I wandered down to the East River walkway. With the weather so nice and this being a Saturday, I couldn’t find an unoccupied bench, so I sat on a grassy patch for a while looking out across the river at Brooklyn and thinking of that movie that Jane and I had to suffer through just so we could get to Gunga Din, this leading me, of course, to more thoughts about the mystery of Jane. And the mystery of me. I was seeing and hearing things. Right?
Who was that person in the mirror?
Once again, I went to bed that night feeling oddly good; in fact, extremely oddly good. At peace, you might say. I slept well. I did get up one time to tiptoe into the living room and slide down a window to shut out the sounds of a Health Bar fight, as they were so loud they might awaken Pop. I turned and glanced fondly at him on the sofa. He was good and he slept well every night. Then I thought of something else: when I grew up I wanted to be like Pop. I went back into the bedroom and climbed into bed, and just before falling asleep I could swear I heard someone whispering, “Nice.”
14
The time jumps went on for the next five years, and always coincided, it seemed, with critical moments of moral decision, like that time in early June of 1942 right after I’d graduated from St. Stephen’s. Pop had checked the cupboard that night after dinner and he gave me some money and a list of groceries to go buy. It could have waited until the next day but we’d run out of orange juice and Pop was anxious I should have it in the morning with my breakfast. He would have gone himself but he didn’t want to miss Inner Sanctum, his favorite radio show with that creepy creaking door at the beginning and then that shivery voice, “This is Raymond, your host…”
A new little grocery store had just opened in the nabe called ABSOLUTE LOWEST PRICES! and as there wasn’t any WHATYOUTINK at the end of it, and even though Pop had said, “Go to A and P,” I thought I’d save him some money and I went there instead. I arrived as they were locking up for the night, but I put on my most adorably pleading Mickey Rooney checking-into-Boys’-Town wistful face and this older white-haired guy just shook his head and sighed and let me in. While they were pulling together Pop’s list, I was waiting at the counter when one of the grocery clerks eyed me and quipped to the white-haired guy, “Well, they’ll never get him in the draft,” at which the white-haired guy turned his head and looked at me sadly, then turned back and said softly, “Yeah, they will.” Someone in a hurry placed a bag with Pop’s order on the counter right next to another one that had been sitting there next to the store’s cash register when I’d first come into the shop and then he quickly moved on while another guy rang up the charge, took my money, and gave me the change. He said, “Here you go, sonny,” sliding and pushing a bag into my arms. “Tell your folks we appreciate their business.” Going home, as I turned the corner on 31st I tripped over something and I fell and skinned a knee. I still had a grip on the bag of groceries, but as I fell I heard this clinking sound, so when I got up I unfurled the top of the bag to see if anything had broken inside. Then my jaw dropped and my mouth did a Martha Raye:
The bag was full of coins and bills, the grocery’s take for the day!
I spent the next twenty seconds staggering around in a daze just like Edward G. Robinson at the end of Brother Orchid after taking six slugs to the chest, and I wound up sitting down on the bottom step of a brownstone with my arms tightly wrapped around the bag atop my legs as I tried calculating the height of a pyramid made out of World’s Fair hamburgers that the money in the bag would probably buy me! Are we getting the message that I wasn’t yet entirely St. Joey of New York? I knew very well what Kurt Vonnegut would do but I wanted a second opinion, and at the thought the Big Loser flew in from Winnetka and he whisked me to the top of the Chrysler Building, at first handing me some stupid apology that it wasn’t the Empire State Building, which was taller, because he’d “lost a Big Friend up there” who’d gotten killed by machine-gun fire from airplanes piloted by “basically decent but incredibly misinformed Christers,” and it made him “too sad anymore” to go up there, but the creep didn’t even get to make his pitch because I waved him off right away, which of course you think means I was resisting temptation, and that could certainly be true, I suppose, except actually it wasn’t, as all it meant was I didn’t want a partner, my Basic Wicked Mind having already formulated with astounding feral cunning a devious scheme for keeping the money whereby I would go to the A&P, buy all of the groceries on Pop’s list and then carry both the money and the groceries home. What was causing me a smidge of concern about the plan was the part where I would have to tell Pop that I’d taken so long because I’d stopped for a minute to pray at St. Stephen’s, where I was kneeling and alone in the church when out of nowhere—though it seemed like it was coming from a holy water font—I heard this voice saying, “Joey! Walk to the corner, turn right for exactly twenty paces to a doorway, open it and there on the ground of the entrance to the recently shuttered and partially destroyed Japanese Martial Arts Academy you will find a paper grocery bag. Take it! Take it and give it to your father!” As I sat there on the stoop and mentally polishing my first rough draft—I was thinking of adding to the end of it: “A plenary indulgence will be granted for compliance”—when I saw these two coins on the ground. I thought they must have spilled from the bag when I fell. I got up and went over and picked them up and as I stood looking down at them in my hand I felt my heart begin to thump very lightly, but also much quicker, and then came this glow in my chest and that very same feeling of excited anticipation as I relived myself running back from Woolworth’s with my cheapo little gifts for Pop and Lourdes.
I was looking at a nickel and a dime.
I went back to the grocer’s and tapped on the glass of the door and when they saw who it was and I was holding the bag, my God their faces lit up like rockets in a Fourth of July night sky! I saw joy! Joy and relief! The older white-haired man just stared at me, stunned, with his mouth in an O and his hands to his cheeks, and then he rushed to the door, pulled it open and hugged me, saying fervently, “Thank you! Thank you!” and seeming even happier than Lourdes the day I told her the Armenian ABTINKWHATCHYOUTINK tailor had moved to Arizona. Before leaving, I asked them to recount the money. The white-haired guy said, “No no no no, that’s not necessary,” but I asked him again and he counted it. I wanted to find out whether fifteen cents was missing. It wasn’t. Walking home both my steps and the bag full of Pop’s list of groceries felt lighter than a pocketful of four-leaf clovers.
“Joey, you take very long. I was worry.”
“Yeah, Pop, it did take me awhile. But I got there.”
Yes. I got there.
15
Over the bunches and the twiddles and twaddles of the years that followed, there weren’t any time jumps nor did I ever again see Jane. But she was out there somewhere: I would get these picture postcards from places like East Angola and Sri Lanka with these crazy, funny oddball messages on them like, “Don’t expect to find Des Moines in Eritrea” and “Nothing is sharper than a sullen Ubangi’s pout,” although sometimes the cards came with pointed reminders like, “Don’t stop praying!” and “Keep going to confession and communion!” as well as “Right is so freaking much better than wrong!” They always seemed to come at a time when I was faced with some moral decision. There is an off chance I’d actually glimpsed Jane once. Just maybe. I’ve never been sure. I was still living in Los Angeles and writing movie scripts when one day on the set of Pimp My Bloody Toga—which according to the Stench Films press release was to be “an intense and shocking reexamination of historical events in ancient Rome”—we were shooting an exterior with the usual cast of thousands grumbling about why they weren’t being given “stunt pay” when their health was so at risk from chariot dust and Arabian horse manure fumes, when I got into a row with the director, Reggie Flame, freshly hot off his monster hit, Illegible, a film about Caligula’s palsied calligrapher. It seems the brand-new “thing” among feature film directors was to shoot an expository sc
ene in a men’s room with at least one member of the cast shown standing at a urinal. This was somehow supposed to make the scene feel “real,” as if the audience didn’t know they were watching a movie and not a live sumo-wrestling match. The vogue had started almost two years before with only one actor wizzing and always with his back to the camera; but when that setup got old, the shot escalated to a tighter angle and more to the side, not the actor’s back, so you could see the “set dressing” flowing down the urinal wall, this progression, and the shot itself, to be seen one day in retrospect as the start of the “slippery slope” for movie restroom scenes, for when even the closer side angle shot became a movie cliché, another director upped the ante to two actors wizzing at once, while yet another drove the bidding up to three and a virtual pissage à trois that for a time no one imagined could ever be surpassed for its sheer bravado and joie de uncouth until someone thought of showing an actress wizzing, and then, driven by some primal and apparently irresistible force of nature, soon after came the shot with the leading actress wiping, the expectation being nothing could be more real than that, and never mind that the shot had not the slightest thing to do with either the character or the plot. And so now while the lighting for the following setup was under way, Flame asked for my help with an improvised scene in which Julius Caesar, while entering the Roman senate on the Ides of March, turns his head to stare with bemused disbelief at twenty-two vestal virgins, extras, squatting and wizzing on the senate floor, which is all the distraction he needed, Flame told me, for Brutus and the other conspirators to smite Caesar with their daggers. He wanted me to give the vestal virgins some dialogue that would serve to keep Caesar staring at them until at least the third knife was driven into his chest. “Maybe bitching about the lack of respect they get,” Flame suggested. “New taxes. Fees. Maybe that. Only keep it historically in context.” Well, I argued against this to the point of much redness in the face and angry shouting in which the word “Brux” made several key and dramatic appearances until finally Flame backed down, and it was then as I was walking away from the encounter that I heard a female extra in the crowd scene outside the Roman senate shouting, “Way to go, writer! Stand up for your beliefs like you do for your pension plan.” I turned and saw the shouter. Standing at the front of the teeming throng, she had her arms raised up and was giving me two thumbs-up, but then she turned and disappeared into the vast and madding crowd. I didn’t try searching for her. It would have been stupidly hopeless, though on the other hand I guess you had to think a little bit about the red lettered slogan on the front of this T-shirt that she was wearing. How it made it past Wardrobe and the Second A.D. I have no clue. It said,
LIFE IS HARD BUT THEN YOU DIE
It was the “but” instead of “and” that got me thinking.
The Barney Google mask could have just been a joke.
As I said, there’d been no more time jumps. None. But as I sit here typing, my memory of everything after high school still has that distancing texture about it, like a story being told secondhand, or maybe even a third. After graduation from St. Stephen’s, I somehow got into Regis, an all-scholarship Jesuit high school in Manhattan. Boy, the power of prayers! Maybe not even mine. Beginning in junior year, the Regis “Jebbies” gave us a smattering of scholastic philosophy to buttress our faith, which for me at that time was really more a deep hope—you know, courses in logic and things like a “properly stated” principle of causality, namely “Every finite effect demands an equal and proportionate cause.” This so you could answer the village atheists at science-oriented Stuyvesant High and their jibes of, “Well, okay, then, so what caused God?” with your coolly delivered ecumenical reply, “You dumb shits! God isn’t finite, not a ‘thing’! God is infinite!” This knowledge didn’t come easy, as I had to suffer frequent humiliations when the Jesuit who taught the course would repeatedly cross out my name at the top of the essays I handed in and replace it with the name of some infamous heretic. Much later in life, perhaps even more useful than these “arguments from reason” that a benign and staggering intelligence had something to do with the creation of the universe, was the time I heard the wonderfully talented standup comedian Richard Pryor say on stage with both medical accuracy and from a legendary personal experience, “You know, when you’re on fire your skin goes to sleep.”
Figure it out.
16
Pop died in the summer of my high school graduation, and I heaved with sobs day and night for weeks. I never knew a human body could contain so many tears. I believed him to be happy now and free, so the tears were not for him. They were for me. I just loved him so much. I had no thoughts of college. I would work, I decided, and I went to Los Angeles and lived with Lourdes and her husband, Bobby, for a couple of years. They had a house in the San Fernando Valley where the scent of orange blossoms mixed with that of the loam in flower planters out in front of so many newly built tract houses, and the scent was so sweet and so pure I would deeply inhale it and wonder what I ever could have done to deserve it. Lourdes and Bobby were doing quite well, and worked at Hanna-Barbera. They were movie cartoon artists. I asked Lourdes if it ever made her think about my paint sets, and she grimaced and then she laughed and nodded and said, “Oh, yeah!” She and Bobby had a lot of movie contacts and I wound up with a job as a production assistant at Paramount Pictures. I wanted to act and “do voices” but then little by little I started to write, if only as a way of trying to break into acting. The quickest and easiest path to success, I believed, was the so-called high-concept movie idea. This was basically a dynamite premise for a movie that you could tell to the studio “suits” in a single sentence before they’d give you coffee or water or even an undoctored Vanti Papaya—for example, “Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde,” or “Bonnie and Clydene,” or “All the men in the world wake up one day to find out that all the women in the world have disappeared.” And then the probing queries: “This thing contemporary or a costumer?” or “Is there a part for Asa Maynor?” You were lucky when the questions weren’t deeper than that, like, “What happens when the men find this out?” or “How is life supposed to go on? Do the women reappear one day looking better?” Any query at all like these was certain trouble, as was also any ill-advised attempt on your part to adapt the old “total topic shutdown” formula and parry, “Well, now how would Bernard Shaw or Fritz Lang have worked it out?” I made a slew of failed high-concept attempts. One was “Hammacher and Schlemmer are Israeli agents who’ve been tied to each other for years while hunting Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Bormann, and it’s the thirtieth anniversary of the start of the hunt and one of them has forgotten.”
Nobody liked this.
Another one I pitched was, “God and the Devil meet for truce talks at four in the morning in the Carnegie Deli.”
Nobody liked this one either.
Those were the better ones.
It might have helped, I suppose, if I’d also had “high-impact” titles for my stories in the vein of My Stepmother Is an Alien, or the film’s original title, Who Knew. It made me wonder whether The Brothers Karamazov would have ever come down to us as a classic if its title had been The Karamazov Brothers. Who knows?
I got lucky. Columbia Pictures finally bit: they bought my high concept, paid me peanuts to write the treatment and then, liking it, cashews for writing the script, which was made—and so was I because the film made money, big money, which meant I could write a few flops in a row and it really wouldn’t matter inasmuch as my name would be forever entwined with that first hugely profitable hit.
I didn’t walk anymore. I strutted.
Bad, Joey! Bad! Pride bad!
Especially the false kind.
I was taught not to strut anymore but to walk, and very slowly at that, by “The King,” Elvis Presley. MGM had hired me to write his next film. Wow! Was I not the Himalayan cat’s rectum?! This delusional hubris ended when I met another screenwriter at the water cooler, which was far down the hall from my office?
??an unfortunate distance inasmuch as if I happened to have writer’s block on any day, the long walk for water turned into a confidence-killing field because all the offices along that hallway were occupied by writers, and the sound of twenty electric typewriters clattering away at warp speed drove me absolutely bonkers and I would find myself muttering a litany consisting of the two words “Hostile assholes!” as I made the dreaded trips back and forth. But then maybe it was worth it because that’s how I met Bill Faye, a middle-aged, heavyset man with a fuzz of gray hair and the milk of human kindness all over his face. He’d written dozens of the trickiest kind of fiction, the short story, for The Saturday Evening Post and we got friendly and on breaks we would visit and schmooze. One of those times he took a call from an editor at the Post asking if he “had anything in his trunk,” to which Bill said, “I’m empty,” and the editor said, “Okay, do the boxing one again.”
I was green, if not livid, with envy.
“Who are you working for?” I asked him one day.
“Ted Richmond.”
“Oh, really? Me too,” I remarked. “Nice guy.”
An affable and chatty man who said he loved to smoke cigars in his bath-bathtub “or any warm Jacuzzi-type thing,” Richmond had turned to producing after years of being Tyrone Power’s publicist.
“Yes, he is a nice man,” was Faye’s answer, the same one he would have given about either Jack Oakie or the Marquis de Sade. I never heard him say anything bad about anyone.