Which Lie Did I Tell? (33 page)

When I begin a piece of writing, I know a lot but not enough. I know the pulse that makes me want to attempt whatever the piece is, article, novel, story, screenplay. (I just finished an article for the Sunday
Daily News
—this is early April of ’99—about what is happening with my beloved Knicks this year. And what is happening is that the beat writers are trying to save the job of the inadequate head coach,
Jeff Van Gundy. Their lack of truth-telling has driven me nuts this year—and that
rage
is what made me write the piece, what accompanied me every second I was thinking about it or writing it.)

I had no such rage when I sat down in my Princeton University office to tell Butch and Sundance’s story. What I had was this: they moved me. These two guys, surviving for years together, and becoming legends
a second time.
Famous outlaws who never killed, who traveled with a beautiful young woman, who were remarkably popular with the ordinary people of their time—well, if I could get that down, maybe I’d have something.

Butch had been, in the Old West, one of the two legendary figures while still alive, the other being
Jesse James. And then, in eight years of life in South America, Butch and Sundance became the
Banditos Yanquis,
legends
again.

You have to know this about me now: I am moved more by
stupid courage than anything else on earth. Have no idea why. But it has been with me for a very long time. Three examples from my childhood.

When I was probably seven or eight, I happened to read a book titled
Scarface, the
Story of a Grizzly.
I remember next to nothing of it, except that Scarface was the biggest grizzly around, and tough enough to take all the crap life throws at you when everybody wants you dead. But my memory is, he was decent, didn’t take advantage of being the toughest one around. And in the last chapter Scarface is old, but you still don’t want to mess with him, and he is walking along this narrow mountain path, when, above him, an avalanche starts. And I figured he’s escaped worse, he’ll make it to a safe part of the mountain path.

But he didn’t do that.

He turned and faced the oncoming avalanche. Then he stood up and as the giant rocks came down at him, he raised his giant paws and fought them, giving as good as he got until the boulders outnumbered him, carried him over the cliff to his death.

I remember Minnie’s coming up and asking was I all right—Minnie is the woman who worked for my family and is the main reason I am still around—and I couldn’t answer, couldn’t do anything but sob my heart out.

The second example is when I am about the same age and the great Gershwin musical,
Porgy and Bess,
came to Chicago. My family went and we sat there and if you don’t know the story, it’s about this cripple, Porgy, who can’t walk, he gets around on this pathetic goat cart, towed by a scrawny goat, and we’re someplace in the Deep South. Porgy is hopelessly in love with Bess, a beauty but weak. Toward the end, Porgy is sent to jail (he murdered the village monster) and while he is there, Bess is wooed by a pusher, Sportin’ Life, who, using drugs as a lure, steals her away, takes her to New York City, the other end of the universe as far as anyone in this town is concerned.

Porgy gets out of jail, and I am dreading the moment when he finds out Bess is gone. I mean, cripples don’t win beauties in this world, not unless they are very rich indeed, and Porgy is a beggar. So he is out of jail and I am so scared for him, his life is over, how is he going to survive his loss, and he chitchats with the villagers and then he says it—where’s Bess?

No one wants to answer but finally he finds out—Bess is gone, she is gone forever, gone to New York City.

Silence in the theater. Then Porgy says these three amazing words:

“Bring my goat.”

And the music gets magical and here comes the goat and Porgy gets on his cart and the whole cast is singing “Oh Lord, I’m on My Way,” one of the greatest songs ever—

—I was gone again.

The show ends and wild applause.

I am sobbing out of all control.

Curtain calls, more cheers.

You know what I’m doing.

Now, we had very good seats, near the front, and people started to put on their coats—

—and they cannot not notice me.

“Is he all right?” a gentleman asks my parents. Now, they didn’t know what to answer, because they had no idea if I was all right or not. Soon other grown-ups began patting my head (I remember this humiliation, oh, do I ever) and the aisles are filled and movement is slow and the only sound is me trying to muffle my crying while I was figuring out—what was going to happen to Porgy? He didn’t even know where he was going, that it was so far, that it would take him to places he had no experience of, that it was going to be so awful because what if his goat died,
where was he going to get the money for another, or what was he going to do when one of the wheels came off his cart?

I cried all the way home, and we lived in the suburbs.

Now, neither of these outbreaks are close to what happened to me when I was eight and
Gunga Din
came to the Alcyon. Cary Grant,
Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., are all captured with knives to their throat while these evil Indian murderers are about to slaughter the entire British garrison, who do not know they are walking into a trap.

I figure Cary is going to save them, but he is wounded and Victor MacLaglen is the strongest of the bunch but he is in shitty shape too, and here come the British, deeper and deeper into the trap, and the Indian killers are waiting there, and suddenly, Cary Grant looks at Gunga Din, this joke of a water carrier, and whispers these words:

“The colonel’s got to know.”

By comparison, I was poised at
Porgy.
Gunga Din’s all shot to shit, but he takes that bugle from a dead guy and starts this climb up this golden temple and when he gets there he blows the bugle and saves the British and is killed.

I have seen that movie sixteen times, and the last time—true, I tell you nothing but truths—I started crying in the
credits.

Why am I telling you all this?

Remember me saying that when I started I knew a lot of things but not enough? Well, one of the things I knew was this:
I had, in my head, a moment of stupid courage.
And I knew if I could just get my story there, I’d be okay.

It comes at the very end. Butch and Sundance have done a payroll robbery, have been given away by a brand on the mule they used to carry the money. In a small Bolivian town, the word goes out, hundreds of armed troops come. (They really did.) Butch and Sundance run out of ammunition, Butch goes for more, a stash they left on their horses, Sundance giving cover. But it all goes badly and they are both of them mortally wounded. They are in a small shack, while outside the troops continue to gather. They both know this: they are going to die of their wounds. This is their farewell conversation.

I can’t do any better than that.

It’s the best ending I’ve ever been involved with. And of course, what
gives me the confidence to say this is I have such faith in the stupid courage part of the sequence—

—
they don’t talk about their situation.

That made them courageous for me. Here they were, bleeding and in increasing pain, surrounded, outnumbered, all that good stuff. They knew they were going to die, it was over. And they could have had memories, not necessarily soppy stuff, but other tough spots would have been okay, they had decades of life to go over. But once I knew they would never talk about the present, I had confidence that I, who had been wrecked by stupid courage over the decades, could finally have a moment of my own.

(I’m a total sucker for them. The one thing I can look at in
Marathon Man
is in the novel—God, I wished it had somehow been in the movie, too—when Babe, the marathon man, has been tortured and there’s not a lot left and the three bad guys take him out to a car to finish things—

—and feebly, he breaks free, tries to literally run for his life, and he was never a great runner, never mentioned in the same breath as his two heroes, Nurmi and Bikila, the legends he has pictures of in his room, and while he runs he calls up all kinds of fantasies to spur himself, he tries to inhale through his damaged tooth, to make the pain even more horrendous, and nothing works, or works well enough—

—and then Bikila and Nurmi are flanking him, telling him the pain is part of being great, only real marathon men understand pain—

—and they bring him on home.)

Anyway, there I am at Princeton, looking for salvation, and that ending was one, if I could just get the story there.

I also felt confident about the beginning.

Wonderful real-life stuff. Butch Cassidy, unknown to the world in 1965, was a legend during his lifetime, so popular he would actually do this when followed by the law: he would ride up to farmhouses and say who he was, and that he was in kind of a pickle, and would it be all right if he hid out in their barn till the sheriff went by.

Sure, Butch. And they hid him.

Maybe it was because of the force of his personality, the universally remarked-on affability, the fact that he never shot or killed anybody until he became a payroll guard in South America, people just did what he asked them to do.

But nothing made me as confident as when Butch was in jail.

This is early in his career. The famous
Hole in the Wall gang is not what it became. And I forget the state but let’s say it was Colorado.
Okay. He is in prison and the governor calls him in. And says this: “Butch, if you’ll promise me you’ll go straight, I’ll let you out.”

And Butch’s answer? “I can’t do that.”