A Way of Life, Like Any Other Read online

  “I like you just the way you are, Little Bear.”

  “I’m a nervous wreck. I can’t sleep since this. If I take any more pills I’ll be a psychotic. Dr. Orloff said so.”

  “You still seeing him?”

  “You know he’s the only one I ever liked. He’s the only one who ever listens, really listens to me. You’re too busy to listen to me.”

  “Pay me fifty bucks an hour and I’d listen to anything.”

  “You’re being cruel.”

  “I didn’t mean it.”

  “You’re being cruel to your Bear. You’ve never been cruel to your Bear before. My God what’s happening to you? The world comes crashing down on me and what do I get from you but cruel? The El Dorado doesn’t run right, you’ve known it for weeks and you don’t do anything about it. You don’t care if I get killed on the freeway. I think you want me to get killed. I don’t care about the plot against you. What about the plot against me?”

  “Look,” Mr. Caliban said, “I’ll take the El Dorado, you take the De Ville. How’s that?”

  “Better.”

  But her anxieties were too deep-seated to be assuaged by comforting gestures. It was easier to be poor than to be rich and to feel poised over a financial abyss. Her judgment of horse flesh was affected. It looked as though her allowance wouldn’t last the Hollywood Park meeting, and by opening day at Santa Anita she might be destitute. One night in frustration she ripped the stuffing out of Big Bear. Mr. Caliban came into Jerry’s room.

  “It’s going to cost me a good two hundred to get that animal restuffed,” he said with a trace of bitterness.

  “Throw it out,” Jerry suggested.

  “I couldn’t do that,” Mr. Caliban said. “You know what those animals mean to your mother. She didn’t mean to do it. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. I think she needs round-the-clock care.”

  “Have her committed,” Jerry said.

  “I couldn’t do that,” Mr. Caliban said. “Maybe some guys would do that, but I couldn’t. We came up together. We went through everything together. Sometimes one partner grows and the other doesn’t. I’m not the same person I was. She probably never should of given up her career. But she wanted to be home with the kids. It’s hard on a woman. I was thinking I’d get a nurse to live in.”

  “That would cost you,” Jerry said.

  “So I’m Sam Caliban I have to worry about every dollar? I’m going to let my wife suffer because I’m too cheap? I guess they don’t teach you no ethics.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jerry said.

  “This is hard on everybody.”

  “At least you have Tanya.”

  “That cunt,” Mr. Caliban said. “I think I picked up a dose from her.”

  “Jesus,” Jerry said.

  “You better get yourself checked,” Mr. Caliban said.

  Mrs. Caliban went downhill. She was picked up selling grapefruit without a permit on the corner of Roxbury and little Santa Monica. The papers never got hold of it, but strings had to be pulled. I tried to talk to her.

  “You’ve got to calm down, Mrs. Caliban. You’ve been like a mother to me. You don’t know how grateful I am. You’re a wonderful person. Why punish yourself?”

  “Stop burning my face. You’re burning my face.”

  “I’m trying to help you. I care for you. We all care for you.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” She was lying in her chartreuse, bears about, glum. “All my life. You don’t know. You would never guess, would you. Stop doing that with your hands. I have washed toilets. You wash a toilet, you feel like a toilet. Him with his nose in the air. He’s got me dancing on a string, break it, and he don’t care. He thinks he made me. Well what is he now, a fat little nothing. I had an affair with Bruce Cabot. I can still belt them out.” She sang.

  They put her on a new pill. It made her happy as a child. Mr. Caliban bought her toy horses for her birthday. She arranged them about her bed and gave them names, Wuzza-Wuzza, Bonwit, Michigan Avenue, Smacky Lips, Wan Q, Frank, Cry Tomorrow.

  My work was suffering. I did a lot of staring, I fell down in Latin and gave a rotten performance at the Roman banquet, ill at ease in my toga, stumbling through a speech that depended on a perfect execution of the fifth declension, at a loss for endings. I missed a bunt on a squeeze play and just stood there in the box as the runner was tagged out and crashed into me. I didn’t like to admit it, but I had allowed myself to become dependent on the stability of the Calibans, and as they fell apart I was falling with them. The nurse guarded Mrs. Caliban, and Mr. Caliban and Jerry were hardly ever home. Mr. Caliban would go to see Tanya after he finished shooting every day, and Jerry would slip it to her on the sly after his father left. They were both on penicillin. I was in a fever fit over Linda, but I was unable to get her to do more than have lunch with me a couple of times a week. We would sit on the great lawn of the high school looking over the tree choked streets of Beverly Hills, discussing literature and her campaign for student body secretary. I was to make her nomination speech and had been boning up on Calhoun. She feared her tits would lose her votes with the girls, I said damn the petty resentments of underlings. She couldn’t go out with me, she said, Marty was too cross. He had confessed Linda’s infidelity to his fraternity brothers, and they had made things worse by razzing him at a stag party, comparing a woman and a donkey in a pornographic movie to Linda and me. I cherished my minutes with her but I was dying for it. When she talked I looked into her mouth. At home I searched the TV Guide for Lauren Bacall movies. At mass I tried to steady myself, but I was beginning to lose my faith.

  Then Granny died, just dropped her face into a plate of stew one night and died. My father wanted to bury her at sea but could not figure out how, and he was unsure what to do with a Methodist corpse. When I arrived Granny was stretched on the dining room table. Old Glory covered her.

  “We had a burial at sea in the Aleutians,” Dad said. “That Jap officer I captured jumped overboard. They’re a proud people, the Japanese. He froze to death in thirty seconds. We gave him the full rites though. He was a very educated man, spoke fifteen languages. I’d like to do the same for your mother’s mother. She was a good old dame, son.”

  He pulled back the flag before I could turn away.

  “She had terrific spirit,” Dad said. “Her morale was tops, right to the end. She fought right to the bell.”

  But we determined that burial at sea in port was impractical. We let Forest Lawn cook her. My father said she had left no will and she had no money. When I had been about five years old I had asked her if she would marry me when I grew up. She had said that I would probably find somebody else, but she promised me her engagement ring for my bride. It was a big diamond and I wondered where it had gone. Her hands were bare. My father said she had probably sold it, years before. I helped him fill out an interment arrangements form. Disposition: cremation. Casket: $265.00. Outside case: none. Embalming or preparing: no. Hearse: none. Limousines: none. Flower car: none. Clothing: no. Disposition of Jewelry: no. Cemetery charges: self. Newspaper: no. Floral crepe or flowers: no. Music—Soloist—Organist—: no. Eligibility for burial benefits: So. Sec. 567-18-9302. Filing fee: $5.00. Tax: @ 2% $5.30. Total: $275.30. They had a minister there who could handle anything.

  “Bereft are her children, but she lives in memory . . .” My father and I were the only mourners. I wrote a letter to Mother and got an answer weeks later saying good riddance.

  Dad was pretty lonely. He took to telephoning me during the week and at breakfast after mass he would ask me to think about moving in with him because a father and a son ought to be together. We could have good times. Life was short. I thought it over. Caliban days weren’t what they had been. Linda wouldn’t have me. Dad needed me. I could help him out. Being much indisposed in both mind and body, incapable of diverting myself either with company or books, and yet in a condition that made some diversion necessary, I was glad of anything that would engage my attention, without
fatiguing it. I would go home. On my last night at the Calibans I had another pleasant dream. I was sitting on Joseph Stalin’s knee, confiding to him in fluent Russian the kindness and good will of the American people. He seemed impressed.

  12

  THE OLD HOLLYWOOD

  FOR A MAN devoted to naval standards, my father had allowed his house to degenerate in matters of hygiene. So low in his mind had he become, and so demoralized was his command by Granny’s surly conduct, that when he had run out of things to do for the Church, he would lie abed, hour after hour, leaving undone the simple tasks that distinguish man from brute, the farmer from his animals. On watch one night, I heard with a start a distant rending crash coming from his bedroom off the galley. I hurried down to find him breathless and entangled in the wreckage of his bed. It seems that the wire mattress, rusted and rotted by his nocturnal diuresis, a condition attributable wholly to his state of mind, which caused him to forget to do things the rest of us accomplish through habit and instinct, had collapsed under his weight.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Can’t you see, Salty?” he said, for Salty is what he had taken to calling me. “The whole shooting gallery collapsed under me.”

  Immediately commencing carpenter, I built him a special platform to sleep on, so contrived that his wastes would pass through the bottom of it; an enameled pan placed under him received whatsoever fell, which being duly emptied and washed, he was thus kept perfectly sweet and clean. Towards my labors he assumed a more benevolent than a grateful attitude, for it was the key to the relations we established, that he was helping me, not I him. As I sawed and joined, he would interject “That’s right,” “Just so,” “A little more to the left,” “You’re getting it now,” “Watch that bulkhead,” “I was afraid that would happen,” “You’re forcing it, it’s like a horse, you’ve got to give him his head,” and like exhortations, though the construction was my own contrivance, and had I offered him the tools of a professional carpenter, a diagram simple enough for a child, and a hundred dollar bet, a straitjacketed lunatic would have had a better chance of building the bed than he. Still, when he was not giving advice, he entertained me with a narrative of changing naval bunk design, from the days of the hammock onward, with digressions concerning where to stow your duffle bag and how he dealt with cases of venereal disease under his command.

  I had a great deal of construction work and general tidying up to do during those first weeks, and he always took the same benevolent attitude toward my efforts, as though he was glad to see I was not idle or degenerate, like the rest of modern youth. I suppose he suspected the worst of my life with the Calibans. I was pleased to see that my busyness buoyed him a little. He began to spend less time in bed. He felt himself responsible that I did things properly and that I was kept occupied.

  When I had disinfected the galley, ridding it of mold, roaches, and miscellaneous garbage, he had me take inventory of its salvaged contents: a mixed set of crockery for two, three forks, two spoons, one knife, coffee pot, pot, roasting pan, one gas mask functioning, one gas mask non-functioning, one bottle ketchup half full, one bottle ketchup one quarter full, framed glassed photograph of Captain in beachmaster’s garb blowing whistle, one stove (oven door hingeless from explosion caused by Chief Petty Officer’s negligence), one chair assigned oven door holding shut detail, one O-Sa-Cool. This last was a self-sustaining cooling box, invented by the British army for action on the Indian subcontinent. You poured water over porous sides and top to activate natural evaporative cooling process. The O-So-Cool cut refrigeration cost factor at equipment purchase and energy unit per month billing levels.

  Galley inventory, repeated weekly, proved so successful that I was assigned to take inventory of the other rooms as well.

  “I’ve never really known what I’ve had, Salty,” Dad said, “and if a man don’t know what he has, he’s in trouble, because how’s he going to know if somebody comes along and takes it away from him?”

  I agreed with the principle, and I was glad to see him enter into inventory spirit, hovering near me, making sure I caught every last item. His day room offered the greatest riches. It was a museum and library of his life. It had to be set in order, if that life was to go forward.

  We began with his address and telephone book, thick with hundreds of entries.

  “I didn’t used to need that,” Dad said. “My secretaries used to do all my contacting for me. But you have to adjust.”

  I suggested that we proceed in two stages. Since the earliest entries dated from the 1920s, it was safe to assume that many of these were now inaccurate, that people had moved, changed telephone numbers, or died. He would know of most of the deaths, as he had attended most of the funerals. We would eliminate the deceased first; then we would go on to check the accuracy of surviving entries and make a fresh, new list that would enable him to reach people with maximum speed and accuracy. It would be a hell of a big operation, but if we pushed ahead and cut down on the coffee breaks, we could beat this thing and come in ahead of schedule. That would put us ahead of the game.

  As I would call out a name, however, he would want to know whether I knew the person.

  “Sy Lesser,” I would say, pencil at the ready, and he:

  “Sy Lesser. Do you remember him, Salty?”

  “I think he was before my time.”

  “Sy Lesser. He was quite a character. He used to come up to the ranch with Big Boy Williams. Big Boy was hitting the bottle pretty hard in those days. I remember his wife. But Sy, he gave me the best deal anyone ever had on a picture up to that time. I got a cut of the profits. That paid for plenty of dresses for your Ma, no t that I minded it, not a bit, the mother of my son. She was a great gal, Salty, in those days, and I don’t know whatever got into her to break up the family. I’ll tell you about it someday, when you’re old enough to understand.

  “Frankly, Sy was a little fella, and when he’d come up to the ranch with Big Boy, we used to put Sy on horseback, we put him on old Charlie, I think it was, and Sy was scared to death, and Padre Maguire was up at the ranch one time, when Sy was there with Big Boy Williams. You remember Padre Maguire. He wrote ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.’ A real character.

  Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,

  Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,

  Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,

  And we’ll all go free.

  He’ll be in the book there, we’ll come to him when we get to the M’s. They’re next, aren’t they? M comes after L, that’s right.

  “Anyhow, Sy was up at the ranch with Big Boy and Padre Maguire, and Sy was on old Charlie. Now old Charlie was so old, the boys used to say the stable could of burned down around his ears and he’d never notice. I don’t know what got into old Charlie that time, but he took off down the hill towards the old beach house with Sy hanging on for dear life, hollering at the top of his lungs, see.

  “No, I’d been in a lot of pictures, and I’d always done all my own stunts, you remember that, and when I saw old Charlie take off with Sy down the hill, I looked around for Tom. Tom died during the war, it nearly broke my heart. I gave a whistle, Phweet!, and Tom come running, just like he always did, and I got a running start and jumped aboard old Tom right up over his hind-quarters—there’s a trick to it, you give yourself a little boost with the hands right under the crotch, here—bareback, with no saddle, there wasn’t time to saddle up. And I lit out after Sy.

  “Tom was plenty fast, and a lot faster than old Charlie, and Tom and I caught up to Sy and old Charlie in about two, maybe three hundred yards. I drew along side, we must of been doing thirty-forty miles an hour, and I just reached over and pulled Sy right out of the saddle and set him down right in front of me on Tom. I’d done a scene like that in .45 Caliber, I think it was, or Arizona Justice, only then I grabbed Frank Kohler off a locomotive. Well, be that as it may, let me tell you Salty, when we got back to the house old Sy was white as a sheet. And
you know what Padre Maguire did then? This is the clincher, right here.

  “To make a long story short, Padre Maguire gave old Sy the last rites! Can you top that? The last rites! The Padre was a great one for the ribbing. Sy wasn’t even a Catholic, you know, he was a Jewish fella. But a wonderful guy, and a great sport. He died in 1936. May of ‘36. I went to the funeral. We weren’t supposed to go in those days, or some people said. But I was always ahead of the times. You got to be. I remember his widow. She was pretty broke up about it. Women take these things hard. The way I figure, when your number’s up. Sy died of a heart attack in the middle of a picture we were making out at Newhall. She never married again. She was a loyal gal, Salty.”

  Since each of the entries called forth biography, sorting out the book occupied many weeks; and while I have ever loved scholarship, my ardor sometimes flagged. My father, however, thrived on the work, and such impatience as I felt was balanced by the pleasure I took in seeing him so happily engaged. When I would reach a point of absolute stultification, unable to grasp the pencil longer, the names blurs, my brain dissolving with Hollywood, I would go into the bathroom and think about Linda. The memory of our desert rendezvous cheered me and cleared my head. Once more I would be spreading the cream over her long body, to and fro, fro to. At that moment Jerry was probably giving it to Tanya from behind or getting his cock sucked. Refreshed, I returned to the work. By the time we reached the O’s, it had become apparent that most of these persons were dead, and for a time I feared Dad might suffer a depression, counting so many of his friends among the fallen. But the opposite was true, for as the corpses piled up, until I began to feel familiar with the occupants of a large percentage of all the graves in Southern California, and death seemed palpable about me, he brightened with every case, and his anecdotes became more vivid, humorous, and rich with detail. He was impressed not so much that hundreds had vanished from this world as that he was still living in it. He spoke of fooling the insurance companies and of the rewards of sensible diet and vigorous physical exercise. With each of the departed, he took note of the cause of death and delivered himself of an opinion how the life might have been extended, the day of expiration postponed. Eddie Dwyer had died of an enlarged liver but he, my father, had always gone easy on the booze and now took none. Nat Liebeskind had died of lung cancer, but my father confined himself to an after dinner cigar and did not inhale. F.W. Murnau had been killed in a motoring accident, but my father always drove cautiously and had lightning reflexes. You could spot signs of decay, as in Sol Howard, who had gone bald at thirty, but my father always dried his head thoroughly after a shower. The anus was an important thing. My father always washed it thoroughly with soap and warm water after defecating, unless he was caught in a public place, and the upshot of it was, he had the anus of a man half his age. If I wasn’t taking care of myself down there, I had better hop to it.