Mr. Vertigo (25 page)

“You mean my boners and such? My curly hairs and the crack in my voice?”

“Just so. All the natural transformations.”

“Maybe I’ve been whacking off too much. What if I stopped that tomfoolery? You know, preserved the bindu a little more. Do you think that would help?”

“I doubt it. There’s only one cure for your condition, but I wouldn’t dream of inflicting it on you. I’ve already put you through enough.”

“I don’t care. If there’s a way to fix it, then that’s what we’ve got to do.”

“I’m talking about castration, Walt. You cut off your balls, and then maybe there’s a chance.”

“Did you say
maybe
?”

“Nothing’s guaranteed. The Frenchman did it, and he went on levitating until he was sixty-four. The Czech did it, and it didn’t do an ounce of good. The mutilation went for naught, and two
months later he jumped off the Charles Bridge and killed himself.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Of course you don’t. If I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t know what to say either. That’s why I’m suggesting we pack it in. I don’t expect you to do a thing like that. No man could ask that of another man. It wouldn’t be human.”

“Well, seeing that the verdict is sort of fuzzy, it wouldn’t be too smart to risk it, would it? I mean, if I give up being Walt the Wonder Boy, at least I’ve got my balls to keep me company. I wouldn’t want to be in a position where I wound up losing both.”

“Exactly. Which is why the subject is closed. There’s no point in talking about it anymore. We’ve had a good run, and now it’s over. At least you get to quit while you’re still on top.”

“But what if the headaches go away?”

“They won’t. Believe me they won’t.”

“How can you know? Maybe those other guys still got them, but what if I’m different?”

“You’re not. It’s a permanent condition, and there’s no cure for it. Short of taking the risk we’ve already rejected, the headaches will be with you for the rest of your life. For every minute you spend in the air, you’ll be racked with pain for three hours on the ground. And the older you are, the worse that pain will be. It’s gravity’s revenge, son. We thought we had it licked, but it turns out to be stronger than we are. That’s the way it goes. We won for a while, and now we’ve lost. So be it. If that’s what God wants’, then we have to bow to his will.”

It was all so sad, so depressing, so futile. I’d struggled to make a success of myself for so long, and now, just when I was about to become one of the immortals of history, I had to turn my back on it and walk away. Master Yehudi swallowed this poison without
flinching a muscle. He accepted our fate like a stoic and refused to make a fuss. It was a noble stance, I suppose, but it wasn’t in my repertoire to take bad news lying down. Once we’d run out of things to say, I stood up and started kicking the furniture and punching the walls, storming about the room like some nutso shadowboxer. I knocked over a chair, sent the night table clattering to the floor, and cursed my bad luck with vocal chords going at full blast. Wise old man that he was, Master Yehudi did nothing to stop me. Even when a couple of nurses rushed into the room to see what the trouble was, he calmly shooed them out, explaining he would cover any damages in full. He knew how I was built, and he knew that my fury needed a chance to express itself. No bottling up for me; no turning the other cheek for Walt. If the world hit me, I had to hit back.

Fair enough. Master Yehudi was smart to let me carry on like that, and I’m not going to blame him if I acted like a dumbbell and carried it too far. Right in the middle of my outburst, I came up with what had to be my all-time stupidest idea, the howler to end all howlers. Oh, it seemed pretty clever at the time, but that was only because I still couldn’t face up to what had happened —and once you deny the facts, you’re only asking for trouble. But I was desperate to prove the master wrong, to show him that his theories about my condition were so much flat fizzy water. So, right there in that Philadelphia hospital room, on the third day of November 1929, I made a sudden, last-ditch attempt to resurrect my career. I stopped punching the wall, turned around and faced the master, and then spread my arms and lifted myself off the ground.

“Look!” I shouted at him. “Take a good look and tell me what you see!”

The master studied me with a dark, mournful expression. “I see the past,” he said. “I see Walt the Wonder Boy for the last
time. I see someone who’s about to be sorry for what he just did.”

“I’m as good as I ever was!” I yelled back at him. “And that’s the goddamned best in the world!”

The master glanced down at his watch. “Ten seconds,” he said. “For every second you stay up there, you’ll have three minutes of pain. I guarantee it.”

I figured I’d put my point across, so rather than risk another long bout of agony, I decided to come down. And then it happened—just as the master had promised it would. The instant my toes touched the ground, my head cracked open again, exploding with a violence that sucked the daylights out of me and made me see stars. Vomit burst through my windpipe and landed on the wall six feet away. Switchblades opened in my skull, tunneling deep into the center of my brain. I shook, I howled, I fell to the floor, and this time I didn’t have the luxury of fainting. I thrashed about like a flounder with a hook in his eye, and when I pleaded for help, imploring the master to call in a doctor to give me a shot, he just shook his head and walked away. “You’ll get over it,” he said. “In less than an hour, you’ll be as good as new.” Then, without offering me a single word of comfort, he quietly straightened up the mess in the room and started packing my bag.

That was the only treatment I deserved. His words had fallen on deaf ears, and that left him with no choice but to back off and let my actions speak for themselves. So the pain spoke to me, and this time I listened. I listened for forty-seven minutes, and by the time class was out, I’d learned everything I needed to know. Talk about a crash course in the ways of the world. Talk about boning up on sorrow. The pain fixed me but good, and when I walked out of the hospital later that morning, my head was more or less screwed on straight again. I knew the facts of life. I knew them in every crevice of my soul and every pore
of my skin, and I wasn’t about to forget them. The glory days were over, Walt the Wonder Boy was dead, and there wasn’t a chance in hell he’d ever show his face again.

We walked back to the master’s hotel in silence, wending our way through the city streets like a pair of ghosts. It took ten or fifteen minutes to get there, and when we reached the entrance I couldn’t think of anything better to do than stick out my hand and try to say good-bye.

“Well,” I said. “I guess this is where we part company.”

“Oh?” the master said. “And why is that?”

“You’ll be looking for a new boy now, and there ain’t much point in hanging around if I’m just going to be in the way.”

“And why would I look for a new boy?” He seemed genuinely astonished by the suggestion.

“Because I’m a dud, that’s why. Because the act is finished, and I ain’t no good to you no more.”

“You think I’d drop you like that?”

“Why not? Fair is fair, and if I can’t deliver the goods, it’s only right for you to start making other plans.”

“I have made plans. I’ve made a hundred of them, a thousand of them. I’ve got plans up my sleeves and plans in my socks. My whole body’s crawling with plans, and before the itch works me into a frenzy, I want to pluck them out and put them on the table for you.”

“For me?”

“Who else, squirt? But we can’t have a serious discussion standing in the doorway, can we? Come on up to the room. We’ll order some lunch and get down to brass tacks.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“What’s to get? We might be out of the levitation business, but that doesn’t mean we’ve closed up shop.”

“You mean we’re still partners?”

“Five years is a long time, son. After all we’ve been through together, I’ve sort of grown attached. I’m not getting any younger, you know. It wouldn’t make sense to start looking for someone else. Not now, not at my age. It took me half a life to find you, and I’m not going to kiss you off because we’ve had a few setbacks. Like I said, I’ve got some plans to discuss with you. If you like those plans and want in, you’re in. If not, we divide up the money and part ways.”

“The money. Jesus God, I clean forgot about the money.”

“You’ve had other things on your mind.”

“I’ve been so low in the dumps, my noodle’s been on holiday. So how much we got? What’s it tote up to in round figures, boss?”

“Twenty-seven thousand dollars. It’s sitting in the hotel safe, and it’s all ours free and clear.”

“And here I thought I was down-and-out broke again. It kind of puts things in a different light, don’t it? I mean, twenty-seven grand’s a nice little booty.”

“Not bad. We could have done worse.”

“So the ship ain’t sunk after all.”

“Not by a long shot. We did okay for ourselves. And with hard times coming, we’ll be pretty snug. Dry and warm in our little boat, we’ll sail the seas of adversity a lot better than most.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“That’s it, mate. All aboard. As soon as the wind is up, we’ll lift anchor—and with a heave and a ho we’ll be off!”

I would have traveled to the ends of the earth with him. By boat, by bicycle, by crawling on my belly—it didn’t matter what means of transportation we used. I just wanted to be where he was and to go where he went. Until that conversation in front of the hotel, I thought I’d lost everything. Not only my career, not only my life, but my master as well. I assumed he was finished with me, that he’d kick me out and never give it a second
thought, but now I knew different. I wasn’t just a paycheck to him. I wasn’t just a flying machine with a rusty engine and damaged wings. For better or worse, we were booked for the duration, and that counted more to me than all the seats in all the theaters and football stadiums put together. I’m not saying that things weren’t black, but they weren’t half as black as they could have been. Master Yehudi was still with me, and not only was he with me, he was carrying a pocketful of matches to light the way.

So we went upstairs and ate our lunch. I don’t know about a thousand plans, but he certainly had three or four of them, and he’d thought each one through pretty carefully. The guy just wouldn’t quit. Five years of hard work had flown out the window, decades of scheming and preparation had turned to dust overnight, and there he was bubbling over with new ideas, plotting our next move as if everything still lay before us. They don’t make them like that anymore. Master Yehudi was the last of a breed, and I’ve never run across the likes of him since: a man who felt perfectly at home in the jungle. He might not have been the king, but he understood its laws better than anyone else. Bash him in the gut, spit in his face, break his heart, and he’d bounce right back, ready to take on all comers. Never say die. He didn’t just live by that motto, he was the man who invented it.

The first plan was the simplest. We’d move to New York and live like regular people. I’d go to school and get a good education, he’d start up a business and make money, and we’d both live happily ever after. I didn’t say a word when he finished, so he passed on to the next one. We’d go out on tour, he said, giving lectures at colleges, churches, and ladies’ garden clubs on the art of levitation. There’d be a big demand for us, at least for the next six months or so, and why not continue to cash in on Walt the Wonder Boy until the last lingering bits of my fame
had dried up? I didn’t like that one either, so he shrugged and moved on to the next. We’d pack up our belongings, he said, get into the car, and drive out to Hollywood. I’d start a new career as a movie actor, and he’d be my agent and manager. What with all the notices I’d had from the act, it wouldn’t be hard to swing me a tryout. I was already a big name, and given my flair for slapstick, I’d probably land on my feet in no time.

“Ah,” I said. “Now you’re talking.”

“I figured you’d go for it,” the master said, leaning back in his chair and lighting up a fat Cuban cigar. “That’s why I saved it for last.”

And just like that, we were off to the races again.

W
e checked out of the hotel early the next morning, and by eight o’clock we were on the road, heading west to a new life in the sunny hills of Tinseltown. It was a long, grueling drive back in those days. There were no superhighways or Howard Johnsons, no six-lane bowling alleys stretching back and forth between coasts, and you had to twist your way through every little town and hamlet, following whatever road would take you in the right direction. If you got stuck behind a farmer hauling a load of hay with a Model-T tractor, that was your tough luck. If they were digging up a road somewhere, you’d have to turn around and find another road, and more often than not that meant going hours out of your way. Those were the rules of the game back then, but I can’t say I was perturbed by the slow going. I was just a passenger, and if I felt like dozing off for an hour or two in the back seat, there was nothing to stop me. A few times, when we hit a particularly deserted stretch of road, the master let me take over at the wheel, but that didn’t happen often, and he wound up doing ninety-eight percent of the driving. It was a hypnotic sort of experience for him, and after five or six days he fell into a wistful, ruminating state of mind, more and more lost in his own thoughts as we pushed toward the middle of the country. We were back in the land of big skies and flat, dreary expanses, and the all-enveloping air seemed to drain some of the enthusiasm out of him. Maybe he was thinking about Mrs.
Witherspoon, or maybe some other person from his past had come back to haunt him, but more than likely he was pondering questions about life and death, the big scary stuff that worms its way into your head when there’s nothing to distract you. Why am I here? Where am I going? What happens to me after I’ve drawn my last breath? These are weighty subjects, I know, but after mulling over the master’s actions on that trip for more than half a century, I believe I know whereof I speak. One conversation stands out in memory, and if I’m not wrong in how I interpreted what he said, it shows the sorts of things that were beginning to prey on his spirit. We were somewhere in Texas, a little past Forth Worth, I think, and I was jabbering on to him in that breezy, boastful way of mine, talking for no other reason than to hear myself talk.