The Complete Works of Marcus Uteris

The late Marcus Uteris considered himself the sanest man in Los Angeles, which is rather like claiming to be the nicest guy in Las Vegas.

Another of his claims — one we must take more seriously now with the posthumous publication of his '‘Television Trilogy” — is that he was the City of the Angels’ unrecognized prose laureate. Was he?

It’s been said that Los Angeles is for the living, and the brashly coming, not for the faint of heart and gently going — and certainly not for self-ordained philosophers living lives of quiet desperation.

Or did Marcus win the day at the end? Did his bizarre endgame reveal a genius who lately walked among us ... or just another flake where no snow falls?

Today’s readers and tomorrow’s critics will have to decide all that based on this slim volume, brought to you at no little sacrifice on the part of the writer. They will decide where three short stories and the brief and fragmented revelation of one life lived place Marcus Uteris on our literary ladder.

The captious among them may suggest that ladders don’t grow very tall in the hard adobe of the Promised Land. Perhaps. But then, one might argue, who needs ladders when the fruit is so plentiful and within easy reach? In any case, Marcus certainly would be content with any rung between Miv Schaaf and Robinson Jeffers.

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF MARCUS UTERIS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR Shadow of a Continent California Quake Long Beach: Fortune’s Harbor (Co-authored with Patricia Kalayjian)

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF M ARCU S UTERIS LARKY L. MEYER

H UN TIN GTO N BEACH, C A

Copyright 1987Š by Calafia Press All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any mechanical means without written permission of the publisher.

First edition Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meyer, Larry L., 1933The complete works of Marcus Uteris.

I.Title PS3563.E874C66 1987 813'.54 87-10325 ISBN 0-942273-03-6

FOR TIM

Ours will be an unusual relationship. Possibly the only one of its kind, ever. But its oddness must not stay us from going directly to the hard business at hand, which I shall shortly put to you in the form of a proposition. (Being holder of a fairly fat purse, I believe you will pay close attention and not refuse me.)

I confess I am curious about you. Who you are, what you are, what you believe in, your instincts, your feelings, your purpose, your reliability—especially your reliability—and so on. I have also resigned myself to never knowing the slightest thing about you, since we shall never meet, a fact that may nevertheless well prove beneficial in the long run to both of us. No, I am not being cryptic, not playing the cynic; I’m only realistic. And it’s I who calls the shots here, as they say in other circles.

You will have to prepare yourself for getting to know me without ever seeing me in the all-too-perishable flesh. (That will become, if not necessary, then incidental to what we are about to do together.) I suppose in the prevailing mind that means you will have the edge on me, for the prevailing mind 7

sees all as an adolescently competitive marble game, the player seduced by the momentary gain of aggies and purees, with no thought given to ends, meanings, grace of being . . . .

You are impatient. Enough you say. Get on with it. The proposition! Simply that I am about to hire you for a job. You bristle at my assuming you will accept in the blind. But I have a strong conviction you will do just that —without paying too much mind to the conditions. I have my reasons for believ­ ing so. I have not lived forty-six years to be a fool at the end.

Call it a task more than a job, really, and a relatively sim­ ple one at that, for which you will be paid well enough. Too well, perhaps. But then we Uterises have always paid well for services performed well.

I see you hurriedly nodding me on, your acquisitiveness rising, your pulse quickening at the prospect of an easy buck.

All well and good —providing you carry out your assignment to the letter. You’ll not get away with a shoddy job, I assure you. In my absence, my lawyer will see to that. And if you fail, the $90,000 will go to someone more deserving. Someone who will do my bidding, without cavil, short-cutting and the like.

Another thing. There will be times in the course of all this when you will be inclined to chortle, hoot, and otherwise ridicule me for being what, at a given instant, you think I am.

Please don’t. Do not patronize me and I will play fair with you. This is no contest of minds or wills. I know who I am, and I did not have to waste half a lifetime learning who by deprecating others. This, you will surely agree, is the begin­ ning of wisdom. To be thankful for one’s strengths and re­ signed to one’s limitations. To realize that no one gets the whole pie, but a wedge of greater or usually lesser size, to eat or spit out as he or she sees fit, before the plate is clean, or taken away, or both. To come to terms with oneself, as they say in the university. To reach for that admirable blend in self of a man’s intelligence, a boy’s energy and a child’s wonder.

Yes, I have leaned on the masculine gender here. For good 8

reason. Odds are heavy that whoever finds this document will be male.

Now you know me better and the grin is gone. You are ready to listen. More willing to carry the responsibility I shall fasten to you.

Very well. The deal, to use the vernacular. The $90,000, or some leftover portion thereof, will be yours when my Television Trilogy is printed by some reputable publisher. I realize the last-mentioned words must seem contradictory in their pairing, so I amend the oxymoron to read “not thoroughly disreputable publisher,” which eliminates the most flagrant offenders among that merry band of pirates and hucksters, leaving only those whose myopia and chicanery falls within predictable limits and can therefore be discounted in advance.

You catch your breath. You are confused. It is not at all what you guessed when I first mentioned a proposition worth your while. You thought I had something shady in mind. And just what is this trilogy?

Patience. In time. I won’t discuss it here, because it speaks for itself, and you will shortly have the opportunity to see it yourself, read from these very pages the life’s work of a man who expected nothing, had much to give, and has been treated shamefully by those spiritual and intellectual pygmies who decree what shall be read by truth-seekers, but only after counting coins siphoned from the pockets of the nation’s coneys.

Enough of the bitterness. You’re probably right. It doesn’t become me. So let’s get back to what’s expected of you. The particulars. How is it going to work? What are the angles?

And what does my lawyer have to do with it?

Benjamin Reznik will be your contact man. He’ll fill you in on the details. What’s expected of you. He’ll hold in trust the $90,000 I mentioned, advancing to you sums for legiti­ mate expenses (he will, following written instructions from 9

me, be the sole judge as to what’s legitimate) incurred in see­ ing that the Television Trilogy gets into print, in a minimum of 500 hardback copies. A second printing is not necessary, and in any case unlikely, given the present rate of plummet in literacy.

But should there be a financial something . . . some modest success . . . Reznik will see that the profit is split equally between you and the American Cancer Society. You will find him listed in the Beverly Hills exchange, alerted to expect your call. Tell him you have custody of my trilogy and are ready to proceed per instructions. If you decline the offer, feel you are not the one to see it through, bring this manuscript to Ben, and you will receive a $500 finder’s fee.

He will then pass it along to someone more up to the task and eager for the reward.

You have another option. If you are not the one for the job, but know of someone else who is literate and resourceful enough to get it done, you are free to strike your own bargain with him or her, subcontract, if you will, providing Ben Reznik considers your choice acceptable. The Uteris family attorney will be the last word on all questions pertaining to this agreement.

Ha! You like the money but not this wimp-league cloakand-daggery. It looks too much like a setup. There are too many loose ends —too much that does not add up. Why, you ask, if I am so intent on having the Television Trilogy pub­ lished, do I not do it myself with that same $90,000 I have ear­ marked for the project? Why drag in an anonymous outsider whose qualifications are dicey at best?

You know nothing of Byzantium, my friend. Which may actually serve you well. My reasons, however, are several and sound. For one thing, my trilogy has been thrown out the door of most every house—not to mention the offices of what presently pass for the more respected periodicals, where various bits and pieces of it have been unkindly dealt with 10

The verdict has always been the same. No. Non. Nix. Nein.

On one pretext or another. We may examine some of them in all their groundlessness later.

But why then, you ask, should you, acting as my literary agent, as it were, expect success where negatives have been to date the constant rule? I like your mind. I think you will be good for me. Okay. You shall succeed where I have failed by having at your disposal what the knaves are always after: money. Money to grease palms and slicken ways. The oil by which the system operates.

I hear your protesting “huts” already. “But why didn’t you apply the same magic lubricant yourself—directly?” Pride, my friend. I am a Uteris. We are not by blood strangers to folly, but we do not crawl, nor do we have a history of being beg­ gars or brown-nosers. It is this same pride, by the way, that has kept me from answering those two-inch ads you see in Sunday newspapers promising instant publication for the aspiring literary have-nots. You understand.

But, you protest, what about Reznik? Why can’t he do it?

Why is he just an intermediary? Good question. But if you knew Reznik, like I know Reznik, you wouldn’t bother ask­ ing. He’s an accountant, a mechanic. If Dostoyevsky were alive today and brought Ben The Brothers Karamazov, the guy would blow it with Doubleday. No, he’s not the man for the job. Besides, that avuncular man would not approve of what I propose to do with myself. He would interfere.

Threaten not to do my posthumous bidding if he confronted me in the quick.

Yes, you shall have that advantage to work with. My pass­ ing. Can you ask for anything more? That means . . . exactly!

After a life’s labor in a dry vineyard, I shan’t be around for the harvest. If that doesn’t bother me, then why should it con­ cern you?

You’re speechless. And I say, better a hearing when I’m ashes than no hearing at all.

11

Now you begin to see. What I am. What I’m about. What you must do with the incentive I willingly leave you. What has been denied me in life will be assured through my death and the spot expenditure of most of the last of the dwindling Uteris reserves.

A word of caution. You, like the rest, are given to greed and are even now mentally weighing the marketability of the Television Trilogy, sight unseen. You are hoping for the ver­ bal spice that will make your work easy, and mean stacks of racks of copies in every cut-rate drugstore or supermarket.

You are counting on a heavy peppering of the words “fuck,” “prick,” “cock,” “cunt,” “suck,” “tits,” “balls” and all the other Northern Indo-European-derived crudities of one syllable that will massage the herd and speed the flow of dollars into your pocket. Sorry. No soap. You’ve got the wrong man.

A final word . . . whatever credit you want to take for the Television Trilogy is pretty much up to you. But my name must be on it as the creator of these words and insights. My name. Marcus Uteris. You may wish to bask in the reflected glory by calling yourself “finder,” “editorial coordinator,” or even, if you wish, its “editor.” Though you had better do damn little actual editing if you know what’s good for you!

Reznik will be instructed to proof the final version against a copy being sent to him separately.

12

Since we’ll be close for a while, I think it best that you get to know a little more about me. No doubt you’ve already taken note of my surname, and over the same delivered yourself of a snicker. I hear it now as I have heard it countless times, going back to earliest memories of being in the com­ pany of non-Uterises. (Note our formation of the plural.) Your mirth is hardly original, and it shows a coarse streak I didn’t expect in you. In any case, please spare me the oh-so-clever word plays. Believe me, I’ve heard them all.

I might also call your attention to the spelling of this singular name in the singular. The terminal vowel, you see, is the letter “I,” not a “U.” More to the point, the name hap­ pens to be an old and honored one in the annals of Britain.

The family has traced it back to the reign of Henry Tudor, belonging to one Sir Piers Uteris who held the position of licensor of whores, pimps and vagabonds for all Lincolnshire.

A man of parts, the record will show. How Sir Piers fared under the change of faith with the next Henry is unclear, though it is apparent the family fortunes went into temporary decline. I stress the word “temporary.” You will find the name 13

reappearing on a casualty list of those who fell for the Stuarts at Preston. A Daniel Uteris is mentioned by name in a later chronicle as one who had “served verie welle and with modestie under the faire William of Orange.” Another Uteris, John, distinguished himself with Clive in India, while his son, Osley, went on record as opposing repeal of the Corn Laws in 1845—which should give you some idea of family station and sympathies then.

When the Uterises made their first appearance in the New World and what branch of the tree crossed the Atlantic are details that have escaped us in the genealogical dig. Yet the fact is there was a Nathan Uteris in Massachusetts in the early 1820s, a man thought well enough of by his neighbors to be remembered as a “good and Christian man who administered the rod unsparingly to his pupils for their betterment.” A school master. Quite a high calling in those mostly agrarian days.

Nathan, the records show, had three sons and a fixation with Roman first names, to judge by his male get. Of Decius, the oldest, we know little. Perhaps he valued his privacy—a recurring family trait. Lucius, the middle one, migrated to Kentucky, but still fell for the blue at Bull Run. It was the youngest, Severus, who over the yawn of years seems most a chip off the sturdy old block. He was Bostonborn and forthright, and never did the East send a more worthy gentleman to the raw West as when the young Severus packed his carpetbags and climbed the steps of the iron horse to take Congregational doctrine to the needy frontier. In his middle years he lighted in the Arizona Territory with a Christian zeal not to be questioned. How else explain his leaving a pregnant wife in Tucson to trade Bibles to the restive Apaches for repeating rifles some unconscionable opportunist had already put in their vengeful hands?

Severus Uteris never returned from the White Mountains to witness the birth of his son, named Sextus by the widowed 14

wife Ann, who remained loyal to family tradition. God rest them all.

I never saw him, Sextus, my grandfather, but I have heard enough of him, the luckless argonaut who dreamed of wire gold and would disappear at the first hearing of a rumored strike in some sere, stony range in the back of nowhere, only to reappear months later smiling and empty-handed and ripe for another fling at pecking rocks. I only know that I would have loved him. There was a time and place for that kind of improvident dreamer, I think, knowing full well that romantic foolishness is best appreciated from a distance.

Which reluctantly brings me to my own father, the only son of Sextus, bearer of yet-another Roman name. But I’m not prepared to discuss Cicero Uteris. (It’s always pained me to call him “Dad.”) Not quite yet. Later, I promise.

To brighter things, then. To the very brightest. His chief victim, my mother —God bless her matchless soul. She was a Condon, of the Pennsylvannia Quaker Condons, a branch of the same transplanted west when William Howard Condon left Philadelphia and sailed ‘round the Horn in 1850 for the promised land. A sensible man, William Howard. Of different issue and tissue than his junior, Sextus. After a brief go in the Northern Mines he had the wit to decamp and retreat to San Francisco, where he was soon in the business of selling picks and shovels to hardier, quixotic sorts who spent their hardearned dust on liquor and women and more picks and shovels.

Durable stock, William and his line. Balanced. Blessed in time with comforts earned through their own diligence and the small chain of department stores. Puters of leisure time to good use. Chautauqua. Patrons of the respectable arts. All the proper things that are mocked now in this sour age of ours. But why dwell on it?

Elizabeth Mary Condon Uteris. She was a gentle flowering of all that, wilted before her time and abandoned for no good reason by the man who vowed to stay with her to the end.

15

Alone save for me, she faced a world not only not of her mak­ ing, but one beyond her recognizing. Faced it with dignity, generosity and her own special kind of courage.

My clearest memories of her are a child’s, well before I’d reached puberty, when she was still what could be called young, I on her knee and looking up into that finely cut Celtic face with the nose small and faintly aquilene and the hazel eyes that so often looked dazed if lovingly down on me, her only child, and what she must have known then would always be her only child. I can still feel the brush of her long auburn hair that swished with the sound and color of October’s liquidambar leaves, and the gleaming porcelain of her teeth barely hinting at a pale hue of a robin’s egg blue that showed only when she smiled, which was not often but worth living for. There were those countless tendernesses lavished on me that — I find it painful to go on. And you’re not interested anyway.

Slightly embarrassed, in fact. It is no longer fashionable to have loved one’s mother. I know that. And I will spare you any more mawkishness on the subject —as much out of reverence to the memory of that sainted woman as to stop your squirming. I was only trying to explain the name, and nip early any smart talk.

16

The fact that I am writing all this in Los Angeles brings a superior smile to your face. You might have expected as much. Vast submontane cradle of freaks and fools —how fit­ ting. Well, just don’t number me among them! I loathe this madness which surrounds me as much as you. After all, my friend, I’ve spent my life here. Who else could know it bet­ ter than a native son who has resisted successfully for fortysix years the floodtides of fad and sunstruck yahoo hedonism?

I know intimately this city of the fallen angels for all its in­ substantiality, recognize here a garden out of Babylon, see the deadening lotus crowding out the laurel and the yew. But I find fault more with the people than the place. Remember that most of its kookanery is recently imported. Yes, from Wassau, Wisconsin, and Oscaloosa, Iowa, and Memphis, Tennessee, and all the other backwaters and barren dents on the plain where rural mailboxes reach desperately up and out for some word or titillation from what is popularly thought of as the civilized world. Imported. From the South early with confident ignorant populists looking for non-lateritic soil on which to farm. From New England with entrepreneurs gone 17

soft in their Calvinism and usually in the head as well. And, yes, even from the nation’s canker that the magnificent Jef­ ferson diagnosed so early, bringing their fractured vertical in­ telligences with them from Manhattan.

The meretricious makers of movies fill the vacuum for our spiritually disenfranchised, who load their Porsches and their pickups and come, bringing with them the spare values and bloated hopes of America cheated, ready to be gulled again by their kin who came a generation before . . . Jefferson’s dream gone somehow into nightmare . . . a nation wandered up a dead end of desire.

Don’t think I haven’t seen it all! Witnessed maimed wonders, seen clods come into their own, bought a car from H.J. Caruso before Cal Worthington even owned a dog. Yes, I’ve seen it all —been unwittingly caught up in what has become a pernicious fantasy in the mind of some P.T. Barnum under acid.

I have survived the ignominy of a three-term mayor whose only civilized act was to have potato shavings and sardine tins picked up in one collection. I have seen local literary hacks elevated to parity with Alexander the Great and Mao Tsetung in the Times. I have heard the lady animal psychologist talk over the radio to neurasthenic cats and manic-depressive monkeys and heal them of their disorders with a few gentle words. I have talked to “contactees” from the Amalgamated Flying Saucers Clubs of America and been warned to protect myself against radioactive emanations from cruising Venusian scouts by lying on the ground on my back, half-naked with my face covered, lest I contract cancer. I have seen live a film­ ing of “The Dating Game” and been ashamed for my species.

I gazed wonderingly on the Assyrian Rubber Factory before Uni and Roy and A1 were out of rubber pants. I got Korla Pandit’s autograph. I remember Argentine Roca.

Yes, I know my city well. All these tainted wonders have I beheld . . . and many more. But why belabor the banal when 18

there is so much of it? When it engulfs me? Becomes itself a standard by which all else is judged? So I must of necessity go inside to discover within myself something to keep the blooddimmed tide from my door.

This I have done at some little sacrifice, to where I consider myself the sanest man alive in Los Angeles (at this writing, of course). You may not accept that. But I ask, name your candidate?

Wait a minute, you say. If I’m so damned dissatisfied, then why haven’t I moved away? To some more stable town that knows the seasons? A good question. I have pondered it many solitary nights in my Santa Monica apartment and have come up with the answer. Quite simply, I’m fascinated by this strange City of the Angels . . . its energy, its tolerance, its gift of nearly absolute freedom. Dare I say I have come to actually love it? Yes. Add that it has at last outgrown its cultural adolescence to fulfill the prophecy of my beloved culture hero William Butler Yeats, who observed on a Roaring Twenties’ visit that “here, if anywhere in America, I seem to hear the coming footsteps of the muse!”

The footsteps have stopped. The muse has arrived.

I suppose a confession is in order here. The truth is I used to believe that if I were patient, steeped myself in her rich if shallow past, immersed myself in the ever-breaking comber that is her brilliant present, then I might become for the Queen of Angels’ pueblo what Shakespeare was to London, Goethe to Weimar, Dante to Florence. Fat chance! How cruel of the Mother of Angels to turn her back on a reverent and dutiful son and lavish favors on a bunch of carpetbaggers and Juan-come-latelies!

Mine is a tale of one city but two ladies. Yes, I do believe the muse has touched me. But Our Lady has spurned me.

Maybe some gifts are given so that others might be withheld.

Or maybe it’s just a case of the right man in the right place at the right time, but lacking in media exposure.

19

4 No, we Uterises have not sweated for another lately. Yes, the Uteris line benefited from its linkage to the Condons, who have been coupon clippers since William Howard sold his stores. Let me add that neither family has ever been a burden on the republic by resorting to its relief agencies —an act of patriotism seldom recognized as such.

But don’t rush to any conclusions. I have lived for some time on a fixed monthly income of $2,467, which means I know more of Sparta than Acapulco. So, though my art now takes up my days, I am no stranger to the workaday world.

I think of myself as'being as much of a worker as the next man, placing myself in the cultural mainstream, subscribing to the belief in the efficacy of labor. I know its therapeutic value. Good for the body and the mind and the soul, and the few real welfare-loafers miss a great truth by not knowing this.

Statistics, actuarial tables, prison records and files in mental institutions will bear me out. Physical and psychic health belong to those who exercise, toning-up both striated muscle and gray matter. As for relative states of the soul, I suggest you check both the composition of beer bars and churches some Sunday and draw your own conclusions.

20

Enough said. Yes, then I have worked. Taken menial jobs for the intrinsic value of labor and what I might learn about those who share the surface of this sphere with me. I have toiled as a janitor on Wilshire Boulevard, cleaning actresses’ toilet bowls and dusting executives’ bookcases of leatherbound classics whose pages have never been cut. For two years I built up the sinew of my body as a grimy oil-refinery roustabout in Manhattan Beach, where I was recipient of the sobriquet “crazy cunt” from self-styled machos who helped me chip black residue from the inside of cat-crackers for the greater profit of Standard Oil of California —a firm, incidentally, in which I hold a respectable amount of stock.

I was also a seller of “The Great Books” and deluded myself for upwards of a year that I was poking light into needy corners of the national dark. I specialized in bowling alleys, where as zealous emissary from a higher realm I hawked ex­ pensive highlights of Spinoza, Hobbes and the lot to beery men in King Louis shirts who in their bottles of Lucky, or out of some nameless guilt, committed themselves to expenditures in discretionary income they did not have for books their children would never open. That was how I learned of the astonishing similarities between those who bowled down cancer and those no-nonsense lawyers who financed films and paid exorbitant rents for paneled offices on “The Fabulous Boulevard.” My conclusions are yours and the prophet’s. That all is vanity. Mere appearances. Unless we can change it with the Television Trilogy.

21

Good. You agree. I’ve felt all along you were my man. And I forgive you any envy of me . . . that through no effort or seeming ability of my own, I have the financial means to escape what has been your unhappy lot as one of the enslaved multitude. True, I know nothing of what it’s really like. Really like. Have never been flung without life belt into the fecal waters of corporate employment. Have never had to genuflect before the raging executive belittling those who, by way of what he fancies their incompetence, stand in his way of giv­ ing the world another useless trifle.

But then it hasn’t been easy for me, either. My own man, yes, but with things to say that those “in the trade” will not let out. I’ve known the frustrations a Blake or a Hopkins or a Kafka knew in the neglect of print merchants.

No, I am not—not necessarily—claiming an equal place for myself. Comparisons of that sort are meaningless anyway.

Every true artist is himself alone, as individual as a snowflake, or a leaf on the sacred tree. One’s achievement is or it isn’t, stands or falls of its own, is not subject to the hierachical rank­ ings as we find them in the pop Top Forty or the National Football League standings.

22

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying the artist comes into this world with talent whole and intact and only need wait his brief time before being welcomed into the guild. There is a long learning process, a trying apprenticeship, before he or she has mastered self and experience and form and is able to produce something that means and moves. No Homer or Dante existed in isolation, apart from his world. No Chaucer or Shakespeare can cancel debts to those who came before— just as I readily admit to models especially congenial to the artist that over the years took shape within me. In reading the Television Trilogy, you will no doubt identify my own debts to John Milton, Jorge Luis Borges and Joyce Haber.

This is a concession, but it is not hedging, is it? All com­ plementary rather than contradictory. The finished product will still carry the unmistakable stamp of its creator. Yes, style is the man, and if a man has style, it will show. There’s no hiding it.

I bore you with all this. Your drumming fingers tell me to cut the bullshit. Bring on this damned trilogy. Let’s see whatever it is that has to be sold.

Very well. But in my own way, on my own terms. You shall not see it all at once. Rather, the first time through in pieces, thirds, so you may better savor and digest it, as well as come to know whose handiwork it is.

After the first reading, I recommend you reread it as a whole, the stories sequentially, as you would view a triptych, as I have done myself some 500 times. You will find that each trip through uncovers some subtlety of thought or graceful turn of phrase that went previously undetected.

Enough. You don’t deserve to dangle in suspense. Time for the unveiling.

23

THE TELEVISION TRILOGY: PART I THE RISE AND FALL OF MORGAN FULB He was almost an ordinary fellow. Ordinary if not predic­ table in all ways but one, though none of us knew of his feet and their powers then —not even I, his closest companion through the rigors of our young years. For that matter, not even the toe-headed Morgan himself, whose only awareness of his feet (dim still in the light of their later luminescence) was that they just plain and simply hurt him.

No wonder. They grew as prodigiously as radishes, and were not unlike that rubicund root in color . . . at least not in the bulbous toes that appeared deceptively brutish but were, in fact, the mind and perhaps the soul of the yet unawakened (dare I say never-awakened?) man. His parents, a journeyman mechanic father and dime-store clerk mother (at the candy counter, dispenser of convex chocolate wafers sprinkled atop with tiny, sweet white beads), had a devil of a time keeping him in shoes. He just kept busting through them every two weeks.

Morgan and I were playmates from our sixth year on. (On 24

to what? To post-adolescence, as you might have guessed, when we went our separate ways.) From the beginning, I felt, rather than knew, there was something odd about him. Not daft, mind you, or slow or even vicious. More that he had been marked (by whom? you fill it in) for some special assign­ ment, fingered for a private destiny denied the greater number of us footsore pilgrims who wander in circles seeking that holy shrine conceived by the mind to keep us out of trouble. Not that I take any credit for prescience, or imagined the possiblities for good that coexisted with tragedy in the barefoot boy who complained of “sights” rising from below (“under my knees,” his words) that intruded on his sleeping and waking hours with growing urgency.

Shoes he couldn’t abide. The oppression of leather. Jackets to be stripped off the moment he was outside, beyond his parents’ sight, to be dangled from tied strings over his shoulder, excusable to be sure when we were stalking catfish in the Los Angeles River, but not in school, where the teachers understandably balked and sent home complaining notes that never reached the industrious Fulbs.

Who can blame the boy? (I exclude the man here.) Size 11EEE at age eight and no sign of slowing growth! The sure target of ridicule from those who deluded themselves in be­ lieving they were his betters. I held back my darts and so earned his friendship (if it ever came to that) by default. A companion-of-convenience, then. An ear for a lad predom­ inantly foot.

Of course, I knew more about Morgan than the rest, hav­ ing heard his parents fret over their only son and allow as how there was “something funny with him.” Listened all but unnoticed in corners of the modest Fulb family bungalow to concerned rehashings of an infancy somehow queered by a fix­ ation with feet. How, even at two, bent double on his little chair to do his duty, he was able to bend his supple joints to get his feet into his mouth —not just now and again, but 25

always. And how he would cry the nights from pain —pangs whose source was literally at the feet in his crib. Frank and Melba Fulb must be forgiven not having taken the toddler to a doctor. It was matter of indigence, not negligence. More­ over, what could doctors have done confronted with such oedipal exuberance? Amputate?

Morgan accepted his two feet about nine years into their brief and sensational life. It was then, I believe, that he divined himself the recipient of a gift, not a curse, and that the dark, inchoate powers were to be accepted, not resisted.

(Exploited, one should say. Yes, he would go too far, as most men with special gifts do.)

I well remember bearing first witness to the change he was undergoing. The third grade it was, one spring afternoon dur­ ing a math drill, he seated one row to my left and a desk in front of me, his socks and shoes (“gunboats” to his schoolmates) shed as usual and pushed to one side, his great feet flexing luxuriantly in a universe of air. He seemed only half-attentive, on the verge of drifting into some reverie, when Miss Petersen called on him. It was 8 times 9. As always, he delayed his response a long instant, as though searching his memory to read the tables that she hoped were imprinted there. I don’t know why, I can’t account for it, but at that or­ dinary moment my eyes fell from his head in profile to his bare feet. And I saw it all. The ten toes, admirably suited to the decimal system, twitching with a precision and pattern scarcely attributable to chance —a kind of double-barreled liv­ ing abacus at work in service to what I then thought its master. “Seventy-two,” Morgan said with certitude.

Had I imagined it? No, continued observation through subsequent oral exercises verified all —in procedure a replica­ tion of the first: the problem posed, the boy’s slight delay in solving it, the toes fluttering in response to the stimuli carried along an inner circuitry, the answer delivered as computer fact. Where he kept the zero in his little setup I’m not sure, 26

though I suspect it was housed in his instep, and when ac­ tivated made its contribution known by the slightest cramp which bent both heel and toes down and toward the other.

It did not end there, with mere arithmetic, this bottom/top ganging-up on knowledge. When Morgan was called on to read aloud, I would watch his toes ripple with a rhythm that was pure iambic. When confronted with a question in history or geography or the like, his feet, though outwardly almost quiescent, took on a faint tension that gave an upward tilt to his toes, then when the correct answer came (and they were never anything but correct), the phalanges would slump into rest. Astonishing! But I was uneasy over what it all meant.

Needless to say, young Fulb soon earned himself a reputa­ tion as a scholar, and was therefore doubly despised by his in­ feriors, who continued to regard him as nothing more than a Poindexter. I knew better, and became the closest thing he had to a friend. Not that we ever became bosom buddies or chums . . . nothing like that. The gulf between us remained wide. While he knew that I knew at least in a vague way of the duality operating within his body and the preternatural powers he was slowly coming into, I did not, could not, share in them, and he was too private a sort to discuss them, even with me. Thus was I cast in the role of sympathetic outsider, meaning what bond there was between us could not last.

I well recall days in our teens spent awkwardly in his house or mine, he in rapt meditation on bared feet now swollen to size seventeen, I standing mutely by, excluded from that strange communion, feeling not unlike a Thirteenth Century Gaul in the mosque at Cordoba. He did nothing, said noth­ ing, to make me feel otherwise. Merely massaged them heel to toe or stared at the long broad toes, the severe rake of his instep, the sensuous sweep of his balled umber heel. Each part of the whole seemed to respond to his caress by swelling and glowing. I sensed a conspiracy firming.

One day in my treehouse I dared to ask the unaskable — 27

whether his feet indeed had a mind of their own. In the clumsy diction of boyhood I pressed him as to whether their identity might be further split into two separate-but-equal consciousnesses, or whether they functioned according to the principles of bisymmetry, complementing each other in com­ mon tasks, without a thought to hegemony. I further dared to ask what he said to his feet, and vice-versa.

He went into a red rage. He screamed that I was “a fool like the rest” and it was no business of mine anyway. For an instant, he seemed ready to strike me, then he flashed an ugly, superior smile I had never seen. “I don’t need you anymore,” he fairly hissed. With that he clambered down the ladder, out of my eucalyptus tree, out of my yard, out of my life . . . for a time.

Despite some half-hearted tries at reestablishing contact, I lost touch with him. Only through rough third-party memories am I now able to reconstruct very sketchily the next decade of his life. He went on to college, on a modest scholar­ ship to Pomona, where he distinguished himself as a sometime scholar enamored of drama and metaphysics, a pairing of preferences that was remarkably in keeping with who he was becoming, and what he would do with the rest of his life. But then what reception does a rat-eat-rat world give a budding actor-philosopher when he makes his bow? Exactly.

Morgan Fulb seemingly wasted his twenties variously as a bootblack, racing stable groom, shoe salesman, fry cook — menial positions all for a young man soon to burst on the na­ tional horizon like a Fourth-of-July skyrocket at a Baptists’ picnic —without marrying, without sending down roots. A period of consolidation, one may safely theorize. Cementing soul, mind (minds?) and feet into what he imagined was one mighty instrument of pure will. Waiting. Waiting for his chance, and without a doubt learning well the needs and dreams of those with whom he rubbed threadbare elbows.

And then Whitey Boswell got wind of Morgan and his feet.

28

“Discovered” him. You remember Whitey —promoter, charlatan, carny barker risen to roller-derby color man, who never missed a chance to enrich himself by selling someone else on the television tube.

I suppose it was a natural match. Made in Hollywood heaven. Mutually advantageous, mutually exploitative.

Whitey I think smelled nothing more than a meal ticket. Or else, why didn’t he ever bother to check in his service-club haunts on whether Fulb’s reputed pedic powers were on the up and up? Inured to fraud and deception, he must have assumed more of the same, an assumption that sent him reaching into his regular bag of tricks tried and untrue to ped­ dle the property. Down to putting Fulb into seclusion for a month, under the sleazy tutelage of video “coaches” who prepped him for his Los Angeles debut.

Some debut! A KCOP special that featured a Morgan garishly clad in skin-tight, off-white Panama linen suit and open-toed oxfords dyed beyond cordovan into the purple, our subject stretched prone across two chairs, bare toes pointed heavenward, eyes at a pensive half-mast, answering the si^ly questions put to him in a fatuous drawl while his toes fluttered under their chartreuse nail varnish. Boswell-inspired flashsplash, no question. Yet effective. Sufficiently so to stir the network knaves and get them to look at the young man with the giant feet who seemed to have “it.” What? That ineffable something which seduces the goggle-box ruminants into believing they are seeing a “personality,” in this case a seer who claimed to be that and more. Not prime-time material yet, no. But a good hot choice for spots on the syndicated latehour shows. Poor Whitey! Never a gentleman, it seemed he even lacked a contract that would hold up and hold Fulb.

After that first appearance on the tube, Fulb discarded Whitey as so much unwanted baggage, now that he had his foothold, his place on the platform. How pride doth make fools of us all! When Morgan first turned in his purple ox­ 29

fords, worriless Whitey settled back to await the truant s return to his fold of flim-flam artists. In vain. He had drastically undervalued his own goods, as was quickly shown when Fulb began hiring his own promoters —seemly and able young Mormons dressed in discreet gray suits and educated in subtler methods of picking the public’s pocket.

One must presume Fulb promised them a piece of the future action. They in turn must have been won by their young employer’s honest, go-straight-for-the-dollars attitude, and may even have been half-believers in the powers the shoeless prophet claimed as his own. That’s a suspicion. I can’t prove it. Certainly, though, they made a capable team of flacks, marketeers and accountants captained by a man who, even his severest future critics would admit, even after his fall, was a born leader.

Fulb frontloaded his investment and stuck with telly as the best means of “stroking the folks” (his words for inner-circle ears) “in the appropriate numbers and with the optimum mentality” (his boardroom theorem), assuring the success of his cynical enterprise. One-man, half-hour specials spaced three weeks apart on urban independent stations where de­ cent viewing hours were available to reach our desperate, idle consumers in need of hope. Yes, Morgan was there to fill the void, becoming with each video appearance more adept, more the demagogue. In a time without heroes, all was ripe for him.

What he gave us was rather undistinguished wizardry, far less than he was capable of. The MC’s toothy grin. Facile demonstrations of his skill with routine mathematical com­ putations. Hedged predictions of inconsequential future events. Toes in spasm while he read aloud and unerringly the walleted Social Security numbers in the studio audience. And, in conclusion, a pious and shallow homily. Then applause, he bowing and gee-whiz blushing. It was the doings of his feet, he assured us. A God-given gift. No credit due him, Morgan the Modest.

30

I believe the demon in the man grew in direct proportion to the size of his following. His following . . . better they be called his consumers, for that is all they initially were and were meant to be. First came the endorsements —from the nadir of pile remedies to the lucrative fees from Chevrolet via Camp­ bell Ewald. Yes, Morgan joined hot dogs, baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet as the most American of things. How he con­ quered! Many stoops, many dollars.

Then came the time to cash in, what with a solid bloc of buyers hanging on his every word. And what more fitting start than “Fulb’s Foot Fashions —The Best in Bootery”? From there it was a half-step down to patent medicine remedies for virtually any ill that beset one below the knees. And farther down the familiar path, cosmetics, clothes, candy bars, soft drinks—most anything that could be mass-produced and mass-consumed. But he —especially he —couldn’t content himself long with the easy prostitution of his talent.

What a different world with the name of Fulb common as a cold virus! On the tongue of stylish men and chic women who showed their with-it-ness by wearing shoes with his patented plexiglas toe. Taste went down. Eyes were on feet.

The fortunate few ungulates who had hoofs resembling Master Morgan’s waxed socially, while the less-favored moved toward the wall. And wasn’t there such a great and sudden demand for cosmetic foot surgery? And wasn’t Mister Morgan ready with his coast-to-coast franchises-in-waiting—a virtual monopoly of the trade for PedParlors? Yep. Just one more ap­ pendage under the corporate umbrella of Fulb Feet, Inc. The Big Board dressed up the cancer as another American success story within two years of the first public issue—an issue unwittingly hyped by sometime Brahmins who wouldn’t other­ wise have given the upstart Fulb and his rabble the time of a Black Tuesday.

Morgan knew all this better than they. Knew that what resistance there was to his rise centered in the old guard and 31

the more retrograde (responsible?) universities which saw m him a threat to all civilized institutions and principles. Morgan not only knew their fears; he resolved to confront their owners and justify those fears, for it wasn’t in the driven man to stop at wealth and a harmless notoriety. This overman naturally chose more. How much more? Even I do not know where his ambition stopped.

From the first, though, Fulb saw the CRT as the primary instrument to achieve his ends. But it wasn’t enough, he knew.

Not enough to feed his vanity, if nothing else. He coveted print for the access it would give him to the literate few he wished to win all along. And he got it. Remember the thriceweekly column that ascended to syndication in what surely was record time within the fourth estate?

“From the Tip of My Toe” began innocently enough, osten­ sibly a money management column rooted in common sense, with a readership broad and decidedly unsophisticated. Clever gambit to get the wary nabobs nodding off in their clubs . . . the vested to drop their guards. Then slowly, all but unnoticeably, Fulb began to salt his folksy advice on the wisdom of keeping expenditures below income, taking out an IRA, and not forgetting to deduct the cost of night-school courses at tax time, with suggestions that such-and-such a security was on the upswing, while XYZ seemed headed for a long slide. Steadily, these tips from his toe informed his copy—until Wall Street awoke with the jitters. With unerring accuracy he identified the losers and the winners in advance of their respective declines and gains, even before the knowledgeable insiders could shear the sheep.

Skeptics, of course, still claim that Fulb generated his own success by the buying and selling pressures exerted on his gulli­ ble readers. A factor, certainly. But to deny the man had a deeper knowing, a foreknowledge of the market’s ups and downs, seems to me a delusion worthy of an atheist. Then again I may be reaching beyond my cognitive grasp.

32

Let the learned Louis Rukeyser settle that for us.

Of Morgan . . . if he had only stopped there. But no, he was going for it all, clearly shown when comment political into his column crept. Bland, innocent at first, words soon tilted toward shadowy doings . . . forewarnings of far-off political coups, then elucidations on secret treaties only breathed out­ side a few of the world’s foreign offices, exposures of backroom deals made on the domestic front. It was as though he had a private pipeline to the manager of the cosmos, knew not only what had taken place, but what was to come.

True to hidden form, Fulb comported himself with decep­ tive modesty, crediting his feet with the powers that made him a soothsayer nonpareil, disclaiming any personal ambition beyond serving the greater number of men (and women and children, too, we must presume . . . though, the greater truth to be told, they never appeared much on his mind —at least not to the reach of an ordinary man . . . but then, putting aside the possiblity of the usual sexual deviation, and lean­ ing toward Freud and sublimation to explain why it were so, wouldn’t you, wouldn’t I?) as obliging servant in their need to know . . . a kind of Rona Barrett of the mental-power ma­ jor league. That given, Fulb couldn’t have avoided making enemies if his intentions were pure as powder snow. Which his were decidedly not.

I should be fair. Not all the opposition was rooted in right and righteous fear. Some merely saw in the young man with the magic feet a barrier between them and the trough. They were among the first to cry out against “Creeping Fulbism,” and brand him an enemy of the people. But there were also more responsible and reflective citizens who knew that democracy cannot survive without a pragmatic approach to an uncertain future, and they voiced their largely unheard fears. They saw in Fulb, his self-effacing protests to the con­ trary, the germ of a malign power.

Yet the video messiah weathered these cyclonic stirs. As 33

always, they swirled too late with too little turbulence. Fulb s critics either lacked power, or hesitated in their application of it in the face of swelling numbers who prefaced their every remark with an acknowledgment that Fulb “said it was so.”

All gave the grave eminence and his associates besuited in three-piece gray what they needed most: time. Time to con­ solidate gains made. Time to plan the marketing of additonal gimcrackery that bore the master’s mark. Time for the master alone (again all evidence points to it as a one-man heist — whether you’re talking money or power) to contrive in private schemes even his money-counting Mormon minions hadn’t, or wouldn’t, dream of. And so, while the politicos idled themselves with gauging his clout, and anthropologists stupidly wrangled over whether his feet were hyperevolute or atavistic, the possessor of those nether extremities pedipulated all to his greater advantage.

Wise he was to take to the lecture circuit to broaden his base, answering to scattered praise-to-him-singing plants in the audience questions prearranged, while they predicted for him, over coffee or herbal teas once the speech was spoken, a seminal role in humankind’s brighter future. Clearly, the bandwagon effect was operative; those who would openly op­ pose him did so at their increasingly obvious peril. That may be why good and concerned men kept their tongues in their heads and shoes, while a multitude of toadies croaked their support of “footpower.”

Morgan was canny. Give him credit for that. He gave the impression of being unaware of his own following, and said nothing publicly to encourage them. But neither did he disassociate himself from them and their boomlet on his behalf. A clever game he played . . . a delicate balance he maintained. And I wondered then if I might not have mis­ judged him . . . thought base a man who was as simple and well-meaning as the Christ one might have mistaken him for . . . the bearer of strange, perhaps divine, powers that 34

begged to be put to use for the edification of the race.

Then Fulb flashed his hand. Revealed what unquestionably was his deeper aim all along. (I could say it was more a compulsion—and not an afterthought as some have since sug­ gested.) He proclaimed himself a born-again Christian. Pub­ licly. On a “Fulbfulhour” tube show with nearly a third of the nation watching that by-now familiar humility which instantly won the credulous. Clever fellow, he aligned himself with no particular church or sect, pleading rather that he was a will-less instrument of God, sent as an ecumenical healer of division, the “Cement of Christ” (his words —I can’t help suggest toejam was the bonding agent), the humble apostle of harmony.

A shoddy performance! But merely a preview of the low circus to follow. For a time, he put aside his polibusnisophical intrigues to descend the sawdust trail in golden sandals. Yes, 24-karat zoris, to be precise . . . one more prop with which to bedazzle the faithful. From there it was but a baby-step to the last, best and least resort of the successful mass pander: faith healing; again he abused his gift.

Morgan healed by touch, placing a bare foot against the ailing part of the afflicted’s anatomy, then closing his eyes and grunting his own brand of mumbo-jumbo. From the hinter­ lands rushed word of the miracles. From Indianopolis and Tulsa and Knoxville poured the testimonials. If Jesus saved, then Fulb cured. Epilepsy, arthritis, tularemia, dropsy, scro­ fula, kuru, cancer, palsy, female disorders—he had a foot in everything.

Rose there of a sudden a seismic wave of popular support, the frenzied crowds rallying to a cause they naively believed they had fashioned for him, which was to heal, to save, to lead. Gallup did record that the barefoot wonder had, less than three years out of total anonymity, zoomed to first in the hearts of his countrymen, distancing such proven campaigners as Billy Graham and the Pope.

35

But all this is history, well known to you. How the faithful would have made him president, made him king. How his modesty dissolved as his need for it passed. How the worst fears of the enlightened few became real virtually overnight as opportunistic money and the power brokers dutifully fell in line. How we all came within the sweep of a machete blade of being under his heel.

Not many know yet what happened at the end. I mean really happened that “tragic” (strange how many still believe it so) day in October when Morgan Fulb came to his shock­ ing end. I do. How? Because I was with him. Not cheek-byjowl, or toe-to-toe, but close by. In his employ.

I had been out of work that previous spring and went to see him about a job. His cement-gray eyes flashed with immediate recognition, and perhaps because we were once acquaintances when he was short of them, or more likely because he derived a certain pleasure out of having witnesses to his former obscurity on his payroll, he took me on and assigned me to the Clipper Division. He was generous enough. I got a healthy salary and the largely titular position of senior marketing con­ sultant for the distribution of Fulbnail Trimmers. (The pro­ duct was referred to in-house generically as “toenail clipper,” but never fingernail, use of the very word being grounds for a single-warning reprimand.)

No, I didn’t crawl to him. Curiousity as much as necessity sent me. I wanted to see what he was really up to. God knows I didn’t need the job that desperately—as I demonstrated nine months later when I was let go in the inevitable corporate con­ vulsions that follow the demise of strong top man, and found other employment in nine days’ time.

All this is to digress. Back to Fulb. Back to that fateful October 17 when the bottom suddenly dropped out of Fulbism as an ism, and the life trickled red out of the man who ismed it. I realize there are those who out of blind loyalty or obstinacy will refuse to believe what I say. By them I will be branded the worst kind of slanderer. And yet I relate it as it 56

was, or as I saw it from not far off. So brace yourselves.

I submit that Morgan Fulb was not in full control of his feet. Moreover, I contend that he had been having trouble with them for at least a year before the end. Fulb and his feet, quite simply, had grown apart. All the while, within the spatial integrity of Fulb’s integument, there dwelt two con­ sciousnesses, two intelligences, two wills. You doubt it? Rarely do we find any great degree of commonality between two men, let alone a man and a woman. So why suppose that Fulb and his feet managed any better? Were any different?

Yes, what we had was a classic dualism as old as Western civilization. Fulb the man—the mind, what have you—lusted for the metaphysical while his feet hankered after the mathe­ matical. Mystic idealism going one-on-one with empirical ra­ tionalism. The hard desire to dominate men versus an abstract interest in analytic number theory.

In the beginning, and long afterward, they needed one another to survive, to develop, eventually to thrive. They coexisted within a common shell in a state of truce imposed on them by a world that few of us find kind or sympathetic.

Fulb controlled perhaps 90 percent of the body’s weight and extension; his feet (we may logically assume) harbored their common genius. But then symbiosis is a sometime thing with our species.

Throughout his rise, Fulb periodically hired himself (more accurately his feet, because he took no active part in pro­ ceedings that were beyond his interest and doubtlessly beyond his ken as well) out to universities and think tanks to help solve math problems troubling the sages. Doing so served two pur­ poses. It was both a sop to his feet and an aid to his flacks in varnishing the servant-to-man image. But Morgan must have done so grudgingly. He must have known more keenly than most that the survival of one house decreed one master.

Now we come to the core of the boil. To the festering that was there all along and only erupted in the humidity of suc­ 37

cess. Towards the end, Morgan took to denying his feet their requisite rarified nourishment. Increasingly, he begged off meetings with the bearded savants who came to cast their knotty problems at his feet. It was foolish error. Thus de­ prived, his feet retaliated by feigning sleep or stupor when Fulb most depended on them —in a seance or, when on camera, he was full in the act of some legerdepied.

Peevishly, Morgan resorted to disciplinary action, such as donning a pair of custom-made oxfords a size too small and sprinting over gravel beds. Or overtrimming his nails, whit­ tling them down to the quick and ocassionally paring off a sliver of flesh for spite . . . for which he was rewarded with a bumper crop of ingrown toenails. Such mutually Pyrrhic victories were piled one on another, until peace had no price.

Hostilities mounted right into the lovely Gotham autumn Sunday. Arrangements made months in advance promised a contingent of algebraists from MIT and Drexel a consultation with Fulb, at the Drake, at 1p.m. But the demands on Fulb’s time were heavy. His career was in its final spurt. And the toobusy man subsequently reserved the very same hour for a capacity crowd of Fulbites in the Garden —an event to be televised live and thereby test for the first time whether the New Creed could best the NFL. Fulb slipped out of his hotel an hour before the professors’ arrival. He hailed a hack. Told the cabbie in an ever-soslightly theatrical voice to “drive around for awhile.” Fulb’s feet were not fooled. They knew who was to be stood up. They knew and they balked in a way that would let the man they carried know they knew.

Pain shot through Fulb’s legs when he was still six blocks from the Garden, building in intensity with every tick of the meter. Upon arrival, Fulb had to be helped out of the cab, an associate supporting him under each shoulder. Proceed, his stout heart foolishly told him. He did, even when he nearly lost consciousness from the needle-like stabs in his calfs that 38

immediately presaged his appearance before the cameras.

Talk about your vainglory! Sure enough, his feet rebelled, deserted him, cut off the juice that made him more than just another featherless biped.

He cut a ridiculous figure that night, pathetic alongside the standards he had previously set for himself. He stammered.

He groped. He mouthed the stalest platitudes. Even some of the faithful must have seen cause for second thoughts.

Fulb left the Garden in a mighty rage. Attempts by aides to comfort him, reassure him that everyone had bad days and all was retrievable he dismissed with an angry sweep of his hand. He wanted silence, and he wanted to be left alone.

Their instructions on future projects he would issue Monday noon.

Morgan Fulb was not in the Big Apple to direct them on the morrow. Instead, he slipped away in the dead of night to La Guardia, where with an economy of words he roused his standby pilot from slumber and ordered him to fly the Fulb jet to the Coast.

We can guess what thoughts owned him in the ink of 37,000 feet, while the curved continent slid by beneath him. His maiden disgrace burned freshly in his mind. It could happen again. It would happen again . . . unless he kowtowed to his feet, pampered their every whim. And where would that leave htm?\ A junior partner, a slave to another will. While his own enterprises, now so close to full realization, stood to wither from neglect, and leave him in that most miserable condition of being a media has-been.

The prospect fanned his anger. Nay, fueled it. He could think of nothing other than more betrayals—more recurrences of cold feet at crucial moments now that the battle had been joined. That couldn’t be. He wouldn’t let it be. One house could not tolerate three masters. Someone had to go—he or they. And it could not, would not, be he, now that a world, maybe the world, was nearly in his clutch. Fulb’s passion 39

flared. He had to free himself. No half measures would do. No more foot massages. No trips to the podiatrist for Novacain. No more accommodations, no concessions of any kind. The breaking point was now.

The plane began its descent into Burbank, and Fulb stomped off to his private head, where he first voided himself, then plunged his feet into the unflushed bowl. He laughed harshly, some would say hysterically. And it came to him.

What would have to be done. He knew.

Scarcely had his plane touched down than he was off, alone in his black Lincoln, driving west under the early morning stars. He knew.

Miles before Malibu he looked down at the right foot steadi­ ly depressing the acclerator. The sight brought sudden and silent rictal laughter, as though they could hear but not see.

The irony was delicious. “Speeding itself to its own destruc­ tion,” he said aloud. He knew.

The Pacific surf surged in with mournful rhythm as Fulb reached his deserted beach home with its 134 storm panes looking fifty feet down on the vagrant foam. He hurried from the car to his front door with singleness of purpose. He knew.

From the walls of his study he hauled down the gleaming machete—-a gift from a cane-cutting admirer in Cuba. With Satanic laughter he threw open his French windows and step­ ped out to the edge of the palisade that boldly separated his property from the sea’s. It was a perfect dawn, calm as must have been that first glorious morning after the waters were quieted, but the insensate Fulb noticed it not, so consumed with vengeance was he. By now his face wore a gargoyle’s snarl. He threw himself to the ground at the cliffs edge.

He knew.

As the gleaming blade slowly ascended, Fulb drew his legs in, until the objects of his hatred passed into harm’s way and ' the keen steel suddenly reversed itself into an accelerating downward arc. It fell with the lethal speed of a guillotine.

40

Thwock! He cried in joy, not pain. The right arm rose rapidly.

Thwock! Then, in a truly Herculean gesture, Morgan seized the two free forms in rapid sequence and flung them into the Pacific swell. “An end to tyranny,” he bellowed. “Freedom now!”

The freedom was short-lived. Obviously, Fulb had not thought his stratagem through —not with the thoroughness one would have supposed from a man who was not a stranger to the rational and the possible. Lacking feet, he was naturally without the preferred means of locomotion to return to the house and phone for the medical help necessary to stop his hemorrhaging.

To his credit, he tried. Clasped both hands over the stumps of his tibiae and attempted to roll back inside, hoop fashion.

But he either overestimated his strength or underestimated the distance. In short, he came up short.

The cleaning woman found him that afternoon just inside the French doors, face down on his white shag rug, a perpen­ dicular rise on the plane from an elliptical crimson base that measured thirty-eight inches across at its widest. There were screams. Neighbors aroused. Tardy calls for ambulance and doctor. Familiar alarms, and so futile.

Word girdled the globe with electronic speed to stun folks with sketchy details of the bizarre and sudden passing. It was hard to accept. Morgan Fulb, Fabulous Fulb, Mighty Morgan of the Magic Feet, was gone. Mercifully, I might add as a humanist’s postscript.

The rest is history. No purpose is served by my comment­ ing on the laments and disputes that followed the “prophet’s” strange exit. As for the Fulbite’s charge that it was not a suicide but a CIA-contrived assassination, I resist the cynic’s temptation to ask, since when did that agency ever do anything right? I would suggest to the faithful, however, that none of us is unaware of the benefits persecution and martyr­ dom bring a fledgling creed—one already sunk to schism, 41

with its toe idolaters, heel worshippers and arch supporters.

Yes, we live in the post-Fulbian age. Already the man has been reduced to joke status in some select circles. And once more the many have seen hope snatched from their hearts and video sets.

For yet others, Morgan Fulb is a receding blur in memory who, ironically, never made the cover of TV Guide, is credited with virtues he never had and accused of crimes he never committed, as the embroiderers of legend busy themselves with their needles. Might we not expect in a generation or two that youths at the table will exchange knowing grins and elbow nudges as their elders recall over Sunday breakfasts the doings of Morgan? Might we not anticipate that a century hence the majority of folks will doubt there was a Fulb at all?

There is a moral here worth our minding. All men are mortal and prone to error. Fulb was of common clay, and for all his gifts, he was destined to abuse them. Thus, our place in nature is never secure —if, indeed, we have a place. Fulb proved that.

But, you say, what of his feet? To which I shrug and only say, they were, and still may be, drifting somewhere out there in the primordial womb. Waiting.

42

It will astonish you to know that every periodical publishing so-called serious fiction in this great land of ours had the op­ portunity to give Fulb word-life and declined to do so. How do I account for that? How do you account for that? How do they account for that? No, there is no reasonable explanation.

Certainly history shows us that some are in harmony with their times, able to anticipate the next fickle turn in public taste, the whim of tomorrow. They are fortunate, and who’s to blame them if they make the most of their pedestrian talent? What others of longer vision have to say falls on clogged ears, is discounted as strange or irrelevant.

So was it ever. The Mrs. Trollopes and Mr. Goncharovs bask in attention and reap their earthly rewards. The Blakes and Stendahls must suffer the neglect of their contemporaries and die with only hope that their genius will not perish with them. Unfair, yes. Inevitable, most assuredly.

Modesty prevents me from even suggesting I might be a vic­ tim of this ageless injustice. But you are no fool. I sensed that early. What matter that Playboy and Redbook find me not to their jaded palates? Ever thankful for small favors, I do not 43

consider them the last word. Other arbiters will come along, and their judgments will differ. Just as one day the parable will come back into fashion.

44

The postscript to “Fulb” was unseemly, I know. Why must I do such things? Why must I always defend myself? What in­ ner wound makes me rattle so?

Perhaps it’s the absence of him. The one who left. The one who me made a hemiorphan at that critical time. Yes. My father. Cicero himself. Absolve him if you will, call it the eccentricity of the inbred if you must, but I find it impossi­ ble to forgive him. He never deserved me, or parenthood, for that matter. Just managed to blunder into it once, no doubt by the purest chance.

As I think back on the early years, I’m not really sure he knew he had a son. I got no kisses, no fondling; he tendered me no kindnesses. In fact, that self-centered man scarcely ever showed any recognition at all when I chanced to stray through his field of vision. Seemed more puzzled, really, as if some neighbor’s urchin had wandered into his house through a door carelessly left open. That was dear old Dad. I remember him as a smallish man with bespectacled, lit­ tle blue eyes and a tonsured-by-nature dome bent over an open volume in his book-walled study—a room put off-limits 45

to me. Mother enforced it. He was “doing his work,” you see, which was not work at all, but only the airiest kind of men­ tal self-abuse by this self-professed “philosopher-scholar.”

(Money in more-than-adequate amounts flowed in through returns on Mother’s investments, not from his non-existent salary checks.)

“A few men have higher callings and they must not turn a deaf ear,” he would lecture Mother when she suggested in her gentle way that he really should be “out in the world.”

Such a high opinion of himself had Cicero Uteris. It was plain to me even as a child that he thought himself superior to Mother. He read books, don’t you know. Reflected a great deal. Fussed with the long-dead Arnold on how religion and science might be reconciled and Western civilization thereby saved. Mother couldn’t care less.

The breach between my parents widened as the years passed, until there were two separate and distant camps residing in our oversized Brentwood home. It was all Dad’s doings. He cut himself off from us in favor of his library, nursing a grudge against Mother, convinced that she had somehow failed him. Hadn’t this Anglican-Episcopalian of­ fered my mother, a lowly Quaker, the chance to accompany him to higher realms? So what if she brought greater finan­ cial resources than he to their union! (Even then I recognized the wine of sour grapes.)

Eliot was his poet. Newman a man who might be on to something. Very High Church. Very. For a while he even flirted with Rome, seduced by the Missal, enamored of chant and Chesterton, only to be put off eventually by its gore in art . . . bleeding hearts exposed and all that. Not to mention an Irishman in every pew.

A pilgrim still, he decided there was no way to go but up.

Which actually took him east, to the Self Realization Fellowship Restaurant in Hollywood, where he was able to discuss, over noon mushroomburgers, his atman with 46

screwballs of like persuasion. His attachment to this religion of the East proved temporary, however. You see, he turned up mildly allergic to mushrooms and eggs—two staples among the non-flesh-eating followers of Paramahansa Yogananda.

So it was goodbye to Brahma and all that.

No, I’m not being quite fair to my father. I shouldn’t be ridiculing his spiritual odyssey this way. There was another side to him, which only added to his complexity. The em­ piricist. The disciple of Hume and Whitehead pursuing nonmetaphysical truth with a clear head. Inquiring into all disciplines for possible undiscovered areas of common agree­ ment that awaited a synthesizer . . . perhaps himself. A failure. His research was too desultory, too shallow, and as an amateur he did not have the same access to the expanding pool of information that better-connected and credentialed academics had.

I know for a time the chemistry of proteins engaged his in­ terest. Then he moved on to determining an economic way of harnessing sunlight as a lasting source of energy. Still later he launched himself into a two-year study of time, reading every thing he could find written on the dimension, coming to the conclusion he could not prove that time was circular, rather than linear, and precisely at “that” point in the next cycle of the pulsating universe he would be at his desk discovering the same truth he could not prove.

I know all this from browsing through his characteristically incomplete files and notes after he left us. Left for where?

Mexico, we have every reason to believe. Following the 1946 discovery of Bonampak in Chiapas, father threw himself in­ to a furious study of Meso-American cultures, devouring any and all documents he could lay his hands on relating to the subject. He read and re-read Sahagun and Prescott and Stephens and J.S. Eric Thompson and the rest, until he had convinced himself that the Bishop Diego de Landa had not burned the Mayan literature as he claimed in his Relation de 47

las Casas de Yucatan, but, being too much a scholar to com­ mit so heinous an act, had instead secreted the documents in one of the then-known Mayan cities to circumvent the Church. And all that knowledge lay moldering under some corbeled arch in the emerald-green tangle of Yucatan, awaiting the dedicated man with the grit to find it. Guess who old Kickeroney thought that was?

One spring morning in ‘48, Mother and I came down to breakfast to find no gray-fringed head bent over a half­ grapefruit, no practiced hand turning pages in a calf-bound book. Only a note on his plate, which read: “Off to find the codices. Will write. Cicero/’ He never wrote. He never came back. Though Mother hired several men to go down and find him, the only report of any remote validity was that he had been seen by a roving Lacandoon in the autumn of ‘49 wandering in the vicinity of Xuactun dressed in a jaguar skin.

Mother took it very hard. Their relationship had not been a happy one; nevertheless, Mother was devoted to the idea of marriage, and remained faithful to him to the end, always clinging to the hope that he would return. In success or failure, it didn’t matter to her. She was that kind of woman.

And what of me? For all intents and purposes fatherless even before Bonampak? I would lie if I didn’t admit to a feel­ ing of loss. While we had never exchanged more than a sentence a week to my recollection, and my visual contact with him was restricted to mealtime or an occasional stare when we simultaneously sought the same bathroom to answer nature’s urgings, a void grew inside of me.

I was eleven at the time he left, close on the ordeal of puberty, when the mere presence of a father would have helped. But he was not there. Except as a burdensome memory, and as a source of unwarranted guilt on my part that my accidental conception and birth had somehow dashed his 48

career hopes. At that age, one is eager to borrow guilts to sup­ plement one’s own meager hoard.

So do you see why filial respect is not within me, and why the delinquent Cicero didn’t deserve it anyway? I bluntly say, to hell with him! May his bones dissolve in some obscure cenote, less than a league away from a lost codex.

49

Since I was now the man of the house, I resolved to make things as easy as I could for Mother. Restore in her some faith in the sex that had wronged her. I don’t believe I’m bragging when I say I was a near-perfect boy. I avoided mischief and mischief-makers. Which resulted in my making very few friends. This didn’t bother me, really, because I preferred assisting in the maintenance of the household and putting in long hours on my lessons within the dim sanctuary that had lately been my father’s study.

Only once did I stray from the straight and narrow, and, as is not unusual with one-time offenders, I was caught and punished. Way out of proportion to my offense, I might add.

I had just turned fourteen and picked up a certain itch to be abroad in the land. It wasn’t very far abroad. Just a block east and one down toward San Vicente Boulevard, on which block resided two schoolmates with whom I fell, or slid, or lapsed, into an unlikely association. Bob Skinder was a promising candidate for the varsity 440 relay squad. Cooch Laboy was second-string quarterback on the freshman football team.

Neither was of a temperament suited to mine, and I marvel 50

now that we could ever have become even temporary com­ panions. (I deliberately draw the line at calling them friends, and did even then. There’s only one I could ever truly call friend—the subject of a sad story that I will recount later.)

Yet Bob and Cooch and I had one thing in common: a budding fascination with the female body, post-pubertal, preferably naked, though we were willing to make do with most any stage of undress. How did we satisfy this notunnatural lust? The words stick in my throat and prick me red even now. On the other hand, nothing is served by hiding the truth, however painful.

By nocturnal spying, that’s how! By staring through un­ curtained windows and undrawn blinds. Peering into bed­ rooms and bathrooms and parlors from freshly watered rose gardens and untrimmed stands of hostile pyracantha. Yep, a little pack of Peeping Toms!

Skinder and Cooch often went on evening forays without me. They considered me a liability. For one thing, I was naturally more timid than they. For another, I didn’t have their legs. I was always the last one to crowd up to the win­ dow, the last one to leave when we had to run for it, a dis­ tant third when sprinting up a darkened street, away from the shouts of alarm and the slamming of doors. Moreover, Skinder and Cooch always seemed to have better luck without me. They would bring back reports of seeing young women stripped for their baths, or watching the middle-aged but well-endowed Mrs. Coleman knitting bare-breasted in front of a roaring fire, the flamelight making the vision all the more alluring. All this would ignite in me the urge to be with them, and they would make me beg for the date of the next night’s prowl.

I remained something of a jinx. As a trio, we never saw anything sexier than some fifty-year-old guy seated on a sofa, his hands cupped under the slack breasts of his wife who sat on the floor between his legs in her slip —the both of them 51

gawking at the luminous glow of Merv Griffin interviewing some Las Vegas commedienne. Big racy deal!

Thus it went for the fleeting three months of a boy’s late summer. Then Marge Ryskind moved into the neighborhood, at the end of my street, a shapely girl, sixteen, bulging into womanhood. She quickly showed her disdain for us—her new and younger admirers. All of which made her target number one on our night-time raids . . . for a short while. It soon struck me that the potential pleasures were too risky. And after one particular half-hour vigil, during which we watched her and her parents and her older brother, Ted, eating spaghetti, I called it quits. She lived only four doors from my house, and Ted, who played on the UCLA football team, was one of those thick-necked burlies.

Yet I was to be undone all the same. Thanks to Bob Skinder, who became infatuated with Miss Ryskind to the point of not even wanting to share her with Cooch. Many an evening he spent skulking alone in the back and side yards of the Ryskind property just to see his paramour brush her teeth, or squeeze her blackheads, all the while jacking the odds up against his continued free run of the territory.

Of course it had to happen. Skinder wasn’t all that bright.

He showed that one moonless night by thrashing around the Ryskind yard (apparently while the entire family was at a movie) and frightening the elderly neighbor, Mrs. MacLamore, who called the police. Bob made a run for it through the backyard and hurdled the fence into the MacLamore property as the prowl cars closed in. Hurdled right into a mesh of chicken wire stretched horizontal to pre­ vent the last of Mrs. MacLamore’s tomatoes from rotting on the ground. They found him sprawled among the moribund Burpee beefsteaks, tangled and torn.

When I returned from the West Los Angeles Library that night, there was a welcoming committee on hand. A sheepish Cooch, a lacerated Skinder, two flint-eyed juvenile officers 52

from the L.A.P.D., and Mother, who appeared utterly unnerved. Cooch and Skinder —my bosom buddies —had fingered me as the mastermind, ringleader of the gang of peepers, reports on which had been accumulating at precinct headquarters. Confronted with such absurd charges, my tongue retreated, almost gagged me. Talk about being in­ timidated. I was too stunned to even defend myself.

Mother wrung her hands and wept. Her worst fears of rais­ ing a fatherless boy were now made fact by the accusations of two hoodlums and the presence of two uniformed clowns who masqueraded as agents of justice. Yep, she had a pervert on her hands. She buckled. Broke down. Pleaded with the morally superior men-of-the-law for advice. She got it . . . a detailed plan for my rehabilitation. The upshot being that I reported to the police station for wall-washing and hedge­ trimming each of twelve successive Saturdays (Cooch and Skinder got off with ten), and that I was sent at the next term to Blackridge Military Academy—a fate spared my moredeserving companions.

The brief exile marked the first and last rupture in mutual trust between Mother and me. She came to rue the decision as much as I when she withdrew me four months later, a blub­ bering and broken version of my former self, having been reduced to that pitiable state by a handpicked cadre of sadists dedicated to grooming their outcast charges for careers as in­ fantry lieutenants, homicide suspects and war criminals. For me it was a case of never really knowing whom to fear more— my mentors/tormentors or my fellow cadets. Don’t ask for a day-by-day account of the tortures that befell me. My memory mercifully blots out the details of those days of rods and khaki; all that rem ains is a generalized and semi-dormant paranoia that can be suddenly activated by the mere sight of a uniform.

I suppose I have Pop Uteris to thank for that, too.

53

That confession of youthful error brings a smile to your face. You think you now know what makes me tick. Go slowly.

You don’t have enough information to draw any valid con­ clusions yet. I am not the shrinking violet, candy-assed, limpwristed frequenter of teas for the advancement of genteel culture you have me pegged for. My interests do not stop with moral philosophy, literature and voyeurism. Indeed, I can claim as rightly as anyone that there is the vestige of a Renaissance man within me.

It will perhaps surprise you to know that I am a sports fan.

No, don’t jump to any premature conclusions again. I am not one of those engineer-types who wastes his weekends before the tube deluding himself into believing he is seeing history made on the gridiron, only to come back for more and watch Monday-night mismatches that edify no one.

Don’t get so defensive! We are in this together, and you would do well to hear me out. Now, pause to reflect on this and give me your honest answer: After the second month of the season has passed, doesn’t the charm of football wear thin?

Don’t you begin to see the essential oafishness of the game — 54

the circumscribed possibilities imposed on it by the rules? The shortcomings dictated by its linear nature? The absence of true finesse and strategy in the highest sense?

There are fools loose in the land who would have you believe that football is somehow an intellectual pastime— en­ joyed even from the armchair—to smugly justify their own entrenchment in the solid middle class. The late sage of McGill, in his misguided worship of the electronic age, saw football as being in close agreement “with the new needs of decentralized team play,” while its chief rival, baseball, with its fixed positions and delegated specialist jobs, is branded a relic of a now-passed mechanical age.

Other sciolists have come forth to spread similar nonsense.

One has written in an allegedly prestigious journal that foot­ ball is a superbly structured game, praising it for its “con­ tinuing narrative,” while damning baseball for its “episodic nature.” This gentleman also found baseball “unfair” because it was possible to load the bases and realize no reward in score for it; football, on the other hand, is credited with fairness because advantages are gained with each yard advance of the pigskin. And what does this imbecile conclude? That baseball is an antiquated outgrowth of nascent capitalism, while foot­ ball is very much “with it” as a manifestation of a mature capitalism clothed in reason and corporate respectability.

What a lot of poppycock!

Football is to baseball as checkers is to chess!

I realize saying so goes against the prejudices of the modem sports fanatic. But the analogy is apt. First of all, football is locked into time, the victim of a clock, which predetermines what is done at various points in the duration of a closed con­ tinuum (e.g., “running out the clock”). Moreover, the out­ comes of games are likely as not determined well in advance of the closing gun, with one team well ahead of the other, which has the effect of inducing early boredom in those who see in a good and close contest a reason for living. Conversely, 55

baseball is an open-end affair, comfortable with time. Yes, it has a nine-inning duration (barring a tie), but those nine innings are not nagged by the tickings of a clock, and may be played out rapidly or leisurely as befits the team or teams. The cliche that the game is never over until the last out is no less true for being a cliche. Conceivably, one could go into the bottom of the ninth trailing in a 12 to 0 laugher and still achieve a come-from-behind victory.

Upon close examination one finds additional evidence of football’s innate imperfection. It is in a constant state of flux, having yet to find its own level. The endless formations that have come and gone —the short punt, the single wing, the double wing, the T, the split T, the I, the Wishbone, the Veer, etc. Each is bom, then a defense for it comes into being, then they pass together into oblivion or survive in stalemate.

For a while the eleven men played both offense and defense.

Then came a spree of platooning, then back to limited substitution, then back to an offensive and defensive team again where narrow “specialists” are called upon (a mirror to our demeaning age, no?) to perform the most simpleminded task that demands little more than an exercise of Neanderthal brawn. Yes, that’s what I said, and I stick to it.

The flaws in the idea of football, in its very conception, are evident in the endless tinkering with its rules. What is a penalty one year, the next is not. Should a defensive lineman be allowed to use his hands or not? Can the punting team ground the ball inside the opponents’ five-yard line or can it not? One-point conversions? Two point-conversions? Where should the goalposts really be placed? Where is the ball to be put in play after a missed field goal? When is a fumble a fum­ ble, and when is it a muff? And sq on.

Not so baseball, which has the integrity of an a priori truth . . . the near-perfection of a natural law in operation.

The rules governing its play need not be changed each season.

It shares with the real and the best of our universe a reassur­ 56

ing symmetry. There is no such idiotic thing as “ball control.”

Each team has twenty-seven (the cube of the divine number three, eh?) outs to record. Both on offense and defense. In other words, the players (two times the square of three) begin, proceed and end the contest on a level of parity over nine innings (down to the beautiful square of three). Each man has his chance at the plate, alone with himself and his God, awaiting the fastball, scroogie or slider that another will attempt to throw by him. He is set far apart from the poor offensive guard who must, under no circumstances, catch a pass, or the running back on the power sweep who relies on his blockers to clear the way. He has a range of opportunities denied most athletes (should we stop there?), and he succeeds or fails at them as an individual, quite often alone, with only an ash club or a leather glove to aid him.

No wonder the game should be thought, correctly, so American. It is as American as freedom. Truly a marvelous conception, not derivative, and its coming into being in the cerebrum of its discoverer must have approached that same sudden and comprehensive grasp of the whole as Mr. Newton’s insight into the ways of matter in motion. No, I do not think I exaggerate. Think on it. This is not a game where two squads facing opposite goals undergo all sorts of drudgery to drive or throw or kick a puck or bird or ball to the op­ ponents’ line, net, zone, basket, what have you. No, it does not share the qualitative sameness of football, basketball, hockey, tennis, badminton, water polo and soccer (a most peculiar source of spectator pleasure, surpassed for raw ex­ citement only by watching snails mate). Rather, it has an essence of its own, a place for the static moment before the graceful movement, a continuous unfolding of strategy upon counter strategy, a range of possibilities of wondrous intricacy, an open-endedness in which the apotheosis of the drama becomes a hard white sphere receding from sight and soar­ ing into the distant heavens with, at least theoretically, should 57

the ultimate slugger meet square a Nolan Ryan fastball, oneeighth of the Newtonian universe to course through, loose in space, unbound by time. Certainly the existence of baseball is the only positive proof we have for the existence of God. Now you begin to see the light. How you have been had once more by the slick hawkers of novelty—whatever is insub­ stantial, momentary. So subtle are the promotional methods employed by the manipulators of the various media that one’s very manhood is at stake. Self-esteem, we are to believe, is to be measured in direct proportion to the number of weekend hours spent before a goggle box watching grunting louts break each other’s bones for the dear old Colts or Bears or Rams or some such adopted totem.

I sense a blush on your face and the start of a smirk which says that you do, indeed, see through me, that you need not apologize for your preferences to the likes of me. You think it all fits. I’m one of those bitter idlers in the great race to perfection. A mama’s boy with an accountant’s mind. An anachronism who should be wearing the woolen knickers once worn by his erstwhile heroes of the diamond.

You are entitled to your opinion. Particularly when de­ fending yourself. But I admit to no more than being opposed to brutishness in all its guises. That I am no worshipper of speed per se. That chess and ballet are more to my liking than pinochle and polkas.

As a postscript, I might also add that I played the game.

Yes. That’s right. Little old spindly me! All 139 adolescent pounds of me spread over the then five-feet, eight-inch ex­ tension of me. Astonishing, yes, but true. Second base.

Good glove and stroker of line drives. In high school for the Cardinals, on summer Sundays in American Legion games in the Sawtelle district. And we didn’t play a bad brand of ball, either. I hit consistently around the .275 mark and fielded my position more than adequately.

Granted, my physical gifts were not much, but the remark­ 58

able thing about baseball is that the mind can compensate for shortages of strength and sinew. By analyzing in advance the various possible eventualities before a given pitch is thrown and assigning them probability values, by rationally assessing the course of the unplayed portion of the game by what has gone before, one can, in short, play over one’s head by using one’s head.

Oh, the memories of it! Those summer afternoons with the sharp scent of resin and spike-raised dust in the air. The in­ tensity of the grass’s green, the white gleam of the fresh uniforms and the sweet sibilance of a ball well hit or thrown.

The hand-eye coordination that comes unthinkingly when fielding cleanly the short hop. The bone-hard feel of the handle-shaved bat in your grip when you get the gift of a waist-high fastball. The rifle-crack of the drive hooking safety into the leftfield corner. The sheer poetry of it all!

The great man said that every dog will have his day, and I had mine one hot July afternoon in 1952 when our paperthin Bundy Beavers tangled with the first-place Nisei aggrega­ tion of gifted acrobats led by curve-balling Sam Nakamura.

We weren’t of their caliber, but that day we played them tough, as the saying goes. Down only 1-0 in the ninth when snake-throwing Sam got too fine with two out and walked a pair. I was due up and I walked to the bat rack without looking back and pulled out my H&B Jackie Robinsonautographed 34-inch bottle-bat, half-joyous, half-terrified that there was no one on the bench to pinch hit for me.

I squinted to focus in the bright sun, swishing my bat defen­ sively over home plate. I could be sure he wouldn’t be too fine with me. My knees softened at center stage. The fates of the Beavers and the world had planted themselves on my narrow shoulders that would seemingly swing the last wood. I re­ member Sam. I remember clearly staring out at him, at the slits of his eyes and how he hunched his thick body forward as he took the sign, and the confident smile of a master of the 59

nine-inch ball he held across the red threads—Sam who had given up only one scratch single and now faced the eighth man in the batting order.

He rocked, and the right shoulder retreated in a languid rhythm as the ball disappeared behind his glove and back, then the body sprang easily forward and the arm uncoiled above him.

I saw it coming in at the belt and swung. Three feet in front of me gravity and spin yanked the ball down and out in a sud­ den jerk. I missed it by an embarrassing eighteen inches. The catcher snickered. I heard grumbles from my bench. Sam’s smile became an insulting grin as the ball was thrown back.

I dug in again. The sign seen. The nodding acknowledge­ ment. Nakamura’s body collapsing gracefully in and back, then forward with force, expanding. Same pitch. My knees sank in anticipation. My bat came through on the near-level.

Not close to the sinking ball. Eight inches above the pitch smothered in the dirt.

A sepulchral silence descended over the partial fans in the stands, making more audible the groans from the Beaver dugout. A serene patience smoothed the face of the coppered Buddha gripping the ball.

I knew Sam couldn’t resist going with the breaking ball again. I knew then in the sudden coolness of the dying after­ noon that it was a mistake he was making—that he should have wasted it on the outside or jammed me on the inside with a fast one. I knew as though alerted by what gods there be that he would throw it as he did.

It came in high this time, broke slowly, hung there breasthigh, big as a watermelon. My body had seen it before my mind, and the thick-barrelled bat was already out front to meet it flush. It jumped off the wood. A rope hooking with topspin. Straight to the top of the leftfield fence almost before the fielder could turn in his tracks. A crazy ricochet off the horizontal pipe of the chain link toward centerfield.

60

The vision. There I was, Marcus Uteris, running in a crowd joy amplified out of all reality by the thrumming within my ears. Each stride taken that of a titan among mortals. The in­ side corner of the split-seamed cushion at first but an island stepping stone. The awe on the rooted shortstop’s face the homage due a Zeus.

I went into third knowing my life had reached its zenith then and there; that as I completed a graceful hook slide around the tardy tag my trip should have stopped at that magical moment, become a work in bronze. Never again would life be so sweet, and would I feel such a peace.

You see, not everything has passed me by.

61

To my sex life then. That is what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it? That scabrous side of me from which you hope to suck out the gestalt of my being. Well, you can’t help but give it far more weight than it deserves, because you are a prisoner of your time, just as I am not and never was and steadfastly refuse to be.

But I understand your needs. Explain and classify accord­ ing to the prevailing gospel of the shrinks. Impose the sem­ blance of order on chaos. It is a human failing. And, for my part, I want to hold back nothing—even so personal a mat­ ter of such delicacy—because I want you to know me as best you can. Only then can I expect you to do your best for me.

Very well.- It has not been an ordinary sex life, as you might have guessed. But I will begin by first disappointing you, then, most probably, by surprising you. I am not a homosexual.

Let’s get that out of the way. The male anatomy does not attract me; in fact it offends me. Too angular . . . too Gothic. A surplus of striated muscle stretched too long. And too often within, where reside the soul and heart, struts a selfimposed insensitivity to beauty and the lessons of the senses.

Now to point two and no doubt your scorn. I feel its heat 62

before I commit these words to paper. You may pity me. You may laugh with barracksroom coarseness. And I say to you, have fun at my expense, if you will. But keep an open mind.

Very well. I shall not beat around the bush. I’m probably a virgin —if that word applies to males. Probably a virgin?

Yes, in the customary sense, in that, insofar as one measures such things, my conventional maleness has not entered a vaginal cavity. If that makes me a virgin, then make the most of it. It does not mean I haven’t had heterosexual sex —to resort to that inadequate word. It does not mean that I haven’t loved. In fact, I’ve had sex more than sixty times.

Sixty-three, to be exact. I’ve even loved once . . . possibly twice. By the way, I’ll take the latter to the former every time.

I can sense your puzzlement. You smell a contradiction.

Not at all. It is sex on my refined terms, in my way, and not after the fashion of four-legged beasts. About the uses of the penis . . . I’ve always found the idea of rigid penetration abhorrent. There is something inherently brutish and de­ structive in that blood-gorged muscle on a tear, forcing admission through the soft and not-always-open gates of the vulva. It invades a woman’s privacy and ignores her preferences; and it detracts from a gentleman’s dignity . . . not to mention not being a very pretty sight, either. Elsewhere it has been observed that humans were not constructed for what has become the standard, though, as the sperm-freezers have proven, not the only generative method.

No position of the available few for the non-gymnast works well, and in all participants are pretzelled into ungainly shapes and demeaning attitudes, made to look ridiculous, with limbs cramped and at least one posterior elevated beyond esthetic bounds. No, we were just not made for coitus, and some drastic redesign in the anatomy is in order before it could ever be acceptable to me. (From my reading, I’ve deduced, by the way, that it is next to impossible for the so-called lovers to look lovingly into the other’s face during their coupling—not 63

without risking abnormal wear-and-tear on the vital cervical vertebrae.)

I realize you may have other thoughts on the subject. Then keep them to yourself. Neither one of us will make any con­ verts here.

So then, just how do I achieve my gratification? Yes, of course. Orally, as should any civilized individual. And you can hold back the epithets, please. I’m well-acquainted with them all. Pussy-eater, muff-diver, crotch-cannibal, and so on. I only think of those who so derisively employ them to feel myself vin­ dicated. Lovesex, after all, is acknowledged best when one gives of oneself, and I can conceive of no other act so unselfish, so devoid of exploitation.

I’m not going to elaborate on the mutual pleasures that follow from cunnilingus by itself, fellatio by itself, or the con­ currence of the two. The joys stand on their own. I would, however, pass along to you and the squeamish this brief counsel. With my way there is no risk of unwanted pregnan­ cies. The danger of contracting gonorrhea is virtually nil, since this particular coccus is imperiled by oxygen, and here we are dealing with one of the two intakes of that lifegiving element. As for the Big S, one need only exercise the simple precaution of abstaining when one has an open sore in the mouth. Finally, as I understand venery’s latest and most lethal scourge, AIDS remains a remote risk, and in any case can be avoided through lingual use of a condom.

A last word on the subject. Some find the odors from the cave offensive. Sensory perceptions are relative, certainly. Yet I would argue that those contending scents of musk, ammonia and the countless and original other organic smells mingled in rancid sweetness are the very perfume of life. They suggest shelter, warmth, origins, first causes, mysteries beyond our ken. Indeed, it has always surprised me that Revlon hasn’t seen fit to isolate and synthesize the ingredients as an after­ shave for discriminating males.

64

Enough proselytizing. That’s hardly my purpose here.

You’re after the details of what you would call my love life, and those I promise to give you with my customary candor— though I will do it quickly and deny you some of the titillating embellishments.

I told you I had sixty-three separate sexual contacts. This was with twenty-four different women over a period of twentytwo years, and all of them free of conventional coitus. You perhaps will not be surprised to learn the majority—twenty, to be precise—of them were prostitutes. I’m by nature reti­ cent and by no means predatory, so getting to know women, and then to love (you notice I do not say seduce) them in my gentle way is understandably difficult.

The first was a Tijuana tart. I was twenty-two, and she I would guess by the still gentle swells of her body, no more than sixteen. When I saw that soft brown girl stripped, I fell to my knees before her without thinking, without a plan or know­ ing what to do, drawn to the magic muffin beneath the triangular down as if by a magnet.

A parade of other money-takers followed and I am careful not to belittle them or condemn them for two reasons: I, after all, sought them out; secondly, virtually all understood my dif­ ferent needs and were willing to accommodate them. (And yes, I do dare boast a few were moved to mild rapture!)

The first where love was involved involved Rita. (A one­ sided love, I fear, facing lust unalloyed.) I met her one sunny winter Sunday afternoon in Pasadena when the palm fronds had gold in their green. She was at the Rose Bowl swap meet, selling plaster Cupids with gold clocks inset in their abdomens, the clock hands fixed where the navel should have been; four of them about thirty inches high were left, three with Roman numerals, the odd one with your common Arabic, each at an asking price of $39.95. When I first viewed her among her wares, a tall and stalwart young woman, dusky, with those droop-lidded brown eyes that belong to gypsies and take 65

rather than give ground, I knew I would not escape with anything less than a purchase. Yes, I lingered longer than was necessary, over-examining her clocks, feeling the wild burn of her eyes on me. She knew more of the why behind the strange attraction that pulled us both.

Without looking up, I asked her if she would take $25 for the one with the Arabic numerals. She purred that she would, but only for me. I smiled. She returned it in kind, with a dangerous insinuation in the thick lips spread wide. I melted as my stomach overturned; I knew something had to come of it, that surely some revelation was at hand. Boldly, then, I asked her if she would do me the honor of having dinner with me that evening. She whispered yes through her large teeth as though it were fated, written in the tea leaves, the grooves in my palms, the stars. My hands shook as I took up my Cupid, and I knew a bridge of consequence had been crossed in my life’s journey. I was in love .

That night I took her to Musso and Frank’s for steamed clams. We had wine —a chenin blanc from the Napa region— and my senses were sharpened to absorb her beauty. Nearly as tall as I, well-formed in her substantial thickness, I felt I had met my physical match, the realization of which set my heart to pounding and left my body numb with desire.

I behaved rashly. Went out of my head, really. Asked her to come with me and live with me and be my love and all the pleasures prove, etcetera. She spooned down the last of her spumoni and said, in her voice made to sing the fado, “Why not?” The drive to the apartment I secretly rented just for my infrequent assignations (Mother would never have approved of my needs) was an attenuated, but delicious, torment. My legs were willow wands, my hands trembled over the wheel of my 1948 Nash, my eyes continually sought her languid bulk in the shotgun seat for reassurance. All the steel in me had melted. Ahead lay a rite of passage.

Once inside my lair, neither of us played coy. It was straight 66

to the bedroom, arm in arm. I stripped off my clothes quickly and chucked them into an untidy heap. She disrobed more slowly, wriggling out of her garments with the liquid grace of a giant feline, her dark eyes stalking me. I cowered some, retreated to the edge of the bed, then let myself fall backwards qn the unturned covers, never shifting my gaze from that ample miracle.

Her body was remarkable, and I could scarcely believe my late-beginner’s luck. Every feature, muscle, organ, strand of hair that serviced sensuality was outsized, larger than life. I gaped, watched her peel the black panties over her thick thighs until they collapsed lifeless at her ankles. She stepped out of them taller, more athletic, more formidable. Then she broke into a short run of approach. I recall her in the air, fixed there, frozen above me, a creature of pelvic will.

She landed on my face with a mighty jolt. And I took a vigorous grinding before she stiffened and let out a leash of husky cries befitting an orgastic tigress. I was in awe. She had known! Known about my kink, there in the sunlight as we haggled over a plaster-of-Paris Cupid!

My awakening went abruptly sour. Her satisfaction com­ plete, she rose from my bed stonefaced and methodically gathered up her clothes and put them on. That done, she turned her back and went through the door, and, I feared, out of my life. Without a word. Without caresses. Without reciprocation. Without the least sign of affection. I felt used.

A dildo in human form, employed for the briefest fraction of a forgettable evening.

I didn’t think I’d ever see Rita again. I was wrong. A week later the phone rang. ‘“Are you busy?” asked the urgent con­ tralto voice I remembered so well. I told her I wasn’t. I told her with subdued hope to come over, by all means. Which she did for an encore. No variation at all . . . a performance to be repeated one night every three out of four weeks thereafter over a period of eight months’ time.

67

So it continued, one-sided. I gave of myself and was given nothing in return. Why did I allow myself to be so used is the question you’re compelled to ask. Well, I was still quite naive in boudoir etiquette. And I suppose I was needy, as givers perversely are with takers. But I had also come to love her . . . or at least worship her, despite the way she used me.

We even talked a bit after the second month of our rela­ tionship, and I learned something of this exotic gal with the Amazon’s body. Of her life and her aims and her dreams. She hoped to get into show business. A singer-dancer-musical comedy spot . . . maybe hostess of a TV talkshow. But it was hard going. Musicals weren’t what they used to be, and the studios could always draw on the tried and true when some infrequent vehicle pilfered from Broadway came along.

Doubly hard for a twenty-seven-year-old, Pittsburgh-born woman of Serbian-Turkish-French extraction without the right “industry connections.”

I gave her my sympathy and my face and little else. All she returned was scuttlebutt from the studios and gossip gleaned from the movie magazines. We were wearing down, nearing an end I couldn’t bear to think about.

One week she failed to show. When I tried to call I was informed the phone was disconnected, so I picked on the hirelings of the postal service. They had no forwarding ad­ dress. I panicked. Spent too much money on sleazy private detectives who wasted months dithering and alibiing and theorizing on where Rita might have gone. An expenditure of $28,415 earned the barest shred of evidence that she had left the country, gone to Panama of all places, to take a theatrical job —some nonsense about co-starring in a review with a donkey.

It was over. Finis. Finito. Ended. And I never knowing whether she harbored the smallest degree of affection for me, as a person behind a mouth.

Rita was my first love. Not my last. I wish I could tell you 68

that the second and more meaningful relationship fared better than the first. Not so. Some of us are meant to be denied cer­ tain contents.

My love for Clare (and hers for me, I would still like to think) was a case of delayed reaction by some thirteen years.

She was nothing like Rita, and Mother approved. You see, I had known her in my teens when she was at Marlborough — “quite a school,” as Mother was wont to declare with a hopeful shine in her eyes. We didn't have much use for each other then, when she had braces on her gopher teeth and I was still praying for pubic hair. That we both went to the Episcopal church on Sundays didn’t seem to bring us any closer to­ gether, either. But times change, and so do men and women as they grow older and discover their chains are of similar manufacture.

I met her, remet her, renewed our old acquaintance after fifteen years apart at a Sunday-afternoon chamber-music concert at the Williams Andrews Clark Memorial Library, in­ vitations by virtue of the fact that we’d both migrated, separately and unwittingly, into the catholic fold of the Friends of the UCLA Library. Tartini led off that auspicious day, followed by J.S. Bach and Corelli, with Telemann in his customary clean-up slot, all performed under frescoes ex­ ecuted by Italian artisans, courtesy of blind Montana mining dollars buying status. (But who’s complaining? That bandits become benefactors is entrenched in the American Way, is it not?)

Our eyes met in recognition across the room while a female flautist labored. Clare’s braces were off; my pimples were a plague of the past. We saw and knew instantly the common need that would bind us. Oh, Clare! Blond, lovely, virginal girl!

Suddenly I find myself reluctant to tell you about Clare. It is a private part of my life. Still a source of pain and dis­ grace. . . . And yet, why take such things to the grave?

69

Together again in our late twenties —walking arm in arm to the museum and the Van Gogh exhibit, driving to Caltech for lectures on biochemistry explained, strolling barefoot on Zuma Beach after winter storms had turned and scoured the sands, unearthing coins and shells that glittered and gleamed on the vacant, early-morning strand. All those memories come back in a bittersweet rush that catches and hardens in my throat. Oh, lovely Clare made for me! Why? We really were made for each other. Our strengths and our failings were the same. Sensitivity, shyness, a fondness for poetry and spring wildflowers, a revulsion for cheapness of spirit. For nearly two years we courted, meeting every Friday night and Sunday afternoon for sure, sharing private hopes and seeing as though through a single pair of eyes a loving future we would enjoy together.

I did nothing to her, you understand. Nothing carnal. We were still in the friendship stage, pure and golden, a re­ lationship firmly anchored in two-way trust and respect.

Naturally, I knew that marriage must logically come. But I didn’t rush it. There was my problem. My habit. My amatory style, if you will. I had never told her about it, and, frankly, I dreaded the time when I would have to. I just kept telling myself that I would cross that bridge when it was reached, and I dared hope that she would not reject me when it was— particularly if she would allow me at least one demonstration of my art.

In our twentieth month we became engaged, more at her quiet urging than mine, if I remember correctly. Myself, well, I welcomed it with ninety-five percent of my being, the other five being controlled by my mouth, a twisted id and the knowledge that she wanted children via the usual method of impregnation. Luckily, we did not set a firm date, and I was slowly gathering resolve to tell all. It might have even been that April day . . . .

Shattered. Everything. What we were and what we had 70

built between us and what might have been—including the children (and not a Flavia or a Gaius in the lot!) who would have had their origins in a fashion denied most.

I suggested that Sunday outing. A gusty spring wind had vacuumed the brown from the sky and left my small piece of the world radiant from its dry bath. It was a day to be about.

In nature. In the California pictured in coffee-table books.

We drove north out of the Basin over Interstate 405, bound for Vasquez Rocks, our picnic basket morning-packed with my own sesame-oil-fried chicken thighs, pickled artichoke hearts, her own potato salad garnished with heart-shaped slices of gherkins, and a bottle of Almaden rose. I hummed behind the wheel the best of Vivaldi’s seasons, while she gently massaged the back of my neck in a wifely way. Peace was ours . . . for the moment.

It was still ours when we arrived and discovered to our pleasure that we had the old robbers’ roost practically to our­ selves. It was ours when I parked the Nash and we threaded our way through the sandstone mounds and into a secluded niche between two giant red boulders. It remained ours when we opened the hamper and nibbled at our lunch. An idyll, it was. I recited the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English, forgetting not to short-A sing the terminal Es. She cupped her hands under my chin and told me I was cute and bardic. The joy of that moment!

But my place on the wheel had reached its height, my modest hubris was swollen, and there was no way to go but down. I had noticed the unusual absence of families with acrobatic children who invariably climbed with delight over those fantastic sandstone piles. An off day in the park? Or perhaps it was still too early in the day. Then I heard the ominous approach of a flatulent rumbling. It came closer and closer, beyond the gate that barred automobiles from the park. Motorcycles. Engines of the devil.

The stacatto putts seemed somehow curious, questing.

71

Sweat suddenly prickled my forehead and arms that cool day as I thought of my parked Nash. An invitation to brigands.

The noises circled us, drawing closer with every canyon and crevice probed. I crouched and put my arm around Clare and pulled her back into our dent in the rock. But it was only a matter of time before they found us. No more than ten minutes in all —though it seemed many desperate hours.

The first to spot us was their leader, a stocky rogue with greasy, shoulder-length, streaky-brown hair and teeth that looked as though they belonged in a superannuated ear of diseased sweet corn. He cackled and slobbered at the sight of us, then hailed his lackeys, told them to come right away because he’d found something “useful.” Three more dudes rolled up on their bikes to form a semicircle around us, seal­ ing us against our red-rock prison wall.

I knew what they were, and what they had in mind. I also knew I was no match for them. Not, really, for any one of them. But neither was I going to be found wanting in simple courage, so I stepped forward, standing as broad and tall as I could, and placed myself between them and Clare.

“Leave us alone,” I cried. My arms rose of their own, as though to shield her. This drew nothing but sniggers of the most sinister sort. On cue from the head greaseball, they all debiked and moved toward me. I stood my ground. I warned them I would have the police and the park authorities on them if they so much as touched either one of us. Guffaws.

Like wolves they spread and closed. I swung my fist at the one who seemed their leader. He ducked back and I missed, losing my balance. They charged as one.

Strangely, at least to this man who had never engaged in physical violence even as a child, their fists stunned me more than hurt me. But I couldn’t keep my feet. The blows I had taken in the abdomen left me breathless. I fell.

One of the animals in leather kept his knee on my neck and pinned me there, my face locked to the east so I was forced 72

to view the scum—led by the first who had found us, the long­ haired simian they called Mingo —at their play.

I will not offend you or stain my memories of Clare by detailing what transpired there on that tortured ground. I will not speak of the agony I felt as I lay there helpless under the weight of one ruffian’s leg after another. I will not dignify bar­ barity with a description.

I will tell you that I cried out in the name of decency for them to stop, and that they laughed like deranged hyenas and did not stop. Clare’s shrieks, ear-piercing at first, were a futile goad that left me squirming in the dust, while they each in turn degraded her and themselves. I believe I wept.

So it is all out. The shame of a man who was victimized by rapists. I should have managed somehow. Broken their hold on me and delivered her. But that’s all a pipe dream. Egosalving fantasies fashioned in the night behind the wheel of a car heading nowhere can never edit memory. I am no fighter, and never was, save in dreams that failed.

When they finished their four-part crime, the last lout sta­ tioned atop me kicked me in the ribs as he got to his feet.

Then they headed for their machines, chuckling as they but­ toned their Levis. The heavy boot almost stove in my rib cage, and I emitted a delayed cry of pain, in spite of my determina­ tion to give the outlaws no further satisfaction. I expected Clare, who had long since ceased her screaming, to gather herself together and come to my aid. Comfort me. Succor me.

Instead, she stood and beat the dust out of her rumpled skirt, then turned her back on me and walked away. I never saw her lovely face again. Only the flaxen hair a final time blown straight out on that stout April wind as she receded from my sight forever against the sissy-bar of Mingo’s Harley.

It ended there. My love life, such as it was. Don’t think I don’t know why she did it. I’m no fool. It’s just that I expected more of her—some assertion of the spirit and soul. Under­ standing is not accepting. And some wounds never mend.

73

THE TELEVISION TRILOGY: PART II THE ARCHITECT OF FARR’S FAREWELL BLAST This would be Herbert’s day. He knew that the first mo­ ment he opened his eyes to the gray Los Angeles morning. For one thing, the acne scars that had disfigured him in his youth were not swallowing air to an unsightly purple effect as they usually did. Moreover, he was able to to maneuver his Schick double-edged blade around them without once drawing blood. Auspicious, that.

As he clumsily moved his small round pinkish body out of the shower stall he exclaimed aloud, as though committing his life’s course to one day’s heading: “There’s a limit to a man’s humiliation!” Lifted on an adrenal high, he wasn’t depressed by his bathroom for a change . . . not by the paint peeling around the unshrouded bulb over the soap-spattered mirror, not by the green-with-mildew plastic shower curtain badly torn, not by the six floor tiles cracked —so widely that fungus had come to prosper in the fissures.

Herbert clenched two corners of the thin beige towel with 74

the faintly discernible letters “HMS” stitched at one end and worked it vigorously across his buttocks. “H still shows up good,” he said to no one at all.

He had another towel. A gray one of similar thinness. The “M” was pretty plain to the eye on that one, and so was the lower swing of the “S;” but the “H” had vanished—as if it had never been there. His name could have been Mulford Symes for all that towel told.

Abruptly, Herbert ceased the lateral motion and threw the towel to the floor with great force. “Farr, you’re finished!” he bellowed into the mirror, and with that prophecy made sound, he bounded to his bedroom, moving like an aged mouser after its quarry.

Now his heavy chin rose. His jaws clamped into a lock as he resolutely slid open the door of his wardrobe. There they were: two suits, one a blue serge with a fractured black but­ ton on the left sleeve (not really worth bothering about because it did not show to the audience), a brown herringbone with a too-large lapel slit (the natural result of stuffing too many carnations into an opening never meant to hold carna­ tions), a light, peach-hued bamboo sharkskin sport coat that was a trifle small for him, two pairs of dark slacks, and finally, the object of his affection and Farr’s contempt, his pastel lavender sport coat of the softest cashmere.

Fifteen long years back he had sent his measurements along with $19 to a Hong Kong tailor who advertised himself in the local throwaway as King-Kai of Kowloon. And a few months later he had received the striking garment that would one day precipitate the unholy row.

People noticed that coat. They noticed the over-long, over­ broad tuxedo lapels which extended clear to the waist where, in a rakish flourish, they were loosely engaged by one in a parallel pair of cashmere-covered swivel buttons which passed through the appropriate hole. The large pockets were of the patch variety, and the back was vented deeply on each side 75

so that when he moved there was a considerable amount of eye-catching undulation in the lower third of the garment.

People noticed that coat. They also noticed the not-so common fellow who wore it without noticing the polychro­ matic indentations in a face that otherwise would have been faulted on no other count than being slightly porcine. In it Herbert became a man transformed —self-assured, almost benign, perhaps a bit arrogant. Inside, on the face of the right breast pocket, were stitched in gold thread the letters “HMS.” Unlike the towels, the letters were in good repair, in as fine a condition as they had been when first put there by the skilled hands of King Kai. There were differences between towels and coats that had not escaped Herbert’s observation—differences that pointed to some cosmic plan at work.

The coat had another inside pocket: at the breast, on the left side. This one lacked the letters of ownership. Something was in it. Herbert did not have to look or even feel inside to know what it was. It was a half-filled pouch of Edgeworth pipe tobacco he had put there eight years ago, two weeks before he dropped and shattered his meerschaum pipe on the porcelain of his toilet bowl. “Farewell to a foppish habit,” Herbert said at the time, gazing down at the shards of clay.

The tobacco remained in the pocket to counterbalance the weight of his wallet.

Herbert carefully took the cashmere coat down from its contoured hanger and defiantly slipped it on, but not without experiencing the familiar unhinging of the knees, the lightness in the head. Nevertheless, it was on, and the first move in his grand design was done.

With squared shoulders he walked quickly to the kitchen and the teapot. He felt confident now, almost exhilarated.

Chuckling, he reminded himself that a good, strong cup of Murchie’s blend would help keep him steady in the still-distant afternoon when all his resources were to be tested. He was still pouring his tea when he glanced at the calendar over his dirty 76

dishes soaking in the sink. “Incredible!” he gasped. But there it was on the wall before him, ringed in pencil by his own hand. Wednesday, February 6, fell square in the middle of National Children’s Dental Health Week. This precious irony was not lost on the little man, and he laughed unpleasantly.

Tommy Farr was to get his right at the peak of National Children’s Dental Health Week.

It was close to ten when Herbert roused himself from the newspapers which for an hour he had forced himself to read.

“There is damn little time now for procrastinating,” he ad­ monished himself. The show would begin at one and he had to be at the studio well in advance of the others to carry it off.

His hand trembled slightly as he turned the knob to the closet where, stowed away in the far corner, next to the tool kit he had owned for twenty-two years and had only recently used, were fourteen sticks of dynamite wrapped in yet another tat­ tered bath towel. The monogram was completely worn away on this one, meaning it could not be traced to him.

Finding the dynamite was to Symes the greatest stroke of good luck to come his way since he got the coat from King Kai. Contractors had been busy not far from his apartment, blasting out another freeway roadbed that would connect the San Fernando Valley with points west. At first he had been drawn to the project out of curiosity and a sense of civic obligation to oversee the slow breaking-up of some stubborn bedrock. Then he noticed the shed, removed by eighty yards from the sweaty crew, where the dynamite was kept. The en­ tire plan—to the most minute detail—was conceived instantly.

It took Herbert seventeen days to secure it all, one stick squirreled under his shirt each day—save the three Sundays when the men were not working and the shed was doublepadlocked. He pondered making off with all fourteen sticks in one hour of one day, for none of the workmen appeared much concerned with his movements. But that seemed an un­ necessary risk and not at all sporting. Or he could take seven 77

on one day, seven on the next, and show his respect for the principles of bisymmetry; or he could enhance the procedure by snitching over four days three, four, four, and three respec­ tively; or it could be done parabolically, one, two, three, four, three, two, one, giving him two extra sticks for insurance. But why bother? Besides, as Herbert well knew, enterprises of mo­ ment are best kept simple in method.

There followed three months of intensive nocturnal study in the Van Nuys branch of the Los Angeles Public Library on explosives, detonation devices and electrical circuitry. Before the dawn of his plan such subjects had seemed hopelessly abstruse to Herbert, a man who for most of his forty-four years had been more in tune with the king of arts, music. But once committed to his design, the technology posed no real challenge, as is usually the case when will weds mission.

All had built to this apex day. If Herbert’s hands shook as he put the irregular lengths of copper wire into his tool box next to the home-fashioned detonator, they did so impercep­ tibly, and not at all when he carefully unwrapped the towel and, one at a time, placed the sticks in the box, as he had on countless previous dry runs. True, the sight of the shabby towel caused him a vague discomfiture, but he shrugged that off, knowing the process was in irreversible motion. He couldn’t be stopped now!

The bus ride proved nerve-grating. Everyone who boarded the Studio Special seemed to stare, first at him, then at the tool box cradled in his lap; no one admired the coat. To bolster his determination, he closed his eyes to his fellow passengers and dredged up the insult of five month’s standing.

It really required very little dredging, for that humiliation heaped upon him, witnessed by so many of his associates, not to mention Opal, jewel of jewels, was not easily forgotten. He had appeared at his Hammond organ, as was his custom, at seven minutes before one, wearing the same cashmere coat he had worn on so many previous shows. He was seated in his 78

place, sober, confident, ready to provide the prescribed tunes at the prescribed times.

That day Emcee Tommy Farr came shouldering and snort­ ing his way on the set as usual, rearranging the cameramen, chastizing the stage hands for their enduring incompetence, and whining his case to the director, Fred Finkle. On this par­ ticular day Farr pulled up short near the organ, mouth agape.

He glared balefully at Herbert.

“Hey! Yeh, you!” he roared, eyeballs angry coral webs.

Herbert was stunned. What had he done except perform faithfully, without taking even a single sick day in three years, on “Clash by Day?” Maybe he wasn’t a star like Farr, but hadn’t he shared the same stage as Tommy, faced the same rigorous demands of the business? And now this outburst!

Farr spun on his right heel, his face momentarily resem­ bling in color and texture a partially deflated football. “Who is this bastard, anyway? Can anyone tell me? Finkle, com’ere, will ya?” All eyes, including Opal’s, were on Herbert, who shrank in the glare of imminent ridicule.

Fred Finkle, a thin and balding man with deeply furrowed cheeks, slowly walked to stage center. “Yes, Tommy, what is it?”

“Who is that?” Farr pointed without looking at the para­ lyzed Herbert.

“Why, it’s the organist.” Finkle’s inflection suggested the answer was not firm.

“Organist?”

“Yeh, the fellow who plays the accompaniment . . . You know, fanfare, the right answers.” Finkle spoke with more assurance.

“What do ya mean having a goddamn specimen like that on my show? Look at ‘im!” Farr was still pointing at Herbert, though with averted eyes.

Finkle was clearly bewildered.

“Look at the goddamn rag he’s wearing! What, are you try­ 79

ing to torpedo this show? Any more of this shit and you can do it without me. That’s final!” Farr lent the words their customary emphasis by storming off the set in an angular, switch-backed route calculated to force a maximum number of hands to step aside.

Finkle hesitated until the exit was completed, then looked down at the floor away from Herbert. “Symes, isn’t it? Look, please don’t wear that coat anymore . . . wear something else, plain and straight. It’ll be easier on all of us.”

Herbert had never felt more pain. So this was his reward for faithful service? Hadn’t he done his job? Played the in­ troductory bars that brought Tommy Farr on stage? Supplied the fanfare when correct answers were given? Closed the show five days a week with an upbeat melody known to thirty million housewives and who knew how many househusbands?

Hadn’t he dedicated himself and his art toward making “Clash

by Day” America’s favorite daytime gameshow? Show business had been good to him. He had been good to it. They both had been happy.

The only thing Herbert could be grateful for was that the studio audience had not yet been seated to witness his shame.

But Opal had. Opal . . . the first and the only. For two years she had done him in make-up without more than a pleasantry or two passing between them. Then one spring Wednesday, as she was doing his brows, he looked up into her face and daringly said, “Your hair is beautiful, and I want you to go to the movies with me next Saturday.” Opal consented.

An intimacy blossomed.

To the casual eye, this henna-haired, forty-six-year-old, 222-pound widow would have seemed an unlikely candidate for the love of anyone, including Herbert Mulford Symes. But then that is the way of the casual eye —to overlook the real for the spurious ideal; to be diverted by glamor from the greater needs of the human heart.

The joint passion of Herbert and Opal was made flesh in 80

the latter’s rented rooms twice weekly until Fare’s blow-up. To say that Opal became increasingly more distant toward Herbert after his disgrace is only to reveal how fragile are the bonds between human hearts; to ascribe Herbert’s hatred for Tommy Farr simply to the loss of Opal’s affections is to underestimate the man and to overestimate the place of woman. There was also the coat, and the artist hurt in his pride . . . .

“Nuart Studios . . . hey, bud, this is Nuart Studios.”

Herbert reddened at the bus driver’s reminder. He had the uncomfortable feeling the guy had been reading his thoughts.

Hurriedly, he seized his tool box and stepped down from the bus without looking back. Now all trembling had to be be­ hind him.

Herbert consulted his watch: 11:35. Ahead of the game by a few minutes. “Just going in early to check out my organ . . . something’s been wrong with it lately,” Herbert said to the gate guard. The old man passed on the familiar figure with a blink of his rheumy eyes.

Once inside, Herbert worked quickly and skillfully, posi­ tioning the fourteen sticks of dynamite, the detonator and wiring in their predetermined places inside the organ. By 11:46 he was safely in the men’s room, bolted within the stall farthest from the door with his tool box, exactly nine minutes ahead of schedule.

The ease of it all delighted him. Since conceiving the plan, this idle time of waiting for the show to begin worried him most. But now, even the prospect of spending the extra nine minutes perched on the stool failed to ground his rising spirits.

He would still slip in to make-up late and have Faye do him; luckily, it was Opal’s day off, so there would be none of that chilly awkwardness when he was in the chair, and lucky again, he could stow his toolbox in Opal’s locker, to which, though he was now locked from her heart, he retained a key.

Then it was just a matter of hanging deep in the wings and 81

appearing at his organ just before “Clash by Day” went on, after the studio audience was seated. Then it would be too late for anyone —but most notably Tommy Farr—to stop his scheme-in-motion.

Herbert reached deeply into his tool box, under three sheets of sandpaper, and extracted the book he’d packed for this occasion—A Handbook of Mediterranean Cooking, a favorite volume. He read rapidly and with a quickening interest the preparation of filet de boeuf flambe a Lavignonnaise-, he would have to sample it at the first opportunity. Then to stiphado. And on to a chain of spicy dishes he longed to taste.

The salivation ate up one hour of nervous time.

At three to one, Herbert Mulford Symes slid unnoticed onto his little bench before the organ. Perfect. Tommy Farr had his back to him, striding toward the far end of the set, in animated conversation with Finkle. The critical point had been passed. There was no way it could be reversed.

At one straight up, Herbert played the sprightly four bars that accompanied Tommy Farr's cocky strut to midstage and the crescendo of audience applause. Committed.

“A fabulous good afternoon, ladies everywhere\ A hug for you all!”

Farr extended his wide-apart arms forty-five degrees above the horizontal plane as if to gather all daytime America within his never-to-be-closed embrace. “Welcome to ‘Clash by Day,’ the show that pits the mighty against the minion, the haughty against the humble, the celebrity against the unknown citizen in this nation’s favorite game of knowledge. You love it. We love it. And the only ones who don’t love it are the phonies who don’t belong where they are! First off, today’s chief copout is Governor . . . .”

Herbert, his back turned to Farr’s familiar screeching, smiled for reasons of his own. They had nothing to do with the format of “Clash by Day,” the sick brainchild of sardonic producer Marty Hilyer, who Monday through Friday invited 82

politicians, movie and television stars and moons, talk-show regulars, college professors and captains of industry to match wits with seamstresses from Baltimore, cab drivers from Kansas City and building inspectors from the Bronx, selected and pre-tested for their knowledge of the arcane. Should a luminary refuse to appear on “Clash by Day” and vie with a nobody, then his or her name was announced at the opening of each day’s show to join others on the roll of the chickenhearted—targets all for demotic censure.

No, that was not why Symes smiled. He missed the levellers’ world for Burbank and a personal grudge. Farr was his target, and the smile widened as the dinner-jacketed emcee paid much tribute to the show’s remarkably loyal sponsors — sequentially, a toilet bowl cleaner, reducing salon and pre­ pared bake-mix maker. They had been around a long time.

So had Farr. So had the man in the lavender coat, HMS, his ears now partially open to Farr’s recitation of the day’s winner’s prizes (two-weeks’ vacation, all expenses paid, in Chihuahua; 400 boxes of lemon chiffon cake mix; a lifetime’s supply of Blue Boy, etcetera). Herbert always paid close attention to the giveaways, less out of envy than wonder at how a loner like himself could ever realize the full value of a “lifetime supply” of anything. It didn’t pay to be without a companion, an Opal. “. . . meet our challenger for today, Mrs. Reba Gull, a housewife from Elkhart, Indiana!” The voice of his tormen­ tor rose in practiced enthusiasm, and Herbert glanced over his shoulder at a shapeless middle-aged woman in a shapeless print dress.

“Glad to have you with us, Mrs. Gull. I’m sure you know how to play our game, but just to make it official, let me go over the rules. You’re to be matched with a famous American in mental grapple. As the challenger, you get to choose three categories from nine on our master gameboard. Also as challenger, of course, you’re going to get first crack in the first 83

and third frames of our three-round battle to victory. And should you be victorious, you’ll have a chance at our grand prize of $10,000 cash by correctly answering the question put to you by the Clash-by-Day Oracle. One correct answer in twenty seconds’ time. Is all that clear?”

Herbert’s hands fluttered over the keys without depressing a single one, mutely rehearsing the final victory melody Farr would never hear again. This was some kind of a one-of-akind day.

“And what do you think of Southern California, now that you’re out here?” Farr asked as he snaked a French-cuffed arm over Mrs. Gull’s sloping shoulders.

“It certainly is busy and noisy. I wouldn’t want to live here.

It’d wear me to a frazzle.”

Farr chuckled with show-biz tolerance. “Maybe you’re right, Reba. But you just might be surprised how leisurely we live out here. We’re mostly family folks, you know.”

For Herbert, the words occupied time, to no purpose.

“Now it’s time for you to meet your match, Reba Gull.

That’s none other than the distinguished, the honorable, the one and only junior senator from California —now let’s hear it for Rod Noonan!”

Out he came, tall, muscular, showing mostly teeth from the chin up, stylishly coiffed black curls bobbing around the ends of a smile that seemed to project confidence but, upon closer scrutiny, sued for help in the pending contest with an Indiana housewife. He was of the New Frontiersman mold — handsome, personable, educated —but certainly not in the narrow way and to the rarified degree of Marty Hilyer’s ringers. So be it. He would play Hilyer’s sinister game, risk the schoolboy’s humiliation, and still salvage votes with his grace under fire, and, if lose he must, appear to do so for reasons of gallantry.

Herbert played four bars of “California Here I Come,” then looked over his shoulder at the ritual handshakes —Farr with 84

Noonan, Reba Gull with Noonan —then listened to Farr’s urgent baritone that, in its peculiarly happy timbre, praised all contestants, his sponsors, the studio audience, at-home watchers, and himself. But mostly himself. Herbert fumed and quit listening, his fingers caressing King Kai’s cashmere.

Committed, he reminded himself. “. . . and the first choice, Reba —you don’t mind if I call you Reba?—is now yours. Gentlemen, will you bare the board for our lady, our challenger from Mid-America?”

At Farr’s bidding, panels slid back from the nine recessed squares in the greater square of the great game board fixed in the frontal camera’s eye. Millions of folks (including Reba and Rod, but excluding Herbert) read the nine not-unfamiliar categories in that day’s round of America’s favorite game show. Historic Dates, Famous Cosmetics, Old Movies, Guess What, Scientific Milestones, Geographic Oddities, Folks and Strokes, World Logic and Music of the Ages.

“Well, Reba?”

“I think I’ll choose Historic Dates, Old Movies and Scien­ tific Milestones.”

“You understand that you’ve got to beat your opponent by three correct answers in the categories you have selected?

That, as challenger, you get first crack in the initial category, then Senator Noonan goes first, before you lead off again in the last one?”

“I do,” burbled the Hoosier.

“Then we’re on track!” rejoiced Farr, all gusto and get-onwith-it, shoulders rocking to and fro under the form-fitting white coat, neck seeming to stretch vulnerably high out of a powder-blue collar. Then the beloved emcee spun on his heel and leveled a threatening finger on line with Rod Noonan’s chest. “And how about you, Senator? Are you ready to play ‘Clash by Day’—by the rules?”

Noonan beamed bravely, as he might when unfavorable early returns came in on election night. He fingered an errant 85

forelock. “I know the game, Tommy. I’m as ready to play as I’ll ever be.”

Stout applause saluted the popular young senator’s gameness at entering Hilyer’s abattoir. Only Symes seemed untouched by the general emotion. He squirmed on his bench. Never before had a show seemed to drag so. Commit­ ted. He was committed.

“Okay, Reba. Which avenue into knowledge shall we travel first today?”

Mrs. Gull’s vision followed the sweep of Farr’s arm toward the big board, though the quickness of her response suggested a decision previously made: “I think I’ll start with Historic Dates.”

“Historic Dates! Beautiful!” As usual, Farr’s enthusiasm fell just short of the shrill. “You probably stole that one right out of the senator’s mouth!”

Noonan’s smile begged for mercy, but Farr had already turned to face the big board. In the upper-left comer, where Historic Dates had been before, the opaque panel slid back to reveal the first question, which Farr read aloud for the benefit of the blind and the befuddled.

“Okay, then, here we go. The man is Gustavus III, the place is Sweden, the event is the restoration of absolute power by coup d ’etat. The date is? Remember, you have twenty seconds.”

Reba Gull gulped and cleared her throat while her mind worked through some rusty synapses. “Believe that would be August 19, 1772,” she concluded by the eighteenth tick of an unseen clock.

“Why, that’s absolutely right! Round one is yours, Reba!”

For the first time in his six years as organist on the show, Herbert had been caught napping, or, more precisely, wondering about the availability in his local Ralphs’s of fresh pearl onions, called for in his recipe for stiphado. He was therefore exactly 1.5 seconds late with the eight-notes that 86

always heralded a one-level leader. Farr, ever the perfec­ tionist, had not missed the lapse, and there ensued one of those confrontations lasting no longer than the most fleeting instant, conducted at long range, momentarily inconclusive, but full of heat to come. The emcee’s glance of daggers took in all, including the wearing of the forbidden coat, the Hong Kong weave of lavender cashmere. Herbert tried a de­ fiant smile that failed miserably. And Tommy Farr quickly turned away, composed, professionally genial, a red tinge to his ear lobes the only sign that a reckoning awaited at show’s end.

Herbert slumped toward his keyboard and cursed himself.

Why? Why should he cringe? Hadn’t he the upper hand? He was committed! Yes . . . but what if Opal had been watching from out of the limelight? Witnessed this second humiliation that was meant as but a warm-up to a third and greater one.

And . . . yet he had the power to prevent its happening. Yes, of course . . . if only this installment of “Clash by Day” wouldn’t drag on so! “. . . you’re in tough today, Senator,” Farr was saying, “nothing like chinning with those lobbyists along the Potomac, is it? You’re up against one of the finest minds in Indiana!”

Noonan ignored the taunt. That was the way he always dealt with hecklers on the stump. “I’ll take Old Movies, Tommy.” The jaw was prognathous.

“Very well, let’s plunge into round two and Old Movies.

Remember, Senator, if you don’t provide us with the correct answer within twenty seconds, the challenger gets a chance at it under the same conditions, and the opportunity to go two up. Understood?”

“Understood.”

Sporadic clapping for the young legislator’s courage fail­ ed to build before Tommy Farr faced the oracle, and a panel slid back to reveal a memory-wrencher.

“The year was 1944. Twentieth Century Fox made it.

87

Carole Landis starred in it, but she wasn’t the only lady to feel those wartime bumps. What was the title of the film?”

Blood drained slowly from Noonan’s ruddy cheeks. It was plain that the question could have been delivered in Urdu and he would have been no worse off for it. The moistening of his lips helped not a whit. His press aides had warned him to stay off the show and take his brief whipping in absentia. But he thought he might have a chance . . . show that he, too, was of the people. The color returned to his face. “ ’Fraid I’ll have to pass on this one, Tommy.”

“The Senator passes,” Farr announced with imperfect neutrality, revealing what any regular watcher of “Clash by Day” already knew, that mucker Marty Hilyer employed only kindred spirits. “That means our little lady from Elkhart can take dead aim on a big lead if she can right our illustrious guest’s wrong! Ready, Reba?”

“Ready, Mr. Farr.”

“Then go! You have twenty seconds.”

Mrs. Gull required only four. “I believe that would be Four Jills in a Jeep.”

Farr consulted the big board for whatever confirmation he may have needed. “Right! You are absolutely right! It was FourJills in aJeep, and you, little lady, have just opened up some daylight!”

Herbert’s familiar fanfare escalated to notes E through B in salute of a second-level leader, mingled with the studio ap­ plause, and then “Clash by Day” cut to its first two-minute commercial break. Herbert did not look back at Farr and the contestants during the interlude. He would never again look back, because he was committed. The woman would soon win, he now knew, and Farr’s doom was all but sealed, if only he kept what felt like liquified nitrogen coursing through his blood vessels. Patience and cool . . . that’s what one needed on any dangerous mission . . . patience and cool.

“Clash by Day” resumed with Farr massaging the dramatic 88

moment the game had reached. “You know, Reba, you can put him away with one more right answer. That’s all it takes and you’ve won the day’s prizes, plus a one-time try to best the CBD Oracle for 10,000 pretty green dollars! How does that grab you?”

“That sounds mighty exciting.”

“Of course the Senator hasn’t done you any favors. He’s left you with Scientific Milestones, and it’s a toughie.”

Mrs. Gull grinned with winning confidence. “Well, I raised four boys to manhood, and that wasn’t exactly easy, neither.”

“I like your spunk, ma’am,” Farr confessed to the seen and unseen masses. “And I wish you well in your twenty seconds of decision.”

Tension in the studio silenced coughs, murmurs and whispers as all eyes followed Farr’s to the tyranny of the big board. The category was bared, Farr read the words carefully and crisply: “The subject is the breaking of the genetic code.

What bacteria, commonly employed in genetic research, led to the discovery of the double helix?”

Mrs. Gull pondered in an electric quiet as Farr stared at her expectantly and Noonan chewed his lower lip. Viewers at home saw only the Marvel of Elkhart in facial closeup, and the sudden dawn that brightened her homely features.

“Why, that would have to be Escherichia colil” And indeed it did.

The applause was peaking. Reba Gull was grinning. Rod Noonan was shuffling his feet and smiling sickly the way good losers do. Tommy Farr was progressing nicely through his shrill tribute to the brilliant lowly: “You have toppled the tall!

You have humbled the haughty! And you have qualified to— ” Just then Herbert reached the climax in his own tribute to a third-level winner, striking the final key, two F sharps above middle C, as a committed man.

Television sets across the land lost their pictures in a 89

flash —18,242,210 of them, according to one reliable rating company. Herbert’s many months in the library had not been wasted.

The time of the explosion was placed by those who make such matters their special interest at exactly 1:14.40, and was so reported in the press. The pattern of destruction was ir­ regular, according to technical investigators who released their findings three weeks after the fact, when public indignation had abated some.

All of the folks in rows A, B and C—save two fortunates in C-34 and C-36 —were deprived of life in a split second. Fif­ teen in row D, seventeen in row E, nine in row F, and a total of sixteen others going back as far row O (the majority being on the left or the side opposite the organ in the small studio auditorium) perished either instantly or within a few hours following the blast. The final tally ran to 104, with that many and a score more injured. Only fourteen members of the audience were not hospitalized.

Nothing, absolutely nothing was found of Senator Rod Noonan, who had unaccountably wandered toward Herbert’s organ instead of retreating to the opposite wings where he was to have made his exit. Mrs. Gull was, perhaps, more for­ tunate, her life instantly terminated in the full flush of victory.

But all this carnage was incidental to Herbert’s design. He would have considered it unpleasant and unnecessary. Yet there was no questioning his vindication: Tommy Farr had been decapitated by a flying foot pedal.

Like most tragedies, the “Clash-by-Day Case” was not without its ironies. Herbert, perched on his stool no more than three feet from the fourteen lethal rods, did not die im­ mediately. (There are, of course, ample precedents for this, reliably reported by combat veterans who have seen the closest to an exploding grenade or shell somehow spared.) Herbert lingered among the living for roughly an hour after the dynamite went off, conscious and talkative for a time, for­ 90

tunately, for that is how his responsibility for the calamity was determined so quickly.

“Is he dead?” Herbert asked of the fireman who trudged toward him through charred debris.

“Who?” the man asked, stopping dead in his tracks, shaken to find a survivor on the wrecked stage.

“Tommy Farr.”

“Yes, if he was up here with you, I’m afraid he is.”

“Good. If there had been a better way, I would like to have tried it. On the whole, though, I think this went off well enough.”

The fireman remained silent as the prone organist calmly contemplated the patch of blue sky showing through the frac­ tured roof. Herbert knew he was in bad shape. Somehow, in all those months of planning, going over and over each detail with meticulous care, he’d never thought he might be plac­ ing himself in any danger. It just hadn’t entered his mind.

“Am I going to die?” he asked.

“You’re in pretty bad shape,” the fireman mumbled.

So he was. But prior to Herbert Mulford Symes’ expiration, he felt a strange peace he knew was denied the great majority of men at their end. A peace that attended those whose lives had not been wasted, those who accomplish what they, con­ sciously and alone, set out to do. Opal would be told. She would hear and be proud. And she would remember . . . .

“Would you fill a last request?” Herbert asked the bewildered fireman just before the end.

“Sure. What is it?”

“Would you have the coat I’m wearing cleaned and sent to Mrs. Opal Shrickler?”

91

Good. Right off you detect the differences between “Fulb” and “Farr.” Not just the substantive differences, but the shifts in technique in the first two-thirds of the Television Trilogy, my altered approach in treating a common major theme. Yes, whereas the diction in “Fulb” was lofty, the exposition in the always-challenging first person, in “Farr” we find more verbal economy, greater discipline overall, and the comfortable omniscience of the third-person narrator. This detachment provides the author certain advantages, not the least of which is greater access to the tool of irony, and certainly irony finds a heavy application in “Farr.” Clearly, the author feels superior to Herbert, while the narrator in “Fulb” never quite convinces us that he is equal to his subject. Indeed, in “Fulb” one is left with the impression (the author’s intent, of course) that the messianic figure is too large for the nameless observercommentator to treat comprehensively, while the teller of “Farr” exudes total control.

Yet we can carry this comparative analysis too far. “Fulb,” after all, is the more ambitious and expansive work, pushing us toward the limits of cognition. “Farr” is a miniature, one 92

odd man given a psychic X-ray, for the skillful artist, just a piece of cake.

But let’s not get sidetracked. And let us not denigrate “Farr” for any fancied shortcomings. For all its apparent simplicity, there is more here than what surfaces from a hasty reading. One may be inclined to view our poor Herbert as merely an insignificant petty fixture in the fulsome world of game-show biz, because the author has cleverly led us to see him thus with the fun he has had at Symes’ expense. Never­ theless, Herbert becomes what many of us never become, as he himself is aware at his life’s close, the master (albeit stunted) of his queer fate (as Morgan Fulb was not, by the way) —not to mention the fate of many others who certainly would not have entrusted him with it had they a choice.

Which brings us to the pith of the parable, does it not? The awe and the terror of knowing Nietzschean impulses dwell in the least of us. No, the deranged overman is not always identifiable—though, always, we can count on him to add his measure of mayhem to the sorry plight of the race. Another case of a man without God, or, balky with his marginal place in nature, blindly asserting his will. Another study in pride and the unlimited destruction it wreaks. Another case of video failing to edify us, but, instead, pandering to our basest natures.

This, of course, binds “Farr” to “Fulb,” as it will them both to the upcoming “Dork” —this commonality in theme that unites the three, makes them separate links in one chain, a commonality that has suggested itself as a subtitle for my Television Trilogy, “Three Studies in Pride.” Whether or not you want to follow through with my working subtitle I leave up to you, for you will be marketing the package, not I. But be advised: “The Architect of Farr’s Farewell Blast” also made the complete circuit of possible outlets, and was received by the dunces who manage print with the same hogheadedness as was “Fulb.” So you know your work is cut out for you.

93

It takes a lonely, lonely man to sing a lonely song. Yes. Very true. And a man who could create Herbert Symes must have at least an atom or two of Herbert Symes within himself. Yes, I admit to that. I admit to even more than that, but not to Symes being me or me Symes, for believing that is grievous error and a failure on your part to appreciate the intricacies of the artistic process. And that is your fault.

Nevertheless, it is my faults that are at issue here, not yours, and I own up to my share, though I’d prefer to call them limitations. Somehow it’s kinder on the self that way. I am a loner as Symes was a loner, and even Fulb was a loner—an affinity between creator and created that shouldn’t have escaped you.

More to the point, I’m anonymous, a walking definition of the word nondescript. I’ve always been. Cast so by cir­ cumstance and temperament, which may well be the creation of circumstance. So that I have become neutral, approaching nothing, occupying a diminishing space. Yet I am the one who sees, who notices . . . the hefty closet butch making eyes at the delicate sylph of a girl in the Marina Del Rey nightspot 94

and not even succeeding to the degree that the overture is recognized by the lusted-after lovely . . . or the bulbbottomed endomorph in his forest-green too-tight Penney’s pants trying to look inconspicuous while at the counter order­ ing two Big Macs, minus cheese. I suffer with him when he drops his change on the floor and realizes he has not carried it off, that anything smacking of savoirfaire has been denied him, that people are laughing at him, and that he will have to bend over to collect his coins, because no one wishes to deny himself the additional laughter the awkward act will provoke.

(I am tempted to come to his rescue and retrieve the change, but that would put me in the spotlight, and probably make him all the more self-conscious.) Yet, in a sense, he is luckier than he will ever know. He has been noticed. Been made human with the genuflection of an eyelid.

Not me. I am never noticed in public. My five feet nine and one half inches and 161 pounds are spread proportionately over an extension that begs not to be noticed. A perfect 36R. Hair nut brown and so round in the cross-section as to be straight as it falls. Cephalic index of 79. Eyes a mottled hazel.

Nose rather small and almost straight, only slightly platyrrhine, but again not enough to be noticed. No distiguishing ticks. Not even a mole that’s visible when I’m decently dressed.

A singular lack of scars. And so forth, and back again to the circular chase of which is cause and which is effect.

As you might have guessed, I am not pushy, assertive. In fact, I am polite and retiring to a fault, nay, to a limitation.

Is that because I’m nondescript? Or am I nondescript because I am non-assertive? Are they separable? Would it be different if I were six-feet-eight, hairlipped and betrothed to a princess of Islam? Speculation to no purpose, really . . . a lost cause.

Some things we are not meant to know.

Much has been made of the pains of loneliness. Of how it is self-destructive. The old saws are too true. Ask me. Cut off as I am from social obligations, strokes from my brothers and 95

sisters, ameliorating entanglements, preoccupations, escapes from self-absorption, I go one-on-one with uninterrupted thought. I live the life known to octogenarians surviving off small pensions in tiny rooms with thin mattresses and naked light bulbs in flea-infested flats on South Broadway.

I overdramatize, you say. Pretend to a tawdriness of life that is not rightly mine. Perhaps. And yet I have known the worst of what they know. The bed to myself and the staring into the early-morning ceiling opaque, the dancing chiaro­ scuro, hoping that my window is not open and that I’m no higher than the ground floor so I will not be tempted.

Let me tell you a secret. Of what it’s like if you do not know what it’s like. How desperate one can become for contact, benchmarks, milestones, occurrences exterior to oneself that prove one is not alone and also punctuate the passage of time.

My mailbox is the central focus of my life now. I approach it each day at 1 p.m. with my blood rushing. I’m transported, in a state of trance. With hope, I turn the little brass key in the slot of my recessed box, and if I’m lucky (and of course I have a good idea when I’ll likely be lucky), something more than “occupant” mail (though I have come to look warmly on even that cool contact) will await me. That something is a bill. A cause for rejoicing. From the gas company or the Department of Water and Power. Or a pre-return-addressed bill that won’t completely show through the transparent envelope window designed for the purpose, courtesy of my inept friends at General Telephone. Though I make no calls except to the local time service, and no one calls me save hungry carpet cleaners and the growing babel of Angelino wrong-numberites, I am subject to a monthly service fee for holding the device captive in my apartment. Fair exchange, to my mind. But I do have one complaint. General Telephone is erratic in its billing, the date of contact unpredictable.

Sometimes as early as the sixteenth of the month, and once, believe it or not, it didn’t arrive until the twenty-third. One 96

would think, with the electronic equipment at their disposal, they could be more consistent.

I can only be thankful that Bank of America is somewhat better run. Yes, I can count on it between the twenty-third and the twenty-sixth. The statement. Need I add that this is the social highlight of the month, for obvious reasons? I’m not asked to merely scrutinize a total, but to make an accounting, effect a balance. It is a dialogue, a request for agreement, an affirmation. As soon as that tan-gray envelope arrives, I rush to my desk and tear it open and throw myself gratefully into duty, first putting the checks in numerical order, then enter­ ing the check numbers and amounts not yet processed, the deposits not yet recorded, which are then added to the existing balance of record, then the aforementioned liabilities sub­ tracted from the whole; it is a splendid moment when I am done and square with B of A. I have heard them accused of being impersonal. Don’t believe it for an instant! They care more than you know.

Oh, yes. There is one other form of communication I receive. The rejections from New York still trickle in. But I have discussed them before and they are of no real con­ sequence. They do not crush me as they once did. I have matured in my expectations as well as in my art.

Aha! I see on your face the indecent smirk of pity. Please save it for yourself. You’ll need it more than I. To be rejected by the merchants of ephemera I consider a tribute. As for my loneliness, with the pain come blessings that are useful to the artist-philosopher. It provides a platform, a high detached place from which to see clearly life for what it is and what it isn’t and what it could and could not be —see it with nobil­ ity and purity. And I gladly pay the price.

97

There is more than one reason for my solitary situation.

There is more than one reason for every human situation, as we both know. But there I go again . . . wanting to enter the beguiling maze of speculation. Time is too short for that. And let me tell you, my friend, approaching death does wonders in concentrating one’s thinking on what is concrete and fun­ damental. To the point, then.

As my literary steward and agent, you have coming a full disclosure —no matter how indelicate the subject. Besides, how can it hurt me, whether I’m in an earthly grave or a heavenly paradise?

I suffer, and have suffered for most of my life, from acute and chronic flatulence. Please do not giggle. I could as well have been afflicted with a lifelong heart condition, or asthma, or kidney stones, and you would not have been amused. And I do not blame myself for having to break wind half of my waking hours (and no doubt my sleeping hours, too, though I’m not sure). Can I help it if my gastro-intestinal system, in­ stead of reducing proteins and carbohydrates to sinew and the necessary sugars, chooses to function as a catalytic cracker, 98

extracting from such various raw materials as onions, kale, fish, eggs, cabbage, beer, cauliflower, sauces, wines, cheeses, Brussels sprouts and the damnable delectable bean in all its protean guises certain hydrocarbons and sulphides in gaseous form? I think not.

Of course you understand the problems this has posed. How my intercourse has been stifled and cramped. We are, after all, a herd species. And the fart has been clearly identified as an offender (I suspect in sound as well as scent) against public decency. It simply is not acceptable. The gas is to be released from its distended prison, if at all, in private, far from auditory and olfactory receptors. To do otherwise is to trans­ gress, break a taboo. Yes, a taboo. I don’t think the word is too strong. (Remember, I have lived with the condition.)

Anyway, one would think it a fit subject for investigation by anthropologists running out of primitive peoples to study. I daresay when all their data were refined, we would learn pro­ hibitions against farting are as universal as those against incest.

How serious is my complaint? Very well. I give it to you straight. I break wind a great deal. As many as 761 separate times in a single span of twenty hours, recorded by actual count during one particularly painful intestinal riot, follow­ ing a dinner of chile rellenos, enchiladas con queso and refried beans. Other days selected randomly for test have produced a range of eighty-two to 506. Let me admit that the over­ whelming majority, whether silent or unashamedly loud, are quickly attended by an odor that a consensus nose would brand foul. Yes. You caught that “consensus” qualifier. Yes, of course, I am hedging. I’m afraid another observation is in order here. You see, the nose —the ownership of the nose— is all important. If it belongs to the same individual as the anal aperture which released the gas, and the digestive tract which synthesized it, then the nose is more tolerant. It recognizes its own. And familiarity breeds acceptance. No, more than that.

99

Let us be true to one another —even enjoyment! Yes, that’s what I said. It is that way with me, and I therefore suspect it is with the race as a whole. That is proper, isn’t it? To generalize so?

Be that as it may, let me go on record and say that I have come to enjoy my flatuses in all their quintessential diversity—sniffed till my nostrils dilated to catch some piquant nuance that was new in the repertoire of my bowel, the em­ piricist in me forever busying itself with trying to deduce for each petard the foods of origin. A private pleasure, to be sure.

On those rare occasions when I have been subjected to the foul winds of another, I have reverted to kind and found them a torment, an insult to the nose of both God and man.

I intimated that my gassiness had cost me dearly in the company of others. Quite true. I tried to live a normal life with it for too many years, constantly on my guard, my sphincter in a near-perpetual state of contraction, lest I be tagged as a disruptor of the social order. In the relative anonymity of a supermarket or a large auditorium, it was not quite so bad. I made a point of being on the move when I released the unbearable pressure in my colon —pushing my shopping cart hurriedly towards the distant meat counter perhaps, or striding rapidly up the aisle, ostensibly on my way to the water fountain. I might add that I became adept at parting my hams just so while walking, robbing the fart of its thunder, so to speak.

Unfortunately, the vapors were not so easily regulated, and those often proved my undoing. Say intermission was still a half-hour off, and the violin soloist was getting to the very core of a Bach concerto, and I felt the insistent swelling below.

What choice did I have? Surely I couldn’t rise from my seat at that moment, and shuffle my way to the aisle with cheeks sealed —even if the pain would have allowed it. That would have been the greater rudeness. So I would remain stationary and squeeze two or more off in silent sequence, always keep­ 100

ing my eyes intently on the performer, a study in music-lover’s concentration, trusting those within a ten-foot radius would suspect each other of the outrage. But if the program is long and the intermissions few, how can one hope to have the blame light elsewhere? Sooner of later, by the process of triangulation, or whatever, the guilty party will be found out —or located to within three or four seats, which, I’m sure you will agree, is too close for comfort. Now you know why I gave up concert-going and bought a good stereo.

For a time I frequented cocktail parties out of some vague need to widen my social horizons. You can imagine what a pickle my digestive tract —ever ready to plead nervousness as a defense —put me in. No sooner did I greet the hostess and have my first martini in hand than the gasses spiralled down, forced into defiance of natural law by my guts. With the first gentle release I was on my way. Moving. Always moving on the periphery of the chattering crowd, saying my “hellos, howare-yous, fines” in such a brusque and abstracted way that I soon earned for myself the reputation of being “stuck-up.” If the room were small, I would find myself too quickly closing the compass, there to recognize the lingering stench of my own manufacture clinging to the drapes or the gown of the hostess.

It will not surprise you that I quit the cocktail circuit at the age of twenty-eight.

I’m afraid this constitutional defect changed me in pro­ found ways. Hastened my exile. Sped my drift into the reclusive state I do not doubt always awaited me. A final ex­ ample will suffice, and then we can be done with this dis­ tasteful subject. I did have a friend once, as previously mentioned. A good and true friend —as dear and close to me as anyone, excepting Mother and Clare.

Eugen Procopenko was as kind and sensitive a man as was ever bom of woman. We met at Stanford as undergraduates.

He was a history major, committed to a life’s study of the rise of Bolshevism, as befitted the offspring of a white Russian 101

family that had reached San Francisco in the Thirties, by way of Vladivostok and Shanghai. I was a student of English literature who believed in the virtues of a broad exposure to the humanities.

We first spoke after a lecture in which Gorki played a pro­ minent part, literally bumping into each other at the rear door after the fifty-minute bell. Plainly he had been moved, because out of the blue he volunteered to me that Gorki was a “good Russian” whose essential humanity had been betrayed by the brutal revolution that exploited his works and his name to further its own nefarious ends. Said with conviction, as though tears were not far away.

That was Pro —as I soon came to call him when we became friends. A man attuned to ethics and essences. A fine sensi­ bility in a young man of infinite compassion. Friend to the disenfranchised and downtrodden everywhere. Merely men­ tion the plight of the migrant worker or the Amerind and you could see water well up in his eyes.

There were other things that bound us, including a mutual appreciation of architecture, Pro’s minor. In fact, there was only one thing that separated us. Or rather, two things: his delicate nose and my aforementioned troubles. Not that he would say much about it when a fart of mine would settle around us in Stanford’s stagnant air. My penance would be a hurt and reproachful stare from those big brown eyes that housed all the suffering that has visited Mother Russia. I would look away, pretending it was a livestock odor wafted in on the prevailing westerly.

Two years we were friends. And, I suppose, fellow victims of youth, with all the narcotic dreams of truth and beauty that ilk is especially heir to. In the summer of 1958 we went to Europe together. It was to be a three-month architectural in­ spection tour (he was also picking up three units of indepen­ dent study), a pilgrimage to the great Gothic edifices, and only secondarily the Romanesque structures that interested 102

us less. We went to Chartres, Cluny, Reims —even down to Palermo for a look at that Norman-Byzantine-Moorish miracle at Monreale.

Though a delight to mind and eye, Europe did not please my stomach. The change in diet and the stress of being in strange places and having to always run for connecting train or plane raised hell with my already overactive gastric juices.

No foods seemed to suit them, and soon I literally became a two-legged gas bag loosed on Europe’s sacred places.

Pro disapproved. He said little, but he let me know with those soft brown eyes that I wasn’t much better than an iconbreaker. A certain tension began to build between us . . . disagreements over our next destination in Rome or Florence . . . a few cutting asides exchanged in a museum or railroad station . . . spats over where to dine, and me always feeling him looking over my shoulder as I read the menu, ready to censure any choice beyond the ultra-bland.

In Switzerland, appropriately enough, we concluded a peace of sorts. I agreed to try to keep my nether eye closed.

He agreed to stop his quiet carping. We both agreed to an end of cathedral snooping and that the last fourth of our stay on the Continent would be relaxing and carefree.

So it was we headed to Garmisch and the green summer roundness of the Bavarian Alps. At first all went well as we took to the culture we had borrowed from books read in child­ hood. We walked the streets. We bussed to Oberammergau to see the master carver’s wares and the wardrobe of the Passion Players. We even cheated a bit to visit and wonder at the fairytale excesses of Linderhoff, envying the mad Ludwig his kaleidoscopic tearoom and the grotto built for the monarch’s private performance of Lohengrin. But it was too good to last.

One evening I gave in to an offering of koenigsbergerklopse mitt kraut, and my fate was thereby sealed. The next morn­ ing we set out for the Zugspitze, I in pain with an unruly 103

stomach and heading for disaster of a kind, while Eugen scowled his worst. We took the cabin lift to SchneefernerHaus, then hoofed it back down the mountain in the company of thirty other tourists, equally divided between Americans and Europeans —strangers all. It was single file down the trail, and I found myself trapped in the middle of the snake, just ahead of Eugen, cutting nasty ones that I hoped would be dispelled by the mountain breeze and not penetrate too far into the column behind. Pro’s occasional snorts confirmed their potency. My hopes sank. I should have stayed with milk and bread.

Part way down and without sufficient warning loomed the stomach acid test: a narrow tunnel in rock through which we would have to pass, one behind another. Before I entered, my intestines, sensing an excellent opportunity, went into a boil.

Through the hand-groping darkness I fought it, holding back through a prodigious act of will the multiplying vapors demanding release. I fought to check them until my body nearly doubled over from that never-to-be-forgotten pain. Still I tried. I hung on, knowing I held the discomfort of others within me.

But everyone has a breaking point, and I have mine. You can no more hold in forever than you can hold out forever.

With the brightness of the tunnel’s end in view, and only seconds away, my suffering body yielded, my anus capitu­ lated. Came a long low rumble. I knew then that I would live.

An instant later, I also learned that I would have to pay a high price. The odor was wretched and, instead of dispersing and spreading the possible blame to ten or so, stuck grudgingly to me, only falling back when I hurried up on the heels of the aged Belgian lady in front of me. To the rear I heard startled murmurs. My cheeks reddened, my ears burned. But I stumbled ahead, determined to bluff my way through the ordeal.

Then we were in the open, the pedestrians ahead fanning 104

out and waiting for the full party’s egress. Nostrils flared in the quiet, drawing in the mountain air’s fresh bouquet.

“You slob!” Eugen snarled for all to hear. I looked away from his flushed indignant face and stood blinking ludicrously in the Alpine sunlight, gazing beyond the score pair of disap­ proving foreign eyes. I would gladly have been atomized at that moment —mercifully returned as dust to the inanimate universe. But I wasn’t. I stood there with a yet-filling gut, crimson in the face, close to breakdown. I was never so em­ barrassed in my life.

I did not speak a word to Eugen again. All subsequent com­ munication was by grunt. When we boarded our charter flight in Frankfurt, I took a seat in the rear of the plane, far from him by unspoken but mutual agreement. When I deplaned sixteen hours later at LAX, I did not look back at him —not at customs, not at the baggage claim. His behavior had been unconscionable, and I couldn’t bring myself to look on another human face—especially not that of my former friend.

That was the end of it. Of much of what I was, or might have been, I fear. One of my final breaks with the world as it is. We were seemingly well-matched, Pro and I, while in fact we were nothing of the kind. I suffered from my disorder then as I do now; he hardly farted at all.

Yet . . . somehow I feel there’s a greater lesson to be learned in our parting. If I read the vapors right, the faceto-face of a rebellious bowel and a heightened olfactory sen­ sitivity masks a wider rift between New World and Old World, merely portends a forthcoming shift in geopolitical alliances.

Realpolitik, after all, precedes ideology, and possibly even love. The oldest and the newest will contend with the mature culture. I already see a realignment of powers, the Pacific Rim nations against Eurasia and Africa, with South America — tom between the two—both the battleground and the critical mass that will swing the balance. Don’t bother waking me to tell me how it all comes out.

105

The mention of undergraduate years spent at Stanford piqued your interest, and your envy. I’ve suspected all along your origins were middle class, and that you would be im­ pressed by such things as name of school and yacht club membership. Conserve. Believe me, they’re not what they’re cracked up to be.

Yes, I went to Stanford. The logical choice since I had the grades, the money, and my father had been polished on the Farm before me. But I didn’t “see it through to sheepskin,” as old Pop would have put it, wisely calling it quits after my second year, when the hollowness of academia became clear to me. That was just after Pro and I split.

You don’t like me damning with faint praise that presti­ gious Palo Alto institution, do you? Sounds like the bitterness of failure, the lament of a guy who couldn’t cut it. Not at all.

I was there, buddy. You weren’t. And my GPA was 3.6 when I did vamoose.

Perhaps I expected too much. From the opening sessions of Introductory Philosophy and English 1A, I believed that I would be propelled along the road to truth, upon which, with application, dedication, determination, stamina and the 106

rest of the two-bit words, I would one day reach a state of perfect knowledge, be a viewer of the big picture, fulfilled, at peace and happy. Need I say that the road was potholed and meandered aimlessly into thickets of specialized ignorance?

My first mistake was to pledge a fraternity (my father’s fraternity) under Mother’s recommendation that I “get prop­ erly situated with friends.” (She believed deeply in genteel traditions and continuity.) I would have done better to have joined a school of barracuda.

I will not name the house. I should. But I’m ignorant of libel laws, father’s name is on the rolls as one of the brotherhood still, and I fear reprisals from those fraternal “gentlemen,” who were all potential SS camp commandants underneath. So they must go under a collective alias. To bor­ row a non-org phrase of generic derision, I shall call the fraternity Mooga Mooga Mooga.

I pledged Mooga Mooga Mooga, as I have said, because of my father’s previous association, and I have no illusions that I wasn’t dinked for exactly the same reason. I was hardly a find, an “asset” to that resident gang of beer-swilling cut-ups.

I wasn’t a jock, a social luminary or a “genuine pussy hawk,” as they were wont to call a guy who could “score with the sorority chicks.” All I had going for me was a 3.7 GPA after my first year, which turned out to be a liability, a dubious achievement which certainly did not make me any more deserving of Tri-Moog status.

The hazing was rough in my case, culminating (or so I in­ nocently thought) in my being dumped with emptied pockets on a chill Friday night in a remote corner of the Santa Cruz Mountains, there to draw on my wits and somehow make my way back to Palo Alto. I did what was expected of me, drag­ ging myself to the house sore-legged, and with a severe case of bronchial congestion, at a dark late hour on an October Sunday.

107

I assumed I had passed the test. Taken everything they had to dish out. Been admitted to the Mousterian brotherhood at last. And that was the way it was represented to me and my fellow pledges. Little did I realize that for me, and me alone, my betters had contrived a devilish Phase II. It was about two weeks later that I was told all pledges who had distinguished themselves in their “ordeals by fire” (even at Stanford the minds of upperclassmen run in the familiar verbal drainage ditches) were to be honored separately at “special dinners” to mark their passage to acceptance. Three brothers in good standing would host each candidate in restaurants selected for the quality of their cuisine and decor.

Strictly black tie. Get your rental orders in early if you don’t have your own fancy duds. A real high-toned blast.

I was “assigned” to one Bud Barlow, sinister son of a prominent San Francisco attorney, and two of his cronies whom I remember chiefly for their fawning before the betuxed dissolute Bud, my superhost. At six sharp, I descended from my room to the parlor and was welcomed by the genial trio. So cordially. They shaking my hand and clapping me on the back and forcing one chocolate brownie after another on me. Spiked heavily with cannabis, of course, though in those tender years I wouldn’t have known what pot and its effects were, short of a private lecture from Mr. Anslinger himself.

“You’ve drawn awfully lucky, Marcus,’" said Bud expan­ sively, popping a brownie in his own mouth. “You’ve lucked out with a night in The City.” He scraped back a starched cuff and looked at his watch. “Say, we’re already late. Here, finish up the sweets and let’s get going.” The last four squares were abruptly forced into my open palms.

This and subsequent gestures of instant camaraderie from three Moogs I had always considered aloof if not unfriendly should have put me on my guard. But I was won over . . . at least for the moment. After all, I had toed their mark. The pro forma tortures had been survived. And I had arrived.

108

Euphoria attended me as Bud’s Buick headed north. There was laughter aplenty . . . but of two kinds. Mine general, open, welling up from a source I’d never known existed; theirs more restricted, private, manifested in mostly snickers ex­ changed by the three to the exclusion of the one. That is remembered now, not perceived then . . . nor the reason for their high humor.

Colors and shapes came and went in time stretched as I was drawn into the smarmy core of life. To my right from the rear window of the Buick speeding into a lustrous darkness, I feasted on the lower reaches of San Francisco Bay under moonlight, shimmering silver as new as an October Sierra snow. Tears rushed to my eyes. The beauty of it . . . .

“Thanks, fellows, for taking me,” I said, choking on the joy of belonging and becoming. “Thanks for taking me along.”

Gentle chuckling was accompanied by hands affectionately passed through my hair and the close of fingers on my left shoulder.

“Don’t mention it.”

“Just glad to have you aboard.”

“What are Moogs for?”

The Buick’s hum grew louder and the vehicle seemed to lift itself from the pavement and start a long slow climb above earth’s light into a closing congregation of stars . . . .

“You’re going to flip over this. What a fuckin’ spread they put out.”

Bud was talking and the Buick was slowing, pitching earth­ ward in a smooth glide.

“What?” I experienced a time gap between hearing and understanding.

“It’s party time. You ready?”

I didn’t answer, but watched with disembodied wonder a patch of lights dead ahead the decelerating auto. Nothing about them suggested San Francisco, let alone Ernie’s or The Blue Fox. 109

Bud aimed the car toward a parking lot and what looked like some kind of meeting hall, rectangular and unprepossess­ ing, of one story.

“Why are we stopping?”

“To put in an appearance,” Bud said. “Were expected, you know.”

I didn’t know. And I didn’t know why Bud parked the car among sixty or seventy others between yellow diagonal lines painted on graying asphalt. And I wondered with the most meager rising suspicion when the three of them surrounded me and herded me towards a dimly lit door set in a wall of fading green stucco.

It’s all still disjointed in my mind . . . isolated incidents and impressions interrupted by unremembered gaps. Guiding hands gave me a direction to go. Though I tried to listen to the muffled transaction between Bud and the doortender for tickets and seating, I couldn’t fix my mind on it —on any­ thing—even after we were admitted. Instead I scanned the large plain room as through a prism, puzzled by the arcs of linen-covered card tables that semicircled a slightly elevated platform, where two similarly covered metal conference tables were set end-to-end. The gray metal fplding chairs were only two-thirds occupied, and not with the happy high-lifers one expects to see in a fashionable eatery, but with remarkably subdued folk in chaste attire, chiefly men, but also with severe-looking women, hair in chignons, dressed in black, navy and brown.

Bud and his henchmen suddenly crossed my line of sight, and I in my dreamstate began to follow. Bud stopped. And he stopped me with a straight-arm to the shoulder. “Sorry guy.

This is where we part company.”

“What?”

“Remember? You’re the guest of honor. They’ve got you at the head table, you lucky bastard! We’re down with the nerds and the scumbos, dammit.” Bud unfolded an arm in the 110

direction of the still-filling hall. My feet took root as my mind tried to compose itself.

“Come on, I’ll help you find your place.” Bud dislodged me with a stiff poke in the ribs and led me, a lobotomized lamb, toward the head tables split by a pitted oak lectern.

“Here you are.” Bud halted at a chair facing some 150 respectful mumblers, pointing to a placard straddling the weave of white linen. I sighted along his finger and saw it with my own eyes: MARCUS UTERIS in stencilled Roman. Time stretched out—a strand of taffy being pulled beyond its limits, my limits. And when I looked up for an explanation, Bud had dissolved into the prosaic multitude.

There was nothing I could think of doing, except sit down at my place and try to get my bearings. Which I couldn’t do.

I couldn’t put three consecutive thoughts together. Seconds became hours, and within those seconds-become-hours a strange inertia took hold of me. I’d become a creature with­ out will.

A tall bald man with bowed legs got up and delivered some remarks I could not follow. Then they brought in dinner— they being elderly women in brown and white Dutch-servant dress and hose with capricious seams down the back that made their legs look malformed. The sight and scent of the food killed my hunger. Bony chicken that looked more under­ nourished seagull, watery mashed potatoes, and peas fresh from the Del Monte can, along with the inevitable hardbacked roll and coffee poured whether you requested it or not.

And yet I ate, the first few faltering bites out of simple courtesy, before I discovered it to be the most succulent meal I’d ever tasted, and to make it last I reduced my intake to two peas per forkful.

Thus was I occupied until the dessert of lime sherbet was set down next to my lukewarm coffee, drawing my attention to a thin folded program that had lain there unseen beside my water goblet. Idly now I fingered it and read. I was at111

tending the annual banquet of the Bay Area Scientific Christian Federation. Seemed harmless enough. There were six slated speakers in all —first off being a Ted Thornburgh whose topic was “A New Christian Alternative to Darwinian Evolution.” Next up was a Berkeley professor of sociology discussing “Black Christian Calvary in an Age of Polariza­ tion.” To be followed by a UOP physicist locking horns with “The Challenge of Positivism, Perverse and Logical.”

My finger stopped and trembled over the fourth name. Ter­ ror thrust an arm through my dream state to clutch my throat. The speaker was listed as Marcus A. Uteris, Assistant Professor of Anthropology from Stanford University. His sub­ ject, “Three Years of Christian Witness Among the Andaman Islanders.”

Me! My name! Stoned fool . . . Barlow’s catspaw. I didn’t even know where the Andaman Islands were!

I drank from my water, pondering escape. I could rise and excuse myself on the pretext of going to the john, then slip out into the night and try to find a cab, yes. But I couldn’t seem to act —really get going. Not quickly enough, anyway.

Before the assembled had downed their dessert a short stocky man in a salt-and-pepper doubleknit suit gaveled the meeting to order and launched into the head-table introductions.

Meekly I listened to a brief but flowery description of myself as the youngest member of the Stanford faculty and a crackerjack cultural anthropologist who had already set my field on fire. Bud’s doings. It was all I could do to stand and force a smile to acknowledge the clapping.

Desperately I tried to pull myself together, find a graceful way out. No use. My mind wouldn’t stay still, flitting instead from one vaporous thought to another, while the speakers before me droned through the papers they had brought to read. My panic was such that I have never been able to remember a solitary point those learned gentlemen made.

Then my name was called. Restrained applause. My mind 112

whorled like bathwater released down a drain as I rose on custard legs and moved slowly to the lectern. I fully expected to fall forward on my face in a faint before I reached it. But my body was not merciful. To still my quaking hands, I clutched the oak bookrest in a death grip. Staring faces were expectant. Seconds of silence. Who was going to stop this madness? It could only be I, who opened mouth to tell them . . . how I had been had . . . made the dupe in one of Bud Barlow’s Tri-Moog extravaganzas . . . how the overprivileged young bastard had diddled us all!

But when I opened my mouth, other words spilled out. To my complete amazement, they issued forth in fluent, logical sequence, as though another presence shared my mortal shell.

He, she or it extemporized wondrously.

My mouth paid tribute to the Andaman Islanders as a gentle people who, for all their so-called primitiveness, were more Christian than many a baptized soul walking the queer streets of the city by the Golden Gate. Described in detail their fine cutting tools for working stone and shell, and how they were expert horticulturists and fishermen who produced healthy surpluses for trade with adjacent islanders—being evasive when it came to placing those islands geographically.

Spoke long of the intricacies of the kula ring, whereby com­ munity A sent lovely necklaces to community B but not com­ munity C, which had to receive them from community B, while community D exported to community A yams they had received in barter from community C. Sketchily, but yet at some length, praised the colorful rituals that accompanied the exchange of goods and how trade was diligently policed by all parties for sharp practices. Finally, I saluted the Andamanese as kind and humble pagans from whom all good Christians could morally profit in even a casual association.

I spoke for twenty minutes in all, then turned my back to a standing ovation and sat down. The loudness of the ap­ plause thumped me to my senses. Or else the marihuana had 113

suddenly spent itself. It had all been an inspired shot in the dark. The fools! They didn’t know where the Andaman Islands were either!

I slipped off stage just as the final speaker summed up, having heard from the pair who came after no more than I had heard from those before, abstracted this time by the miracle of my performance rather than distracted by the ef­ fects of the dope. Bud and his stooges came scurrying after me; they caught up in the moonlight of the parking lot.

“You were fantastic!” The perpetual S curl to Bud’s mouth was momentarily absent.

“The Andamanese are a fantastic people,” I said.

“I mean you had ‘em eating out of your hand!”

“Yes,” I said crisply. “That’s better than having them devour your intestines.”

There were other feeble compliments extended as Bud wheeled the Buick back down the Peninsula. They were having second thoughts about the geek who had just made it into Mooga Mooga Mooga. But I said nothing and the chat­ ter dwindled into an awkward silence. I was coming down from the heavens, and the common earth was as common as my brothers. Yet as we drew even with the southern reaches of the bay, the land and sea silvered still by the overhead light of the gibbous moon, my mind cleared to a sharpness, and I smiled inwardly as it came back . . . all I had said to the Bay Area Scientific Christian Federation. No other spirit dwelt within my frail frame. It had all been a digest rehash of what I’d read a semester back of the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia.

114

17 Strange how an anthro course taken to satisfy a socialscience requirement for graduation —a graduation I would choose to deny myself—should save me an embarrassment beyond imagining. Yep. Shame averted through good study habits. It might make a useful cautionary tale to tell your lazy kid.

The day following my last public performance, I packed my things and moved out of the Tri Moog house without regrets, without guilt, without feeling I had in any way dishonored my father’s name. I took an apartment off campus —shared one, rather, with the before-mentioned Eugen Procopenko —he of the tender Russian heart and the delicate patrician nose —and from this sanctuary attended classes for another semester.

What more can I say? But that each passing day I was enlightened with the realization that enlightenment did not reside in the tired minds of tenured pedants who gave twentyyear-old lectures and meaningless grades? For a while, I tried to get Mother to sell the house and move to Palo Alto so we could be near. But she refused, fearful lest long-gone Dad 115

should suddenly emerge from the jungle and reappear on Brentwood turf and find his taproot severed. The predica­ ment was painful —for the both of us.

Then came my summer in Europe with Pro. After that there was no reason to return to the Farm. Scholar, school thyself! Did I not have at my disposal all the tools I required?

A library of 10,000 select volumes gathering dust since my father’s disappearance? I didn’t need degrees to use as col­ lateral for a job I likewise didn’t need. I heard a different call, and what I needed to answer it dwelt both within me and was close at hand in those tools of tools that so enoble our lonely species as we make our awkward way through an oblivious cosmos—books.

116

You are impressed. You no longer smirk. That’s because you are getting to know me. I am not the buffoon you sup­ posed a mere thirty pages ago. And as you have come to know me better, you realize that while the odds against your suc­ cess on my behalf become greater, so do the rewards—for you, for me, for our literate brothers and sisters out there in the shrinking realm of Readerland. Yes, I am a man, not without gifts, who has lived and has something to say.

I marvel at the moment of this writing that I have told you so much about myself. Normally I’m close-mouthed, almost secretive. Not even Mother knew most of what I have divulged here. But then there is a reason for it, eh? We’re partners. We must level with one another.

What have I missed? Oh yes . . . politics. You will want to know my politics. You already have ideas on that, I’m sure.

Well, at the risk of disappointing you, I’ll say they are not very much—one way or the other. Though I am conservative by nature, I vote liberal without fail or enthusiasm. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because I’m an outsider, and outsiders must by their nature vote against the insiders, or those who think they are insiders, or those who want to be insiders, those 117

who in any case are the spiritual drones we know as Republicans.

That explanation ill-befits me, you think. A man of my learning must certainly have given the subject more thought than that. I have, but to little effect, I fear. Nothing has ever moved me to man a barricade or contribute to the National Conservative Political Action Committee. In fact, when I bum at all with political zeal it is as a passionate centrist —a man intent on keeping equidistant between the turbulent poles.

Why? Why not take a side? Why don’t I stand up and be counted? Well, I’m not given to swallowing absolutes whole.

And I happen to find fault with both the loose but prevail­ ing political philosophies, which are not philosophies at all, but sets of prejudices clung to in peevish defiance of reason.

The Democrats I have known deceive themselves as even children would never deceive themselves. They believe, you see. In everything that is good and kind and from the heart.

All men are brothers, and if fratricide is committed before one’s very eyes, one need only turn his head and erase his memory, or correct the conditions which pointed the killer on his vicious but ineluctable course. It just means more collec­ tive effort is required on all our parts. After all, the promised land is attainable if only we organize against the privileged and powerful few who abuse the many for pleasure and profit.

Expose the injustice —trumpet it to the heavens —and all will be given over to the disenfranchised. Then equality will reign, the lion will lie down with the lamb, the shark will swim with the tuna, and peace and happiness will spread through the republic like maple syrup on a short stack.

Yet you and I know it is not attainable—this happiness that is to be a general condition from sea to shining sea. Just as it is not a monopoly of male WASPS driving Lincolns and manipulating the exchanges. If happiness exists at all, it does so rarely, and for no good reason, merely the result of a chemical imbalance in the body.

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I can speak no more respectfully of the Republicans I have known—excluding Mother, whose devotion to respectability excuses all. Oddly, they are far less complex than their counterparts, most of them governed in behavior, thought and voting patterns by three Bs Von Biilow would not have certified: bigotry, Babbitry and Birchism. And supporting that triumvirate is a drive as old as man —one that can be snared in the single word: greed. With God as an ally (if not an equal), one trusts not in the human mind or fancy, only in the marketplace, where one’s virtue is calculated arithmet­ ically. And to keep what one has and, perhaps more im­ portant, to deprive others of a like share, the price is eternal vigilance.

But all the above is half-hearted. I simply do not think much about the bombing of Burgos or the Paris Commune or Potsdam or the memoirs of Kennan or Kerensky. All a bore. Those who bluster and connive and gnash their teeth in the name of reform or reaction do not deflect history from its erratic course more than a millimeter. Better, I say, to think on the stars and beyond. To wonder whether the universe is like an expanding bubble, all matter confined to its outer surface, while a corresponding universe of anti­ matter exists in mirror image on the inside of the swelling film, and whether there are holes that permit one “universe” to flow into the other with those awesome results advertised.

A cleaner kind of speculation. And no less productive.

As for the artist, he must not concern himself with the petty miseries and injustices of the day, the year or the decade. He must look farther than that, and closer than that, beyond the most distant galaxy and deep into himself. Only then is there song and meaning.

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THE TELEVISION TRILOGY: PART III THE MAN WHO WORE A DORK IN HIS EAR Wee Willie Weidelmann (or so he was called through the vagaries of an overall uncharitable fate —his real and deserved name apparently lost to record) claimed descent from a long line of court-kept dwarfs, only to find his age disinterested in his lineage and skeptical of his wit. This disinterest was re­ vealed very early in Willie’s life, long before his nanism was clinically identified. (We may safely assume, however, that the fertile pair whose responsibility he briefly was had more than an inkling of his stunted future.)

And how did Willie come by the Teutonic surname? Hap. Strange random intersections of events that shape so many lives —all lives, if we but probe long and deeply enough. Enter one priest by name of Gerd Weidelmann, a pariah in his own Pico-Rivera parish, mistrusted by parishioners and fellow Dominicans alike for his natural drives made unnatural by Holy Orders. (Lust was the charge that came too easily to the tongue.)

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His sin was taking to heart the biblical command to propa­ gate, rejecting the much-later-imposed ban against marriage as an antiquated survival of a bygone time when celibacy had a reform purpose. Which is to say, he ran off with the presi­ dent of Saint Beatrice’s Altar Society. In a loud splash of scandal, he married her (nee Rose Casey) in a civil ceremony, made a domestic commitment to a smallish bungalow in the same community he had served as cleric, then proceeded to plant his seed with single-minded regularity. But alas! It was in barren ground. (How like a universe perverse to thwart us in our greatest hopes!)

Father Weidelmann grew despondent in the union, seeing the reason for it rendered vain, and mindful that his faith for­ bade remarriage and a second chance at paternity. The novelty of conjugal life wore off in three years. In four he became derelict in his sexual duties. No wonder Rose Casey Weidelmann left him in the fifth and took up with Ozwald Darbo, prominent local retail druggist and proprietor of the local Owl Drugstore, and not long thereafter wed the merchant.

But back to Wee Willie Weidelmann. (WWW —and have you noticed that no three letters in our alphabet laid end-toend occupy so much space as those belonging to the diminu­ tive fellow we at last are prepared to discuss?) What of him?

How do he and the padre figure?

It seemed a match made in heaven —if there is a heaven and a matchmaker presiding over it. But picture the priest’s passion for progeny, and then a foundling bound in a bluetrimmed cotton receiving blanket and dumped in the lobby of a Whittier Boulevard cinema one windy March Sunday a.m. (A return of Going My Way was the cinematic fare of the day—which may or may not be significant, but which invites romantic speculation all the same.) Who put in the claim? Offered home and hearth and name to an abandoned babe? None other.

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Maybe it would have been better if their blood had been shared. (Curiously, quite apart from any consanguineal benefits, the priest’s was O positive and the adopted waif’s was the rare AB negative —the universal donor and the universal receiver, respectively. An omen there? Or something deeper, beyond the ordinary suspicion that biology does rule?)

If their types were similar, perhaps they could have meshed better. Jelled. Belonged. But where the foster father was sober and studious and introspective, little Willie was antic and dramatic and noisome. For a while the erstwhile prelate’s suf­ focating love did prevail —until the sum total of Europe’s Court cunning came of age. Fifteen, to be exact, though in appearance (stature-wise) still a size 7.

The elder Weidelmann filled the child’s days with kindness and instruction. The midget reciprocated with indifference or a show of pretended ignorance. Granted, he was subject to influences out of the home, and savaged with such epithets as “peewee” and “runt” going back to even pre-school age, but that alone cannot account for his willfulness, nor the almost casual disrespect he constantly extended to his presumptive father. While the defrocked priest worked for little by day at a milk-carton factory punch press and tutored his ward at night in the teachings of Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus and Sheen, Willie frittered away the daylight hours, inattentive at school or a truant loose on Pico-Rivera’s mean avenidas.

Those evening lessons from Father Weidelmann went in one ear and out the other.

Their relationship was doomed from the beginning. Re­ straint versus exuberance. Soft against hard. Tacky meets slick. All of which spelled heartbreak for Gerd and liberation for Willie, who at fifteen established himself as an urchin in good standing, savvy in the ways of the street. On the pretext of supplementing the “family” income, he quit school and manned a boulevard kiosk where morning and evening newspapers were sold, along with astrology sheets, The Daily 122

Racing Form and lurid softcore paperbacks. Father Weidelmann offered no protest. By then he had become a depressed and shrinking quantity, a bumt-out case, convinced in his own mind that the child which God entrusted to his care was flawed in soul and brain as well as body, and that he, himself, his own Christian fortitude, had been marked for some extraordinary trials.

Where Wee Willie Weidelmann chose to station himself deserves a mention. That kiosk—his plywood buffer for twelve hours a day—happened to be smack dab in front of the maincorner door of the Owl Drugstore, that same emporium owned and managed by the spouse of his would-have-been foster mother, Rosey Casey Weidelmann Darbo herself. What conclusions are to be drawn? Perhaps it was a calculated in­ sult to Pere Weidelmann. Perhaps Willie was unconsciously drawn toward a mother figure he never knew but needed. Or perhaps it was simply the most profitable location in all PicoRivera for selling newspapers. Perhaps it was all of the above, or none.

Wee Willie found his place on the street, hawking his Herald Examiners and Times with shrill shouts of their more sordid headlines, standing on a wooden crate within his painted-green hexagonal shelter to facilitate the making of change and bring him closer to eye-level contact with his customers, trading jests and insults with boulevard regulars, treating those he knew only on sight with undue familiarity, even occasionally screaming hoarse and coarse advice to perfect strangers passing on the sidewalk. It all fed the emerging performer in him. Brought some of the recognition he craved. Made him something of a local landmark—a curiousity to be explained to out-of-town guests, though Pico-Rivera was only modestly blessed with them.

Not enough for the ambitious dwarf. After four years at the same stand, he felt he was being taken for granted—given lit­ tle more recognition than the lamppost with which he shared 123

the comer pavement. He received no invitations to dinner, no requests to come and liven up a party with a raucous jest or a mirthful caper.

This lack of social standing nagged at Willie. He feared the same crabbed future that beset the senior Weidelmann. He longed for approval, for the balm of banter and laughter he was designed by size and birth and breeding to incite and echo. A cause for worry, that. Approaching twenty, and for him nearing life’s midpoint according to the actuarial tables, he slid into depression and decline. Even his take in front of the Owl dipped by 20 percent.

History tells us some men in their hour of need often are surprised hosts to helpful spirits or inspirations that seem to come from out of the blue. Others are in the right place at the right time to seize and exploit breaks destiny casts their way. (History does not tell us of those who received no heavenly advice, or were too timid or proud to answer oppor­ tunity’s knock.)

Willie Weidelmann had his day. October 2 it was, a super­ heated afternoon with a bone-dry Santa Ana blow doing its worst, which included fanning a fire that erupted in Dushon’s Novelty Store. Willie quit his post at precisely 3:35 p.m. (slack time, before the Herald Examiners night final and the Times' bulldog edition were chucked off the truck) to run after other looters and beat the firemen there. Dushon’s was only a block and a half away, but short legs are short legs, and strides restricted are strides restricted, so when he arrived, the building was half-ablaze and the best of the spoils already carried off.

Undaunted, the four-foot-eight-inch scavenger scurried under the billowing smoke to the still fire-free rear of the shop, there to find in a neglected corner closet what apparently was Dushon’s private stock: dorks. Probably stashed for the pro­ prietor’s own amusement, without any intent to sell. Phalli in plaster, ceramic, rubber —more than five dozen all —in every 124

conceivable size, shape, color and attitude. A cache crude in kind but not design.

With a watchful eye on the advancing fire, Willie hurriedly yet methodically filled his pockets, until the cupboard was bare and his clothes bulged with priapic swag. Then, hear­ ing the siren and clanging bells of an approaching hook-andladder company, he slipped out the back into an alley. His little legs churned. He got away. Unseen.

There’s no knowing whether Willie Weidelmann had any plans for his plaster peckers at the time he liberated them. But it’s doubtful that he did. Rather, they must have seemed the best salvage left among the cheap puzzles, loaded cigars, sneezing powders and false noses shortly to be incinerated.

Two weeks passed and nothing changed. Willie was there at his kiosk, chasing dimes flipped to him by customers who generally kept him at a decent distance. Pico-Rivera’s recog­ nition of him had long since peaked, and over-familiarity greased his slide into neglect. Willie still felt there was more to him than met the eye. He still had the power to amuse, con­ found and cheer, if only “they” would give him a chance.

On the third Friday after the fire, Willie mounted his milk crate with a new excitement. He was still dressed in what had come to be his uniform—Levis pants and jacket tailored down to his dimensions, and a red felt beret perched atop a squarish head that always seemed too big for the body. But something new had been added—something guaranteed to force doubletakes from passersby, uncertain grins or sheepish lookaways from customers. The plucky dwarf wore a cock in his ear. Yes, a rubber simulation of the same in dark brown and lately of Dushon’s collection, jutting rigidly out from his right ear, rooted in his aurifice by a means not apparent to street strollers.

At the busy hour of five a small crowd gathered around the kiosk. There were chortles and cackles aplenty as Willie screamed out his “wextras,” feigning ignorance of the novel 125

adornment. There were also shouts and guffaws and vulgar catcalls, which Willie lustily returned in kind. There were also shocked women who paused at the corner long enough to see what was going on, then stepped briskly off in disapproving silence, though their feelings would find a concert voice shortly.

Tiny Weidelmann gloried in it, his high thin voice now cracking often with a nervous hilarity as he fielded the obvious questions and denied that anything about him had changed.

The hubbub didn’t die down til eight that evening. As Willie closed up, he congratulated himself. He had had a great time, and receipts were up 30 percent for the night, added impetus for ushering in the new Willie Weidelmann—or applied to the old one a new luster he vowed not to not let fade.

The next day he showed up with a creamy-white ceramic specimen, half-limp, extruding from the same right ear. More light-hearted commotion provoked by the earthy kid. (Or was he? A kid? Ever?) It also sold more papers and paperbacks.

Now Willie knew he was on to something, had the formula to put him in the boulevard limelight. He need only perfect and polish it, and keep the suckers’ attention while he did.

Willie took to wearing a different earpiece every day, rotating them in such a manner that over two month’s time no one could be sure of having seen the same one twice. Some were hooded, some trimmed, some were tense, some slack, some were winsome, some threatening, some were pale as alabaster, some the purplish hue of old beef. Withal, Willie always wore one and only one. If it was in the left ear, it was head in, while those in the right ear were always headed out.

Young Weidelmann sustained his earections for three months, drawing larger crowds each day, adding to his take of coins, swelling his own ego freed at last, pushing his schtick to the max, and pressing the public’s patience beyond even that. At the urgings of certain ladies and Ozwald Darbo, who certainly could count many of those same ladies as his former 126

patrons, city fathers cracked down hard. The aging newsboy was charged with indecent exposure and offending public morals. He was brought to a speedy trial.

No fool, and not above abusing natural sympathies, Willie insisted on a jury trial. The prosecution was cautious, almost diffident. What was to be gained from convicting a pint-sized hawker a little weak in the head? And perhaps invite the American Civil Liberties Union in to stir the stinking pot?

But Willie was on his muscle. His pride was not merely at stake, it was out of control, and no one was going to deny him his time and place in the sun. He clearly acted rashly when, just as the feeling in the courtroom seemed to be shifting in his favor, he interrupted the judge as he gave instructions to the jury with an unprovoked and screeching non sequitur: “You, sir, may be the spokesman of the great unwashed, but I, sir, am the vanguard of the great unchained!”

That rare eloquence got him thirty days in a sunless cell in city jail. Yet it also got him the exposure he craved. The bi-weekly Pico-Rivera Progress gave the trial and the verdict three front-page columns —enough to draw the attention of city editors on the Los Angeles mets, who sent feature writers out to interview the sawed-off violator of public decency.

There had to be a rib-tickling piece or two on local yokeldom for their citified readers. There was. Three in the Times alone after the voluble Weidelmann was interviewed —tongue-incheek cutesy stuff that got picked up by faraway papers subscribing to the service. AP and UPI were late to the feast, but they chewed profitably on the smelly carcass, playing up the angle of small-town philistinism versus the fearless local libertarian . . . who just happened to be four feet eight and wore plaster pricks in his ear.

It was the worst thing that could have happened to Willie, though he couldn’t have known it then. He was riding too high. And there was no way to go but up. When Esquire sent a writer-photographer team out to his stand in front of the 127

Owl, Willie simply burst his hat size. In fact, he got three pages (two of them shared with ads), three pictures (one a color shot from above that distorted the size of his silly grin and the nut-brown dork dangling from his right ear) and five hundred words of facetious copy that, if nothing else, finished selling Willie on himself.

There’s no mapping the fickle ground of public interest, though. Some significant number of readers who stared into the wildly leering countenance, with the six-inch phallus parallel to the slope of a lumpy shoulder, were somehow turned on by the right man at the right place with the right pitch. He didn’t have to go out to meet the world . . . its emissaries came to him. From the local talk shows first. Sure, Willie was willing to talk about himself and the troubles he’d seen. Give ’em both barrels on Channel 9 —“put the jerks in their place!” Which he did. In his o\vn high-pitched pene­ trating whine-squeal, he proclaimed to 200,000 goggle-box thralls his “individuality,” which was “mortally threatened” by “narrow-minded puritans” who wanted to “evict” him from his corner and deprive him “of his sole livelihood.” Nay, his “very soul.”

Effective foofaraw, from a bom showman who leaped up and down before the camera, exuding in equal parts salty ham and unfettered paranoia. He got response and an audience. Very soon came offers from the network big boys to make the late-night scatology-and-snicker scene. He was transported! The Big Time! The Big Platform! And so soon and all at once! Whoopee!

Padre Weidelmann denounced it all as a scheme of the devil one night over oatmeal. Willie burned. Was he to be lectured to by a defeated punch-press operator? A washed-up priest who somehow had got his holy hooks in him and kept trying to force that humility-God-crap down his throat? Not bloody likely! He was going to go on, whatever the old fool said. Parry and thrust with Johnny and Dick and Phil and 128

Merv and dazzle all those beautiful people looking on. He had the wherewithal, the tools, that indefinable something called presence.

Swelled so with a perception of his own magnificence, Willie turned cruelly on his aging benefactor. “Shut up, old man,” he shouted. “The devil wants only priests who do it with the ladies. He takes them down below.” Willie turned a stubby thumb down on the crude table of unpainted pine planks toward Dis. “Ingrate! Blasphemer!” huffed the priest, struggling for breath.

“Stick it in your ear!” Willie hooted.

The poor man quaked as though afflicted with the palsy.

His soupspoon slipped through his fingers into the depths of his oatmeal. “Y-y-y-your own f-father.”

“You ain’t my father,” Willie snapped. “You’re a nobody and I ’m going places. We ain’t related.”

Now the priest seemed on the brink of apoplexy. He struggled to his feet and waved an angry finger over the square head, his mouth working a while to no result. Then, from the depths of his medieval soul, there came a strangled curse befit­ ting an ill-used passionate man of God suffering hell’s torments. He foresaw for the treacherous ward he had loved and wept over and nursed through several illnesses a brief— very brief—phase of notoriety to be followed by a sudden and permanent fall from grace, then an obscurity everlasting. It would come to pass, he declared in a broken voice, as God was his witness.

Wee Willie mocked him with idiot’s laughter. “God don’t even know you—you crazy old bastard! And I don’t either. I’m tired of you and your oatmeal.”

With that he upturned his bowl on the table and waddled off to what had been for more than twenty years his room. In a battered Samsonite two-suiter and war-surplus duffle bag, he packed his belongings, which amounted to a modest 129

number of clothes, a few toiletries and his collection of ersatz penises. The time had come to go west . . . find more fashionable lodgings, something swank, maybe something on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Five years of banking twenty per­ cent from his newstand take gave him a tidy stake of $6,800 for an assault on the bigger and brighter world around the corner —far from an Owl Drugstore. Willie snapped his suitcase shut and marched past the sobbing foster father and out the door without a word of thanks or farewell. Easy.

Child’s play.

Was this fallen priest blessed with the gift of prophecy? Did Wee Willie Weidelmann overplay an essentially weak hand?

Or was the opportunistic runt merely raised up on a vagrant ripple in the sewage settling pond that is American pop culture, only to vanish in a shallow trough once his anesthetic value was spent on a public ever fleeing the pain of thought?

Yet he had his day. About sixty of them, in fact. During which span he sold his newstand, rented a $1300-a-month apartment on Sunset Boulevard and made four appearances on network talk shows. He was waiting and ready for his assault on fame, turned out in a new tuxedo and red beret— along with the inevitable auricular adornment that had become his trademark. On camera he did cavort, giggle, grimace, bellow, mug, mime and otherwise steal light from the mega-egos and their gatherings of moons pretending to star status. Also a reluctant man to exit when his time came, he immediately earned himself a reputation for pushiness that even exceeded the generous boundaries allowed within “the industry.” Consequently, he was steadily moved back in order of appearance, until his segment was last and cut-shortable.

Ratings did rise slightly the first two times he appeared.

The press had served him well. The yahoos in the land were curious about the little man who wore a dork in his ear. How could he do such a thing? Did he drive a Mercedes? What kind of person was he? Where did he have his hair done? Why 130

didn’t the authorities arrest him? Why didn’t they let him be? But when their curiousity was sated, those same students of the here and now turned their dials to catch reruns of Mission Impossible.

We may conclude that Willie didn’t have much going for himself from appearance one. He seemed articulate only on a first and hurried hearing—before the hollowness of his cause and the scarcity of his wit became embarrassingly obvious.

Phil questioned him earnestly, hoping to find a niche for the guy in his pantheon of Midwestern progressives who discussed vital issues candidly. Nope. Just another creep from the Coast was the clear verdict visible on Phil’s visage, a message clearly and plainly relayed to those day-idle folks in videoland.

With Johnny, Willie’s “thing” was explored, exploited, milked for every possible vulgar double entendre. But that done, came a strained ten-second on-camera silence that Willie tried to fill with his animated and coarse non sequiturs.

Merv fell back on the “who do you know” and “what’s your next movie” routine, but was shocked to find out that his brash young guest, whose bowed legs couldn’t close the air space between chairseat and floor, not only didn’t know anybody who counted, but apparently hadn’t done anything more than upset the moral sensibilities of a two-named town he didn’t know from Desert Center. (The irrepressible Weidelmann did assure his befuddled host that he would “consider making a few flicks—if the parts were right.”) Merv found further conversation difficult.

The always-thoughtful Dick, after brushing aside without comment a spate of phallic references, plumbed the dwarf for “the deeper meaning” of his life. What did he hope to ac­ complish? What lasting achievement did he want to leave on his record? Good questions . . . and Dick actually allowed his guest enough time to answer them.

For once Willie was without a smart-mouth comeback. He 131

stammered and fumbled. And what did he finally say? How did he explain himself? What irritation of wisdom dropped from his lips? With emotion-charged voice he spoke shrilly and lamely of “helping people get rid of their hang-ups” and “busting out of their puritanicalism” (no, no neologism came of it) just as he had. That was it. Nothing more bubbled up from la bas.

It was his final show —the one that brought down the cur­ tain on Wee Willie Weidelmann, gross performer. True, there was a brief commerce in plastic puds rushed into production by entrepreneurial sharks who advertised their tawdry wares in skinbooks as “what the modish will be wearing tomorrow.”

But very few gentlemen were observed wearing anything of the kind—tomorrow or the week following. The ill-conceived fad quite simply never emerged from the embryo.

Willie fought the decision with all his resources. They were insufficient. Invitations no longer came—even from marginal cable stations with time on their hands. His own calls to ex­ ecutive suites were fielded by cool receptionists, and promised callbacks were never made. Personal visits to the media’s plastic towers meant hours spent in stark antechambers for men and women who never got out of conference. So Willie resorted to agents of the meanest sort, who were candid if not kind. He was passe. The dick-trick was belly-up. He ought to go back to selling newspapers.

After six months of frustration, his funds devoured by living up to appearances, he did just that, only to find a truculent Chicano named Raul entrenched on his corner before the Owl. And what had been surrendered could not be retaken . . . leastways, not by a gringo shrimp.

For the first time in his short life, Willie faced despair; and never before exposed to it, he lacked the steel for it and col­ lapsed inward. Morose and silent and bitter now, he wandered dingy streets seeking what only he knew, until the last of his stake ran out and there was nothing to do but go home, to 132

the non-home he had scorned not nine months before.

The good padre rejoiced that January afternoon. Gone from his mind were Willie’s old wrongs and his own impreca­ tions. There was a Biblical precedent for this: the prodigal son had returned.

Yet this was no humble-pie-munching filial repentant dressed in tattered Levis. Not this elfin man burning with a giant’s rage. Old Weidelmann’s joyous exclamations were received in a moody silence. The nightly oatmeal was eaten with the senior Weidelmann’s prayer of grateful thanksgiving and Weidelmann-the-Younger’s gagging swallows. The old man failed to note the danger signs or remember the anger that attended their parting. His boy was back. Bygones were bygones.

When Gerd Weidelmann left his bungalow for the carton factory the next morning, Willie had not stirred from his bed.

Let him sleep, the ex-priest thought. He would surprise the lad. Pick up a bag of dried apricots on his way home to enhance the evening meal. They would make a sort of party of it. Celebrate the remolding of a family. And with these happy thoughts in mind, his eight hours at the punch press seemed to pass in half the time.

There were no such happy thoughts for Wee Willie Weidel­ mann. He rose sluggishly at ten, and even though he vaguely knew from his first waking moments that this January 22 would be his last day among the quick, the hours dragged by slowly. Only once did he peer out a curtained window at the overcast day with its threat of rain. Enough to further depress him, feed the lump of disgrace he felt growing within him like an ambitious tumor.

Without breakfast or lunch or any combination thereof, he paced the cramped dimensions of the Weidelmann dwelling.

The world was fickle and unfeeling. He had given it his best, given what he thought it wanted, and it deceived and dis­ carded him for his troubles.

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Early in the afternoon, Willie Weidelmann made an inven­ tory of his possessions. It did not take long. His failure had taken most of the little he had. There were only his pockets to empty, plus the rattling contents of his two-suiter . . . a dime, four pennies, his lucky peso passed as a quarter by a wetback many years back at the kiosk (some damned luck!) . . . a key to his fashionable apartment he had failed to sur­ render when they bounced him for falling two months behind in his rent . . . a toothbrush worn down to half its bristle . . . a flattened tube of Crest with less than a squeeze in it . . . his Levis and beret showing their wear . . . a souvenir ashtray from a KNBC dressing room . . . a () and two E tiles from a Scrabble set he had bought to improve his mind. And the props from the suitcase . . . the dummy organs in all their splendor—fifty-eight of them left unbroken from that fateful raid on Dushon’s.

His depression reformed in self-pity before metamorphos­ ing into despair. It was all over. Slowly, deliberately, he began sorting them, the rubber joints in one heap, the plaster in another, the ceramics with their shining glaze in a third pile.

At two-thirty, with the aid of an accumulation of throw­ away weekly newspapers, he burned the twenty-six rubber specimens in the fireplace, venting upon the neighborhood (not to mention the interior of the Weidelmann domicile) a stench that doubtlessly would have been reported to the Air Resources Board had there been a temperature inversion.

At three-thirty, the now-determined dwarf crushed under heel on the bathroom floor the fifteen plaster prods and flush­ ed the irregular sized shards part way down the ancient john, thus assuring some future householder a nasty plumbing bill.

And then, at four-thirty, Willie took a vengeful hammer to the seventeen ceramic cocks until they were reduced to a lethal powder.

At five-ten he put the water on to boil.

At five-seventeen he stirred in two cups of oatmeal.

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At five-twenty-three he added Dushon’s powder.

At five-thirty-five he served supper to Gerd Weidelmann who strew shriveled apricot halves across the steaming con­ tents of two bowls.

On the afternoon of January 26 the two bodies were laid to rest in unconsecrated ground by a whiskey priest who had left his unsanctioned ministry and a common-law wife in Oakland to fly down and deliver revolutionary obsequies. He was elo­ quent, but it was eloquence largely wasted. Aside from four container company workers who got half-days off, only one mourner showed up at graveside. Rose Casey Weidelmann Darbo wore a lacy black veil and pants suit of the same funereal hue. Why was she there? We are left to guess . . . though guilt has a way of clinging to the Rose Casey Weidelmann Darbos of this world.

The markers are still there in the old Pico-Rivera cemetery which allows upright headstones and makes the twice-a-year mowers earn their wine money. Each spring rye grass has its full run of life around the askew and upturned stones, and each fall the Santa Ana winds carry its seed to distant freeway gores. Neglect has invited vandals and wits with their spraypaint cans. The old renegade priest’s marker, which once bore his dates, has been defaced . . . perhaps by one of the angry faithful who has not forgiven him his human frailty. Even his name has been crudely chiseled away.

As for Wee Willie Weidelmann, who carried forth a tradi­ tion of courtly clowning into a century which expected both more and less of him than it got, his humble monument, too, has been tampered with. Over the customary particulars of name and dates, a wag has thoughtlessly scrawled in orange Magic Marker, ‘“If a man bleeds, is he not a prick?”

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There you have it, old sport. The Television Trilogy in its entirety. The third and closing leg in the Uterine triangle. I leave you to draw your own conclusions on “Dork,” its merits apart from the other segments and how it fits into the whole, though, of course, you perceived the thematic parallels with “Fulb,” its complementary nature to “Farr,” its subtle rounding-out of the oeuvre. Surely you’ll agree that “Dork” has maturity in its favor, and the unmistakable polish of a minor master in complete control of his material.

Yet . . . I see that you wish to fault me. Gingerly and cir­ cuitously. The reach of “Dork” is foreshortened, you say.

Lacks the sweep of “Fulb” and its neutrality. I answer that it was written last and parsimony and bitterness are among the few perquisites of age. Still you cavil . . . and come out with the big charge. Did I have to? Such a crude device! And selecting for bait a diction that’s right for trolling in the porn gutter! For shame!

To hell with you, you sanctimonius son-of-a-bitch! What do you know of publishing? Of reaching the public? So I made a concession to this debased age. After 176 rejections —count 136

’em! —wouldn’t you? So I needed an attention-getter. Don’t go getting holier-than-me until you’ve stumbled in my moc­ casins . . . which will come soon enough.

Besides, beneath the dross there’s the hard metal of a moral lesson we could all do well to learn, or relearn. Filial respect must still count for something, be encouraged. Family life and family love must not be sacrificed to ambition, however within our grasp fame may seem at the moment. Go to the New Testament. What doth it profit a man to gain the world and yet suffer the loss of his own soul?

Don’t ask me why that imbecile editor of a so-called quality magazine came down on “Dork” as “morally pointless.”

Couldn’t he read between the lines? Couldn’t he see Padre Weidelmann as martyr/hero in this parable of Christian love?

Are these New York poseurs that dense? Don’t get me wrong.

I’m not thin-skinned. I welcome criticism as long as it’s just and constructive. The craftsman in me cries out for that. I’ll take my lumps when they’re deserved!

Naturally, this conspiracy of purblind editors doesn’t make your job any easier. And I have handicapped you in another way, I realize. You have no Galsworthian saga to throw around here, no Proustian monument running volumes beyond count. Just a lean three short stories, my bony Televi­ sion Trilogy that still says all I believe needs saying. By my artistic nature, I favor the spare slice of life over the rambling “Big Picture,” and I’ve spent the peak of my creative years pulverizing the same small plot of literary ground, fertilizing, weeding, watering.

I also remind you that the short story is a very demanding form. Done well, it requires discipline uncommon to novelists, not to mention non-fiction hacks writing bestsellers about Nazi hookers curing their breast cancer with yoga, or those al­ legedly wiser heads who prattle foolishly but profitably in print about some fancied horrible social ill or other inconsequen­ tial concern of the tribe that will be uncured and forgotten 137

a month after the next presidential election. No, I am not one of them. My legacy may be small, but by now we both have reason to believe it will be lasting. Comfort yourself also with the knowledge that no forests will be depleted in providing it for the discriminating few.

To the matter of style, then . . . another head upon which I may be faulted, where I’m out of step with my literary generation. You have noticed in me a fondness for—no, let’s be up-front about it, an over-reliance on Latinate words. Yes. It’s a failing I can’t quite explain. Ascribe it to the genes, to too much reading in my father’s library, to the weight of my very name—whatever. Certainly it robs my prose of directness and that lyric power one gets from Anglo-Saxon words, which are the pillars of our remarkable poetry. No doubt.

And yet I ask you to judge those words on their own merits.

Forget for the moment your need to have a battle cry or a gospel force-fed you daily through the eyes. How deny what words the Normans left are better suited to serve reason? Is there not a straightforward logic in the languages from what we condescendingly call “the South?” Not to mention a cer­ tain elegance? A grace? A felicity of phrase?

No, my friend, I do you no disservice. I am not sending you out on a tiger hunt unarmed. Not as long as there are a few civilized men and women about who read and think and feel.

Reread the Television Trilogy now that you’ve been through it once. Be on the watch for its subtleties. For its durable if relative truths. Savor it. Make it a part of you. Take it unaltered to that unknowing waiting world that you are entering and I am leaving. For both our sakes.

138

The first sign of it appeared that blustery December day I took Mother to Disneyland. It was to be a celebration of her sixty-fifth birthday, and we planned to make a day of it . . . dawdle on Main Street for a couple of hours as she so loved doing, a trip through the haunted mansion, a mid-afternoon chicken dinner alfresco, all topped off with two back-to-back rides on “The Pirates of the Caribbean” —Mother’s favorite.

Before we got very far off Main Street she was fatigued, stopping at every other bench to rest. Sensing something amiss, I suggested we return to the car, and when she offered no protest, I knew she really wasn’t herself. The walk back was labored, my shoulder her chief means of support for the last quarter mile.

For the next couple of days, I urged her to visit a doctor, get an overdue check-up, see if she wasn’t lacking something in her diet. Mother was usually a stoic in matters medical.

When ill or suffering, she concealed it, wanting not to be a burden on me, nor call attention to herself in any way. As a personal rule, she did not go to doctors. She said they were paid to find something wrong and would invent a sickness for 139

you if they could not detect one with their tests. I believe another reason she avoided them was her deep and genuine modesty, though she would never have admitted that, and I would certainly never have mentioned it to her. She was un­ willing to have her body poked and scrutinized by some stranger licensed by a body of greater strangers to violate the privacy of her person.

So I was surprised on the third day when she consented.

Surprised, and a bit worried, I might add. Her hazel eyes seemed to have lost something in determination, in that quiet pride that had always been an irreducible quality of hers.

The first visit set up a second. For tests. They were incon­ clusive, and led to more. Then still more. There was a blood imbalance. I accompanied her to Dr. Mangan’s office each time, saw her dignity and her strength slowly fade, watched the middle-aged man in white jacket become more officious and distant from us with each visit, felt my own purchase on what life I’d known and valued slipping.

I think we both knew in our own way the what if not the how as soon as Dr. Mangan, whose eyes pinched to slits behind his bifocals as he steeled himself for the dirty duty assigned him, which he carried out that sunny afternoon of December 29 when he sat us down in his office. A modem medical man, he was. Of the existential Twentieth —at least when his pa­ tients were in the crosshairs. The test could always be wrong, he assured us. Hematology was a tricky business. But if they were not —if they were in fact accurate, and further tests were to confirm what they showed —there were periods or a period of remission that could be expected in many of the chronic rather than the acute cases. Why, at that very moment there were brilliant men in Houston on the verge of a cure for leukemia. And one of the most prominent men involved in that research suffered from the same disease himself. That was motivation in spades, if you were looking for it.

But I knew it was a false hope, a fondling of the odds that 140

tried to raise the improbable to the possible, and that Dr. Mangan had come to the late and unstated conclusion that Mother had been suffering from the disease for some time without either knowing or making any show of her knowledge.

There was no period of remission. Not even a temporary arrest in her rapidly deteriorating health. The one transfu­ sion she received even seemed to accelerate the ravages of the disease rather than stay them. Daily, before my eyes, the regal, aubum-haired lady with the blue veins showing through the still-smooth, translucent skin, shrunk and withered as though years were passing in hours.

I did what I could for her, became her constant nurse and companion, but to little effect. She seemed embarrassed by the attention, felt guilty that I now had to do for her what she had always done for herself. I tried to cheer her with funny fillers I read in the New Yorker or unintentional howlers culled from the Times ’TV log because I didn’t know what else to do. Ridiculous behavior. In retrospect, I suppose I was desperately trying to preserve my own sanity and ward off the horror of watching the illness run its barbarous course.

At first she acknowledged my clumsy ministrations with faint sad smiles that were a coda to all the splendid years we had had together. But even they soon ceased. More and more she was beset by either fits of silent weeping or long periods of wordless brooding in which she seemed disassociated from her life . . . our life together.

By mid-January all her tears had stopped. (Not mine.) The states of stupor lengthened until there were only brief periods in a day when Mother was what I would call lucid and seemed to recognize her only child. It pained me, would perhaps have destroyed me, had I not been so busy tending her. She had by now lost control of her bodily functions, had become inert, a vegetable with the life-juices drying up.

Finally I did what I never thought I would be able to do.

I took her to a convalescent hospital. There was no other 141

course of action. I just couldn’t care for her properly at home, lacking both the training and the facilities. An act of betrayal, yes. But you must understand . . . the circumstances.

It was not a bad convalescent hospital —not the kind that have been the subject of frequent scandals and investigations.

It was neat and clean and presided over by a staff that seemed almost cheerful, albeit a professional cheer, as thin as the chicken soup they served the inmates. Why can’t they be forthright and call them dying stations? For that is what they are.

Mother was the youngest of the patients who stared vacantly through the small central garden, shuffled aimlessly up the long mint-green halls, tossed and moaned in their crankedup beds. But Mother didn’t notice the others. She saw nothing and said nothing as I pushed her wheelchair through the labyrinthine halls haunted by brittle-boned wraithes. I do not believe she was one bit conscious of time or place, perhaps only dimly aware of her own dying. I was grateful for that.

In the room she was to briefly share lay a great bony woman of incalculable age who kept twisting on her bed with a loud groan for every movement, punctuated in her still moments by a clear voice racked with pain that kept calling over and over, “Oh, Honey! When will it end? Why won’t it end?”

I was ready to demand of the nurse that either Mother or the woman be removed to another room, until I looked down on Mother and realized it didn’t matter. What little life she still possessed was drawn inside for the final fight in the los­ ing struggle.

For the better part of thirty-six hours, I stood or sat at her bedside, jabbering from time to time at the face with the empty stare, numbly watching as the nurses came in to record the vital signs. The last one on duty, a mousey little brunette with a child’s face, concluded her routine by cooing to me, “It won’t be long now,” as though we might be happy witnesses to a birth. I was well aware it would not be long.

142

Mother’s breathing had become increasingly labored and noisy, as if her exhalations were passing through a clogged bagpipe.

I was not present for the final breath, for which I still feel guilt, undeserved though it may be. At 8 p.m. on January 22, the nurse came in on her rounds and I hurriedly excused myself and stepped out into the empty hall to walk off my gas pains. That way I could distribute the noxious odors over a wider area and away from the sensitive nostrils of both the liv­ ing and the dying. That is the way of the body, as you know.

It humiliates cruelly and in manifold ways, while being no stranger to irony.

At 8:10 I stepped back into the room. The bony lady was curiously quiet, as though listening for some far-off call. The nurse raised her eyes to me and lowered her brows. “She’s passed on,” she said. And so Mother had. Eyes closed, mouth slightly agape, a shriveled apple of a woman now, the lifeless origin of her one and surviving child, her son, the last Uteris.

I took one look at the husk of her and felt the profound shame she would have felt had our roles been reversed. Then I turned and bolted out of the room, almost running toward the exit, away from the closing green walls and the smell of ammonia and the end of forty-four years of meaning.

A doddering nonagenarian, his mouth propped open with some dislocation of the jawbone, raised an arm to hail me and tried to say something, but words wouldn’t come and I scooted by him and down an intersecting hall before he could turn half circle. I dodged a bathrobed man without a nose who had two plastic tubes extending from a pair of holes in the raw meat between his dim-visioned eyes. I was breathing hard. At last I saw an illuminated green-letter-on-white exit sign at a corridor’s end and sprinted for it. I threw my weight against its horizontal brass bar. It opened. Onto the dark parking lot, where I stood trembling on the asphalt, collecting with it the night dew, filled with gratitude that I would never again need 143

to enter that or any similar house of horrors.

The funeral arranging was mine alone, and I bungled my way from one prescribed detail to the next —casket selection, words with the sexton, ordering from the florist mums and gladiolas and so on —forgetting how to perform each duty as it ended, sustained through it all by the knowledge that there was no need to remember.

Mother was buried on January 26. On a Bermuda-grassed knoll near Malibu that overlooks the foamy combers of the Pacific, a plot she and Cicero had bought before my birth at Mother’s urging. She so loved the ocean.

In view of its mindless crashing a handful of us stood, listen­ ing with bowed head as the minister recited the Twenty-third Psalm, five neighbors Mother had been friendly with, two dis­ tant female relatives from the Condon side, and me . . . last bearer of the flawed seed of the Uteris line.

I found myself ashamed at the fewness of mourners. At least for Mother’s sake, there should have been more. But then solitary lives bring solitary deaths and interments. There is always a price to pay.

When the casket was lowered into the earth, I knew it was more than Mother’s life that had ended. Many as yet un­ formed, unstated hopes for myself went with her, and my horizons —my artistic horizons, for those were the only horizons that for years now owned much of my private sky— had shrunk. Not from any sudden loss of talent, or sudden recognition of a lack that was always present, but through a partial collapse of will. Going it alone without Mother, without her daily kindnesses and constant love, would be difficult.

I spent the rest of the day, my dark-blue trouser legs rolled above the knees, wading in the Pacific’s chilling brine, shiver­ ing, and brine of my own manufacture bathing my eyes. Why the wading? I suppose I wanted to absorb a little of the sea’s strength and to cleanse myself. And to honor her memory.

144

I visit Mother’s grave twice a month now —and have since her burial. On the seventh and twenty-second of each month, rain or shine or wind, I place a dozen carnations, six red and six white, over the gray marble plate that informs the in­ terested that she was. You may wonder why I prolong my agony, why I don’t turn my gaze to what could be rather than to what was. Well, time hasn’t passed me by, as you were quick to think a hundred pages ago. I have merely moved slowly so as not to be mistaken for its ally in the rush to Armageddon. Perhaps I am really a Sicilian in WASP’s clothing. I want to remember what is worth remembering. I do not subscribe to any teleology. And I do not share your ex­ citement over things to come.

And yet, what does this matter? What does it matter what I want or feel? I occupy a human form, and it plays the rat with me. For all my graveside visits, my mnemonic hold on Mother slips with each gone day, and I know her less. The gap between us grows—try as I do to dredge a decaying memory for images, scenes, fragments of conversation.

I find myself waking in the night thinking of her, seeing the likeness of her, but then I am aware that I do not remember enough, that I have forgotten nine-tenths of what she was, not just to me, but what she was. And then a blade pierces my heart as I realize that I probably know no more of her than I do the fool who deserted us both in the summer of ‘48 and still may be wandering the jungles of the Peten.

145

Four weeks to the day of Mother’s death, I heard the highpitched, barely audible whine as I was walking to the fridge for my evening glass of buttermilk. It drew me outside with a flashlight to hunt the source, and I was just about to give up and go back in when its beam caught the heaving lump of black and white. Such a pitiable sight, the small body violently trembling on the uncertain legs of a just-weaned puppy. For a moment I thought she might actually fall apart, become little patches of detached fur and viscera right there on my front lawn, where someone had dumped here.

My first reaction was outrage. To think that any so-called human could abandon a helpless creature that way. Then I reconsidered. Though I had never had a dog or any other pet during my youth, I remember reading what happened to un­ wanted dogs in Los Angeles. No doubt the owner of the maternal bitch also knew that the two-legged beasts in our pueblo disposed of the four-legged ones by herding them into chambers which simulate for a prolonged time the pressure of 30,000 feet of altitude. This causes internal ruptures and bleeding and a delayed death. So you see, the abandonment 146

of Prudence Pemberton (as I came to call her) in my back yard was actually a greater act of mercy than was my adop­ tion of her.

Something about our coming together haunts me as more than hap. Could the spirit, the essence, of Mother have returned to dwell in that forlorn puppy? For one who takes his epistemological cues from David Hume, it is difficult to even entertain the thought. Then again, in a galaxy as big as ours, all things must be possible, and if all things are possi­ ble, then all things will occur, sooner or later.

Prudence was predominantly black, with a white throat and neck, and a white belly and forepaws spotted with black— signs of her Dalmatian ancestry. She also had a wide, flat triangular head and a tail that curled gayly up over her shorthaired back, these traits revealing obvious ties to Labrador.

And yet there was at least another strain within her—French hound, beagle or maybe even dachshund are my slightly in­ formed guesses —that kept her of diminished size, ap­ proaching that of, say, a robust cocker spaniel.

Prudence and I quickly became thick as lovers, and when I sold the Brentwood house and moved to the Santa Monica apartment, she was even a closer companion. And even more demanding. When feeling neglected or much deprived of fondling, she would emit a Dalmatian lament meant to draw me to her. Or, if I didn’t respond quickly enough when sum­ moned, she would trot over to me, nuzzle my pen hand so that the ink would stagger drunkenly over the editing of this very manuscript . . . so like a woman to be jealous of an artist’s art. I would have to put my pen aside to stroke her soft, black, floppy ears and coo my caring for her. She then would in­ crease her demands by rolling over to have circles furrowed in the bristles of her belly . . . a belly that was softer than a maiden’s pubic hairs . . . a belly that swelled toward me in a way of greeting, of yielding, of giving.

Ah, yes! Comes the charge. The buyer of Alpo or pelleted 147

grains gets his way and puts on the white man’s burden. He has only, say his detractors, switched brown-skinned girls with black-coated puppies. Yes, dogs are damned for servility by the same folks who praise cats for their independent ways.

(Talk about your welfare scoundrels! Living off handouts, not even earning their keep, now that rodents have been poisoned out of respectable homes.) And who are these damners and praisers? Mostly Protestants. Mostly women. Frequently widows of early-dead board chairmen and corporate honchos who keep John Calvin alive as a force in this great and neurotic land of ours. Ultimately, cat-loving dog-haters are those who can’t abide a love that is pure and simple and honestly given, wherein there are no strings, no gamesplaying, no locking-in of one’s essence. Too few of us are ready for that open a love, eh?

Perhaps Prudence was the daughter I never had. At the least, she with her loving belly rolls that revealed wise fleas darting for the cover of thicker hair or carpet also revealed to me a love as perfect as I’ve known . . . no questions asked.

No questions asked . . . think about that! That’s when one ceases to be human and begins to love, isn’t it?

Oh the times we had together! Before the winter fireplace sharing popcorn and Mozart. In the patio on summer even­ ings watching the evening cirrus grow and glow pink over barbecued ground round!

She was prone to fungus that grey-ashed the black hair above her eyes, requiring me to apply Panolog ointment to arrest its spread. Patiently she would stand while I did it, ap­ preciative, as I was appreciative to have her and meet her needs. And I would let my lips brush the thick black hairs growing from her narrow forehead, and let my willing hands thrum the soft puppy hairs of her rump. She would in return show her love by gently toothing my fingers and ears and such when she could as well have bitten them off.

During those matchless moments we—. Stop. Enough.

148

What passes between a man and his dog, or, for that matter, a woman and her dog, is no one else’s business. I would like simply to say that Prudence and I knew as true a love as ever was, though for lack of experience I can’t really substantiate the claim. Nevertheless, from experience I can say that no love is quite complete, and not-quite-complete loves are marked for early doom. Sad that only relationships based on accom­ modation and emotional truces last long by human reckonings.

It comes back to me now, at this writing, the painful remembering and knowing—or not knowing. Staring into the warm, brown, scarcely comprehending eyes that told me our love was less incomplete than non-complementary. Her watery brown eyes stared my wonder down, to where I blinked and thought the fleeting thought that she knew . . . not more than I, but things different than I. Below cognition, or above it, on a plain of feeling. I suspect she knew a universe apart from mine. And we, both accursed mammals, warm-blooded but dumb to one another, have exclusive exiles. Anent emo­ tions, we pass each other in the night on a soundless ocean where even the semaphore flags have been tampered with by a malicious god or gods unknown.

Nonsense? I think not. I believe something cruel watches over us. Takes love away, one way or another, and leaves us with pain.

We had nine months together. Nine months plus threequarters of a day, to be precise. I had let her out one chill November dusk to do her duty and didn’t worry when she didn’t immediately come scratching at the back door for re­ entry. Sometimes she liked to chase agile sparrows and taunting magpies in the fenced yard, something her breeding made more than mere play. But when an hour passed, I stirred from my editing and went for my flashlight.

I found her writhing in the crabgrass, whines muted by her gagging, stomach bloated, brown beseeching eyes liquid in the 149

moonlight. Beside her lay jagged stubs of chicken bones and a well-chewed tub of the Kentucky Colonel’s best that some unconscionable bastard had jettisoned in my yard.

Poor Prudence! I gathered her in my arms and loaded her in the car and rushed her to Luv-a-Pet Animal Hospital. In vain. The hemorrhaging was massive. She died on the operating table.

150

Okay, the obits are over. And I’m even more relieved than you. But remember—debts are to the honest man what smack is to the addict: there’s no backing off.

Now we can proceed You have no doubt wondered why I have not wondered, on this bond that receives the letters’ slightly smudged impressions, about you since that first open­ ing outburst. Am I no longer curious about what you are, what you like, what life you’ve led, etcetera? After all, as my spiritual sidekick and private confessor and soon-to-be literary executor, you’ve earned as much.

No offense, but I find I’m not the least interested. Don’t get your hackles up, because I’m certainly not sorry. The stark fact is that my time here is short, and I become increasingly preoccupied with thoughts of self and art.

I see you’re still upset and seize at that to strike back. I’m being selfish. Of course I am. (It comes with the muse.) And self-pity is wearisome, made common by overuse. Yes . . . and yet for me the faith persists. Faith in the worth of my labor, faith in what I am and what I was and soon will not be. Faith even in you. Yes, in you. Somehow I believe that you will ac­ 151

complish what I have not in bringing my work to the light of print, abetted in that end by my own impending end. But that doesn’t satisfy you, does it? You’re still a bit browned-off. I presume too much (which I readily admit to), but need I re­ mind you that I’m paying well for the privilege of getting all this off my chest?

Okay, then. Think it all over. Reflect as I have done. I suspect we really have very little in common and even less that binds us. I am enough of a realist to know that you are indulg­ ing me as I indulge myself, with that same selfishness. Your interest in me is not unlike what you might extend an exotic butterfly under your inspecting lens an hour before dining with a new mistress. I am no more than a curiosity, not to be taken seriously. Certainly not to be allowed to intrude into your private life. Yes, you are a busy man. You’ve worked hard to get where you are, made the necessary accommoda­ tions to arrive at an uneasy, one-sided peace with the world.

You also know the short-run wisdom of picking up an easy dollar where you find it —which, naturally, I am counting heavily on.

It is good we will never meet, even you now agree, or we might hate each other.

152

You’re not letting me off the hook that easily. So major a contradiction can not be hurried over unexplained. If I am serious about carrying out my plan to abort my life, then how do I reconcile that reprehensible act with the Christianity to which I have implied, in both my trilogy and my apology, at least a tenuous tie?

My offenses against gods and men have been few. Whatever crime I now commit against myself remains victimless, in­ conveniencing no one, burdening no one, taking bread from the mouth of no one, inflicting grief on no one. (A few benefits do befall the lonely man.) Therefore, I become my own judge, and knowing the accused as well as I do, I discover my capacity for mercy is infinite. I forgive. Absolution absolute.

Yes, I would like to have been born some meridional Catholic and known ordinary joys. Or perhaps that sung-of pagan suckled in a creed outworn. Then I would be deaf to these cries I hear from the cannibal god to whose door the narrow but demanding logic of the North leads me. Tillich and Niebuhr have brought me to this: morality is a function 153

of situation, and no two situations are ever the same. Mine is that there are limits to my hopes, my dreams, and I have gained little ground on them as the world measures that ground, therefore I choose to run no longer after what is not meant for me, revising old notions of what’s right and possi­ ble (the former is always ruled by the latter) for myself.

You dismiss it all with the wave of a hand. Gibberish. You want to corner me and have it out. I am not Blaise Pascal, you say; I cannot walk both sides of the street. I have to come clean with you. Yet you insist on answers when there are no answers, if only to pin me to the wall like that variant but­ terfly and say to friends and mistress curled around the walnut and cotton of the den-wall display case, “Here’s an odd specimen I came across in Los Angeles.”

The old game . . . getting even and getting better. Time slowly presses the life out of us and all the while we jockey for position against other dying men. A trap within a delusion . . . that’s what it comes down to after all. And we turn our heads from the sight of the tattered drunk sprawled in the alley with his cradled bottle of Tokay and the serene smile on his face. Unacceptable, that. An insult to the striving decent doer in us all . . . or all of us who play the game, anyway.

But still you press me. You read the bitterness in my words and disown your own impulse to second them. You want to shed the shortcomings of our race as a molting snake its skin.

Who am I to put us down? Where did I get credentials to make noise, utter rubbish?

You’d like to believe that’s all it is, but you might also wonder if I’m on to something. Say to yourself, what if what he is saying points in the direction I always wanted to go but never dared? And if it does, then what is the answer to the next question which I have asked the self in secret and, it follows, must also have been asked and answered by others?

By him? What’s the answer?

With more cunning than I knew I had, I flip the glowing 154

ember back into your mental lap and say, “What’s the question?”

“The question, for Chrissakes!”

And I cryptically say that there is no answer to that question.

You fall back and say, angrily now, I think, because you are at last engaged against your will, “But what do you think?

What do you really think?”

“Think about what?”

“Think about you and me and the ugly, overwhelming question?”

And I will feint and wiggle, and you will bore in because you want to know, and I have tricked you into admitting again that you want to know, and I will say with much hunch­ ing of these slight shoulders that surely we cannot have been put here without a purpose.

And you will say that is not enough . That one must know whether or not what one has been and has done has counted for something, influenced something, altered something— in short, had an effect.

And I will say, my back to the wall at last, that whether one dies of myeloma at thirty or succeeds to a million dollars at forty pivots on a deoxyribonucleic acid dice throw for a stake of mostly dumb interstellar dust . . . . Or perhaps that dust will reassemble to ask these same questions at the same or a different place at a distant or a come-again time. Take your bow, Cicero.

155

I seldom leave my apartment anymore. I prefer it that way.

Much better than staying on in the Brentwood house, which I sold two years ago. It would hurt Mother to know what had been the family home for forty years is no longer occupied by a Uteris. And yet I’m sure she would understand. It was just too big for me to keep up. I rattled around in it like a solitary pea in a giant’s maraca. Besides, there were too many familiar objects, too many painful associations haunting that house.

Mother would approve of my Santa Monica place. While on the small side (850 square feet as I pace it off), it’s agreeable, about five degrees cooler year-round, and there is the ever-present tang of sea air borne in on the onshore breeze. An altogether agreeable climate for a shut-in who has ordered his living habits to give rhythm to his last days.

I rise at seven sharp and devote forty minutes to indoor ex­ ercises on my Bullworker, then at mid-morning I turn to the Television Trilogy and polish it, and after wearying of that, put the finishing touches to this, my last will and testament that you will execute. It is not all work and no play, however.

I do set aside time for quiet and private fun, and keep on 156

hand an ample supply of Orville Redenbacher gourmet pop­ ping com, and each Monday, Wednesday and Friday evening I heat up a batch and ingest the buttered billows in copious amounts. On the intervening weekdays, I feed the soul by listening to my recording of Gregorian Chant by the monks of the Abbey of Encalcat. The soothing regularity of these pleasures almost tempts me to stick around . . . but then I think a while on thee, dear friend, and sorrows begin at content’s end.

I observe Saturday night, the one in seven that tradition prescribes be devoted to hoopla and excess. Though alone, I yield, and here somewhat reluctantly confess to conduct once considered felonious. I have never been much of a drinker.

When young I gave it a try, favoring neutral spirits flavored with botanicals, but gin wronged me regularly, was certain to do my body no good, so I gave it up. Saturn’s night now finds me pulling on a joint rolled from an old and moldy stash of Panama Red, purchased at what I’m sure is twice the go­ ing price from the dealer son and junior partner of S. Watanabe, Mother’s gardener at the Brentwood place.

You’re amused at the very idea. So am I. Bud Barlow’s prank fostered a habit that’s brought a little joy to me dur­ ing my years of trial. A break in the strain. So what if I’m lowering my testosterone level? Warping my chromosomes?

For me such warnings lack relevance.

Anyway, I do it, and by doing it am gently shoved into two hours of transcendence on Saturday night. Visions and in­ sights parade through my forebrain in rapid file, yet I let them pass and refuse to record them on paper, because to do so seems a violation of life, which, paradoxically, at these moments of altered consciousness, appears more precious than art itself. Something heretical in that, and sometimes I turn on the television to combat the heresy, distract myself. Not the least wonder of Cannabis sativa is that the tawdry pro­ gramming is made watchable, even at times, enjoyable. You 157

realize I must keep up with the subject of my trilogy. (Yes, sometimes I cheat. Sometimes I light up Sunday night, too.

It does wonders for those early-evening specials. And yes, I’m aware that Dr. Seuss under grass is a trip and a half.)

Twice a month, following my visits to Mother’s grave, I go to the beach, picking the least-frequented stretch of sand to walk barefoot over, watch the western sky and let the cold Pacific waters numb me to my knees. Mother would understand.

Through careful planning, I have been able to limit all other ventures into the outside world to one every ten days.

I probably could stretch it to two weeks if it weren’t for my Valiant; I find the battery loses its juice after the eleventh day of idleness, and then I have to bother the Auto Club. (Nothing lasts save meaninglessness.) The direct route I have worked out for myself makes it less painful: the drugstore for Digel, aspirins, Anusol and such; the laundromat for forty minutes to wash and dry my cottons; finally, Safeway for granola, pop­ corn, figs and other staples that assure a healthy body. Two miles (four for the round trip) and two hours is all that is required.

Yet even that at times seems too much, and I am oh-soaware that the convenience food stands are closing in on me.

Even on my route selected to avoid the mushrooming, fat-fried ugliness, I know I will pass one Jack-in-the-Box (with another in the works since two weeks ago), a Taco Bell, a matched pair of McDonalds, an Arby’s (standing precisely mid-way between the two golden arches), an A&W Root Beer stand, an Orange Julius and two representatives of the lesser burger chains.

Usually, the eateries do not possess corners, that being strategic territory occupied by gas stations whose suppliers have the political and monetary clout to seize and hold them.

I count them as I go: three Standard/Chevrons; two Union 76s; two Dutch pectens; one each for Mobil, Phillips, Exxon (formerly Enco?) and an all self-service operation that calls 158

its product Hellpower. (The last-mentioned is where I fill up every six weeks out of the same perversity that made me vote for McGovern.)

Yet the circle tightens in a strangle. Yes, old friend, you will be here to see what I will not: the final victory of the franchise—perhaps even the franchising of America itself, with the pushing of its chromatic plastic signs and wares into the most beknighted pockets of terrestial want. May you have the stomach for it.

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As my life draws to a terminal point, there are times within these rooms I inhabit when I have second thoughts. That it might have been different. That I might go back and recoup possibilities I felt were never really mine. More often than not it is when I have returned from my twice-monthly outings to the beach, after visiting Mother. Crouched there on the brown vacant sand, packed hard by the coming and going of the tides, I have spied a young girl up the strand. I watch her splash in an ankle’s depth of foam as she comes toward me, passes me by, her head bowed forward in thought. She is lovely, emerging from the grace of girlhood, at the halting end of innocence, and the sea spray has formed droplets on her peach-dark skin.

I squint and fix her in backlit pose, a silhouette on the brink of becoming and knowing. I tell myself she needs me now.

That I should rise and brush the sand from my legs and go to her and tell her. Everything. Then offer myself as guide through the trials ahead. Save her life and find mine.

A snare, of course. The so-very-old deception of the flesh.

As if I dared disturb her, intrude. At such moments I have 160

the marvelous facility for remembering who I am and what I’ve been and how I could never be anything else, and I nip the romantic rebellion in the bud without having budged from my cross-legged station on the beach, sans peach.

You bristle at that and the defeatism that shows so baldly through everything I say. You would do differently. You would go to that young girl with the translucent beads clinging to her slim golden body, crane your neck and whisper into the ear of the head cast demurely down and tell her all, share her thoughts that were once yours, too, in brighter days, and take her to your bed and caress her cares—our cares—away for the moment, and explain to her there’s only the moment.

Ha! You say you want to live it all again! Want the chance to repeat your folly. And be forgiven for it. After all, you pro­ test, a man is innocent until proven otherwise, though you will concede that in the end we are all proven guilty. All roman­ tics are seducers, penetrators, chingadas. Levellers of a pernicious kind who wish nothing more than to bring everyone down from aloft.

I am a realist and of stronger stuff, more Eliot’s man than Yeats’. I do not want to go back and try to be what I never was, or even what I was, because I have gone too far as myself, and not gone so far without some pride. Perhaps I do wear my trousers rolled as my eyes stalk that inviolable golden girl upon the beach. Yes, and I have heard the eternal footman, while holding my seersucker coat, snicker. She will not sing to me. I do not think she will sing to you, either, old buddy.

She’s probably crying, and to herself.

161

Still (to use the Newsweek connective), there remain un­ guarded moments when I like to think I can be of some service to humankind as other than the Television Trilogy’s author.

Yes, even me, anonymous, old, self-consuming me.

We live in an age of energy shortages, yes? The end of our fossil-fuel reserves looms on the horizon of the coming century—or just beyond. Purveyors of power warn us regularly that the crunch will come. Then why has no one thought of it? It puzzles me. Perhaps because I’ve lived two-thirds of my life being a gas factory from the navel down, I am a natural for the insight. Exactly! We are, after all, talking about a gaseous hydrocarbon not far removed in atomic structure from methane, and quite combustible, as many an experi­ menting schoolboy has learned to his sorrow. Yet we persist in letting this most natural of natural resources go untapped and waste its sweetness in an atmosphere of useless nitrogen.

Suppose for a moment that we had in every WC, say, a fivegallon, strong glass jar fitted on top with a cushioned rubber seat device that when not depressed contains its gasses, but when sat upon opens an inlet valve while maintaining a

162

perfect seal between rubber and cheeks. Peristaltic action, bowel miseries, etcetera, provide the necessary force. Then when the donor rises the gases are trapped and stored for human use. Exactly. The ultimate example of recycling.

I don’t know if it’s technically feasible to actually recycle the waste directly into the incoming natural gas line, or whether we might have a collection agency (municipally or privately owned, whatever, I don’t want to open that can of worms!) drop by weekly to pick up a five-gallon bottle and leave an empty replacement —kind of the reverse of the Sparkletts folks. In any case, I can foresee maybe a 30 per­ cent reduction in our present residential consumption of gas taken from the finite earth innards, and its supplement being cleaner-burning than coal or coal oil and therefore no pro­ ducer of smog.

Yes, of course, there are probably a few bugs in this scheme of mine, but surely the idea itself is sound. Don’t we have enough unemployed engineers to make the necessary refine­ ments? After all, I’m more poet than mechanic. The initial breakthrough in theory, the capture of the principle is my specialty. There’s always a surplus of those stolid Edison types who can tidy up what I’ve left behind. I don’t feel any obliga­ tion to draw blueprints for ARCO! When you get down to the nub of it, why did I raise the subject in the first place? What, pray, do I owe the world?

What has it ever done for me that hasn’t been treble-hooked with pain? I say it had damn well better learn to get on without me! And learn it soon.

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I made a mistake today. I should have played the Navajo and never kept Mother’s personal effects after she died. But I couldn’t bring myself to throw 'em out. I had the Bekins men cart them over here, and I stored them in my basement garage. So that this sunny June morning, while searching for a missing egg shirrer, I blundered into boxes that retrieved memories and loosed tears. In the same carton in which I found the shirrer were plastic candle holders. Little Scotty dogs with holes bored in their backs. Nine yellow, eight a pale violet. Sight of them exumed that buried day when they had topped the cake (coconut fudge, my favorite) Mother baked for my birthday.

She had tears in her eyes that evening when she lit them.

I knew she was moved by the passing of another year and the prospect of a time not far off when I would probably leave her and take my rightful place in the world.

“Seventeen today, Marcus,” she said in an attempt at gaiety. “I hope this will not be the last time we celebrate together.”

My throat was thick and closing as I drew a breath to blow 164

out the candles. Before I exhaled (snuffing all save one, per usual), I made a wish that never would another birthday come, hers or mine, without us being together, eating cake by candlelight.

My hands rubbed the Scotties and the metal inch-and-ahalf-long pins that had anchored them in a frosting tasted many years back. I swallowed to open my throat. And then I erred in looking down into the open carton where I had bared a glass-faced picture of her, looking up, out at me. It was one of those brown-tinted photographs that seem to have been the thing in the 1920s, the image seen and held ac­ curately, but unmistakably of a bygone era. Mother wore one of those beaded veils over her face, falling from a jaunty little Robin Hood cap that showed up dark brown in a field of lighter brown. I drew back. Staring at me was the face of a hesitant vamp, cradled within the half-circle of Cicero’s arm.

There was a dangerous beauty in the face. And a certain predatory set to the mouth, and a do-we-dare challenge in the furtive eyes beneath the neatly trimmed pageboy.

Yes, she had lived without me. Had thoughts, secrets, feel­ ings, even lusts, we must presume, unknown to me. One is wise not to poke into attic trunks and basement boxes.

165

This chapter should have a title. Maybe “Fragments.” Or “Loose Ends That Need Tying.” Something that will answer any left-behind questions. Your questions.

No, I’m not afraid of going through with it. No, I don’t think going through with it means I’m running out. No, I do not consider myself a failure. Had I been born black or brown, become faggot or felon, my art might have seen the light of print. But I’m a straight WASP, a moribund species in Los Angeles, whose stinger has corroded in its sheath.

Without this weapon, I find myself shrinking from the ex­ uberance and life of the world’s ultimate melting pot, this Protean city that owns me yet resists all my attempts to own it.

Of course I am not alone. No one has left much of a mark on this 460-square mile, 460-million-ton marshmallow. Smite it and your sword print is quickly swallowed by the goo. Why, long-gone sabre-tooths and dire wolves and gingko trees left more of an impression during the Pleistocene than any of us ever will!

Which is not to add any libels against this misunderstood city of my birth. Nor is it meant to indict any of my contem­ 166

poraries. They are not, whatever you have heard to the con­ trary, a bunch of Babbitts wearing lampshades or Gidgets gone to giggles. Simply nice and bright and overall kindly people who, like the California girls of popular song, just want to have fun. Of course, their laudable pursuit of freedom does have a hedonistic base, making them cowards in the heart.

They give of themselves, but not too much, because they wish to laugh, not lead. My problem is that I wish to give more and laugh less even while I am in retreat.

Which leads us to the troubling void. You can’t help but agree that what we lack most in this age of brass are heroes and heroines. Those we can look to for help, inspiration, guidance. We used to have them —enlightened lawmakers and leaders, artists of the first circle, philosophers not wallow­ ing in despair. But I challenge you to finger them now —those who by the dint of mind or spirit at least open the banality of collective life to the possibility of tragedy. They are absent.

And we are left with honor a heap of ashes, dignity in the keep of the lonely few who never appear on, or listen to, talk shows.

Go ahead, scratch for names. And in your desperation don’t cite that pair of moppets appearing each weekday on the public television channel. Some human pulls their strings behind the scenes. And we don’t even know that Ernie and Bert have surnames.

Ah, yes! He goes back to television, you’re saying. Why, after having picked on it so in my trilogy? Why more? Why massage such a low medium to move my message? Exactly.

To make a universal message as universal as one can, what better way than invoke the great, levelling tube? Why not deal in the age’s soma ordinaire? After all, in a time bereft of heroes telly does give us celebrities to tide us over.

Of course servile print debased assists in spreading the na­ tional infection, as is distressingly plain by the success of People and The National Enquirer and like literary boils at every supermarket checkstand. The good news is that there’s 167

more than enough pus to go around. The bad news is that it may be, in the long run, as lead was to Rome and cigarettes to our bodies, harmful to our health.

Finally, in your search for heroes, please skip over me. My artist’s anonymity has been hard-won. I know no one and no one knows me —that well have I covered my tracks. Yes, art is long, time is fleeting; so an artificer makes concessions in the interest of time, always short.

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There’s one thing I’ve kept from you. And here I spill my guts with the utmost hesitancy. You will remember I told you I fly the colors of a radical empiricist, no stranger to Wittgen­ stein and Kamap. Now I make a clean breast of it all, fully aware that to hold back is to obscure, leave in doubt all the reasons why I must shortly go into the great beyond, that un­ discovered bourne where travelers can’t use their credit cards.

I’m uncertain how to begin. Words for once do not come easily. How do I tell you that I, an arch skeptic, doubting Thomas’ foremost fan, admirer of Pontius Pilate and sworn enemy to parapsychology and similar hokum in all their guises, have myself crossed over? That I am clairvoyant? Seen things I had no business seeing? Called into question my own sense perceptions? And answered myself under the most rigorous cross-examination that, yes, indeed, I have a pipeline to the preternatural?

It’s a grisly clairvoyance. Involuntary. Mercifully, I have not seen those stiff masks often.

I must have been thirteen when it first happened. I was playing Monopoly with my only cousin, Blake, my senior by 169

two years . . . Blake of the golden curls and the object of Mother’s sister's highest hopes. He rolled the dice and counted his flatiron off eleven spaces to a lucky landing between my hotels on Ventnor and Marvin Gardens. With joy and de­ fiance, his youthful, healthy ruddy face turned up to me.

That was the way I saw him, momentarily, before in a flash the skin pulled taut and a withered gray over a skull trans­ formed into . . . well, one of a male of the species in his late twenties exhaling his last breath of life. I remember shudder­ ing at the sight —that ghastly physiognomy appealing to me to do something. Anything!

As I recall, Blake won that afternoon’s game. He also died at twenty-eight of Bright’s disease, looking on his last day precisely as he had briefly that earlier day when he con­ gratulated himself on having visited the Water Works.

That was just the first happening—the first of these still life/death visitations. It happened again with a grammar school guy named Fred who went out at seventeen with an aneurysm. Then a Brentwood neighbor, Helen Woosley, who raised gorgeous fuchsias over our hedge and taught me everything I know of snapdragons and sandy loams, provided another grotesque preview clip nine years before she passed away, a victim of multiple sclerosis.

Some in their madness might call this a gift. I say it’s a tor­ ture, given to one who can least endure it. And yes, it hap­ pened with Mother. I don’t want to dwell on that, except to say I saw her as she was on her last day for an attenuated two seconds, while she cooked up an evening omelette for us, ten years before her time did come. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t bury or erase the vision, though I took some consolation in that the specter was of a woman in her late seventies, unaware that the cancer’s ravages would subtract fifteen years from her appearance.

There has been one more visitation, only last May in my bathroom, when I was shaving under the fluorescent lights 170

that make yawning pits of all my pores, and purple the most ordinary blemishes. All of sudden my Gillette Trak II stop­ ped in its track. And there it was, that face I feared to recognize. Another death mask. My own. I estimated the ghoulish reflection at perhaps fifty-six years, which gave me eleven more. And so it was, that very morning, before I had towelled my face, that I firmed up two resolutions: I would hide myself from others so I would no longer have to see them as their embalmers did; and I would steal a march on everyone’s executioner by exiting before my time and by my own hand.

Now it all begins to fall into place, doesn’t it? No, I’m not daft, as you once believed. All things considered, my course of action makes great good sense. Don’t we all want that op­ tion available to us? The best of us and the worst of us and the rest of us? You know, should we contract the proverbial incurable etcetera? I’m glad you at last understand me.

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I’m stalling. About to back out and rob you of your 90K. A wobbly kneed coward who strings you on just to get you to listen to what is no longer nonsense . . . but neither is it the way you wanted to spend this afternoon.

Not so. Everything in its time, they say. They could as well have added everything in its place in time. To level with you, it’s the setting. Los Angeles. Even at this moment, though I have lived behind drawn blinds for three months now, still the sun trickles through, seeping into the comer of this very room where my Underwood awaits me, the insidious rays making near-gold of the pale green of my shag carpet. It is a persis­ tent thing, complicating everything. No sane man kills himself in the presence of sunlight, and I cannot wait for, or trust in, a bad January.

I know now that I will have to leave Southern California.

Absent myself from the land of my birth, quit Canaan, this drowsy garden with its strange fruit. Go to a more “civilized” place to commit this most civilized of acts, which means you will find this document elsewhere, in what we both must agree are more appropriate surroundings, which means you will be 172

no countryman of mine, no fellow lotus-muncher . . . unless you are there on holiday.

That’s all to the good, when you think about it. Those who live south of San Luis Obispo on the southern Pacific Slope are infected with a lethargy that invites dreams and the neglect of duty. Throughout my adult life, I have tried to fathom the why of it. I once convinced myself that it was the vegetation as much as the climate and the boring earlymorning canopy of stratus. I blamed the feathery, insub­ stantial eucalyptus in all its redolent species and messy sub­ species as culprit number one among the myriad exotics brought to thrive in unrightful places, alongside the native liveoaks and sycamores. But further research demolished the thesis. Long before that dubious arboreal gift got here from Down Under, I discovered, there were Kuksu cults and addicts of the jimson weed and just plain dopers and dreamers on in­ ertia’s landscape. The answer must be in the air we breathe, and was breathed in prehistory, when those first Amerindian bands took that odd, one-in-a-thousand migrational offramp south and west and found lassitude to their liking.

Be reassured that I won’t welch. Not now. In truth, life has become a hairball caught in my throat and I’m getting it out by getting out. All out. Which should gladden your greedy heart while violating your sense of fair play. You would like a little more humility from me now. Some greater show of in­ decision, uncertainty, wonder. No one gets to quit believing he’s won the game.

My apologies for believing that I have done just that in a slight way—a conviction I take to the grave, where it can’t be abused by you or your betters. But I’ll grant you a last con­ cession. Yes, I know my life, in the language of the street, has been “no biggie.” No Hamlet am I, nor was meant to be. And yes, the most frightening possibility has crossed my mind: that the Television Trilogy is no more than the well-honed ravings of a madman, edifying no one, of potential amusement to 173

only a few human raptors . . . if it is ever read. I have pondered all this, and am still for taking my chances. Every­ one in the end must so rest his case.

What else is there to say? Only to beg desperately again that you see to the trilogy—even if you decide you must put your own name to it, claim some co-credit as its author. We might both be redeemed.

Finally, you might wish to visit my grave, if the spirit or op­ portunism moves you. (Get an edge on literary pilgrims to come, eh?) I’ll be in Malibu next to Mother, usurping Cicero’s earth. Reznik will see to the details of burial and the head­ stone with epitaph: IF NOTHING ELSE, HE WAS TRANSITIONAL

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1

PUBLISHER S POSTSCRIPT TRANSIENT DIES IN BIZARRE BEDROOM DRAMA

By Roy Wickmann Examiner Staff Writer AUG 14—A man identified as Marcus A. Uteris, 46, of Los Angeles, was found dead in a Market Street hotel room yester­ day evening. A San Francisco Police Department spokesperson said two officers responded to a phone call for help from a hysterical Mrs. Hattie Johnson shortly after 9 p.m. When the officers arrived, they found Uteris stretched out naked and ap­ parently lifeless on a bed in the shabby third-floor room.

Attempts at mouth-to-mouth resucitation failed to revive the man.

Mrs. Johnson, who was in the room with Uteris when the police arrived, was incoherent and unable to describe in detail what had happened. “He told me to do it,” she sobbed repeatedly. “The others always told me when to get up.”

A back-up pair of officers had to be summoned to help subdue the 300-pound Hunters Point woman, who was trans­ ported to the Hall of Justice, where she was booked on a resorting charge.

The Coroner reported the probable cause of death as suffocation.

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Book design by Mike Shenon. The text is set in 11 pt.

Baskerville by the Freedmen’s Organization. Production

by K. Wesley Hall Advertising. Printed on acid-free paper in the United States of America.

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Usually about here a picture of the author appears. Our best efforts — including ploughing through every Uni High yearbook between 1945 and 1970 — failed to produce a picture of this fugitive man, more private than Thomas Pynchon. Indeed, so well did he cover his tracks that one begins to doubt he ever walked the streets of Brentwood.

Jacket Design by Mike Shenon ISBN □-cWEE73-Q3-b

“With an acutely critical eye, Meyer views the condition of contemporary life for the thinking individual. Ranging from broad strokes of bawdy hum or to subtle intellectual distinctions, Complete Works of Marcus Uteris is a tour de force that is frequently profound and consistently entertaining.”

John Espey, Author of The Anniversary “A wildly tragic-comic novel that makes fodder of television culture. Bold, bawdy, uninhibited, Meyer romps with his clowns in an extravagantly conceived satire.”

Frances Ring, Author of Against the Current: As l Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“An elaborate literary joke that is not only Rabelaisian but strangely arresting . . . a book as different and unpredictable as its setting, Los Angeles.”

Anthony Arthur, author of Deliverance at Los Banos.