jeu d’esprit but in conversations unable to form syntactical or meaningful sentences. Rolling from my right to my left side in search of comfort, my bones crepitated like sticks under heavy boots. What little stimulation I had in those two weeks was provided by some cotton-mouthed, pause-punctuated, long-distance conversations to Scarsdale in which the girl with the roan-colored hair and I weighed the pros and cons of our possible marriage, rather timidly and anxiously finding in favor of the pros.

  When at the end of two weeks Mr. Blue still hadn’t appeared, and I thought that he’d surely be showing up to discuss his legal business with the Counselor, I one night asked the latter where “his” buddy was. “What do you mean my buddy?” the Counselor said. “I never saw the crazy man in my life till I saw him talking with you.”

  At first I thought he was joshing, but after repeated questioning it developed that he wasn’t in the least, and this revelation led me to an attempted reconstruction of my first meeting with Mr. Blue. No matter my attempts to place him with Oscar or someone who could have brought him to the apartment, I couldn’t erase the truth that one day I had wakened to find him standing over the davenport and we had begun talking. This in turn led me to the rather startling conclusion that Mr. Blue had simply wandered from the street into the apartment and into my life. Why this singular fact should have nonplused me so, I can’t say; but it did upset me terribly; and in direct proportion to my dismay I found myself admiring the Counselor’s character. So much more adaptive he was than I, so amenably courageous in leaving his door ajar for any who would enter, so chameleon in his ability to strike just the proper postures for the hand-wringing, grief-stricken lunatics who sought haven there; whereas I, no doubt already somewhat institutionalized, was fearful of life and wanted my universe regimented and at moral attention, my meals scheduled, my ball-points all in one jar, my acquaintances at my finger tips, and my door bolted against the grief-bearing intrusions of the world. “You’re some sack of shit, aren’t you?” I said affectionately. “Now, what do you mean by that?” the Counselor said. “Well,” I said, “you might begin by telling me just who in

  the hell Mr. Blue is?” After pondering the question lengthily and with mock gravity, the Counselor said, “Well, straight-shooter, I don’t honestly know. But it’s a good question. It has a ringing but obvious alliteration. ‘Who, who, whooooo is Mr. Blue?’“ I laughed appreciatively, and the next day I phoned the party in Scarsdale and told her to expect me within a matter of days, not knowing when I talked with her that I’d see Mr. Blue again.

  In a saloon I frequented with Oscar I had struck an acquaintance with a transplanted newsman from London, and it was while with him that I again saw Mr. Blue. A handsome, late-thirtyish, and much-decorated British Commando of World War II, the Englishman had after a hoodooed romance in London elected to “come give America a see” and had since his arrival here drifted from town to city, from copy desk to general assignment, “seeing” America through a jaundiced but forgiving eye. An able writer, in his clipped English he told me a wry tale about his longevity span on American newspapers. Sooner or later he found himself writing the paper’s editorials, “all very solemn and indignant and bloody highfalutin,” he remarked, and as long as he wrote these imprisoning the laughing man within him, he stayed on the job. When the day came (and like a bloody bowel movement, he said, it always came) that he discovered himself writing in incendiary tones about the need for a traffic light at the “corner of Myrtle Avenue and Shoshoni” (he reverenced and collected our Indian names) “Boulevard” and laughing aloud —roaring really, helpless to stay the tears streaming down his cheeks, all eyes in the city room cast apprehensively, some what amazedly, on him—he resigned in the interest of his “bloody sanity” and moved on to Wichita Falls—yearning, one gathered, so steadfastly for Fleet Street and room-tempe
rature beer that one was always repressing an urge to ask why he didn’t go home.

  On hearing that I was going to Scarsdale to marry, he said, “I’ll drive you,” explaining he’d heard the Westchester countryside was reminiscent of England and that he longed to see it. And on a suffocating day in late spring, with the wistful Londoner driving his Thunderbird, undoubtedly ruing the wheel’s being on the “wrong” side and buoyed up in the anticipated comfort of vistas of green places and hedgerows, we were driving through a suburb leading out of the city when my eye fell on Mr. Blue.

  Portfolio case in hand, a sale in the offing, he was anxiously traversing a wide lawn toward a fin de siecle Victorian house, a three-story clapboard colossus of such proportions that a siding contract for it would have been a windfall of epic proportions. “Stop the car!” I said to the startled Englishman. “Stop the car!” Sticking my head out the window even as the Thunderbird was spluttering to the curb, I called, “Hey, Mr. Blue! Mr. Blue! It’s me! Freddy!”

  Under the furious momentum of his stride Mr. Blue halted waveringly, set the portfolio case down, straightened up to his full five feet, three, saluted me in the military manner, and with genuine affection called back, “Freddy!” He did not say any more, and I understood that with that massive house looming in the background he had precious little time for me and small talk. Still, I was immensely fond of the pussy-bedazzled old bastard, biases, bullshit, and all, and I yearned to think of something that would stay him from his frenzied course for just a moment more. Probably no little in envy of the all-afternoon “lunches,” I didn’t at all like the looks of his obese, luxuriant-haired, and silk-suited canvasser and deeply resented his making Mr. Blue, the “factory representative,” carry his own portfolio case. He was not at all the Ivy League canvasser of Mr. Blue’s dreams. Having reached the house first, he now stood at the bottom of the steps with his hands on his womanish hips and stared moodily at me by way of letting me know I was interrupting enterprises of great pith and moment. “Fuck you, fat boy,” I mumbled under my breath. Then, scarcely thinking about it, I shouted, “Give us fifty, Mr. Blue!” To the astonishment of both the canvasser and my British chauffeur, down went Mr. Blue, and up and down, and down and up, and up and down. By the time he had reached his fifteenth, perhaps twentieth push-up, the Londoner was mumbling an intrigued “Why, the bloody, dirty old man is mad!” and the canvasser, numb with fury, was stand ing over Mr. Blue angrily beseeching him not to ruin the sale with such maniacal shenanigans. Laughing, I said, “Drive on.” Suddenly the thought of remembering Mr. Blue going so laboriously yet somehow so effortlessly up and down, and down and up, appealed overwhelmingly to the anecdotal within me.

  Helpless to stay it, I let my easy laughter fill the car for the better part of the next fifty miles. When finally, seemingly too exhausted to laugh a moment more, I fell quiet, my friend, asking the primal newsman’s question, said, “Who in the bloody world is Mr. Blue?” That started it all over again. Beginning to laugh even before my reply came, I said, “Oh, yes! Oh, yes! That’s it! Who, who, whoooo in the bloody world is Mr. Blue?” and ended, to the beguiled and somewhat un easy chuckling of the Englishman, by roaring all the way to Scarsdale, much too preoccupied to discover if that nostalgic Limey ever that day found the comfort of familiar scenes.

  The next I heard of Mr. Blue, some months later, was that he was dead. Standing at the Commodore Hotel’s commuter bar which opens onto the lower concourse of Grand Central, I had been in the city being interviewed for a job I hadn’t wanted and had glibly refused (before, I might add, it was even offered) and was devotedly sipping a beer, fingering the two dollars or so of silver in my pocket (the extent of my fortune), and fabricating for my wife a tale of a horrendous personality clash between the interviewer and myself, when someone very close to me guardedly spoke my name and I looked up to see the gray-flanneled, horn-rimmed attorney who had registered such surprise at my endless lip-reading of Lolita. He told me that he had been in New York trying a case, but because I was indifferent to him I elected to believe he was in town filing a brief, probably, I surmised, somewhere as pedestrian as at probate court. For drinking funds to stimulate the fantasy and add just the proper details to the story of my ghastly interview, I immediately hit him for twenty dollars. I thought of asking him for ten, but, bad luck for him, I was indifferent enough to him to make it twenty. Hurt that he didn’t wince as he gave me the money, I thought I’d better offer him some notions of my plans for repaying him. The following weekend I was to get a fifteen-hundred-dollar check from the Columbia Broadcasting System. Since seeing him last, I explained, I had been studying direction under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio and in coaching would-be actors had so impressed him with my own thespian ability (“Golly,” I injected, “something I never dreamed I possessed!”) that he had recommended me for a cameo role in an upcoming Playhouse 90 and—God’s-in-his-heaven-all’s-right-with-the-world—I had got the goddam male lead!

  “Actually,” I said, “I just this moment left rehearsal and am fagged—but fagged.” As I thought he would be, he was impressed. Coming up on his tiptoes and listing toward me in anticipation, he demanded all the details.

  “It’s tremendous,” I said, pronouncing it treee-MEN-dous and stalling for time. “A real message play. Tennessee Williams’ first original for TV!” Hadn’t he heard about it? Now that I mentioned it he thought he had read something that morning in the Times (oh, how bullshit begets bullshit!), but tell him more. Well, I played this Chicago-born surgeon, Horatio Vah-nee, married to an exquisite, aristocratic Southern belle, Miss Melissa Jennie Coker, from Charleston, South Carolina, and as the play opens I am living in an ocean-front mansion on Charleston’s Battery with her and my three sons, Legare, Manigault, and Ravenal, and am one of the two Northerners accepted in the community, the other being Paul Muni, who plays a four-star general, retired, and an ex-President of the United States, “sort of,” I offered, “a rough-hewn Ike, you might say,” and chuckled. “You have to get the back ground to get the full impact of what follows,” I said and went on to explain that as the curtain rises I am president of the Charleston Historical Society, on the board of the Confederate League of Respiratory Surgeons, a generous contributor to the Union for the Eternal Maintenance of the First Cannonball Fired on Fort Sumter, sergeant-at-arms for the St. Cecelia Ball, and musical minister to the Society for the Preservation of Carolina Spirituals. “Enter Fate, with a capital F,” I said, jamming my middle finger up into the smoky though virginal air. My brother, played by Mickey Rooney, who is a base and vindictive little garage mechanic in Chicago and who has always envied me my hard-won esteem, shows up in Charleston one sunny day and lightheartedly offers me documented and indisputable proof that I’m a “fucking nigger.” I let that sink in. “Oh, it’s treee-MEN-dous,” I repeated. “As pretty and sweet a thing as Williams has ever done. It’s all about the consequences of this discovery. A lot like Hamlet after the prince discovers that Claudius has all along been fornicating with his Mom and has done in his Pop.” Sighing, I told him I shouldn’t say more for fear of spoiling the drama for him. Enough to say, I said, that the consequences are not happy: all the better people get smashed one night down at the Carolina Yacht Club and come and burn down my water front mansion; Legare, Manigault, and Ravenal are taken from me and spirited off to their uncle, a mystical and besotted mining engineer in Cambodia; my mother-in-law locks herself in a steamer trunk in the attic and passes her days gnawing on chestnuts and acorns; and the last we hear of my wife, Miss Melissa Jennie Coker, she has taken to running naked up and down the concrete sea wall that runs along the Battery and protects the mansions from the arbitrary whims of the sea.

  Thinking that ought to hold him till he dialed in Playhouse the following Thursday and found no Manigault, no Melissa, no Tennessee, no me, I changed the subject and began to query him about some of the madmen who had frequented the apartment. We discussed this one, having a laugh, and that one, having two laughs, and
when I asked about Mr. Blue, my informant went preternaturally grave. “Mr. Blue,” he said, “is dead.” Not only was he dead, but because the attorney’s uncle had been the investigating officer I was able to get many of the details.

  The calamity had occurred just prior to Christmas. Because the U.S.S. Deborah, a champion of robustness, had apostasized smoking, Mr. Blue, a nonsmoker, had acquired the habit of doing his chain-smoking in the can, his muscular buttocks

  settled anxiously on the throne, fiendishly wolfing in the smoke, flicking his ashes into the sink, afterward washing them down with tap water and flushing his butts whirlingly down the toilet bowl. From a storage-rental warehouse Deborah had re

  moved her plastic Yule tree and orange crates stuffed with her silver icicles, her canned snow, her tissue-wrapped green, yellow, red, and blue ornament balls, her papier-mache Magi, her delicate and gossamer-winged seraphs, her cardboard rep