Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation Read online

  PEGGY MANTLE: I’ve got to admit it. I loved him. He wasn’t the toughest kid in school, or the best-looking, but even then, even when he was young, he was so—so, I don’t know what you’d call, dynamic…Well, I just loved him, that’s all. He was great. Just great. I loved him, that’s all.

  LEON POTTER: Marty? The times we had, nobody could match. We were real crazy. Used to take bath towels and crayon CCC in a triangle on them, and tie them around our necks, and play Crime Cracker Cids. Kids, that should have been, but we were just fooling around. You know, we’d make up these crimes and solve them. Like we’d take milk bottles out of the wooden boxes everybody had at their side door, and then pretend there was a milk bottle thief around, and solve the case. We had good times. I liked him lots. It’ll be good seeing him again. Wonder if he remembers me—oh, yeah, he’ll remember me.

  There they go, the vagrants, swirled away as the warning plaque lights up with its FASTEN SEAT BELTS and NO SMOKING. There they go, back to the soft-edged world where they belong; somewhere inside your head, Marty Field. They’re gone, and you’re here, and the plane is coming in over Cleveland. So now think carefully…answer carefully…do you remember?

  As the plane taxis up to Cleveland Municipal Airport, do you remember Leon? Do you remember Peggy, whose father owned the Mantle apple orchards? Do you remember Evan Dennis who tried to raise a beard and looked like a poor man’s Christ or a poorer man’s Van Gogh? Do they come back unfogged, Marty Field, who was Morrie Feldman of 89 Harmon Drive, Lainesville, Ohio? Are they there, all real and the way they really were?

  Or do the years muddy the thinking? Are they softer in their images, around the edges. Can you think about them the way they’re thinking about you? Come on, don’t hedge your bets, Marty Field. You’re a big man now; you did thirteen weeks at the Copa, you play the Chez Paree and the Palace. You get good bait from Sullivan and Sinatra when they want you on their shows, and Pontiac’s got a special lined up for you in the fall, so you don’t have to lie to anyone. Not to their memories, not to yourself, not even to the Fates. Tell the truth, Marty, and see how it sounds.

  Don’t be afraid. Only cowards are afraid, Marty, and you’re not conditioned to be a coward, are you? Left home at seventeen, out on a fruit truck, riding in the cab right behind the NO HITCHHIKERS sticker on the windshield. You’ve been around, Marty Field, and you know what the score is, so tell the truth. Level with yourself. You’re going back to see them after thirteen years and you’ve got to know.

  I’m cashing in on the big rock ’n’ roll craze, slanting songs at the teenagers. The way I figure it, they’ve exhausted the teen market, and they’re going to have to start on the preteens, so I’m going to beat the trend. I’ve just recorded my first record, it’s called “Nine Years Old and So Much in Love.” It’s backed with “Ten Years Old and Already Disillusioned.”

  Okay, Marty, forget the sick shticks. That’s what got you your fame, that’s why they’re honoring you today in Lainesville. But that’s dodging the issue. That’s turning tail and running, Marty. Forget the routines, just answer the questions. Do you remember them? The truth now.

  You’re about as funny as a guided tour through Dachau.

  Another bit, Marty? Another funny from your long and weirdie repertoire? Or is that routine closer to the truth? Is it a subconscious gag, Marty, babe? Does it set you thinking about Evan Dennis and Jack Wheeldon and all the rest from the sleepy, rustic town of Lainesville, just thirty-one miles from Cleveland in the so-called liberal heart of the great American Midwest?

  Is it the truth, as you descend the aluminum staircase of the great flying machine, Marty Field?

  Does it start the old mental ball game, that remark about Dachau, where they threw Jews into furnaces? Does it do something to your nice pseudo-Gentile gut? That gut that has been with you since Morrie Feldman days…that heaved on you when you had the nose job done to give you such a fine Gentile snout…that didn’t complain when the name was changed legally. Does it bother that gut now, and give you the hollow, early-morning-chilly feeling of having stayed up all night on No-Doz and hot, black coffee? Does it bug you, Marty?

  …ve haff an interesting phenomena in Chermany today…you’ll haff to excuse the paint under my fingernails; I’ve been busy all night, writing “goyim go home” on the doors of cathedrals…

  Oooh, that was a zinger, wasn’t it, Marty. It was a nice switch on the synagogue-swastika-painting bits the papers have been carrying. Or is it just that, Marty? Say, how the hell did you ever become a sick comic, anyhow? Was it a way of making a buck, or are you a little sick yourself? Maybe a little angry?

  At what, goddam you, get outta here and let me alone!

  Why, at your past, Marty, babe. Your swingin’ past in good old we’re-honoring-Marty-Field Lainesville.

  Is that the axe, sweetie? Is that why you keep swingin’?

  Shut up. Let me alone. It’s a gig, that’s all, just another gig. It’s a booking. I’m in. I’m out. I take their lousy honor and blow the scene. There’s no social signif here. I’m a sickie because it’s a buck. That’s it. I’m whole; I’m not a weirdie, that’s just my bit. It goes over.

  Sure, Marty. Sure, babe. I understand perfectly.

  What’d you call me?

  Not a thing, swinger. Not a mumblin’ thing.

  You’d damned well better not call me yellow, either.

  Cool it, man. No one’s asking you to cop out. The whole world loves Marty Field. He’s a swinger. He’s a funny man. He was a funny kid, maybe too, but now he’s a funny man. Go on, sweetie, there they are, waiting behind the hurricane fence, waiting to greet the conquering hero. Go on, Attila, say something funny for the people.

  The banner was raised by two children, then, and Marty Field’s face broke into its calculated good humor at the sight of

  WELCOME HOME MARTY FIELD

  PRIDE OF LAINESVILLE!!!!

  It wasn’t such a long ride, but then it never had been. Thirty-one miles, past the Fair Grounds, past the Colony Lumber Company where he had played so long before. Remembering the condemned pond, so deep behind the Colony Lumber Company; remembering his birthday, when he had thought there would be no party and he had stayed all day, miserable and wasting time, only to go home and see the remains of the surprise party, held without him. Remembering the tears for something lost, and never to be regained.

  Past Lathrop grade school, where he had broken one of the ornamental lamps over the door. Past Harmon Drive, where he had lived. Down Mentor Avenue, and after a time, into the center of town. The square, and around the square, past what was once the Lyric Theatre, now metamorphosed into an office building. Remembering the tiny theatre, and its ridiculous banner beneath the marquee: Lake County’s Most Intimate Theatre. Remembering how you had to sit in your neighbor’s lap, the movie was so small. Intimate, indeed. Remembering.

  Then the hotel, and washing up, and a fresh white shirt with button-down collar, and your Continental suit, so they could stare and say, “He really knows how to dress in style, don’t he?”

  All that, all so fast, one bit after another. Too many memories, too many attempts to ravel the truth about what really happened. Was it a happy childhood? Was it the way they say it was, and the way you’d like to remember it?

  Or was it something else? Something that has made you the man you are…the man who climbs into the spotlight every day of his life, takes a scissors and cuts up his fellow man. Which way was it, Marty? Come on, stop stalling.

  An honor banquet, and Lord! they never had food like that in Lainesville before. No pasty dry sliver of white chicken meat for Marty Field, no, indeed, not! The best of the best for the man who outTrendexed Maverick. And after the meal, a fast tour of the town—kept open, center-stripe on Main Street left rolled out after eight o’clock—just to stir that faulty, foggy memory.

  A dance at the Moose lodge…

  A late-night pizza…

  A lot of autographs…

  Too
many handshakes…

  Then let’s get some sleep, don’t forget the big dedication of the plaque tomorrow, over at the High School, that’s a helluvan honor, doncha know.

  Sleep. You call that a sleep?

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the Principal began, “humor is a very delicate thing.” He was a big, florid man; his job had been secure for fifteen years, with the exception of the time Champion Junior High had been condemned, torn down, and joined with the new Senior High. Then they had tried to drag in a man from East Cleveland, but the Principal had called on his brother-in-law, whose influence in local politics was considerable. And abruptly, the man from East Cleveland had found his record wanting. The Principal was a big, florid, well-fed, and secure man.

  “And like all delicate things,” he went on, “it takes a special sort of green thumb to make it flower. Such a green thumb is possessed by the man I’m privileged to introduce this afternoon.

  “I recall the first time I ever saw Marty Field,” he pontificated, drawing thumbs down into vest pockets. “I was Principal of the old Champion Junior High, and one September morning, as I left my office, I saw a thin, small boy hurrying late to class. Well, sir, I said to myself…”

  Marty Field closed off reception. There it was. Again. The small, short, sickly bit again. Yeah, you were so right, Principal. I was small, and miserable thin, and that was part of it. But only part. That was the part where I couldn’t keep up. But that isn’t where it began. It went back much further.

  Go back, then, Marty Field. For the first time since they contacted you about the honors Lainesville wanted to bestow on you, go back and conjure it up as it really was.

  Tell it true, Marty. No gags, no punch lines, no shticks…just the way it was.

  All things are as they were then, except…

  YOU ARE THERE…

  Your name is Morrie Feldman. Your father’s name is Lew Feldman, your mother is Sarah Feldman. You are the only Jew on your street, the only Jewish kid in your grade school. There are seven Jewish familiesin town. You go to Lathrop grade school and you are a little kid. At recess time they get you out on the ball diamond, and one of them picks a fight with you. Usually it’s Jack Wheeldon, whose head is square and whose hair is cut in a butch, and whose father is a somethingorother at the Diamond Alkali plant. Jack Wheeldon is big and laughs like a jackass and you don’t like him because he looks with a terrible strangeness out of his cruel eyes.

  You stand there while Jack Wheeldon calls you a dirty kike, and your mother is a dirty kike, and you pee your pants because all kikes do that, don’t they, you frigging little kike? And when you swing and hit him on the side of the head, the circle of kids magically grows about you, and while you’re locked in an adolescent grapple with Jack Wheeldon (who is all the things in this life that you despise because they are bigger than you and slower-witted and frightening), someone kicks you from behind. Hard. At the base of your spine. With a Thom McAn shoe. And then you can’t help it and you start to cry.

  You fall down, and they begin kicking you. They all kick you very hard, and you aren’t old enough or smart enough to pull your arms and legs around you. So after a while everything goes sandy and fuzzy and you know you are unconscious. There’s a special sort of pleasure in that, because that’s what happens to the good guys in the movies on Saturday afternoons, when they’re being attacked by the bad guys. And after a while Miss Dexter with the pointy nose, from the fifth grade upstairs, comes out on the playground, and sees what is happening, and goes back inside to tell someone else. Then, later, the faceless teacher from the third grade, who likes you, comes running out, and lifts you in her arms and tenderly carries you inside.

  The first thing you hear when you wake up is one of the kids saying; “…dirty Jewish elephant.” And you wonder with childish logic why he calls you an elephant. You don’t have a long trunk. That is the first time they let you know you have a shonikker apple between your eyes and your mouth.

  Your name is Morrie Feldman, and you live at 89 Harmon Drive. You have been away at camp all summer, and now you are back, and your father is telling you that your dog Puddles was gassed while you were away. Mrs. Shanks, next door, called the pound while your father and mother were in Cleveland for the afternoon, and had them take Puddles down and gas him. Your father tells you he is sorry, and doesn’t know why Mrs. Shanks would do such a thing, but you run out of the house and hide under the side porch all day and cry, anyhow. Later, you steal Mrs. Shanks’s rug-beater from her garage. You bury it very deep in the soft, amber dirt behind the garage.

  Your name is Morrie Feldman, and you are in junior high school. You hear something heavy hit the front of your house late one night, and then something else, and then a half-eaten grapefruit comes crashing through your front window, and out on the lawn—here in Ohio, and who’d ever think it—you see a huge cross burning. The next day you learn about the Anti-Defamation League. You don’t tell anyone that you saw Mr. Evan Dennis from Dennis’s Florists, with soot on his face and hands, running down the street to a car with its headlights out.

  The name is the same, and it’s later, and somehow you have a girl named Peggy Mantle, who has blond hair and blue eyes and Anglo-Saxon features, and you love her very much. Until you catch her doing things she never did with you. She’s doing them in the bushes behind her house after the Halloween party. She’s doing them with Leon Potter from across the street, whose mother always slams the door when you come on the porch. You don’t say anything. You can’t. You’re afraid.

  You’ve been afraid for a long time now. When you were smaller, once in a while you could beat Jack Wheeldon, or convince Leon that he should play with you. But they’ve continued to get bigger, and you’ve stayed small and frail, and they can beat you with their fists.

  So you’ve learned to cut them up with your tongue.

  You’ve learned how to tear them and shred them and slice them with your mouth. That’s how it started. That’s where it came from. That’s why you leave town in a fruit truck, and go to Buffalo, and from there New York. That’s why you go to a plastic surgeon when you’ve saved the money, and have your nose molded to look like another nose…Leon Potter’s nose, or as close to it as the surgeon’s samples came, but you don’t realize that till much later.

  That’s why you decide to change your name.

  Your name is not Morrie Feldman.

  Your name is Marty Field.

  You’re a funny, funny man.

  “…and so it is my extreme pleasure to introduce the boy we watched grow into a national celebrity…Marty Field!”

  The auditorium caught up the frantic applause and flung it back and forth between the walls. The tumult was like nothing else Marty Field had ever heard. It caught in his eyes and ears and mouth like a great tidal wave, and drenched him with adoration. He rose and walked to the Principal, extending his hand automatically, receiving the embossed bronze plaque and the handshake simultaneously.

  Then the wave subsided, leaving him washed up on the shore of expectancy, a sea of eyes beyond, waiting to bathe him in love and fame once more.

  Fritz, it’s cold; throw another Jew on the fire.

  “Th-thank you…thank you very much…”

  Tell them. Tell them, Morrie Feldman. Tell them what it was like. Tell them you know them for what they are. Make them realize that you’ve never forgotten. Show them the never-healed wounds; open the sores for them. Let them taste the filth of their own natures. Don’t let them get away with it. That’s why you came, isn’t it? That was why the conquering hero returned! Don’t let them lie to their children about all the good times, the fine times, the wonderful wonderful Marty Field they all loved and helped and admired. Don’t let them spew their subtle poisons to their children while using you as an example of what a good non-you-know-what is like.

  Let them wallow in their own scum, Marty Field.

  So Abie says, “Business is business.”

  “…I don’t know quite wha
t to say…”

  Don’t let him Jew-you-down…

  “…after all these years, to return home to such a warm and sincere…”

  Kike!

  “…I want you to know I’ll always cherish this handsome bronze…”

  Yid!

  “…means more to me than all the awards I’ll ever…”

  Dirty little Christ-killer!

  “…so thank you very much, again.”

  You walk off the stage, Marty Field. You hold your thirty pieces of silver (or is that one piece of bronze?) and you leave the high school, and get in the car that will take you back to the airport, and the world that loves you. You had your chance, and you didn’t take it. Of course, you didn’t, Marty. Because you’re a coward. Strike your blow for truth and freedom? Hardly. It’s your life, and you handle it for the guffaw, for the belly-buster, for the big exit.

  But that’s okay. Don’t let it wig you, kid. And stop crying; you’re not entitled to those tears. Stick with the sick shticks, buddy-boy.

  Want a tag line? Want a punch line? How’s this:

  Have you seen the Do-It-Yourself Easter Kit? Two boards, three nails, and a Jew.

  Author signifies audience reaction of laughter, applause, and sounds of scissors.

  Yeah, you’re a scream, Marty.

  Gentleman Junkie

  He looked down from the fourth-floor window of the Professional Building, watching an old man in a junk wagon pulled by a spavined horse.

  Even from the window he could see the milky white blindness of the horse’s left eye. It seemed fitting, somehow.

  Walter Caulder turned away from the window, tasting the steel wool in his mouth. It was getting worse. A vagrant shiver flowed up from somewhere deep inside and he locked his arms about his body, trembling.

  It was not going to get better, despite what Enid said. Trip-hammer pressures within his skull pistoned horizontally, threatening to cave his temples outward. A low, canine moan slid between his teeth, oily and hungry and lost in an instant.