Crazy (9 page)

“Tell me, Joey,” she asked, “are you praying?”

“Yes, I’m praying,” I answered her truthfully.

“Every night?”

“Every night.”

“‘Now I lay me down to sleep’? The ‘Our Father’? ‘Hail Mary’?”

“The works.”

“You’re being good to your father?”

“I’m trying.”

At this she nodded, big dimples appearing as she smiled and said, “I know. And didn’t it feel wonderful, Joey? Didn’t it? Just like handing out the gifts that you bought with the fifteen cents that you found.”

I blinked. “How did you know about that?”

She shrugged and turned again to the sea. A gentle breeze was drifting in, lightly ruffling her hair as she softly replied, “I just know.”

This was now feeling spooky. I felt a fluttering in my chest.

“Jane, what are you? I can’t talk about this to anyone else, ’cause if I did they’d want to put me away somewhere. Please, I mean it! It’s beginning to make me nervous now.
Very
nervous. Am I dead? Is that it? Am I dead and I just don’t know it?”

A warm glint of amusement in her eyes, she turned back to me and fondly sighed, “Oh, Joey.” Then she slowly shook her head. “No, Joey, you’re not dead,” she said, “No way.”

But then she had to add, “Not exactly.”

I started losing it again.

“Not
exactly,
Jane? Not
exactly?
”

Still bemused, she flipped her Lilliputian hand in dismissal.

“Oh, don’t worry. It isn’t anything bad. In fact, it’s good.”

“Being not exactly dead is something
good?
”

“Yes, it’s good. Now, Joey, do something for me, would you please?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“I’d love a stick of cotton candy. I want a pink one, not the blue. Would you get it for me, please?”

I just stared. I was “not exactly dead” and she wanted cotton candy. Oh, well, certainly! Right! I mean of
course!
We’d passed a cotton candy cart on our way and I turned and saw the guy and the cart were still there, so I stood up and said, “Sure” just as Jane was slipping a five-dollar bill from somewhere, maybe from behind her ear for all I knew.

I said, “No, Jane. On me. I’m buying.”

For a second she just stared. I couldn’t tell if she looked pleased or was about to pass out, but then she smiled and said, “Thank you, Joey. Thank you so
much!
”

I’d started walking toward the cotton candy cart when I heard her calling to me and I stopped and looked back. She was facing me and kneeling on the bench, her little hands on the back of it and with her head slightly tilted to the side and the strangest expression clouding her face. Was it wistful? Sad? That old look of adoration when we met?

I couldn’t tell.

“You’re going to take care of Vera Virago?” she called out.

For a second I was quiet and still. This was heavy.

Then, “Yeah. Yeah, I will,” I said at last. “I promise.”

She blew me a kiss and as I turned and kept walking I could still feel her eyes on my back. At the cotton candy cart I picked out a pink one, paid, took the stick, turned around and took some steps toward the bench and then stopped. The bench was empty.

Jane wasn’t there.

I hurried back to the bench, looking out at the empty beach and then up and down the boardwalk, and then finally went into Not Nathan’s, guessing maybe she’d had to “go baffoom” for real. I didn’t see the owner around, so I rapped on the restroom door and when nobody spoke I pulled it open.

No one there.

The owner came out from the back.

“Who are looking for?” he weepily asked me.

I stared blankly, then looked off and said softly, “I don’t know.”

Outside the shop I stood pensively examining the cotton candy stick I was holding, then looked up at the guy with the cart, assessing chances of getting my nickel back:

So help me, God, I never licked it even once!

I decided I’d give it to Vera Virago.

Click click click…click……click….……click……….….…. click.

Like some hideously ugly Romulan mother ship silently scouring the surface of Earth to finish off any moaning, wounded survivors of their initial annihilating attack, Bloor’s shadow fell over my laptop computer.

“So I hear that you used to write movies.”

I lifted my fingers from the keyboard. “Who told you that?” I asked, not daring to turn because I couldn’t risk her interpreting my stare for a challenge just as you’d have to with a lion you just happened to run into at a waterhole out on the Serengeti. This was something I’d learned just by staring intently at Frank Buck eating.

I heard Bloor answer, “Someone.”

“Someone,” I echoed dully. “Like my chart?”

“Don’t be smart.” Then, “What was that?” she said. “You got gas?” I’d quietly groaned because I knew what was coming: an idea for a movie. I’d heard them for most of my adult life: from cabdrivers, barbers, doctors, anyone who’s got you trapped for a while, like this dentist in Van Nuys who once tried to get me jazzed about writing a movie about the romance of dentistry, this as he was sharpening a #6 drill and with my mouth propped open as I stared with bulging eyes at the dental horror photos that were plastered all over the wall in front of me: gaping red mouths with rotted and broken yellow teeth, which was what the angry dental god Flosseidon was going to smite you with if you didn’t brush twice a day and also come to this dentist’s Tupperware parties.

“Tell me, what’s your idea?” I asked Bloor miserably.

I wasn’t looking for electroshock that morning.

“You’ve got an idea for a movie script,” I added, “right?”

Bloor’s eyebrows lifted. “What are you, a mind reader, pal?”

I nodded and blandly answered, “Yes.”

This was insolence plain, which she was used to.

“Okay, I’m thinking of a number,” she said.

Ah, God!
I lowered my forehead into a hand.

“I was kidding,” I muttered.

It was a dangerous miscalculation.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Bloor answered in this unnervingly deadly and quiet tone. I squelched an impulse to shout,
“No, I shouldn’t!”
and then maybe
“And Dreyfus was guilty as hell!”
inasmuch as I pictured her with laser beams shooting from her eyes and her hand upraised to plunge a hypodermic needle into my back that was filled with the venom of the Dead Sea anemone which made you say, “Shittier than you by far” whenever somebody asked you how you were feeling. This didn’t happen. Instead I said, “Come on! I mean actually I’d
love
to hear your idea.”

There was a pause and a silence thicker than tar deeply thinking about freeways and the Problem of Evil. Then I heard the dull click of a stiletto heel as Bloor shifted her weight to her other leg. A good sign. It meant she was relaxing. I had read this in a book about buffaloes.

“Yeah, all I need is a writer to help me with the technical stuff,” I heard her say. I turned and faced her. She was standing with her arms akimbo.

“What technical stuff? You mean the screenplay format?”

“No, the words,” she said.

I wanted to bury my forehead in my hand.

“And so what movies did you write?” she went on. “Would I know them?”

“Maybe not,” I said. “They’re really pretty old.”

“Well, for instance.”

I decided to live dangerously.

“Well,
Tilt
,” I said.

“What was that?”

“A sort of theological thriller. These Italian villagers across from the town of Pisa are jealous as hell because Pisa has the Leaning Tower, which gets all the tourists and the trade, so they kidnap this structural engineering genius and then threaten to throw him and his lucky slide rule into the deepest part of the Tiber tied to “Cement Blocks Marinara con Basilico” unless he figures out a way that they can straighten up the Tower of Pisa.”

“Is there a girl?”

“Yeah, Gina. She’s the mayor of Pisa’s daughter.”

Bloor nodded. “Not bad. So what else did you write?”

“The Fly Six.”

Bloor’s brow furrowed up in surprise. “They made a
Six
?”

“Oh, well, sure! It’s the one where by day the Fly is a restaurant inspector for the New York Board of Health.”

“That the one with Jeff Goldblum?”

“No. Dolly Parton. I made the Fly a woman for that one.”

“Wow!”

“Yeah, that’s why I got paid the big bucks.”

“No kidding! So now listen,” Bloor began as she took a step closer. “About my movie idea. I mean, you really want to hear it?”

“God,
yes
!”

Too much, you think? No. She bought it.

“Well, okay then,” she launched. “The plot’s about Adolf Hitler. Big name recognition,
kapiche
? Plus I’ve also got a way to put the story in the twenty-first century, which saves you
mucho dinero
on the budget. No historical sets you’d have to deal with. You couldn’t. They’ve got McDonald’s now all over Berlin.”

“Yeah, too many.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“Just a feeling.”

Arms akimbo, head lowered, Bloor inscrutably searched my face for any hint of a dark intent, while in the depths of her eyes rows of slumbering bats hanging upside down began restlessly twitching.

The moment passed.

“Yeah, I get those too,” she said, nodding.

“So how does Hitler wind up in this century?” I asked her.

“Well, at first I thought reincarnation.”

“Intriguing.”

“Doesn’t work. Hitler can’t be reborn as someone else. He’s got to really
be
Hitler.”

“What are you getting at? Demonic possession?”

“Kid stuff. The plot’s about Hitler’s disembodied brain.”

“About Hitler’s—?”

“Let me finish. What we say is there’s these sore-loser Nazi scientists and after Hitler dies they grab his brain and they ice it and they wait for the perfect time to transplant it into the body of an American presidential candidate. In the meantime, while these scientists are twiddling their thumbs they turn into a bizarro kind of ritualistic secret society, wearing monk-type hooded robes and holding lighted candles in the dead of night while they parade in a circle around this freezer containing Hitler’s brain and all singing ‘I Guess He’d Rather Be in Colorado.’ The song’s a temp track, by the way. We’ll pick one later. In the meantime, this is all taking place in the Arctic, where they’ve built a base where they can guard the brain. Making sense so far, kiddo?”

“Why the Arctic?”

“Power failures. No danger there the brain would defrost.”

Bloor went on to explain how the scientists are foiled by a CIA agent with telepathic powers and who at the end of the film would be revealed to be “an alien being with Jewish interests.”

“I see the alien as Tom Hanks, by the way,” she finished.

I looked aside, slightly nodding and stroking my chin.

“Yeah, Hanks,” I said. “Hanks could be good, Hanks could do it.”

“Tom Cruise?”

“Scientology problem. Couch jumper.”

“I’d forgotten.”

“Humphrey Bogart?”

“He’s dead.”

“Then John Garfield.”

“So is he. Hey, what century are you living in, bright eyes?”

Good question. I didn’t know the answer.

It didn’t matter.

“Now what’s hanging me up,” Bloor continued, “is where we ought to start the picture. Do we begin with Hitler dying, or do we do that in a flashback so we can start in the Arctic with these weirdos and their ritual thing around the brain? You know, a real grabber like, who are they and why are they worshipping that freezer? What do you think?”

A dangerous moment. First there was that “we.” Very chilling. And then what answer could I give her without finally breaking up? I felt like asking for a last cigarette and a blindfold but then flashed back to a meeting one night with Paul Newman in his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was to star in a film I was writing for him and we met to discuss my first draft in which the character’s flaws and problems with his marriage and his job are laid out at the beginning (Act One), and then he works through them in the middle (Act Two) while he’s shipwrecked on an island, and then at the end (Act Three) he’s rescued and comes back home where he deals with all his Act One problems as a deeply changed man. Paul wanted the movie to start on the island, and as being a movie superstar ensconced in a Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow didn’t mean that housekeeping wouldn’t forget to leave him one or two drinking glasses, we’d been sipping vodka tonics out of a pair of Paul’s shoes so that every time I’d woozily protest that we wouldn’t know the character had changed unless we knew what he was like
before
then, Paul would lean in his nose about an inch from mine, thus pinning me fast with those icy blues and a Zen like air of unfathomable wisdom while at the same time struggling to hold his head up as he countered, “Who is to say where Act One should begin?” Which not only shut me up for good but also taught me convincingly that if you want to evade a question or bang the door shut on a topic of discussion,
this
was the line to use, and not that tired old standby, “But then what would Voltaire, or even Montesquieu, think of that?”—this formerly the standard weapon of choice to be mercilessly brandished with impunity since no one will admit they have no clue as to what it might mean. But some exhausted guardian angel ever anxious for my safety must have whispered in my ear that the standard line wouldn’t work with Bloor, and in fact would only baffle and confuse her, thus awakening feelings of inferiority that might even incite her to a murderous rage.

“So come on,” Bloor prodded. “What do you think?”

I said, “Who is to say where Act One should begin?”

Nodding her head just a little, Bloor read me inscrutably, then dubiously and quietly commented, “Yeah. Yeah, I see where you’re going.”

She moved in a step and looked down at my laptop screen.

“That a script you’re writing now?”

“No, not a script. A memoir.”

“You mean like a book, then.”

“Sort of.”

“Is it good? Will it sell?”

The danger being minimal, I couldn’t resist.

“Well, the truth is I think it could wind up a classic.”

“A
classic?
”

“Who knows? I mean, it worked for James Joyce with
Finnegan’s Wake,
and so I’m thinking why shouldn’t it work for
me?
”

“So what’s the trick?”

“The final sentence of the book is going to end with ‘the.’”

She looked surprised. “They let you do that?”

I lowered my head a little, glaring smokily upward like Jack La Rue when the waiter says they’re out of pepperoni for his pizza, then said quietly and dangerously, “Who’s going to stop me?”

Bloor looked at me blankly, very often an unsettling sign and maybe I’d miscalculated, I feared. But the intercom crackled and saved me.

“Nurse Bloor to the desk! Nurse Bloor!”

“Gotta go. So bottom line: you think my movie idea is commercial?”

Making sure that my brow was furrowed, and in an effort to come off like Sigmund Freud asking Jung, “Are you
positive
these archetypes exist?” I looked off and murmured, “Fascinating. Really. So deep.”

What a wretched elitist phony! I knew very well that executive judgments in the Hollywood studio system were no more well grounded than Bloor’s, and perhaps even worse. I once had a screenwriting gig at Columbia’s Gower Street lot, where for a time it was the custom for favored writers, producers and directors to take lunch at this huge, long conference table with the studio head presiding, and at one of these lunches he brought up the subject of a rival studio’s about-to-be-released motion picture. He had seen its sneak preview the night before at a theater in Sherman Oaks. “Anyone else here see it?” he asked. “No? Well, you’re lucky. The picture’s a disaster. I’m predicting with total one-thousand-percent accuracy that it won’t even earn back its negative cost.”

I don’t know what got into me then; maybe the dry, crummy meat loaf I’d ordered, or a scene I’d written over and over and couldn’t whip, but I spoke up and said, “Sir, what do you base that on? How do you know that?”

The studio head’s bushy gray eyebrows lifted. “How do I
know
that, you ask? How do I
know
it? I know it because I’m shifting in my seat the whole picture! I know it from my
ass,
young man! My
ass
tells me!” At which Burton Wohl, then working on adapting his novel
A Cold Wind in August
for the screen, followed up with, “Is it therefore your contention, sir, that yours is the monitor ass of the universe?”

Thirty years later it would be recognized that nobody’s ass was telling anybody anything. But that was then and Nurse Bloor was even “thener.”

“Nurse Bloor to the desk!” blared the intercom again.

Bloor’s eyelids narrowed.

“To be continued,” she said.

I heard the crackling of ice forming in my bloodstream.

As she pivoted to leave, Bloor stopped and turned to me.

“I almost forgot,” she said. “Twyford, Mackey and Baloqui want to know if you’re up for a round of Hearts.”

Yes, that’s right. Baloqui, too, had made it to his eighties, but sadly he’d succumbed to senility and had checked in the week before. I didn’t want to see him like that and stayed away; he’d been too vital a force for such an ending. Fordham Prep had unleashed the latent madman in his soul, most especially in his senior year when in the middle of the night he decided to prowl the corridors of the Hotel Edison where his senior prom had been held, banging hard on guestroom doors and then loudly identifying himself in a voice prematurely deep as “Inspector Cardini of the Vice Squad” before commanding, “Open up! Come on, we know you’ve got a woman in there!” And if a man in the room answered, “But it’s my wife!” he’d come back with, “Sir, your wife is the complainant!” Whoever knew what had been lurking in this Spaniard’s heart! After prep school he enlisted in the Air Force—in his view the most dashing of the military services—flew a fighter jet, and after mustering out began flying for United Airlines. This was back in the “Main Line’s” early days when the door to the pi lot’s compartment was always left open so that the passengers could see that the pi lot wasn’t dead, this having been found, for some reason, to have a calming, reassuring effect upon the passengers. I’d stayed in touch with Baloqui all my life, and wasn’t surprised when he told me how he’d sought, in those open-door days, to ease the boredom of coast-to-coast red-eye flights. He would bide his time, he said, waiting for weather conditions “to be right,” and when they were he would cap his teeth with these long plastic vampire fangs that he’d bought at the Hollywood Magic Shop in L.A. and then patiently wait for that rare occasion when, with thunder and lightning in the distance, the eerie blue plasma of Saint Elmo’s fire started flashing and dancing around the pi lot’s compartment, which is when he’d turn his head around and hideously smile, fangs bared, at the passengers.