Greatest hits, p.41
Greatest Hits, page 41
He called late in the afternoon; the last spear of light permitted entrance by the surrounding buildings, had almost vanished from the airshaft, and I sat in gloomy relaxation trying to decipher the Mayan Codex that Doubleday charmingly called a royalty statement.
“What’re you up to?” he said, without identifying himself.
“I’m locked in non-orgasmic congress with Doubleday’s bookkeepers. It’s the first time I’ve ever been fucked by a mindless octopus.”
“How about dinner?”
“When, tonight?”
“Yeah. I’m in the city. You free?”
“According to my royalty statements that’s exactly what I am.”
“The new book isn’t doing well?”
“How could it? They must have taken the entire printing, loaded it on barges, floated it out the Narrows, and deep-sixed it. Weighted down, no doubt, by the excess profits from their latest bestselling cookbook.”
“You don’t sound like the man to cheer me up tonight.”
“Sure I am. You can spend my last exuberant evening with me before I establish residency in the nearest leper colony.”
“That would be the Carrville Leprosarium. In Louisiana. And they don’t call it leprosy anymore. Hansen’s Disease.”
“Why aren’t I grateful for that information?”
“I could stop off at Abercrombie & Fitch on my way over and pick up a nice big bell for you. Or maybe a cassette of Frankie Laine singing ‘Unclean, Unclean.’ Do wonders for getting you a seat on the subway during rush hour.”
Badinage. Brightalk. Never a discouraging word, and the deer and the antelope play. The ritual incantations of those who had resonated to Salinger. I still had my red baseball cap in the bottom of a carton of old clothes, at the back of the bedroom closet. Nostalgia somehow cannot survive the smell of mothballs.
“I’m here; come on over whenever you’re free.”
“About an hour. We’ll go have a steak. I’m paying.”
I smiled. Naturally, you’re paying. With a five-thousand-copy print-run of Laurence Bedloe’s most recent astonishment, The Salamander Enchantment, rapidly being carried by salutary sea-currents toward the Bermuda Triangle, naturally you’re paying for steaks. Now if you’re up for Twinkies and Hawaiian Punch, I’m paying.
“See you when you get here.”
“Take care.”
“So long.”
I listened to the dial tone for about two minutes. Then I sat in the growing darkness, thinking about Arctic tundra. Somehow it didn’t make the Carrville Leprosarium seem more attractive.
* * *
After a while the doorbell buzzed and I put on some lights and let him in. He had the look of a man who has broken some vows.
“I need a drink,” he said. He fell into the rocker with the leather seat, toed off his loafers, and sank down onto his spine, eyes closed. “By the unspeakable name of the slavering hordes of Yog-Sothoth, though Allah be the wiser, I do fiercely need a drink.”
“Can be done, chum. Give it a speakable name and I’ll put it in your paw in moments.”
He rubbed his closed eyes ferociously. From inside his hands he mumbled, “Any damn thing. Largeish, if you will.”
I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard and gave the cognac a pass. This looked like heavy weather drinking. I poured Wild Turkey into a big water glass without benefit of jigger, tossed in a single ice cube, raised the level with a little tap water, and carried the Bomber’s Moon back into the living room.
Jimmy was sitting on the floor, in the darkness near the window. I couldn’t see him that well, but I could hear him sobbing. I think I grabbed for the doorjamb to steady myself. In the fifteen years we’d been friends, I’d never seen him cry. I’d never known him to cry. I’d never heard anyone mention that they’d seen him cry. It had never occurred to me that he might one day, in my presence, cry. I didn’t even know if he was able to cry.
He didn’t know I was there, staring at him.
Very quietly, I carried the glass over to him, put it down beside his crossed legs, and I went back across the room and sat just outside a pool of lamplight, my face in darkness. I had no idea what to do, didn’t want to say something wrong, definitely didn’t want whatever I finally said to be banality or homey homily; so I waited. Eventually, it seemed to me, he’d stop, take a drink, and we’d talk.
Eventually he stopped, noticed the glass, reached for it slowly, and drank long and deep; and then he looked around for me.
“Here’s a new one for you,” he said.
I spoke softly. “Not so new; I do it all the time.”
A marvelous waiting silence resumed.
Quite a while later he said, “I never asked you: Were you pissed off at me for marrying Leslie?”
I thought about the right answer. Not necessarily the kindest answer, or the most politic answer, or the truthful answer; just the right one. “I think we were about done with each other.”
“That’s no answer.”
“It’s an answer. You want others, I can make up others. But that’s definitely an answer.”
More silence. He finished the drink, I went in and threw a lot of cubes in a mixing bowl, brought the bowl and the bottle, and set them down in front of him. He worked at it slowly. Neither of us would end up alcoholics: we weren’t passionate enough about the juice. Oh, hi there, I’m recruiting for Richard the Lion-Hearted; we’re putting together a wonderful follow-up to last year’s big hit, The Children’s Crusade. This year it’s The Wino’s March on Mecca, from the people who brought you the Black Death. You’ll just love it—all the Sterno and Grand Marnier you can osmose. Whaddaya say?
Listen, I’ll talk to you later. You go save Mecca, I’ll have a go at writing the Great American Novel, and we’ll meet right next to the big lions on the steps of the New York Public Library two years from now. You can’t miss me, I’ll be the one without the Holy Grail.
“You know, I’ve always felt like your kid brother,” he said.
“It’s only six months, Jimmy.”
“Always felt faintly ridiculous around you. Loudmouthed, gauche, coming on too strong even when I was purposely speaking so softly I knew people had to strain to hear me.”
“It’s only six months, Jimmy.”
“You know I’m a better writer than you, don’t you? Not just sales … better. There’s heat in my stuff; it works, it pulls the plow. Better.
“For Christ’s sake, Larry, there’s nothing but cold dead air blowing through your books. They ought to hand out woolly mittens with every copy of your stuff.”
I thought about Arctic tundra. “Six months, Jimmy; just six months.”
He started crying again. “For Christ’s sake, Larry, help me! You’ve got it all together, you’ve got the answers, you’ve always had the answers. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, I’m falling apart. I feel like I’m being emptied out, like a hot water bottle; it’s all running away from me. I’m going to kill somebody, I swear to god I’m going to run through the streets killing strangers.”
“How about some gin rummy, tenth of a cent a point?”
He got up, went into the bathroom, and washed his face.
When he came back, he sat down in the rocker, looking bushed. “You ready to talk about it now?” I asked.
He stretched his hands out on the arms of the rocker until the fingertips were just at the edge. Just at the edge. “This open marriage with Leslie is killing me. I can’t stand it.”
It was the first I’d heard of it. When he married her, I stopped thinking about anything in that area. I never knew what went on with them in that way. I felt my stomach getting cold. That’s the way I respond to photographs of Dachau.
“So get out of it,” I said.
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“It’s only six months, Jimmy.”
He started yelling. “Give me a break, will you? I’ve got nobody else in the world to talk to. You’re my best friend, maybe the only friend I can really trust. I’m talking to you, I’m asking for help!”
What I wanted to say was: Come off it, Jimmy! You’ve got exactly and precisely what you always wanted. You’re rich, you’re well liked, you’re urbane and charming; you’ve got a beautiful, intelligent wife, a big classy home steeped in authentic antiquity; everywhere you go they know you, your face is on the tube and they don’t hold you for the last fifteen minutes of the Carson Show; you go where you want, do what you want, you’re a workaholic under the weight of the Puritan Work Ethic, so you get off on slaving night and day …
You’re who you made you, Jimmy; so come off it.
Wanted to say that. But didn’t. Sat there and said, “Go ahead, tell me what’s happening.” Remember when you were a kid, how awful it was when you bit down on the tinfoil?
And he went on for about two hours, telling me everything about his life, and Leslie’s life, and my life, and about how dear I was to him because I was his role model. All of this went in and flowed out again, and I must confess there were even three or four things that disgusted me.
And then we went out to O. Henry’s Steak House and had magisterial chunks off some King of the Beasts, and I put ketchup on mine and Kercher Oliver James Crowstairs, the bestselling and critically acclaimed author, winced and said, “That’s disgusting, Larry.”
And I said: “Chalk it up to improper toilet training.”
* * *
Jimmy’s baronial mansion was not the one in which he’d lived with Leslie. That had been Connecticut. This was Los Angeles. The Crown Point mansion had been brought over stone-by-stone from Dorset. This one looked as if it had been brought over ticky-by-tacky from the back lot at Twentieth.
But it had a “library.” Yes, indeed, it had a library that held the 37,000 books Jimmy had owned at the moment of his death. He read a book a day, summer or winter, bright or cloudy, naked or clothed.
And we gathered there, in the high-arched library, for the reading of the will, the last will and testament of Jimmy, beloved Kerch, American literary treasure.
It was not what I expected. But then, Jimmy never did the expected. There was an evening we spent together at a reception for the Brazilian ambassador to the United States, at the Spanish legation in Washington, during which Jimmy had a meaningful relationship with a gigantic silver Cellini tureen filled with applesauce.
It was not what I expected.
The room had been set up with deep, comfortable chairs all facing an enormous beam-television screen. The projector was hooked up with a Sony Betamax unit. An impish-looking man of middle height, wearing what was clearly a very expensive three-piece suit that had not been properly tailored to the slump of his shoulders, stood before the screen holding a document that was very likely the last hurrah of my friend Jimmy Crowstairs.
Despite the serious manner of the imp in the three-piece suit, intended I suppose to give the occasion the proper portentous ambiance, it was impossible to get away from a festive feeling in that room. Jimmy had been an inveterate collector—of everything. The library was floor-to-ceiling with books, almost all hardcovers, arranged alphabetically by author, from Aeschylus, Aldiss, and Algren at the left of the topmost shelf of the first bookcase to the left side of the entranceway … to Zamyatin, Zelazny, and Zola at the bottom of the last bookcase all the way around the enormous room at the right side of the entrance. But there were also glass cases spotted across the room, containing pewter figurines, Makundi sculpture from Mozambique, lacquered boxes from Russia, T’ang dynasty glazes, gold scarabs encrusted with lapis lazuli from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, scrimshaw from whaling villages in New England, Amerindian pottery, German kinetic sculptures flickering and strobing, ceramic statues from the Austrian courts, fantasy bronzes by Enzenbacher, Spacher, and Rumph; and lucite easels with paintings: Kanemitsu, Stamitz, Pebworth, David Hockney, the Dillons, Wunderlich, Bash, Wyeth, Rothko, Kley, Campanile, and Willardson. And in the dead center of the room was a nine-foot-tall model of the Abominable Snowman that Steve Kirk had designed for the Matterhorn at Disneyland.
No matter how hard the imp in the three-piece suit worked at it, he could not possibly overcome the lunatic frivolity of that yeti.
The five chairs were arranged in a semicircle. At the extreme left, already seated, Jimmy’s sister, SylviaTheCunt, stared straight ahead, folding and refolding the telegram that had commanded her appearance here. The next chair was empty. And the next chair. In the fourth chair sat Jimmy’s friend Bran Winslow, himself a writer, and probably the gentlest human being I’d ever met. He had not been at the burial ceremony. In the last chair, at the extreme right, sat Missy, which was short for Mississippi, who was—and for the past fifteen years had been—Jimmy’s assistant, good right hand, troubleshooter, basic office staff, and Person Friday. She let no one call her a “girl,” even if the word Friday followed it.
Obviously the two empty chairs were for Leslie and me.
We moved toward the chairs and started to sit down, but the imp stopped us, saying, “Mrs. Crowstairs, would you take the third seat please; Mr. Bedloe, Kerch wanted you to sit in the second seat.” We rearranged ourselves. It made good sense: I separated Leslie and SylviaTheCunt, who looked at each other with the enthusiasm one might evince at the prospect of root canal surgery.
The imp waited till we were settled, then he said, “My name is Kenneth L. Gross; I was the attorney for Kercher Oliver James Crowstairs and remain legal counsel for both his estate and the Kerch Corporation in which Mr. Crowstairs was the principal party of record.”
He showed us the document we had all come to hear.
“This document is Mr. Crowstairs’s last will and testament, as you might have supposed. However, it will not be read here today.”
Why had I suspected Jimmy wasn’t finished with us yet?
He waited a moment for the effect, then went on. “Mr. Crowstairs, as you all know, was a rather remarkable man, with a flair for the original. One day, several years ago, we were discussing the preparation of this document, and I mentioned, almost as a joke, that he ought to videotape the reading of his will. Kerch … Mr. Crowstairs immediately fastened on the idea and instructed me to look into the legal ramifications of such a videotaping.
“At first there were questions of validity, but Mr. Crowstairs financed the appropriate research, and in a decision handed down just eight months ago by the Supreme Court of the State of California, such a procedure was adjudged permissible, contingent on a written document being prepared as it has been historically.
“Many of the smaller grants in this document will be handled directly through my office, but the principal beneficiaries are gathered here, per Mr. Crowstairs’s instructions; and you will now hear your bequests directly from the deceased. This extended element of the basic instrument was videotaped four months ago … before any of us had any idea … we never thought …”
He faltered to silence. I liked him a lot. He had cared about Jimmy.
Then he went behind us and turned on the television set from the projection module, cut in the Betamax, light appeared on the enormous screen, color-bands of leader ran through, and suddenly we were looking at this room, with Jimmy, the attorney, Missy, a tall, thin Black woman I didn’t recognize, and Bran Winslow, sitting at Jimmy’s desk. It was obvious that Missy, the Black woman, and Bran Winslow were the witnesses to the execution of the will, and I now understood how two people as close to Jimmy as Missy and Bran had been, who had been there only a few months before when this document had been merely an act of preparing for the long, far inevitable future, had chosen not to attend the burial service.
They all sat up there, larger than life, on the screen, and I thought with the faintest flutter of trepidation, What a field day the archivists will have with this little chunk of literary gossip.
Roll ’em, C. B. It’s magic time, I thought. Break a leg, Jimmy.
* * *
He once took me along with him on what he called a “dangerous mission of research.”
Because of the confessional nature of much of what he wrote—Jimmy had believed Hemingway when Poppa said, “a writer should never write what he doesn’t know”—Kerch was forever putting himself in crazy situations where raw material for books had to be obtained firsthand, usually at risk of one’s life or sanity; or at very least at risk of one’s complexion.
He had scaled mountains, raced sports cars, worked in a steel foundry, traveled cross-country on a Vincent Black Shadow with Hell’s Angels, marched with Chavez in the Coachella Valley, spent time in Southern jails for civil rights activities, chummed it up with a Mafia capo, managed to con a trio of radical feminist lesbians into a four-way sexual liaison, covered a South American revolution, hired himself out to a firm specializing in industrial espionage, and god knows what all else.
He had no secrets when he wrote. He talked about his feelings when his mother had lingered in her endless midnight coma and he signed the order to kick out the plug on her life-support system; he revealed the most intimate secrets of his love life, with Leslie and others; he told stories on himself that men with more humility and a greater sense of shame would have buried in the vaults of their family secrets. Probably because of that open conversation that went on between Jimmy and his millions of readers, his popularity grew and grew. It was possible to trust a man who told everything, a man who could not be morally or literarily blackmailed. It made it seem reasonable that he would go to the burning core of whatever he wrote, because he was not afraid of sunlight striking the tomb of the vampire.
