Brief Encounters Read online

  Had I lived where I do now I might have heard the fatal shots. I asked someone who was there to remind me: Did John know he had been shot? A policeman, I’m told, in the race to the hospital, asked John if he was aware what was happening and did he know who he was. He did.

  I recall getting a good bit of hate mail for a remark I made at the time about the gun lobby and how democratic they were in including the mentally ill among those with easy access to firearms.

  I just watched one of those shows on DVD. In a moment I’d forgotten, John is lightheartedly contemplating old age. “Some day we’ll be an old couple living on the south coast of Ireland, saying [feeble old codger voice] ‘I remember when we were on The Dick Cavett Show.’”

  It wasn’t poignant at the time.

  DECEMBER 10, 2010

  A Bittersweet Christmas Story

  Snow was predicted for Lincoln, and there was every reason to think it would be a really fine Christmas.

  Having recently received the remarkable gift of puberty with its attendant wonders, I had my hopes up for another great present, not exactly comparable: a longed-for piece of magical apparatus I had reason to believe would be under the tree on Christmas Eve.

  We always opened packages then instead of on Christmas Day, and in a sort of Norman Rockwellian tableau: nice warm house, a Nebraska snowfall settling outside, and relatives of varying ages and beloved Sandy, my big, manly spaniel, all semicircled around the gifts arrayed under the tree.

  It’s sad to think how cozy such Midwestern family Christmases were when you were that age, and how odiously I now view the allegedly jolly season, with its trampling crowds and extorted gifts. But let that pass.

  Back then, in that far-off happier time, Christmas was magical when it finally arrived with excruciating slowness.

  Nobody, when you’re that age, could ever convince you that there would come a day when all those chatty, friendly uncles, aunts, parents, and grandparents in that comfy circle, contentedly digesting dinner around the tree, would be … gone. That you yourself would someday be the sole surviving link in that warm family circle. Unthinkable.

  Without even shutting my eyes I can summon an aural montage of the pleasant chatter and those unvarying phrases used every year: the “Oh, how beautifuls” and “Oh, you shouldn’t haves” and “Where on earth did you find its?” The sometimes mendacious “How did you know I wanted one?” and the well-worn “It’s a shame to spoil the wrapping.” (I could never see why.)

  Every one of those Christmas Eves is interchangeable and identical in memory, and they usually ended with “Well, we’d better be getting home before the snow gets any deeper” and the hugs and kisses goodnight and confessions of having eaten too much.

  All interchangeable, that is, except for one.

  My step-grandparents lived next door. The father of my college-professor, former-Marine-captain stepmother was known by his first initials, T.R., and was a book salesman for Scott, Foresman, the publisher who gave us Dick and Jane. He sired six offspring, three of each.

  He was a huge and imposing man and I always thought he looked just like a local statue of William Jennings Bryan. He had a voice so deep it made Orson Welles sound like Truman Capote. When booming “You big bum!” at referees at Nebraska football games, it caused everybody in the stadium who wasn’t deaf to jump, turn around, and look.

  On this particular Christmas Eve, T.R. seemed uncharacteristically nervous. My beloved Aunt Harriet had assumed the job of picking up presents from under the tree and handing them to the recipients. After a while T.R., exuding growing anxiety, urged her to “take some from this side of the tree.” “Hold your horses,” said Harriet, being a daughter of some independence.

  His agitation increased. “Give Mom one” only produced, from Harriet, further refusal to be directed.

  T.R.’s agitation and uneasiness began to assume health-issue proportions. I worried that we were going to have a Christmas remembered for T.R.’s clutching his chest, pitching forward, and expiring among the gifts and Christmas frippery.

  A couple more “Give Mom ones” finally became an exasperated “Give Mom that little blue package right there.” Harriet relented. It was given.

  What happened next is remembered almost as something out of fiction. Like something that happens in a certain kind of harmless-seeming short story that contains a jolt.

  Bertha—an overweight yet handsome woman—unwrapped what it became instantly clear was a jewelry box. T.R. hovered nearby, breathing audibly in anticipation.

  She flipped open the lid, revealing a ring with a good-sized diamond that shot sparks into the room.

  Without removing the ring—and while emitting a sort of low growl—with a backhand swing of the arm, she flung box and ring away. The innocent box and contents flew about six feet, smacked the wall, and bounced to the floor.

  She spat out, “That doesn’t make up!”

  The whole scene seemed to freeze-frame into a still picture. T.R. began to cry and tried to put a hand on her shoulder. It, too, was flung away. I didn’t know where to look.

  Somehow the evening ended.

  How does memory edit such happenings? The moment was so vivid that I have no recall of the next, inevitable attempted comfortings and awkward departures. Did we open the rest of the presents in the poisoned atmosphere? Probably someone with aplomb suggested we were all tired and should finish Christmas on Christmas Day.

  It seems as if days went by before I had whatever minimal courage it took to ask my stepmother about the shocking thing.

  “Mom had a pretty tough time with Dad,” she said. “Living in little western Nebraska towns. He was the principal at Chadron, not making much. He was gone a lot. Mom had wanted to teach school. She was quickly saddled with kids, starting with me. The last thing in the world I think Mom wanted was the six of us. Two, maybe. Mom was an intelligent woman and felt that a woman’s life should consist of something more than pushing the next generation around in baby carriages. Being the oldest, I had to take care of the two youngest because by then Mom had simply had it with motherhood.”

  I’d gotten old enough to be able to ask why she had to have so many kids. Did she, um, not know what was causing them?

  “That’s not the sort of thing you spoke to your mother about then, but I wondered, too. I shouldn’t say this, but I sometimes think Dad insisted. I hate to think it, but maybe he even—how can I put this?—forced himself on her.”

  All this was a bit over my head. My image of these two kindly old folks living next door on our elm-lined street—I thought contentedly—was now murky. Did everybody I thought liked each other not like each other? And why had the accumulated rage come out just then? In front of everybody? For maximum embarrassing revenge?

  How many other people in my world were not what they seemed? It’s safe to say that the moment that ring hit the wall, my notion of the adult world altered. There must be a lot of things in it I didn’t understand.

  The incident submerged from memory until, home from college years later, I found an old album with a picture of a young, handsome, and smiling couple on a long-ago wedding day, beaming before the camera. They were the (youthful) purchaser and rejecter of the Christmas ring. It brought to mind those pictures in the paper of a grinning couple or family, taken before one of them committed murder.

  I know it sounds a bit contrived, but on that same trip, if not the same day, brushing up on some assigned Congreve, I came across the eternally misquoted couplet that ends with “Nor Hell a fury like a woman scorn’d.”

  But it’s the preceding line that brought that grinning young couple in the old wedding photo—T.R. and Bertha—to mind: “Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d.”

  Especially on Christmas Eve.

  DECEMBER 24, 2010

  Sauce for the Goose? Take a Gander

  To this day I don’t know what made me do it.

  But if it’s possible to get drunker than I got that night I can’t
imagine it.

  It was not a party, celebration, New Year’s Eve, or a wedding night; mine or anyone else’s.

  I blame Jerry Lewis.

  I met Jerry when he hosted The Tonight Show for a fortnight in 1962 during the interim weeks between Jack Paar’s exit and Johnny Carson’s taking over. I found him to be an intelligent and personable man; more of both than I might have guessed.

  In the next year, ABC gave Jerry an unprecedented, history-making two hours live on Saturday night. He remembered me and, apparently, my writing, and I joined his staff in Hollywood. Our continued friendship may have been partly rooted in his paying me four times more than I had ever made before.

  Before I got the job, and still out of work, I stood frozen in my manager’s office as I heard him negotiating the deal. “I’m sorry, but my client does not work for a thousand dollars a week.”

  Just as he was about to hang up in true tough-nosed negotiating style I wanted to yell, “That’s right. He works for $360 a week!”

  It got settled and I got the job. The much-heralded project was launched with a gala opening night, lavish even by Hollywood standards—complete with searchlights—at the old El Capitan Theatre (briefly renamed the Jerry Lewis Theatre), near legendary Hollywood and Vine.

  Jerry, in a true Lewisian gesture, made the gala opening night special in a way I’ve never heard of before or since. He dressed himself and all the guests in tuxedos. But not only the guests. Camera operators, stage hands, ushers, off-camera crew, men invisible up in the flies wore, many for the first time, no doubt, black tie. A nervy youth (at twenty-six), I asked him why. “You dress a man’s talent,” he said.

  Gowns dressed the handful of ladies’ talents.

  Even the traditional opening-night gift baskets were extra-lavish. Each included a fifth of Johnnie Walker Black Label. (Note this for later.)

  My little apartment in the Bel-Air Arms—technically in Bel-Air, but up against the freeway and so far from the swanky, mansioned part of Bel-Air that it might as well have been in Kansas—was the typical two-story rectangular affair surrounding the inevitable swimming pool. Apartment #1 housed the inevitable cranky landlady.

  The big night came and went. The critics were not kind, and with a numbing unanimity. The first show got reviews comparable to the account of the attempted mooring of the Hindenburg at Lakehurst.

  Although the show got much better—and some of them were terrific—it never really recovered from that awful night. And then Kennedy was assassinated, casting a pall on everything, and after a few more weeks at a loss that would run a small nation for a year, ABC pulled the plug.

  As we slumped through the remaining few weeks, just about everyone was depressed.

  My enjoyment of the silliness of Hollywood had faded. I’d seen the La Brea Tar Pits, so what was left? I had no love life to speak of, or even think of, and decided I had to do something I’d never done. But what?

  My opening-night Johnnie Walker bottle, still virginal, was by then the only survivor of the gift basket. I’d been using it to replace a missing bookend. How about seeing what the fun is in getting really drunk?

  There was no maid at the Arms, and all the dishes and glasses were dirty. But there was a water cooler with those little paper cups. I filled one and embarked on my adventure.

  I downed it in a series of short, prissy little gulps. I felt something. “Am I now really drunk?” I thought, probably aloud. I derived a sort of satisfying sense of manliness from not resorting to water, soda, 7-Up, Pepsi, or whatever it was you drank scotch with.

  “No, thanks. I take it straight,” I said to no one.

  Up to that time I had had drinks, of course. But one and rarely two were always more than enough to disturb my equilibrium.

  Strange things began to happen. I had decided to be lavish and fill a new cup for each new portion of firewater. Since I was sure I was on only my third one, why were there six or seven empties now on the coffee table? And why was the bottle suddenly more than half empty? Had I spilled some?

  By now I had started pretending the paper cups were glasses, hurling them into an imaginary fireplace with a hearty “Long live the king!” Then, “Hey, why don’t we take ourselves a little walk in the balmy California night air?” (I was now openly talking aloud. And the voice wasn’t entirely familiar.)

  I had the crazy thought, “What’s good enough for the Scott Fitzgeralds at the Plaza fountain is good enough for me. Let’s jump into the pool fully clothed.” I agreed with this thought.

  I was on the second floor and the steps down to the pool seemed unfamiliarly rubbery, sort of like walking on a trampoline. Balancing with a bit of trouble on the edge of the deep end of the pool, I decided I should take off my good shoes—but then vetoed this on the grounds that it would compromise my flamboyant and daring stunt, which had now assumed in my mind glamorous and heroic proportions.

  But then, a touch of compromise. I congratulated myself on having one sensible thought. My Bulova wristwatch from high school graduation was not waterproof. I took it off, placed it in my pocket, and jumped in. I kept its pitiful corpse for years.

  The moment my fully clad body cannonballed (hoping to awaken the crabby landlady) into the aqua and rotated eerily underwater, I shot out and up to my room, not really wanting to encounter the Medusa of Apartment #1, partly for fear of being kicked out if she identified the no-night-swimming-rule-breaking culprit; not thinking that it wouldn’t have taken the talents of the famous resident of 221B Baker Street, London, to follow the dripped trail to my door.

  I flopped onto the bed after what seemed like half an hour of peeling off sopping, tangling garments. Losing my balance a few times, I devised a sort of joke. I wondered, wobbling and reeling as I was, would a chance earthquake make me steady?

  I’d felt the aftereffects of a couple of drinks before, but nothing close to what Ernie Hemingway so vividly described as having to keep your eyes open to stop the room from spinning.

  The term “hangover” was still merely a word to me. I’d witnessed a ferocious one my freshman year. A fellow Yalie was tottering along the sidewalk, hoping to catch a late breakfast and looking twenty years older than he had the day before. He’d awakened after a fraternity binge with a hangover so bad he thought he was dying. “I felt so awful I wasn’t sure I’d live,” he told me, and then added, “I actually read the Bible.”

  Supine on the bed, gazing heavenward, I foolishly shut my eyes. The room rotated like an overhead fan. Nausea followed. Then sleep. But the full price of this goofy jape was as yet unpaid.

  (Aftermath—maybe—to come. Too painful to contemplate right now.)

  JANUARY 7, 2011

  The Wrath of Grapes

  And now, back to our story.

  We left our hero self-victimized by the foolish notion that it might be fun to down somewhat more than half a bottle of scotch.

  The price the next morning, should you never have learned so firsthand, is prodigious.

  Struggling into a seated position on the edge of the bed, I gave the room a moment to settle down. It took a while to decide where I was. It took even longer to decide who.

  The mouth was a distinct displeasure. I remember saying aloud, to no one, “It tastes like I’ve eaten an assortment of larvae.” I tried to laugh but the head pain forbade any more than a murmur of self-appreciation. I made it to the sink as Vesuvius erupted.

  Writers and actors have always been reliable sources of income for the alcohol industry, with some notorious examples: Barrymore, Fields, Burton, O’Toole, Faulkner, Robards, Bogart, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, to name a fraction.

  W. C. Fields once recalled that “we lost our corkscrew and had to live on food and water for several days.” Of course, W.C. was a disciplined alcoholic, swearing “I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast.”

  Samuel Johnson’s “This is one of the disadvantages of wine: it makes a man mistake words for thought” is akin to Othello’s “O God, that men
should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!”

  Lady Astor claimed she didn’t drink because “I want to know when I’m having a good time.”

  The great Kingsley Amis, author of my favorite comic novel, Lucky Jim, and world-class consumer of both hard and only relatively milder stuff, came to mind earlier when I mentioned morning-after mouth. He has left us perhaps as close to the last word as we may ever get regarding the hangover:

  Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

  Robert Benchley wrote often of his hangovers—the only cure for which he said was death—and which he detested almost as much as the pigeons that always “came rumbling in and out of my window.”

  “Best thing you can do is eat a big breakfast” began to sound in my head, along with other soundings there. Struggling into drier clothing than the soggy garments I had somehow gotten out of but slept among, following my watch-drowning ritual, I somehow drove in a painful (interior) haze a few blocks to the UCLA campus. I remembered a “Breakfast Is ‘Our Specialty’” sign. The illiterate and unnecessary use of quotes for emphasis—as in DO NOT “LEAN” ON THE COUNTER—always amuses me, but it didn’t then.

  There, stepping gently because each footfall produced a sort of low timpani roll accompanied by a painful twinge in my head (I wondered if I had broken anything in there), I managed to arrange myself into a chair at a table for two, hoping to God no one would join me.