A Stranger in the Mirror (4 page)

On Labor Day, the summer season in the Catskills was over and the Great Merlin was out of a job, and along with him, Toby. Toby was free to go. But where? He was homeless, jobless and penniless. Toby's decision was made for him when a guest offered him twenty-five dollars to drive her and her three young children from the Catskills to Chicago. Toby left without saying good-bye to the Great Merlin or his smelly props.

Chicago, in 1939, was a prosperous, wide-open city. It was a city with a price, and those who knew their way around could buy anything from women to dope to politicians. There were hundreds of nightclubs that catered to every taste. Toby made the rounds of all of them, from the big, brassy Chez Paree to the little bars on Rush Street. The answer was always the same. No one wanted to hire a young punk as a comic. The sands were running out for Toby. It was time he started to fulfill his mother's dream. He was almost nineteen years old.

One of the clubs Toby hung around was the Knee High, where the entertainment consisted of a dred three-piece combo, a broken-down, middle-aged drunken comic and two strippers, Meri and Jeri, who were billed as the Perry Sisters and were, improbably enough, really sisters. They were in their twenties, and attractive in a cheap, blowsy way. Jeri came up to the bar

one evening and sat next to Toby. He smiled and said politely, "I like your act." Jeri turned to look at him and saw a naive, baby-faced kid, too young and too poorly dressed to be a mark. She nodded indifferently and started to turn away, when Toby stood up. Jeri stared at the telltale bulge in his pants, then turned to look up at the innocent young face again. "Jesus Christ," she said. "Is that all you?" He smiled. "There's only one way to find out." At three o'clock that morning, Toby was in bed with both of the Perry Sisters.

Everything had been meticulously planned. One hour before showtime, Jeri had taken the club comic, a compulsive gambler, to an apartment on Diversey Avenue where a crap game was in progress. When he saw the action, he licked his lips and said, "We can stay only a minute." Thirty minutes later, when Jeri slipped away, the comic was rolling the dice. screaming like a maniac, "An eighter from Decatur, you son of a bitch!" lost in some fantasy world where success and stardom and riches all hung on each roll of the dice. At the Knee High, Toby sat at the bar, neat and tidy, waiting. When showtime came and the comic had not appeared, the owner of the club began to rage and curse. "That bastard's through this time, you hear? I won't have him near my club again." "I don't blame you," Meri said. "But you're in luck. There's a new comic sitting at the bar. He just got in from New York." "What? Where?" The owner took one look at Toby. "For chnssakes, where's his nanny? He's a baby''' "He's great! " Jeri said. And she meanr it. "Try him," Meri added. "What can you lose?" "My fuckin' customers!" But he shru^d and walked over to where Toby was sitting. "So you're a comic, huh?" "Yeah," Toby said casually. "I just finished doing a gig in the Catskills."

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The owner studied him a moment. "How old are you?'' "Twenty-two," Toby lied. "Horseshit. All right. Get out there. And if you lay an egg, you won't live to see twenty-two." And there it was. Toby Temple's dream had finally come true. He was standing in the spotlight while the band played a fanfare for him, and the audience, his audience, sat there waiting to discover him, to adore him. He felt a surge of affection so strong that the feeling brought a lump to his throat. It was as though he and the audience were one, bound together by some wonderful, magical cord. For an instant he thought of his mother and hoped that wherever she was, she could see him now. The fanfare stopped. Toby went into his routine. "Good evening, you lucky people. My name is Toby Temple. I guess you all know your names." Silence. He went on. "Did you hear about the new head of the Mafia in Chicago? He's a queer. From now on, the Kiss of Death includes dinner and dancing." There was no laughter. They were staring at him, cold and hostile, and Toby began to feel the sharp claws of fear tearing at his stomach. His body was suddenly soaked in perspiration. That wonderful bond with the audience had vanished. He kept going. "I just played an engagement in a theater up in Maine. The theater was so far back in the woods that the manager was a bear." Silence. They hated him. "Nobody told me this was a deaf-mute convention. I feel like the social director on the Titanic. Being here is like walking up the gangplank and there's no ship." They began to boo. Two minutes after Toby had begun, the owner frantically signaled to the musicians, who started to play loudly, drowning out Toby's voice. He stood there, a big smile on his face, his eyes stinging with tears. He wanted to scream at them.

/( was the screams that awakened Mr". Csinski. They

were high-pitched and feral, eerie in the stillness of the night, and it was not until she sat up in bed that she realized it was the baby screaming. She hurried into the other room where she had fixed up a nursery. Josephine was rolling from side to side, her face blue from convulsions. At the hospital, an intern gave the baby an intravenous sedative, and she fell into a peaceful sleep. Dr. Wilsons who had delivered fosephine, gave her a thorough examination. He could find nothing wrong with her. But he was uneasy. He could not forget the clock on the wall.

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Vaudeville had flourished in America from 1881 until its final demise when the Palace Theatre closed its doors in 1932. Vaudeville had been the training ground for all the aspiring young co^iics, the battlefield where they sharpened their wits against hostile, jeering audiences. However, the comics who won out went on to fame and fortune. Eddie Cantor and W. C. Fields, Jolson and Benny, Abbott and Costello, and Jessel and Burns and the Marx Brothers, and dozens more. Vaudeville was a haven, a steady paycheck, but with vaudeville dead, comics had to turn to other fields. The big names were booked for radio shows and personal appearances, and they also played the important nightclubs around the country. For the struggling young comics like Toby, however, it was another story. They played nightclubs, too, but it was a different world. It was called the Toilet Circuit, and the name was a euphemism. It consisted of dirty saloons all over the country where the great unwashed public gathered to guzzle beer and belch at the strippers and destroy the comics for sport. The dressing rooms were stinking toilets, smelling of stale food and spilled drinks and urine and cheap perfume and, overlaying it all, the rancid odor of fear: flop sweat. The toilets were so filthy that the female performers squatted over the dressing room sinks to urinate. Payment varied from an indigestible meal to five, ten or sometimes as much as fifteen dollars a night, depending on the audience reaction. Toby Temple played them all, and they became his school. The names of the towns were different, but the places were all the same, and the smells were the same, and the hostile audiences were the same- If they did not like a performer, they threw beer bottles at him and heckled him throughout his performance and whistled him off. It was a tough school, but it was a good one, because it taught Toby all the tricks of survival. He learned to deal with drunken tourists and sober hoodlums, and never to confuse the two. He learned how to spot a potential heckler and quiet him by asking him for a sip of his drink or borrowing his napkin to mop his brow. Toby talked himself into jobs at places with names like Lake Kiamesha and Shawanga Lodge and the Avon. He played Wildwood, New Jersey, and the B'nai B'rith and the Sons of Italy and Moose halls. And he kept learnir T. .Toby's act consisted of parodies of popular songs, imitations of Gable and Grant and Bogart and Cagney, and material stolen from the big-name comics who could afford expensive writers. All the struggling comics stole their material, and they bragged about it. "I'm doing Jerry Lester" -- meaning they were using his material -- "and I'm twice as good as he is." "I'm doing Milton Berle." "You should see my Red Skelton." Because material was the key, they stole only from the best. Toby would try anything. He would fix the indifferent, hard-faced audience with his wistful blue eyes and say, "Did you ever see an Eskimo pee?" He would put his two hands in front of his fly, and ice cubes would dribble out. He would put on a turban and wrap himself in a sheet. "Abdul, the snake charmer," he would intone. He would play a flute, and out of a wicker basket a cobra began to appear, moving rhythmically to the music as Toby pulled wires. The snake's body was a douche bag, and its head was the nozzle, There was always someone in the audience who thought it was funny. He did the standards and the stockies and the platters, where you laid the jokes in their laps. He had dozens of shticks. He had to be ready to switch from one bit to another, before the beer bottles started flying.

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And no matter where he played, there was always the sound of a flushing toilet during his act.

Toby traveled across the country by bus. When he arrived at a new town he would check into the cheapest hotel or boardinghouse and size up the nightclubs and bars and horse parlors. He stuffed cardboard in the soles of his shoes and whitened his shirt collars with chalk to save on laundry. The towns were all dreary, and the food was always bad- but it was the loneliness that ate into him. He had no one. There was not a single person in the vast universe who cared whether he lived or died. He wrote to his father from time to time, but it was out of a sense of duty rather than love. Toby desperately needed someone to talk to, someone who would understand him, share his dreams with him. He watched the successful entertainers leave the big clubs with their entourages and their beautiful, classy girls and drive off in shiny limousines, and Toby envied them. Someday... The worst moments were when he flopped, when he was booed in the middle of his act, thrown out before he had a chance to get started. At those times Toby hated the people in the audience; he wanted to kill them. It wasn't only that he had failed, it was that he had failed at the bottom. He could go down no further; he was there. He hid in his hotel room and cried and begged God to leave him alone, to take away his desire to stand in front of an audience and entertain them. God, he prayed, let me want to be a shoe salesman or a butcher. Anything but this. His mother had been wrong. God had not singled him out. He was never going to be famous. Tomorrow, he would find some other line of work. He would apply for a nine-to-five job in an office and live like a normal human being. And the next night Toby would be on stage again, doing his imitations, telling jokes, trying to win over the people before they turned on him and attacked. He would smile at them innocently and say, "This man was in love with his duck, and he took it to a movie with him one night. The cashier said, 'You can't bring that duck in here', so the man went around the corner and stuffed the duck down the front of his trousers, bought a ticket and went inside. The duck started getting restless; so the man opened up his fly and let the duck's head out. Well, next to the man was a lady and her husband. She turned to her husband and said, 'Ralph, the man next to me has his penis out.' So Ralph said, 'Is he bothering you?' 'No,' she said. 'Okay. Then forget it and enjoy the movie.' A few minutes later the wife nudged her husband again. 'Ralph -- his penis--' And her husband said, 'I told you to ignore it.' And she said, 'I can't--it's eating my popcorn!' " He made one-night appearances at the Three Six Five in San Francisco, Rudy's Rail in New York and Kin Wa Low's in Toledo. He played plumbers' conventions and bar mitzvahs and bowling banquets. And he learned. He did four and five shows a day at small theaters named the Gem and the Odeon and the Empire and the Star. And he learned. And, finally, one of the things that Toby Temple teamed was that he could spend the rest of his life playing the Toilet Circuit, unknown and undiscovered. But an event occurred that made the whole matter academic. On a cold Sunday afternoon in early December in 1941, Toby was playing a five-a-day act at the Dewey Theatre on Fourteenth Street in New York. There were eight acts on the bill, and part of Toby's job was to introduce them. The first show went well. During the second show, when Toby introduced the Flying Kanazawas, a family of Japanese acrobats, the audience began to hiss them. Toby retreated backstage. "What the hell's the matter with them out there?" he asked. "Jesus, haven't you heard? The Japs attacked Pearl Harbor a few hours ago," the stage manager told him. "So what?" Toby asked. "Look at those guys -- they're great." The next show, when it was the turn of the Japanese troupe, Toby went out on stage and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, it's a great privilege to present to you. fresh from their

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triumph in Manila-- the Flying Filipinos!" The moment the audience saw the Japanese troupe, they began to hiss. During the rest of the day Toby turned them into the Happy Hawaiians, the Mad Mongolians and, finally, the Eskimo Flyers. But he was unable to save them. Nor, as it turned out, himself. When he telephoned his father that evening, Toby learned that there was a letter waiting for him at home. It began, "Greetings", and was signed by the President. Six weeks later, Toby was sworn into the United States Army. The day he was inducted, his head was pounding so hard that he was barely able to take tHe oath.

The headaches came often, and when they happened, little fosephine felt as though two giant hands were squeezing her temples. She tried not to cry, because it upset her mother. Mrs. Czinski had discovered religion. She had always secretly felt that in some way she and her baby were responsible for the death of her husband. She had wandered into a revival meeting one afternoon, and the minister had thundered, "You are all soaked in sin and wickedness. The God that holds you over the pit of Hell like a loathsome insect over a fire abhors you. You hang by a slender thread, every damned one of you, and the flames of His wrath will consume you unless you repent!" Mrs. Csinski instantly felt better, for she knew that she was hearing the word of the Lord. ''/<'.? a punishment from God because we killed your father," her mother would tell Josephine, and while she was too young to understand what the words meant, she knew that she had done something bad, and she wished she knew what it was, so that she could tell her mother that she was In the beginning, Toby Temple's war was a nightmare. In the army. he was a nobody, a serial number in a uniform like millions of others, faceless, nameless, anonymous.