The Man Who Cancelled Himself (24 page)

“Was he still living at the Chelsea Hotel?”

“No, he shared a basement apartment on Perry Street with a large, ugly rat. It cost him a hundred a month. No kitchen, no heat—it was disgusting. Food wrappers and dirty clothes everywhere. I hated to go there. It
smelled.
For that matter, so did he. Lyle was totally lacking in what you would call basic personal hygiene in those days. He didn’t shower or brush his teeth regularly. He wore the same clothes for days and days at a time. He was, well,
scattered.
He hardly ever knew what day of the week it was. Or even what month it was. He was always broke. For money he did his clown thing and delivered pizzas on his bike. What he really wanted to do was act, so he was sitting in on classes at N.Y.U. and hanging around the off-off-Broadway scene, auditioning for every workshop and showcase that came along. He had no agent, no training, no clue. He was merely one of those thousands of people, young and old, who exist on the edge of the theater world, and on their dreams of glory.”

“How did he seem to you?”

Fiona frowned. “Seem?”

“His mood. Was he angry?”

She considered this a moment. “He was very hostile toward authority, but who wasn’t? It was ’72 and Vietnam was happening.”

“And what about his parents?”

She glanced at me briefly. “Anything in particular you’re wondering about?” she asked guardedly.

“He says he told you about his shock therapy. You and no one else.”

She nodded. “I wondered if that’s what you were getting at. It’s actually going in his book?”

“It is.”

“He told me all about it one night in bed. He said his parents did it to him, and that was why he hated them so much. Naturally, I …” She tipped her head forward once more to hide her face. “I didn’t believe a word of it. Still don’t. I just think he was trying to impress me by portraying himself as this dangerous, romantic rebel who society had failed to tame. One thing you should understand about Lyle, Hoagy, is that he’s always searching for villains in his life. For enemies. The truth is, he has none—other than himself. My own opinion’s that he simply took too much acid when he was a teenager and it made him a little crazy. In a good kind of way, of course.”

“Which kind of way is that?”

“He held nothing back. Not one thing. That made him …” She tossed her hair back with a violent shrug. “He was incredible in bed. The best lover I’ve ever had. Though I’d appreciate it if that didn’t make it into his book. It would come as a real source of shock and disappointment to Noble.”

“Consider it forgotten.”

“You’re not like other ghostwriters,” she observed, raising an eyebrow at me.

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Is that because you’ve had your own dirty laundry aired out in public?”

“He held nothing back,” I repeated, to get her back on Lyle’s track, and off mine.

“Yes.” She looked at me a moment longer, then abruptly went back to tearing at her cuticles. “That also made him an amazing actor. I was in awe of him. Because he wasn’t afraid of anything. That’s what holds most of us back. Fear. Lyle had none. No inhibitions whatsoever. I also thought he was terribly sweet underneath. He wasn’t. Underneath, he was a cauldron of rage. But I didn’t know that then. Or maybe I did. Maybe I was fooling myself. Maybe we always do when we love someone.”

“You can drop the maybe.”

“After a few weeks, he gave up his place and moved in with me. And we were a couple.”

“How did your parents react to him?”

“He refused to meet them,” she replied. “Wouldn’t go out to Scarsdale with me. And if they were coming in to see me, he’d actually leave the apartment and not come back until they’d gone. It was years before he finally met them, and he was real surly and unpleasant toward them. My dad thought he was just horrible … They gave us a washer-dryer combo for the apartment when we got married. We’d been living there together for three years by then. Lyle thought it was
the
most absurd gift. A symbol of everything that was wrong with middle-class society. He wanted to throw it out in the street. He never got over my parents giving us that.”

“What did you think of it?”

“I
asked
them for it,” she replied with a snicker. “Beat going to the Laundromat.”

“Did he have any contact with his own parents?”

“They were totally excluded from his life. He never phoned them or wrote. He wouldn’t even invite them to the wedding.”

“Did you ever meet them?”

“Just once, a couple of years after we were married. We were living in the apartment on Bank Street then. Things were just starting to click for us. Lyle was on
Saturday Night Live.
I was getting steady theater work. We were finding our way in life. But it really kept bothering me how much Lyle hated his folks. I loved mine. I wanted him to love his. So I got it in my mind that I was going to bring about a reconciliation. I called them and invited them to town to visit us. They were
thrilled.
I didn’t tell Lyle they were coming. I figured if I warned him, he’d freak. Anyway, when they walked in … the blood completely drained from his face. And he started screaming at me: ‘How could you
do
this to me?! I thought you
loved
me! How could you do this?!’ He punched me in the mouth, Hoagy. Hard enough to break a tooth and bloody my lip. Then he ran out the door like a child having a temper tantrum. Naturally, the Hudnuts were horrified. They fussed over me, got me some ice for my mouth. They were terribly upset. So was I. That was the only time Lyle ever hit me. It was a long time before I forgave him. I don’t think he ever forgave me.”

“What were Herb and Aileen like?”

“Well, they didn’t fart in public,” she joked. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”

“It’s not.” Out in the hallway, Lulu seconded that with a sour grunt. She sounded remarkably like Elliot, Merilee’s former pig, when she did that. I missed Elliot. Or, more precisely, the sandwiches.

“They were parents.” Fiona paused, reaching for the words. “Surburban, dull, totally unhip. But perfectly nice people. Herb wore a tie and wing-tip shoes, and he kept rattling on about their train trip in, and the cab ride down—he was obviously very uncomfortable. Aileen seemed frightened by the whole experience. Dazed, almost. It
was
rather surreal. I mean, I’d been living with their son for five years and they’d never met me before and now here I was flat on my back, bleeding from the mouth, and they’re trying to apologize for their son decking me.”

“Can you remember what they said?”

“That it was a nice try, and they appreciated that I’d made the effort.”

“Anything about Lyle?”

Fiona frowned and began pulling at her left thumb, hard, as if she were trying to yank it out at the socket. This was a new one. “She said that Lyle had been his own little man from the time he was two years old. That’s what she called him—his own little man. She said he always knew what he wanted and that once he’d decided he couldn’t be budged. Not ever.” She released her thumb. “They didn’t stay long. And that was the only time I ever saw them.”

“Did the subject of shock therapy come up?”

“I just told you—that never happened.”

I nodded, glancing through my notes. “I understand you were drama school classmates with Marty Muck.”

She brightened. “That’s right. Marty was extremely funny and quick. And a gifted writer, even then.”

“How did the Suburbanites come about?”

“Well, improv was just sort of the thing to do,” she replied. “For actors, it’s basic training. How you learn to reach inside yourself, to use your body, to interact with other performers. You know, the teacher will say: Okay, Hoagy, you’ve just gotten a phone call that your son was killed in a car accident, and now you have to tell your wife. It’s totally spontaneous. You just never know what will come out of anyone, especially yourself. It can be really moving or angry or scary. Of course, our emphasis with the Suburbanites was on funny and crazy. Because we all were. We were classmates, except for Lyle, and we all hung out together—Steve Sweet, who is out in L.A. now writing for Jay Leno, Tory Modesto, who just had her own HBO comedy special, Marty, Lyle, me …”

“Tommy Meyer?”

She shook her head. “Tommy had terrible stage fright. Couldn’t get up in front of an audience. He wanted to be a serious playwright. He and Marty were always working on some play. The rest of us were constantly improvising sketches together. We’d laugh and laugh. These days, if you’re funny, you break in by doing stand-up on the comedy club circuit. In those days, you cut your teeth in an improv group. Like Second City in Chicago, which produced John Belushi, Danny Ackroyd, Harold Ramis, half of the original
Saturday Night Live
people. There were improv groups all over the country then. In L.A. there was The Committee. In Boston there was The Proposition, which Jane Curtin came out of. Typically, they’d perform a few standard sketches. Then they’d take audience suggestions and come back after intermission and have at them. Sometimes they paid off, sometimes they didn’t. It was live. That gave it a real edge. To a degree, that’s what has made
Saturday Night Live
work to this day … Anyway, that’s the sort of thing we talked about doing. We developed a stable of characters. Lyle’s best was Commander Fuck, who was the self-styled Liberace of professional wrestling. He and Steve had a whole ring routine they did together. Marty did a bartender who turns into a rooster every time someone says ‘on the rocks.’ Tory did a reporter from
Rolling Stone
who is conducting an interview with Johnny Puke, the oldest living Grateful Dead roadie. I did this sadistic school nurse, Nurse Hertz, who lived to inflict pain on little girls with menstrual cramps. Oh, and Lyle and I did Katherine Hepburn and John Wayne dropping acid together for the first time on the set of
Rooster Cogburn.”
Fiona craned her neck, a là Hepburn. “Dahling, your
teeth.
They’ve become
worms.
The most dahling, dahling worms.” She let loose with Hepburn’s cascading trill of a laugh. It was a drop-dead imitation. Her John Wayne wasn’t bad either: “And
you,
Katie, are the spitting image of a Comanche warrior name of Howls-at-the-Moon, with whom I once had anal intercourse one cold night along the banks of the Missouri.” Fiona let out another laugh. Her own this time. “It was really silly stuff, but we were kids. Lyle would try anything for a laugh, and he’d get one as often as not. He was quite clearly our star.”

“And your leader as well?”

This seemed to amuse her. “I’m sure he feels he was. He’s always felt he carried us. But Marty’s really the one who put it all together. It was Marty who approached St. James Infirmary, this basement jazz club on Hudson, and talked them into letting us go on on Sunday and Monday nights, when the musicians were off. There was no cover, just a two-drink minimum. We got a split of the take, which was maybe fifty dollars a night for all of us at the beginning. Later on, when we’d developed a following, we each made about two hundred a week. Not much, but we could survive, which was more than a lot of performers could say.”

“How did the character of Chubby Chance come about?”

Her face turned to stone. “I’d rather not get into that.”

I tugged at my ear. “You were there, weren’t you?”

“I was just along for the ride,” she said, turning vague. “Talk to The Boys. They’re really in the best position to fill you in.” She broke off, gurgling. “Lyle was far and away the neediest member of the group. He had this insatiable hunger for the audience’s attention. If there’s one thing you should understand about Lyle as a performer it’s this: He was in it for love. For him, the audience was there to give him the love he was denying himself from Herb and Aileen. To dote on him, fuss over him, adore him. He was so desperate to impress. That’s what drove him as a performer. I think, more than anything, he was just very immature. He had to be the center of attention, onstage or off, like a spoiled child. If we had people over for dinner, say, and the subject turned to something he didn’t know anything about, like the war or Vonnegut or the new Albee play, he’d get really restless and surly. Don’t forget, he never went to college, and he had a very limited range of subjects he could talk about. His favorite was
him.
He loved to talk about how talented he was.”

“He still does,” I observed. “What else did he want? What was he after?”

She glanced down at her cuticles. She’d drawn fresh blood. She lunged for a Band-Aid on the coffee table and began dressing her finger. “He worshipped the
National Lampoon
crowd, which was
the
hot, hip crowd of young talent in New York. They did the magazine. They did
National Lampoon Radio Hour,
featuring people like Billy Murray. They did
Lemmings,
the satire of Woodstock that Tony Hendra put together off-Broadway. Belushi was in that. So was Chevy Chase. Lyle desperately wanted to be a part of what they were doing. He used to hang around the magazine offices trying to pitch them ideas for articles and radio scripts. But it was a very closed, very elitist group, and he couldn’t crack it. It took something very extraordinary for that to happen. It took
Saturday Night Live,
which positively exploded on the scene. That was in the fall of ’75. John and Chevy became instant stars. Huge stars. And it so happened that Lyle could do an absolutely uncanny impersonation of John—particularly John doing his samurai warrior bit. It was truly devastating. So we worked it into this insane sketch about the day John Belushi flips out and
becomes
the samurai warrior
while
he’s at the doctor for a prostate examination. Marty played the doctor. It was totally over the top—”

“Or bottom,” I suggested. “As the case may be.”

“But the audiences went crazy over it. And before long word reached John that there was this kid down in the Village who did an incredible imitation of him. One night, he and a few of his friends came down to see us perform. After Lyle did the bit, John jumped up there onstage with him, totally bombed, and pretended he was going to sue him. I’ll never, ever forget the look on Lyle’s face when he realized John Belushi liked what he’d done.”