Brief Encounters Page 6

  God apparently heard me.

  Had anyone sat down, I wouldn’t have been able to talk.

  Giving the waitress my order caused the timpani to resume, and if anyone had sat down I decided I would scribble the words “deaf and dumb” on a napkin. “Laryngitis” would have done just as well, but I actually think it was less painful—and this sounds really silly—to think shorter words.

  I had gotten out, sotto voce, the recommended voluminous breakfast: “Ham, eggs, toast, fried potatoes, coffee, and orange juice.” The silly truth is that I had to recite the list twice. The first time, there had been no waitress standing there. Hallucination? When the real one appeared, I may have left off “please” because each syllable brought with it that nasty little twinge.

  Almost magically, each bite seemed to contribute a measure of soothing.

  Tottering less, I went next door to get a pair of sunglasses. I’d never known sunlight to be so punishing. They were expensive but I felt I couldn’t really blame myself for not having thought of them back at the apartment. As it turned out, they went nicely with the pair I then found in my pocket. Nothing was going really well.

  As I eased onto a park bench on the campus, the only positive thought I could come up with was that if I somehow lost one pair of sunglasses while sitting there, I had a backup.

  I don’t see much reason to go on further about this.

  You are either one of the e-mailers from the first column who can too easily identify from experience, or one who can’t, finding the whole thing tedious.

  Did I learn anything from this folly?

  Can’t say I never imbibed again, but nothing even close to this nightmare.

  I learned to wonder how in hell anyone can repeat such a self-torture throughout life. Surely the pain of the first bang-up hangover becomes less as time goes by. Or doesn’t it work that way? Wouldn’t some sort of Pavlovian mechanism set in to keep you from sledge-hammering your own head on a regular basis? Pray tell.

  I have no valuable advice to impart from my sodden and ill-advised Johnnie Walker experiment except for one thing.

  Should you find yourself standing near me someday and should you for some reason utter the word “scotch” … stand back.

  JANUARY 28, 2011

  How Do You Open for a Mind-Reading Horse?

  Do you, or someone else out there, have any idea what became of Ed Steib?

  Let me make it easier. Maybe you remember him by the way he billed himself: “The Mysterious Mr. X and His Mind-Reading Horse.”

  I guess not.

  It was one of those nice times of day on the prairies of Nebraska (Lincoln, in this case) when evening is setting in and the mourning doves begin their soft, three-note coo (“hoo, hoo, ho-woo-oo”) that, wherever I hear it now, puts me right back on the glider on our front porch on Twenty-Third Street. (Are there still gliders?)

  The phone rang. A sort of rough, rustic voice barked, “This is Ed Steib. Is this the young magician Dick Cavett I hear so much about?”

  Since I was the only fourteen-year-old magician in Lincoln that I knew of with that name, I affirmed it.

  “I want you to do a show with me and I’ll pay you a hundred dollars.”

  As the old joke goes: I fainted and they brought me to. Then they brought me two more.

  The vast sum mentioned was five times my highest fee to date.

  One hundred smackers. And not to play Fairbury, or Broken Bow, or Beaver Crossing (yes), Nebraska, but Omaha! Omaha was to Lincoln, in my world, as New York is to Chicago. And a bright, impertinent young collegiate-type comic named Johnny Carson had a radio show from there.

  When I told my dad, he wryly observed that one hundred dollars for one day’s work was “not much. That’s only one-eighth of what I made teaching school during the Depression—in a year!”

  The show was to be in a big stadium and I could remember having marveled at Milton Berle there, playing to a sell-out crowd a year earlier. Now I was to be in those converging spotlights, cavorting like Uncle Miltie to an adoring sea of spectators.

  Ed Steib said he had heard that I was good, adding that he had also heard that I was “a nice-looking kid.” Could this have had anything to do with my dad’s decision to accompany me on this gig? Also, there were no (legal) fourteen-year-old drivers in Nebraska.

  I decided to feature my most stunning “effect” (magicians don’t say “trick”)—my rabbit vanish. A rabbit is placed in an ornate breakaway box, which is then dismantled, showing each piece on both sides. No rabbit.

  The handmade (by me) Egyptian two-fold screen the box sat on is then placed aside. But a bit of white fur is visible. Feigning embarrassment I stand in front of it and try to go on despite raucous jeers and cries of “Turn it around!” When this reaches fever pitch, I do, revealing only the phrase “HA HA!”

  My dad and I drove to Omaha the night before because there were two shows, the first an early matinee. This added to the excitement the need to spend a night in a hotel, back then still a glamorous adventure. I think it was the Hotel Rome. It brought to mind a hotel gag I used in my act: that they do change the sheets every day—from one room to another.

  The momentous day dawned. Behind the stadium we were greeted by the affable Mr. X in person. You might cast him as a Nebraska farmer, probably of peasant German stock. Nearby grazed the Wonder Horse, looking decidedly untheatrical and a bit tired; probably, I figured, from the rigors of “the old two-a-day.”

  Outside the stadium were striking posters in black and red of Ed and his four-legged costar, with pictures apparently taken, in both cases, some years earlier.

  I was steeped in the great language-gifted radio comedian Fred Allen back then and could turn him on in my head. (A harbinger perhaps of becoming a comedy writer?) I heard Fred saying, “Tell me, Mr. Steib, how long have you been wowing the populace with this spavined equine clairvoyant?”

  The stage was a platform across from the grandstand.

  I began setting up an hour before showtime to be sure to be ready when the crowd began to arrive. It was windy, and my dad got some tire chains out of our ’38 DeSoto to anchor my aluminum magic table with its obligatory black felt top and gold fringe. Nearing showtime, the adrenaline started as I pictured the throngs pouring through the turnstiles and scrambling for seats.

  And by showtime it was clear. Something had gone wrong.

  Had the fair visitors missed all of the “Mr. X” posters tacked up along the busiest avenues of the fair? Or misread the time and date?

  To put it at its breathtaking simplest, nobody showed up.

  The clock ticked past showtime by a minute. Then two, three, four. And more. There was a dearth of customers, to the tune of none.

  The vast interior seating area lacked a single living individual.

  There was something awe-inducing about the sight of that stadium. For sheer, unadulterated emptiness I have never seen anything to match it.

  I’ve seen empty rooms, empty closets, empty houses, empty theaters, and empty wheat fields. But for blank, unparalleled vacuity, nothing holds a candle to a yawning, empty stadium sleeping in the sun on a lazy summer afternoon in Nebraska. Pompeii when the ashes cooled was more populous than that grinning expanse of geometrically segmented concrete void.

  I haven’t been fully honest in this. There is something emptier: an empty stadium into which three people enter. A trio of would-be spectators were glimpsed for a moment, wandering in way up top, sitting down, looking around, and exiting.

  Ed had a wonderful resilience. He shrugged the whole thing off as the result of poor placement of his “paper” (posters) and reminded me to be equally ready for the evening show. I’d forgotten about it.

  The horse, too, appeared unfazed, but being psychic, had probably foreseen the whole thing.

  My dad and I drove around Omaha and had lunch, and he tried to elevate my spirits by saying (A. B. Cavett being a humorist) that I was getting good experience at least in packing and unpack
ing my act. I was woeful and crestfallen but did my best not to let my father see it.

  That night we packed them in.

  By 8:00 the place was jammed with eager and noisy spectators.

  I should mention that the majority may not have been Steib-and-Horse fans. For the night show, we were the intermission act to a stock car race. Obviously the addition of the race was just what the public needed to remind them of their eagerness to see Ed and me and the nag.

  The only hitch was that the management, fearing running overtime, decided to dispense with the kid and his conjuring trumpery.

  A bitter blow. God, how I wanted to play to that huge crowd.

  Gloom abated considerably when Ed suddenly recalled that he needed an announcer; someone to read over the sound system the narration of his and his hairy partner’s wonder show.

  It seemed glamorous sitting up in the booth with the track announcer, reading from the faded, much-handled pages Ed gave me. I thrilled at hearing my voice boom out over the loudspeakers, making sure everyone saw that the blindfolded horse was stomping out the number of fingers held up by his master.

  The only other showstopper I recall from the horse’s repertoire was walking, blindfolded, up a seesaw or teeter-totter, tipping it, and proceeding down the other side, while in dramatic tones I pointed out that this would be difficult even for an un-blindfolded horse. (I couldn’t tell if it occurred to the crowd, as it did to me, that even a horse wouldn’t be dumb enough to try it un-blindfolded.)

  Afterward, I was filled with the heady glow of having given a performance, if not exactly the one intended. There’s nothing like a cheering crowd, I loved the “chills and spills” of the stock car race, and I was getting $100 to boot. Could Broadway be far off?

  Halfway back to Lincoln it began to sink in that I hadn’t done what I’d yearned to do: my act, cheered as Milton Berle had been by a huge crowd. No rabbit vanish.

  Moreover, Ed hadn’t so much paid me my $100 as told me he would, carefully noting down my address. And I had no reason to doubt his word. He had never not paid me before.

  We were almost back to Lincoln when my father managed to include me in his vast amusement over the whole thing and we got to laughing so hard tears obscured the road. He advised me not to spend the money in one place, which set us off again.

  But I wasn’t yet suspicious or cynical enough to think my check might never appear.

  “Aw, hell,” my father said. “We had a thousand dollars’ worth of fun out of it.”

  This was more than half a century ago. Have I become cynical, jaded, ungenerous, and hardened in the intervening years? I think not. Because when the money does come, I plan to give it to charity.

  FEBRUARY 25, 2011

  My Life as a Juvenile Delinquent

  It was one of those delicious summer nights in Nebraska when you’re blissfully wallowing in vacation. You gulp dinner in order to slip out through the screen door into the dark, into an atmosphere of rustling elm leaves and June bugs, and join up with some friends to play “kick the can” or “ditch” or to raise, if not hell, heck.

  This night slipped over the line into the infernal.

  My friend Tom Keene and a few more of us were out prowling. Neither Tom nor I can be certain who did what, or why. We were amusing ourselves fairly harmlessly, we thought, by picking up clods and small stones and tossing them noisily onto people’s porches, then running when the porch light went on or someone looked out to see what was up.

  At most, mischief.

  Then somebody (me?) picked up a pop (soda, for easterners) bottle, or maybe it was a bigger rock. It’s funny how, even though I’m not even sure I was the heaver, I can still see the missile arching toward the porch of what turned out be an elderly couple and smashing into the five- or six-foot etched-glass panel of their front door, reducing it—with a sickening crash—to a noisy cascade of glittering shards.

  Not being totally stupid, we fled—in a phrase perhaps fairly new back in the fifties—like bats out of hell.

  Apparently, we failed to run far enough. Someone had called John Law. Suddenly we were facing an approaching car that, as night prowlers, we knew (from the telltale extra-bright headlights) would be the fuzz. Soon we were inside it.

  Using what may be some sort of police psychology, the two officers spoke no word. They just silently hauled our sorry little quartet to the station house.

  Tom and I looked at each other as it struck us all at once that we were—holy mackerel!—in a police station.

  It was, admittedly, somewhat romantic, but at the same time scary. Through an open door we could see a corner of an actual barred jail cell, just like in the movies.

  Part of me wanted to be put in there for at least a while, to have a better story to tell, but most of me didn’t. The words “bread and water” murmured ominously in my head. So did the sound of my dad reciting Wordsworth: “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy.”

  Adding to the scariness was the fact that we were not quizzed as a group, but individually; undoubtedly the most effective technique. I don’t recall having had a chance, once picked up by the cops, to conspire to lie. It apparently just came naturally. I remember one frightened voice whispering, “What if they hook us up to a lie detector?” They didn’t.

  Some primitive preservation instinct caused each of us, separately, to deny having done anything beyond being, unluckily, in the area where the crime had taken place. This seemed to have gone over well enough. But then something happened.

  The third guy to go in for grilling—let’s call him Barry, for indeed that was his name—threw a chill into the rest of us.

  He emerged from his questioning crying. My guts gurgle even now, remembering the moment.

  He didn’t say he had ratted us out.

  He didn’t need to.

  Then, another surprise. They let us go.

  They were apparently smarter psychologists than we thought. Or else quietly sadistic. Rather than saying that they now had the story and booking us, they released us to our consciences.

  I slept horribly that night. The others reported the same.

  When I read Crime and Punishment in later years, some of Raskolnikov’s mental tortures rang all too familiar.

  What would our parents do when they found out? Would we be kicked out of school? Put in that cell for real? With drunks and child gropers? The words “bread and water” played again.

  My aching insomnia was so bad that night that I tiptoed to the medicine chest and dug out an unused pill I’d gotten from the dentist once for wisdom-tooth pain. It finally put me to sleep.

  Nothing happened the next day, either. Tom said, “They’re waiting for us to crack.” A shrewd comment, as it happened.

  It was now Saturday morning and I was on a local radio show produced by and for kids called Storytime Playhouse. I was able to lose myself in the fifteen-minute drama (as the director, I had awarded myself three choice roles, done in different voices) and totally forgot the whole thing. Until about three minutes after we went off the air.

  I’d never experienced real gut-rending mental pain until then. We, the guilty gang, were beginning to look haggard. It was no longer mere speculation that Barry had shoved us overboard. With shame, he had admitted it, along with something about not being able to look his “mom in the eye.” (You can imagine the scorn with which this wimpiness was greeted.)

  Something had to be done. That something propelled me into the corner Walgreens phone booth a block from the radio station. I had half-formed a sort of scheme.

  A bit of explanation: Even before puberty I had a low voice. “He sounds like a little man!” and other nauseating comments were always made around me. My postpubescent but still teenage vocal organ was that of an adult.

  I became aware of this from time to time, as when I would ask a question of a public speaker from the back row. Everyone would turn around, dismissing diminutive me on sight as the source of the rumble.
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br />   Might this be our lifesaver? A force, unassociated with reason, drove me.

  Although Walgreens was “air-cooled,” I was sweating all over in my T-shirt and Lee jeans as I dialed the police station. The improbable dialogue that followed went something like this:

  (Phone picked up at station.)

  “Police headquarters, Collins speaking.”

  “Officer Collins, might you be the officer who questioned a group of fractious teenage boys the other night about a broken glass door?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Well, I have the dubious honor of being the father of one of those boys. And I must congratulate you, officer, on the masterful job you did handling this matter.”

  “Well, thank you. We try to do our best, of course.”

  “Well, I can assure you your psychology worked. Those poor kids have hardly slept since. And what they’ve done is take up a collection from their allowances and savings and put together a hefty envelope of cash, which they delivered to the old folks whose door glass they smashed. The people were damn nice about it and thanked and forgave them and even gave them something to eat.” [This, happily or unhappily, but certainly expensively, was true.]

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that. We usually wait a few days on a situation like this. One of the boys confessed and I hoped that it might eventuate [cop-ese] this way. I generally prefer to handle cases like this in that modality [more cop-ese!] rather than spoil the kids’ ‘record’ with legal procedurism [sic]. I’m glad it seems to have culminated in a satisfactory resolution.” [My real father, an English teacher, might have advised the good officer on the desirability of using shorter words.]

  “Well, my hearty thanks to you, Officer Collins. You’re a master psychologist and one hell of a policeman. Thanks again and good day to you, sir.”

  I hung up, as Woody Allen has said, sweating audibly.

  In fact, I had waited just a moment or two to give the voice at the other end a chance to say, “Okay, you little bastard, how dumb do you think I am? Now you’re really in trouble.” And perhaps adding something about that dread phrase, “reform school.”