Night Gallery 1 (4 page)

Mishkin put his hand on the doorknob. "Then book the schmuck in the Air Force Museum." He pointed his cigar at Jackie. "This guy don't tell jokes—he goes on bombing missions. Do the last show, and I'll tell the bartender to pay ya off."

He started out the door. Jackie got to his feet and followed him out.

"Wait a minute, Mr. Mishkin. Please. You can't ace me out after one lousy show." He started toward Jules as if for confirmation.

Mishkin took the cigar out of his teeth. "I can't?" he asked. He looked toward Jules and jerked a thumb at Jackie. "Read him the contract."

Jackie felt the age-old panic. The fantasy again—the nightmare. The whole world was Myron's Mecca. And Myron Mishkin was the Great Omniscient Ass Kicker in charge of the universe. He presided at Jackie's nightly funerals, Jackie's failures, the busts, the flops, the crap-outs—the daily, weekly, monthly boots out of the door.

"Mr. Mishkin . . . look, Mr. Mishkin . . . it's a tough house. Honest to God. It's a tough house. But if I could have a coupla weeks—"

Mishkin looked at Jackie's hand on his arm and very gingerly removed it.

"Mr. Mishkin." Jackie's voice trembled. "An act's gotta build. I mean—you gotta allow a coupla weeks for word of mouth."

"I do?" Mishkin stared at him. "Honest to God—I gotta allow a coupla weeks for word of mouth?"

Jackie took hope. He whirled around toward Jules. "Tell him, Julie. Will ya tell him? Tell him about that gig in Buffalo. Six weeks held over. And capacity, man. In a tough room—lemme tell ya. But when I get started, man, I zoom. I could fill the Hollywood Bowl." He laughed, shrill and high-pitched. "Tell him, Julie. Go ahead, tell him."

Mishkin looked from one to the other. "Unasked," he said softly, putting the cigar back into his mouth. "Unasked, I give ya the following opinion." He took out the cigar and pointed it again at Jackie. "You couldn't fill a men's room with free shoeshines. I'm strictly truck trade here, but they know what they like. And you, they don't like. A piece of advice, Mr. Slater—from an old-time saloon keeper. This is your agent here? Well, you tell him to buy you a correspondence course in diesel-engine fixing. Or maybe the Regular Army. But he should get rid of ya."

His cigar went out, and he extracted a kitchen match from a side pocket, then scratched it against the shiny surface of the seat of his pants and lit the cigar. "Slater—as God is my witness—you don't have enough talent to pay ten percent to yourself—let alone that poor putz over there who books you."

Mishkin turned and walked down the corridor, passing the Finger Lakes Fandangos as they came out from the stage—a quartet of rouged and powdered beef.

Jackie moved back into the room, past Jules, and slumped down into the chair. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked at his reflection. "You wanna hear somethin', Julie?" he said, whispering. "I was a fat, ugly little kid the day I was born. I had eight sets of foster parents before I was seventeen. They used to play jokes on me. Like when I'd come home from school—they'd moved."

Jules tried to chuckle, but it caught in his throat. He just looked down at the floor.

"One of them," Jackie said, quietly, "sent me to a Y.M.C.A. camp one summer. Y'know what the kids used to do there for kicks? They pushed me off the dock. Like every day, they pushed me off the dock. And then they'd all laugh. So I figured . . . I figured that's what I'd do with my life. I'd make people laugh."

Jules kept his eyes fixed on the floor, but he made a little gesture, spreading out his hands at his sides. "You made some people laugh, Jackie."

Jackie closed his eyes. "Once," he said, "once I really got a boff from a guy in a men's room. I had this toup—this hairpiece. Black curly hair. And I'd left my date in the restaurant. Beautiful chick. And I went to the toilet . . . and when I was finished . . . I bent over to flush the john—and the toup fell in the toilet. You shoulda heard that guy. Like he started to cry, he laughed so hard."

Jackie turned to stare at Jules. "That's the story of my life, Julie. I keep fallin' in toilets." Then he turned back to stare at himself in the mirror. "I'm a second-rate schlep, goin' nowhere. And after twenty-four years of scratching each other's backs—we're still doin'

one-nighters in garbage dumps. Julie—how right am I?"

Jules shrugged and said nothing.

"Well, I'll tell ya somethin'," Jackie continued. "I wish . . . I wish I could make everybody laugh. That's what I wish. I'd give up everything I got. One trunk with the locks busted. Two suits and a sport coat. The wardrobe. Complete. One knitted tie with a hole in it and one that spells out, 'Will you kiss me in the dark, baby?' when the lights are out. One pair of shoes with lifts—one pair of sneakers."

Jules sniffled.

"Everything I got," Jackie said. "Everything. Just to make people laugh."

Then very slowly he put his face in his hands and he began to cry.

Jules swallowed, sniffled again, pulled out his handkerchief, and looked at this weeping whale in the chair. He wanted to reach out and touch him, say something gentle . . . something kind. But in the back of his fifty-seven-year-old agent's mind, the thought came to him. Oh, God, but Jackie was right. He could break his balls for the next twenty years, lining up the one-nighters, counting out his ten-percent in nickels and dimes, and telling this poor, no-talent hippo that he was the greatest—when they both knew you could blow only so much smoke up anyone's butt until you had to acknowledge defeat and officially surrender. He thought all this as he tiptoed quietly out of the room. Jackie was the last of the stable. Most of them gone. Some of them dead and buried. All of them either has-beens or never-wases. And as he walked down the corridor, he thought some more. Maybe he could find some stacked broad who'd sing topless. Or maybe he could latch onto a magician who did dirty tricks. He'd have to find some kind of act. He'd just have to scrounge. And scrounging, Jules Kettleman had done all his life. It wasn't his fault, he thought, as he went out a side door into the alley, that he always unearthed dogs. Dogs, hambones, and fat Pagliaccis who planted their big asses on a wailing wall and wondered why they got carbuncles instead of laughs.

"It's to weep," he said to himself as he walked out the alley toward the street. "Not to laugh—but to weep."

Inside the dressing room, Jackie Slaker had stopped his crying and was practicing his routines in front of the mirror. ". . . and this one fag said, 'I didn't know we had a Navy —' "

Jackie Slater got drunk and forgot that Jules Kettleman wasn't in his dressing room when he'd finished the last show. And now he was drunker and didn't even remember who Jules Kettleman was. It was 2:30 in the morning, and he was the next-to-last customer in the Mark Twain Bar, a block from his motel. He sat with mammoth buttocks overlapping the bar stool, fondling his seventh bourbon.

The bartender was eating a sandwich in one of the empty booths, then rose and came around the other side of the bar and looked at Jackie. "Your name Slater?" he asked.

Jackie nodded.

The bartender reached into his apron pocket for a folded piece of paper. He tossed it on the bar. "Some guy came in earlier. He left this for you."

Jackie blinked at it. "What is it?" he asked.

The bartender shrugged. "A note, I guess—for you. Some guy named . . . Kettleman."

Jackie reached for the paper, unfolded it, and started to read it upside down. He blinked, then threw the paper back. "Would
you
read it for me?"

"You mean out loud?" the bartender asked.

"Right out loud."

The bartender beamed as he unfolded the paper. Pouting drinks in that kind of flea-bag saloon was a listening job. Forever listening. And usually it was the tortured tomes of misunderstood husbands, depression-ridden salesmen on the way down, or the blurred wisdom of all drunks who turn philosopher whenever they get bagged. He cleared his throat like a TV announcer and read aloud. "'Dear Jackie. Please don't hate me for taking a run-out. But I'm as desperate as you are, and I've got to have bread. There's a steel-guitar band in Philadelphia—"

Jackie upset his glass on the bar, then reached over and yanked the paper from the bartender's hand. He looked at it briefly through swimming eyeballs, then crumpled it up and threw it on the floor.

"Son of a bitch," said Jackie. Then he pointed at his empty glass.

The bartender shrugged and poured a shot into it. "What do you do?" he asked.

"What do I do? I'm a comic."

The bartender surveyed him dourly. "A comic?"

Jackie nodded vigorously. "And Kettleman is my agent. Was my agent. I hope his frigging steel guitar band rests!"

"Where you been playin'?" the bartender asked.

"At Myron's Mecca," Jackie responded. "I did two shows. Just two shows." He downed his drink. "And I will never again set foot in Myron's Mecca."

The bartender started to wipe the bar, looking up at the clock over bis shoulder. "I gather you didn't kill 'em in Myron's Mecca."

Jackie drained the glass. "How could I? They were already deceased." He tapped at the glass with a forefinger.

"I'm closin'," said the bartender.

"One more."

The bartender shrugged and poured out another shot.

Jackie held up his glass. "I give you Corning, New York," he toasted. "I give you Myron's Mecca. Six tables with a pallbearer at each one of them."

He finished the drink, put the glass down, and lumbered to his feet. It was at this point that he took note of the other customer in the bar.

Sitting cross-legged on a bar stool, dressed in a cape, upturned tasseled bedroom slippers, and a turban housing a cracked ruby, was a tiny little man with an iodine-colored face who looked like Sam Jaffe playing Gunga Din. He was looking out the corner of his eye toward Jackie, then turned on the bar stool to face him, unfolding his tiny little pipestem legs as he did so.

"We have not met, yefendi," he said in a fluty little voice. "Chatterje is the name. Miracles by profession."

Jackie blinked at him through blurred, bloodshot eyes. "Miracles?"

Chatterje smiled a tiny apologetic little smile.

"Miracles.''

"That's what I need," Jackie said, "a miracle. Not a big son of a bitch of a miracle—but a lousy little miracle. You know what, Mr. Chatterje? You are face to face with Mr. Unlucky."

Chatterje got off the stool and walked over to Jackie. "Forgiveness, Mr. Slater—but compared to me, you are the winner of the Irish Sweepstakes. You are the owner of the 1969 New York Mets. And on the day they repealed Prohibition—you are the Little Old Wine Maker."

Jackie looked down at the dark face and the black, slightly clouded, shoebutton eyes. He patted the little man's shoulder. "Mr. Chatterje—you don't know what trouble is. You know that? You are now looking at a shipmaker in the desert, a jewel cutter with the palsy, and an opera singer with laryngitis."

Chatterje held up his hands as if in protest and shook his head back and forth. "Reflect, if you will, Mr. Slater, this undersized guru who stands in front of you —this child of adversity—"

"Mr. Chatterje," Jackie interjected, "I played a B'nai B'rith convention in New Rochelle where they wanted to replace me with an Arab "

The bartender looked from one to the other, like watching a Ping-Pong match, then started to untie his apron. "Maybe fifty thousand people are in this town," he said to his reflection in the mirror, "and who do I get? The Formaldehyde Twins. I gotta open up the only morgue with a liquor license in the whole state of New York." He turned from the mirror. "Why the hell don't you two guys go out and get mugged someplace?"

Chatterje folded his hands together. "Preferable," he said morosely. "Decidedly preferable to what is in store for me. Death certainly before dishonor." He looked up at Jackie. "You, Mr. Slater, are yet a young man with much ahead of you. It need not always be Myron's Mecca. You could yet make it on the
Ed Sullivan Show
. I, on the other hand, am fingering the tassels at the far end of my rope. Let the Pale Horseman gallop in now. Let a celestial tailor enter to measure me for a shroud. For by dawn tomorrow, if I do not perform a miracle—I am relieved of my powers and I have dishonored my ancestors for centuries back."

The bartender went to the front door and lowered a shade. "So work a miracle already," he said, "but do it outside."

The turbaned little man shrugged. "There is no willing recipient," he said. "There is no soul trusting enough to allow this poor guru to conjure up a blessing." He fingered the cracked ruby of his turban. "I am without hope," he said. "I am a dispossessed soul, tiptoeing in agony across the wasteland of my shattered dreams."

"So tiptoe the hell outta here, Swami," the bartender said, preparing the night lock on the door.

Chatterje turned on his Arabian slippers and started toward the door.

Jackie reached out and grabbed his arm. "Wait a minute," he said. He studied Chatterje's face. "What is it with the miracle?"

Chatterje smiled sadly. "You are now diddling with the essence! That is what it is all about. Miracles. Every miracle-making guru must work a wonder at least once a month. I am in arrears—Hence disaster."

Jackie focused his swimming eyeballs. "What kinda miracle?" he asked.

Chatterje shrugged again. "Name it."

"I got a choice?" Jackie asked.

"You should only ask."

"Could you . . . could you get me on the
Ed Sullivan Show
?"

"Most likely."

"Could you get me four weeks at the Sands in Vegas?"

"With options."

A dream started to build. Jackie clutched the little man's silk vest and almost rifted him off the floor. "Could you . . . could you—"

"Speak, yefendi," Chatterje said.

"Could you fix it?" Jackie whispered. "Could you fix it so that I could make people laugh?"

He held his breath, waiting for the dream to burst apart.

"Make people laugh?" Chatterje repeated. "Hysterically, yefendi. Uncontrollably. Laughter beyond your wildest dreams."

Jackie's mouth was wide open. "Do it," he whispered again.