“Shelly, they gonna cancel me at The Palace. You heard!”
Shelly nodded. He’d heard.
“I need you, boy. I need you bad. You been with me from the first and if you take off and leave me I’m gonna be out in the open for them lousy kike bastards in the other room there.” He noticed Shelly stiffen, but had no idea why.
“Sorry, Stag. I have to go away.”
Stag Preston’s face became a grimace. “You can’t! You can’t just jerk out and leave me sittin’, man! I need your help. You been makin’ a pile…look, I’ll give you a couple of my shares of the contract…that way you’ll have a bigger bite than any one of them.”
Shelly actually felt sorry for the boy. It was down to the wire now. He could feel it in the air. Everyone was running away from him and he knew he was slipping. Now even his monumental self-assurance, the driving hunger that had made him as big as he was, could not help.
Stag abruptly altered his expressions and his nostrils flared as he threatened Shelly, “Look, you sonofabitch, I’m tellin’ you this: you leave me and I’ll have you blackballed in every city in this country. You’ll have to go to Russia to get a job, you smart-aleck sonofabitch, you hear me?”
Shelly shook his head sadly.
“What you gonna do with all that contract, you bastard? What you gonna do with that thirty percent…give it to those slobs out there to use against me? That what you’re gonna do? Sell it to them?”
He stood with fists clenched at his side, panting, the blood drained out of his hollow-cheeked face, his eyes black and intense, glowing, glaring.
Shelly spoke very softly. “No, Stag, I’m going to put it where it belongs, give it back to the one who deserves it most.” He reached into his jacket pocket for the contract.
“That crummy Ruth Kemp, thass who! That’s who you gonna give it to…that mewlin’ sonofabitch woman come around here suckin’ and cryin’ till we don’t know what all…”
Shelly cut him off as he handed the contract shares across to the boy. “Here, Stag, you take them. It’s a gift. A little piece of your soul back again. I held it too long.”
Then he turned for the door, and said very quietly, without capitals, “excuse me now, i have to go take a bath.”
TWENTY
Shelly was undecided about the scene. He was not surprised when he read the item in Variety a week later that said:
Personal management of Stag Preston has been undertaken by Miss Jean Friedel, recently of Colonel Jack Freeport’s staff. Miss Friedel announced the shift in positions at a press conference called to refute a rumor that ABC-Paramount Records had severed its contractual obligations with the young 22-year-old rock’n’roll star whose meteoric rise to fame was…
He was not surprised at all. Jean had told him she was one of the animals. She was still prowling, and though the cat and the canary can smile at one another occasionally, coexistence is no existence at all. She had broken the last tie to the hipster life for him.
He had to get out of New York, that much he knew. For a while he considered going back to Freeport, but that would have been another dead end; or rather, a cloverleaf running up and over and back down onto the same road he had traveled with Stag Preston.
It had been four years, and more. He was thirty-eight years old. No longer a hotshot, hardrock flak-man who could sell sandboxes to Arabs. He was a tired guy of thirty-eight with a lot of good years ahead if he could find the way.
So Shelly went looking for jobs. With money in the bank, he went looking for jobs. Good jobs. Honest jobs. He rejected a nightclub account, because it catered to too many people he knew. He accepted personal management of a quartet of commercial folk singers, recently graduated from Yale, because they still smelled clean, and it was possible he could do something for them before they got too cocky and too slippery and he would be forced to move on.
But he kept track of Stag and Jean.
In the trades, by word of mouth, through friends at the clubs where Stag was now playing, and at the small label for which Stag was now recording. It had been phenomenal; within a year after Shelly had left, Stag could not be booked into any of the big money venues. Vegas was stillborn for him. Forget television. Atlantic City: no-price. Hate California, for him it’s cold and it’s damp, that’s why Staggy is a tramp! He was losing a mint; and none of it belonged to him. The syndicate of small-time operators was hardly as lenient as Freeport had been, but they had been conned into accepting much of Stag’s wastrel manner as “front.”
Then a further blow was struck in the face of Stag’s waning popularity. A print of the movie he had made that night for Porter Hackett got loose. No one was able to pin the blame, and really, no one tried too hard. They were having a bit too much fun showing the flick at parties. It was copied and recopied, and though none of the big exposé rags picked it up (for some strange reason; possibly because Stag was on the way out in any case, and there was bigger game afoot), it became a Hollywood joke. A running gag that had nasty undertones. The sentiment toward Stag took a sharp downward dip after that. Even sharper than before, if that was possible.
One weekend when Shelly was in the city, he lunched with Jean, and noted that she was weary, very weary. “I’ll be pulling out soon,” she said. “I’ve made my contacts, and I’m on my way.” Shelly had thought, Yeah, on your way, honey.
Going my way?
No, the other way. Straight down.
“How’s the kid?” Shelly had asked.
“He’s been getting into hock more and more with the little men. They keep biting into his thirty-seven percent. I don’t think they’ll put up with these losses much longer. They’ve got a peculiar trapped look about them, Shelly.”
He had known what she meant. They were losing money, and that was losing life to the syndicate of small-time operators.
And still Stag lived high. Clinging to all he had left—his delusions of grandeur—he lived high, and the little men spent.
Then one night, in Kansas City, Shelly picked up a newspaper and it was on the front page. It was laid out there like an epitaph, only it wasn’t as clean and neat and final as an epitaph. It had a stink to it; it smelled of the four years Shelly had spent selling his soul under the delusion he was “making it.” It smelled of the year he had been away from Stag…a year so short it had seemed like only the turning of a page, but some years are like that…free and open and clear and perhaps even clean. But the story on the front page of the Kansas City Star wasn’t clean and open. It was murky and the photos accompanying were all full of darks that might have been blood.
The article told how Stag Preston had been found face down on a lonely Connecticut road, his throat and face slashed—apparently by determined amateurs—and his career just as effectively slashed. The Star compared it with the gangland knifing of Joe E. Lewis, many years before, but said this was no such shady operation. It said Stag Preston, the singing idol (who in the past year had withdrawn more and more from public life), had been robbed and mugged. It was shameful. It was terrible. But nobody cried. It also said he had been taken to SuchandSuch Memorial Hospital.
It was all there, all they had to do was read it. Why had Stag been taken to a public hospital, rather than to a private admittance? Because he no longer had backers to foot his bills, and in fact, if you read it right, his backers were the ones who had put him there.
The article concluded with the information that the singer was fighting a life and death battle in the emergency rooms of the hospital.
Shelly faked an excuse to his folk singers, bracketed them with instructions about finishing out the gig in K.C., and hopped a plane to New York after a telegram to Jean Friedel.
She met him at Idlewild and they Hertz’d it out to Connecticut.
The expiation of guilt is a sometime thing, and a spotty process at best, taking longer than a year.
He sat in the waiting room of the hospital for three hours before they would allow him to go in. He sat for three hours, th
e entire time spent trying to understand just why he was here. It wasn’t enough, apparently, to say, I’m finished, goodbye, and end. It wasn’t enough when the human being lying in there was a part of your creation, part of yourself. Stag Preston lay stretched out between sheets and inside bandages, but it was also Shelly Morgenstern. Left outside, but cut up just as badly, bleeding just as profusely, suffering even more, for he was denied the peace of coma.
Three hours and three hundred thousand thoughts; faces from memory gliding past like blind crayfish in a subterranean cavern, unseeing but living their brief lives behind his eyes. Faces of Carlene, of Trudy Quillan and Golightly, of Asa Kemp and Ruth, of the Colonel, Joe Costanza, Jeanie, and last of all, falling away, diminishing, growing smaller smaller smaller as it faded past and was gone, the girl Marlene.
So many faces. All touched with a stain of rot, and all from the touch of the boy who lay inside, gasping deeply, trying to breathe air, not blood, a tube down his throat, the strained stitching along the throat, across the cheeks, down over the larynx. That boy in there. How much of his touch had left the brown rot? How much of it was him and how much was Sheldon Morgenstern, who bore his guilt heavily, painfully?
Three hours wandering in a wasteland of question marks shaped like crosses, of dark images that pointed accusing fingers, of helplessness and turmoil. It was very bad; and even when the doctors came out and told him he might look in for a few moments, that the boy would live—but never sing again—it wasn’t finished. He did not walk into the room alone. Insubstantial shapes, ghosts with grins drawn up like the death rictus called sardonicus of lockjaw, heavy bodies that pressed at him—these followed, silently, watching.
He looked down at Stag Preston. The boy was covered to the chin with the white sheet, almost unruffled by crease or wrinkle, solemn in silence. His head was completely swathed in linen, a male nun in a Bedouin’s headwrap, bound tightly closed, sealed in, a cocoon, deepest quiet, the breathing out of a painfully white face as regular as soft breaths lightly drawn could be.
And the eyes were open.
Those dark, piercing eyes that said, I am me; I am always me; if I close my eyes, me ceases for a moment, so I keep them open; I am watching you.
The sight of the dark eyes staring up shocked the older man. For a moment he thought Stag Preston might have died, the eyes reflexing open, remaining that way, studying for an eternity the cracks in the ceiling. But then the eyes blinked moistly.
Shelly moved closer, made a pistol with thumb and forefinger, and fired it in salutation. Stag moved his head imperceptibly in recognition.
Then he spoke.
If the croak of a frog can be called speech, then he spoke. If the moan of a strangling baby can be called speech, then he spoke. If a crippled and struggling thing on its back, trying to turn over, can be called speech, then by all means Stag Preston spoke.
He rasped. He ratcheted. He croaked. And he spoke:
“I want to tell you,” he said. It took him the better part of a minute to utter those five words; they were almost totally incomprehensible, and Shelly understood him instantly. It was painful to watch the boy. He had to talk; whatever else happened in this room, this night, right now he had to tell someone he trusted, had always trusted, as much as he could trust anyone. But the sound was a bubbling, broken-gear thing.
Shelly kneeled beside the bed and listened. It took Stag Preston nearly fifteen minutes to say it:
“They owned me, all of me. I had to borrow real heavy from them. I—I had to keep up a front, couldn’t go back to that friggin’ poor. Had to, don’tcha know? Then when they—”
He rattled it out like lengths of chain.
He had borrowed till he was into the syndicate of small-time operators up to his eyebrows. Then when his records were gathering dust in the distributor’s bins, when Am-Par and Universal and The Palace and all the big clubs refused to book him, when his drawing power was so low they couldn’t sell him even as a minor act on a twenty-bill tour, they knew they had to sell short, had to get out, but not till they’d collected their money. They demanded it. They demanded it from a person incapable of being ordered about, a human being who had twisted himself so much in five years that he could no more be demanded at than he could hold his breath till expiration. Stag—arrogantly clinging to the emotional vestiges of his popularity in a world that suddenly wanted no part of him—refused to pay. He had called them the names they called themselves, among themselves; names they could use to one another but names no one else could use with impunity. He had called them schmucks, he had called them kikes, he had called them sheenies and mockies and wops and dagos and spaghetti-headers; he had called them finks and crooks and bastards. And motherfuckers. Oh, yes, that too. They were not gangsters, these little men with small goals and tiny ambitions. They were not “The Combine” and they were not “The Mafia” and they were not “The Syndicate” as the tabloids think of The Syndicate. They were only what they had always been, a consortium of small-time operators (in lower case) and they were not familiar with beatings and killings and vengeance; but this money-losing property with his vile language, his snotty manner, his big mouth, had called them the names they could not be called openly (not to mention motherfucker); and had taken their money—their money! their blood!—and had refused to pay them back. Unacceptable behavior, the little putz!
So they did something they had never done before. They hired two men, for a price, and those two men took revenge for no financial expedient, but only by transmitting to knife, boot and cleaving fist the fury and helpless revenge of small men with small desires…and large insecurities.
They had left Stag Preston bleeding and unconscious on a lonely Connecticut road, with the debt still unpaid, but satisfaction extracted. Pound of flesh, an incision for every smart-aleck word he had called them.
They had managed to save Stag Preston’s life, but he would never sing again.
“I can barely…barely talk…Shelly…” The boy ended his relating of the facts. “Get them for me, Shelly. Tell the p-police, huh?”
Shelly stood up, then, and looked, as deeply as he could force himself to look, into the face of Stag Preston. Time rolled back, thoughts rolled back, the light and the sense and the immediacy of it rolled back. He was standing on a deep, empty plain, charcoal-gray and only a lance in his hands, with all the windmills gone. He was there by himself, and as the wind came up, swirling the sand and the bits of rotting leaves too tired to make fertilizer, he heard the voices of emptiness. Voices reciting the kaddish in Hebrew the way only his father could speak Hebrew, with the S’s sibilant and tiny bits of spittle flying; the goodbye that was mouselike and passing away as the bus left home going out to the big city; he heard the first voice of the first hipster he had ever known with the “Hey, now! Like I cert’ny don’t wanna put you on, fella, but if you wanna make it in this city you got to put somethin’ down…you got to say somethin’, man. That way everyone knows you are with it and on the scene. Do I make myself clear, I mean, do you understand?” and his own voices so many voices answering fading into one another, “Yeah, uh, yessir, uh, yeah, I under—I understand I dig, right? I dig!” And his voice changing, changing so subtly, he could never tell just when the change had come, except perhaps it was the first day he said a word he had previously only read on the walls of toilets, and said it without being self-conscious. That word with the first letter an F, the one he had always shied from, he now said without feeling chilly inside about it. Was that the moment?
Whenever it had been, now he said the word again, softly under his breath, hungry to know, just that one word that began with an F, and he felt chilly again…and he knew he was free.
It can happen that simply.
It can happen, just with a word that begins with an F and nothing more profound. It only takes something small.
“Goodbye, Stag,” he said. He smiled, a very thin smile, the grin of the razor; and then so resigned, half-sorry, because he could not help
it; a smile that was just a pressing together of the lips. He did that, saying, “And goodbye, say goodbye to Luther for me. I heard him sing once, a long time ago in a hotel in Louisville, and I liked it very much. Goodbye.”
He left the hospital room, and found the doctor in charge of Stag’s case and asked him how much the bill would be. The doctor did not know, and tried to refer Shelly to the cashier’s office, but Shelly asked the doctor to estimate, so he did, and Shelly wrote a check for one hundred dollars over that amount and gave it to the doctor to pay the bill.
Not because it was Stag Preston in there.
Not because he had known his ordeal by fire with Stag in there.
Not because he had come out of this terrible thing a person whose life was worth living.
For none of those reasons, but simply because in there was someone he had once known, and a right guy doesn’t turn down a buddy when he’s in need.
Then he went out into the night, and went looking for his muscles. He had found his soul, now all he needed was to burn off the fat of guilt, and get some muscles.
TWENTY AND ONE
Life is not art. In art, they go into the sunset arm in arm and live happily ever after. Fade to black, and credits. In life they go into the sunset, argue about whether the furniture will be Swedish Modern or French Provincial, whether the baby’s name will be Frederick Alan after her father or Timothy Tyler after his father, and inside two years begin the path to Reno. In art it is all clean, neat, final, tied up in a socko exit line and a clear moral point. In life it is messy; the ex-lovers see each other a few more times, drag it out, do it sloppy. The guy who rebelled slips back and takes a few more jabs to his ethics, his manhood and his pride. The nice black-and-white punch lines get muddy and gray and insubstantial. The Fastest Gun in the West grows old and wets his bed. The Wicked Witch of the East gets psychoanalyzed and turns out to be a latent dyke. The beautiful princess gets a little too heavy and the prince cheats on her with a scullery maid. It happens. That’s life.