4

Enter Mimi

I was fired from the melodrama when the middle-aged lady who played my disappointed mother fell in love with an out-of-work actor who wanted my role. “He’s too fat,” she said, “he’s too old, but love is blind, eh?” It surely is, I told her. Then I worked for three weeks as a straight man for a trained seal named Boris—its owner had wrenched his back and needed a sub—and I tossed chopped fish into its humid mouth and tolerated the baleful looks and occasional nips it gave me when I missed a line, not to mention its body odor: you could hardly believe a live thing could stink that badly. Then the seal fired me with a chomp to my fingers and a slap of its tail. “He doesn’t like you, I guess,” said Boris’s owner, lying on the floor next to his boarding room bed. “But at least your hand won’t smell of fish. After a while”—he sniffed his own fingers, wincing at the effort—“it’s permanent.” Boris and I were appearing in a small theater in Duluth, and I convinced the house manager to give me a spot by myself. “What do you do?” he asked, and I told him I could sing and dance. Well, I could, even though for years all I’d sung was duets. He was dubious, but let me finish the week because he hated my old partner, the seal.

What kept me going was Hattie. In the few moments before I stepped on the stage, I imagined she was in the audience. Somehow, my journey had brought me here, to this midwestern backwater where she’d moved instead of dying. She’d seen my name on the bill or had spotted me going through a stage door or had simply been bored and had come to the theater. I could see her, amid the alien elbows of the audience. The woman behind her is upset to be sitting behind such a tall girl, with such distracting red hair, but Hattie doesn’t notice. She is waiting for her only brother to step onstage. She is ready to applaud.

And then, every night, I would lose heart, because she was supposed to be beside me onstage. Even Boris was better than no one. Though inhuman and hateful, at least he looked in my direction once in a while, for herring and straight lines. I needed a partner. I had always needed a partner.

So I found one, or she found me.

Hattie had been my first partner, of course, and later Rocky and I would claim he was my second, that I wandered lonely as a cloud until he appeared by my side. We said this the way long-married parents never mention first loves to the children, or if they do, as a joke—Your mother was set to marry Chuck O’Neill, bucktoothed kid, ears out to here, nice enough, did I mention his nose? I always felt bad about that, because before I had Rocky, I had Miriam.

We met in Duluth, at the end of my disastrous week as a single act. For all I know, Boris pointed me out to Miriam: See that guy? He’s lonely. He smells of fish. Chances are he’ll do anything for you if you’re nice to him. She was a child comic, a woman dressed as a girl, à la Baby Snooks except sexy: miles of crinolines, corkscrew blond curls, glossy Mary Janes that she stared at, toes in, when she started to say something tinged with innuendo. By the punch line she looked up, all smiles. A guy named Ben Savant was her straight man, a dark-hearted rogue trying to talk her into a kiss. Basically it was a Dumb Dora act. Mimi, what do your parents do at night? They put out the cat. Well, what does your father do in the morning? He lets in the cat. No, no: forget about the cat, the cat’s run away from home. Wa-ahah!

She carried an enormous lollipop that, though she only mimed licking it, got somehow sticky anyhow and picked up pieces of fluff, so it had to be replaced every few days. (If she’d kept the cellophane on, the stage lights would have flashed off.) The act was mostly Savant leering and her acting innocent. Like so many things, funny then, unacceptable now. His suit was as black as his mustache, which was as black as his hat; her blond hair matched her dress. Only the lollipop was lively.

I had a habit of watching other acts from the wings; green as I was, someone else’s talent could cheer me up. It was the only thing that did. That Saturday night, I saw Mimi and Savant lay ’em in the aisles, which was almost as interesting as their transformation as they stepped off the stage. Savant was a kid, probably not much older than me, and his villainous mustache was blackened cotton wool spirit gummed to his upper lip. “Hot,” he said to me, peeling it off. He stuck it in my hand, like he was tipping a bellboy. Miriam followed. Up close you could see she was no kid. I figured she was at least ten years older than me. You could see how wide her real mouth was, blotted out with pancake, a tiny cupid’s bow pout painted over it like a ribbon on a wreath. Same with her nose: it was a fair-sized hook, but she had it shaded into buttonhood. I’m sure it was convincing from the house. As Mimi, lost child, she kept her eyes wide open, her upper lashes hitting the bottom of her eyebrows; she applied the mascara with a heated pin, to make it thick. Each lash ended in a round ball, like a drawing of a crown in a children’s picture book. It must have been an effort to keep so wide-eyed, because in real life she had the heavy-lidded look of a vamp, sleepy and cynical. The lids came down the minute the curtain did.

She noticed me clutching another guy’s used mustache and smiled. One of her incisors had come in crooked; it made her look extra delighted.

“Hello, son,” she said. “Hungry?”

I shrugged. Six months on the road alone had made me a lousy conversationalist. Miriam didn’t care.

“Come to dinner,” she said.

I shrugged again.

“You’re about to be handed your pictures,” she said accurately. “I’m offering you a free meal. Don’t be dumb.” She extended her hand, and I took it, and she dragged me across the street to a Chinese restaurant, my first. Dark red walls and dark green booths, Chinese tchotchkes everywhere, and a woman dressed as a toddler who sat across the table and seemed to be flirting with me. Despite the costume, I couldn’t reconcile the kid who skipped onstage with this languid creature.

“Hey, boy wonder,” Miriam said.

“Who, me?”

She’d filled in the rest of her lips the minute we sat down; now they matched the scarlet rickrack that trimmed our emerald-green booth. Her elbows were on the tabletop, her hips all the way back on the seat. Though I could not see down her high-necked dress, somehow I felt like I could. “I collect boy wonders,” she said.

“Like your partner?”

“Ben? Ben has a crush on the saxophone player.”

I tried to remember a lady saxophone player.

“Don’t look so shocked!” she said, though at the moment I wasn’t. “He’s a nice boy. They all are.”

So then I began to get shocked. But she reached across the table and fingered a button on my jacket cuff. She smoked. She swore. An old-timer, she’d been playing six years old for ten years. “I’ve tried other acts, but this is the only one.”

“What will you do when you get too old for it?” I said.

“Hey! Who says?”

“No,” I said. “I—Never. Of course never.”

“That’s right.” She had her fingers in my plate. I had ordered chop suey, because it was the only thing on the menu I’d ever heard of. “You don’t think I’m too old, do you?” she asked, and she reached across the table with her sticky fingers and fiddled the button again.

“For what?” I asked. I was trying to flirt. Now I suspect flirting on my part would have been beside the point.

“That remains to be seen.”

I was eighteen years old, but before this night—this memorable night, as it turned out—I’d never so much as kissed a girl. In the most abstract way the female sex was not a mystery: I’d grown up in a house filled to the rafters with it. I’d had passing crushes on girls at Valley High, but they were not Jewish. There were no nice Jewish girls my age in Vee Jay; my father sent Hattie and me to dances at the Jewish Community Center in Des Moines, where we took to the floor with each other. We picked out couples to mock. Hattie could mimic anyone’s shuffling step. If Pop had wanted us to meet our future spouses, he should have sent us without each other. Now here I was in a Chinese restaurant, some strange woman tickling me on the wrist, and I realized I could have gone with any of those Valley Junction girls, if it hadn’t been for Hattie. She had taken up all my time. These days any psychiatrist will tell you that it’s normal to feel anger at someone who dies—first for being dumb enough to quit living, then for every other transgression—but I didn’t know that. There I was, invigorated with rage for Hattie. I turned my hand around and caught Mimi’s.

“He lives!” she said. She stubbed out her cigarette and blinked at me—a movement so deliberate and lash heavy I thought I could feel the wind from it on my cheek. I brought her knuckles to my mouth and kissed them.

Nine hours later, after the second show, in her hotel room, I said, “The only thing you’re too old for is this wig.” It was a wig after all; it had shifted under my hand.

“How old do you think I am?” she asked.

Well, I may have been underexperienced, but I wasn’t a lost cause. “I don’t know.”

“Sixteen.”

I laughed.

“Sixteen,” she repeated, and suddenly I saw it: she was sixteen. Six years old for ten years, six plus ten. Maybe it was her lovely large nose that made her look older, or her cigarettes, or the way she’d seduced a lonely young man as though she were a vaudeville cliché. Later I got so good at guessing women’s ages—not out loud, of course—that I could have done it as an act. At the time, though: sixteen?

“You’re still too old for the wig,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “Well, the wig.” She got up and went to the chair by the window to smoke a cigarette. She had a swimmer’s figure, lovely to me, tiny through the torso but wide hipped and perfectly suited to her costume: nothing to tape down above, concealed by petticoats below.

“Why?” I asked. As the boys in the band would say, I had already discovered that she wasn’t a natural blonde. The way she was sitting, I could see the major piece of evidence.

She looked at me, and sighed. “Because this,” she said, and pulled off the wig. What was underneath was not exactly hair: it was flossy blond in some parts, and white in others, and ragged and peaked; underneath you could see its original dark brown, like tree bark in a snowstorm. “I’ve been peroxiding for . . . Last week some chorus girl did this to me. She said she knew how I could go real. . . .” She tossed the wig around on her fist, and then regarded it, as though she were on the edge of a sentimental wig-induced monologue, a sweet vaudeville Hamlet. “It’ll grow out eventually, but in the meantime . . .”

“That’s not so bad,” I said. “You should just cut it short.”

“The wig?”

“Your hair. I could do it for you.”

“You know how?”

“I cut my own. That’s harder. Do you have scissors?”

“In . . .” She gestured toward a bag on the vanity. I found them: they were shaped like a long-billed bird.

“You’re sure?” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

And so, in Duluth, Minnesota, shortly after sleeping with a girl for the first time in my life, I cut her hair short, and tried to comb it back. I was so grateful to Miriam that I would have done anything: after the haircut, I could clip her nails, or iron her dresses, or polish her shoes.

“It bristles,” she said.

“You need some greasy kid’s stuff.” She had Vaseline in her bag; that would do, though a few moments later I would wrestle her back to bed and we’d get the pillowcases and sheets so greasy they turned translucent. Now I took a glob from the jar and combed it through her hair, which was actually nearly mahogany.

“I think I’ll keep you around,” she said. “You’re handy.”

And so she did, and so I was.

The Disappointment Act

“You’re going on in Indianapolis tomorrow,” Miriam said the next morning over the room-service tray. She had ordered me coddled eggs and dry toast, like the invalid I was. “With me,” she added. “Okay, Savant?”

I’d never meant to be a comedian, but as always my breaks came when I rode on someone else’s coattails, in this case Miriam’s frothy yellow skirt. Ben Savant said he wanted to take some time off. He knew that Mimi had been eyeing me that week—that’s why he’d handed over his handlebar mustache—and before he left town he handed over everything else too: his costume, his supply of cotton wool and spirit gum, even his name and glossies, because there was no point in throwing out perfectly good pictures. Turned out the guy I met wasn’t even the real Ben Savant; he’d stepped in so seamlessly everyone, including Mimi, had forgotten his real name. The first Savant had drunk himself to death some years before, and had been, in fact, Miriam’s father. The mustache, as advertised, was hot, and the spirit gum tasted awful.

There was something about seeing Miriam close-up onstage that unnerved me, too many layers of what-age-was-she and where-had-we-met. I could see the girders of brown makeup meant to bend her nose into something less Semitic; I could see a bruise on her neck, free of makeup because only someone standing right next to her could peer past her collar and see it. Good God, did I do that? The wide-open eyes and the simpering giggle seemed designed to drive me crazy, not to amuse the audience.

Mimi, who do you like better, your father or your mother?

Why, I don’t have anything against either one of ’em.

The shorn hair turned her from a cutie to a beauty. I’d never noticed that a hairstyle could make such a difference. There, revealed, her arching nose, her newly huge brown eyes. The neck so long it seemed impossible. Cheekbones. A profile. Her dark oiled hair showed comb marks like the grain of dark oiled wood, and entirely changed her complexion from slightly ruddy, under the blond wig, to roses-and-cream. Her eyebrows matched the rest of her, instead of looking like a proofreader’s fatheaded correction: insert eyebrows here.

I was eighteen: of course I loved her. She’d rescued and renovated me, and in return I kept proposing marriage. How else could I keep her around? She turned me down every time, which I took to mean she loved me but hated convention. Years after we’d broken up, I’d tell myself: you were a kid, you didn’t really love her. In the months afterward, though, I walked the streets of every new and old town, saying, you loved her, you loved her, you loved her, that was love. She always faced the audiences, and I faced her.

She was a nice Jewish girl, like me from somewhere unlikely: Louisville, Kentucky. She was a little confused when I brought her a Christmas stocking filled with candy and dime-store presents; she was totally flummoxed three months later when I presented her with an Easter basket. “I hate to break it to you,” she said, “but we’re Jewish. You know that, don’t you?”

“Some Jews celebrate Easter,” I said.

She stared at me.

I tried to explain that I’d always thought of Easter as a secular holiday: chicks, candy, bunnies, cards. My mother and then Annie bought us Easter baskets from the five-and-ten. I don’t know how old I was before I realized it all had something to do with the death of Jesus Christ, but I know exactly how old I was before I realized it was entirely connected to the death of Jesus Christ: eighteen, at the Monroe Hotel in Chicago. Thereafter, we sometimes went to Saturday-morning services, if we were in the right town and awake in time.

Miriam was the least serious person I’d ever known. She laughed constantly, at my jokes and my foibles: the time I tried to iron a pair of pants and left a cathedral-shaped burn on the seat without realizing, my first unpleasant encounter with a pickled egg. She seemed always to have just bitten me somewhere, about to run away from the scene of her mischief. She had teenage skin, by which I mean beautiful, and even then, when I ran a hand down her back, I realized I would never sleep with anyone that young again. She decided she’d educate me in everything. “Now, pay attention,” she said, leaning over me in bed. “I’m only going to show you this once.

“What a sweet, sweet boy you are.”

She was a beautiful girl. Sometimes she drank too much—always after the shows, never before—and then she did seem a little like onstage Mimi, because she cried and then laughed immediately afterward. Sometimes she even talked in her baby voice. I hated it.

“You’re a grown woman,” I said, even though this wasn’t exactly true, and she would pout, and come over and sit on my lap—she was quite a lapful—and say, “You’re supposed to help me forget.”

So: we weren’t married, but I assumed we somehow were. Miriam didn’t. She still flirted with an occasional boy wonder, praising him for his youth as though she herself was seventy-five. Then she said, one morning when we’d finished a week in Madison, “I think it’s time to break up the act.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, that might be easier. The agent can get us work—”

“No, no,” said Miriam. We were surrounded by room-service trays again; she had a terrible weakness for bellboys. “Everything, I meant. No act. No romance.”

Oh.

Despite the wig and the cupid’s bow mouth, she never saw life onstage as separate from life off: to her, that would have been as ridiculous as claiming you were one person while taking a walk, and another while sitting in a restaurant, and then someone else again while bathing. But, see, I did feel that way. Even standing up from a chair I felt suddenly changed, now a standing man, a man who stood, and if I put my mind to it, I could be a man who walked, and a man who sang. This is why I always loved to dance: everyone wanted to know a man who danced.

Turned out my predecessor in the Ben Savant biz had decided to make a comeback, and they were going to try something new, a reverse drag double, where she’d play the male part and he the female. With the short hair—which I had cut for her every two weeks—she could go wigless.

“Finally I can get out of these petticoats. Good-bye,” she said to me, and walked away into the sunset—actually, we were in our hotel room and she didn’t move. Still, I see her in men’s pants held up by suspenders, her coat hooked over one shoulder on two curved fingers, a boater tucked under her arm. She tries to swagger away like a boy, but she’s still my girl, though smaller and smaller, till she disappears at the end of the road where the sidewalks clap together and there’s no room for anyone. She hasn’t bumped her nose on the backdrop, she’s just gone.

Aha, you might say to me: she left you, and so you hated her. I toyed with hate, and then chose something harder. I decided I wanted to be her pal. Other people who’d left me had managed by dying, and it seemed a shame to let a whole living woman go to waste. I wanted her to think well of me, which seemed a kind of revenge in itself. Look what a reasonable fellow you just left! Look how you can’t forget him! So I courted her—for the first time—I wrote her letters, which she returned with postcards, and once or twice, though I couldn’t afford it, I called her on the telephone (I tracked her new act’s progress with the week’s Variety). She seemed fresh out of love, but I was sure that somewhere in her luggage, among the makeup and the worn-out shoes, was a tiny package of affection for me, which I kept petitioning for. It belonged to me. Hating her wouldn’t have been so awful, so constant, but that might require her to hate me, and that, I realized, I couldn’t bear.

We’d parted at the Madison Orpheum, after ten months on the road together. I refused to say good-bye; I had a horror of the word. I had not said good-bye to my sisters, I had not said good-bye to my father, I would not say good-bye to Miriam. That last night, I could hear her call my name backstage, but I’d gone to hide among the blades in a sword-swallower’s dressing room. “You’re safe here,” the sword swallower assured me, laughing because he believed I was the heartbreaker. Eventually, Miriam gave up, and went back to the hotel room to pack her things alone. Will I ever see you again? I’d asked, and she’d shrugged. But that’s the thing about the circuit: what you once lost—on purpose, by accident—is delivered to your doorstep sooner or later. And make no mistake: you are delivered, too, even to people who’d like to refuse you. Maybe especially.

The Genuine Article

So I was back to being a single, a comedian, I decided. I figured what most people figure: a comedy act is a business, the comic is the boss, the straight man’s just the hired help. Surely after my time on the road with Miriam, I deserved a promotion. I tried to write some patter songs. One—inspired by my eleventh-grade English class—went this way:

I’ll be a satyr that’s wiser but sadder
if you’re not my nymph anymore.

All of the patter I had wouldn’t matter
if you walked away from my door.

Wasn’t it bliss when we kissed in the mist?

It wasn’t a myth, then, my lips on your wrist.

Insistently kissing my kissable miss.

Mad as a hatter, but what would it matter
if you aren’t my love anymore.

(To write a song, you walk down the street with your head thrown back, hoping some rhyme will trickle down your throat like a nosebleed. Kiss, bliss, sis, bris?

Probably not bris.)

I got some photos made up, captioned Mike Sharp, glad to get my old name or some facsimile back under my own face. Miriam and I had shared her agent, a faceless guy named Maurice who worked out of New York and didn’t care anything about this year’s Savant; he wouldn’t return my calls and telegrams. A juggler I met in Milwaukee said he knew a hungry agent in Chicago who I should cable. So I did, with the words “Find me work!”

Theater bookers didn’t care about this year’s Savant, either; maybe that’s why last year’s Savant had come back to Mimi. I became what was called a disappointment act, a trouper who’d step in anytime someone got sick or drunk or arrested or divorced. For two years I did everything: tap-dancing, singing, tab shows, flash shows, juggling. I was the guy who was merely sufficient. You hired me, or you had a hole onstage: I caught the tumbling Irish acrobat; I sang harmony to the chubby ingenue’s declarations of love; I was the husband who opened the door at the end of a scene to catch my wife caressing the handsome stranger. Mike Sharp: the thumb in the dike.

That was onstage. Off, I looked around and saw: no one. Not my family, not Miriam, and especially not Hattie, who I almost expected to pop up now that Miriam was gone, I’d ignored her for so long. I was a single, an orphan. And lonely. For ten months I’d had someone to say things to. Not serious things, just I wonder if these shoes will last another month or I saw the funniest baby on the street today or My stomach’s upset, but I don’t think it’s serious. In a bar you can discuss politics or women or money, but you can’t tell a stranger that your stomach’s upset but you don’t think it’s serious.

Everyone in vaudeville was strange to me: men and women, slack-rope walkers and animal trainers, Russians and Catholics and Negroes. You couldn’t tell from an act who was real and who’d put on an accent, the counterfeit from the actual. The female impersonators, for instance: some of them were perfectly masculine, big knuckled and ready to fight. Others out of costume still seemed girlish, not like real girls, but like the most pampered eerie fairy-tale girl there ever was. They stood on the sidewalk with their unlit cigarettes, waiting for someone to approach with a match. Someone always did.

I learned as much Yiddish from Gentiles as Jews; for years I wasn’t sure what was actual Yiddish and what was backstage slang. Sometimes I did a Dutch act, sometimes Italian. I even did a Hebe act for a couple of weeks, with a guy named Farnsworth who played an Irish tough trying to wheedle me into a bargain. Already it was appallingly dated, but I waxed my teeth so they looked pointed and worked up a Yiddishe accent modeled, I am sorry to say, on my father’s. Still, being Jewish myself wasn’t really an advantage. For a Hebe act you played smart and stingy, for a Dutch act, stupid and lovable. Anyone could do it.

I don’t know how I got through those years after Mimi left me, except through a combination of pride and rage, the cocktail that young men guzzle down until they either wise up or die from years of consumption. They’re delicious together, pride and rage. I would not go back home. I could not fail Hattie, sometimes because I loved her and believed I was fulfilling her wishes, sometimes because I hated her and wanted to show her what I was made of. I had the worst of all worlds: I was a solo act, except when I was acting.

I’d been doing the Hebe act when I landed in Iowa again, Cedar Rapids, about 130 miles from Vee Jay. Farnsworth, or whatever his real name was, horrified me: he smelled worse than Boris the Seal, and told me every day that he was looking for my replacement. It had gotten to where we only spoke onstage. In Iowa, I moped and thought of my sisters: Rose and Annie in Valley Junction; Ida in Des Moines; Fannie in Madrid; Sadie in Cascade, not far from Cedar Rapids. I sent money home, though I couldn’t afford it. Annie wrote back, care of my agent: Scribble a little note next time. I hadn’t. Now I composed telegrams in my head. Not to Pop: of course he wouldn’t come. But Rose loved comedians, and Annie loved Rose: they could be coaxed, couldn’t they?

To see their brother do a Hebe act?

I was so miserable that week everyone on the bill stayed away from me, except for a blackface tramp juggler and eccentric dancer named Walter Cutter, who played the deuce spot. We nodded when we passed each other backstage. He shook my hand once when I came off, like a critic who’d just been grudgingly impressed with a young upstart’s talent. Nice of him, since he—though not the headliner—was the guy who brought the house down, every single time. He could juggle fourteen balls and make them look like six dozen. He did a stair dance that rivaled Bill Robinson’s (and that’s saying something), rubber-limbed and elegant.

The only thing Walter Cutter didn’t do was talk. Not onstage, not off.

“You know why, don’t you?” Farnsworth said to me, breaking his own vow of silence. “He’s a nigger. He keeps his face blacked up and thinks he’ll get away with it, doesn’t talk ’cause that’ll show him up as colored.”

Plenty of genuinely black acts wore greasepaint onstage. Walter used burnt cork to cover his skin. Farnsworth was right: he never took it off. He had removed his white glove to shake my hand, and I could see that he was light-complected; I myself was swarthy. In other words, we were about the same color. If he’d wanted to, he probably could have passed and worked the theaters in the south where they wouldn’t hire colored; most northern theaters booked whoever audiences wanted to come and see.

I’d been on the same bill as plenty of Negro acts, and I’d seen anger and disdain and occasional violence and matter-of-fact friendly mixing and indifference—this was 1930, after all—but I’d never run into anything like what Walter stirred up in our Cedar Rapids colleagues, all without saying a word. Some people, like Farnsworth, just hated his race. Some people—this was Farnsworth’s problem too—hated him because he was a showstopper they had to follow. Mostly I think his silence got to them, the comics especially. They didn’t trust a guy who didn’t talk, talk all the time, brag and kibbitz and insult. They told jokes and Walter didn’t even smile, never mind laugh. Oh, they hated him. No one playing the Criterion would speak to me, because I had shaken his hand. Somebody tried ratting Walter out to the house manager. It didn’t make any difference: the theater booked plenty of black acts, plus he’d already gone on and killed. Only a fool would take an act like that off the bill and send him down the road.

By the end of the week we were best pals, though all we’d done was nod and shake each other’s hands and play some pinochle backstage. Walter kept score on a piece of paper with the tiniest stub of a pencil. When he won a hand, he smiled, and I saw that he was missing half his teeth. He didn’t talk, so I didn’t talk. We mimed to each other. Saturday between shows I gestured at him: a drink?

He shrugged agreeably and beckoned me through the stage door. Not till we got to the speakeasy did I remember he might have trouble getting served, but the bartender seemed to know him. Even so, Walter hadn’t washed his face, though wherever he had the hint of wrinkles you could see his skin under the cracked cork. There we were: a black guy made up to look black and a Jewish guy dressed up as an old Jew. I almost laughed. I could taste the wax on my front teeth.

We carried our drinks to a table and sat down to play pinochle. Between hands, he wrote things on a notepad. Our first conversation. His handwriting was ornate. Where are you from? Iowa, I told him. Home! he wrote, and then he dealt the cards.

“After a fashion,” I said.

Lucky you. Haven’t seen my people in thirty years.

“No? Why not?”

He grimaced. Then he wrote, They won’t. He put the pencil on the table and pointed a long finger at his temple and shook his head.

“What?” I asked.

He tapped his ear, and shook his head more empathetically.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t get you.”

He sighed, silently of course, and picked up the pencil. He held it for a few minutes like it was a burning match he wanted to let singe his fingers, and then wrote, in big block letters, with none of the usual elegant flourish:

DEAF.

He pointed to himself.

I said, “You don’t seem so.”

Eyebrows up. A shake of the head. On the page, I read lips. Have since I was a child. A teacher showed me. Scares people.

“Scares people? Why?”

Either I can hear and am just pretending or it’s magic. So says my parents. They were frightened of me. He went back and crossed out were and changed it to are.

From his suit pocket he drew out an old picture on a gray cardboard backing, a theatrical shot from the end of the last century: himself, in full tramp dress, including what must have been a red nose, no cork, just a big shaggy false beard and a matching wig bristling out from under his stovepipe hat, the familiar look of educated seriousness on his face. His hands were full of rubber balls, and he offered one at the camera, as though it was the fruit of knowledge and he thought you better not take it, in case you became as wise and desperate and down at the heels as he. At the bottom of the cardboard it said, CUTTER THE GREAT COON JUGGLER—THE GENUINE ARTICLE.

He wrote on the pad, Me at fourteen. Then he picked up the picture and put it in my hand and gestured, For you.

“No,” I said, “I can’t take this.”

He pulled out several from his pocket, to show that he had plenty. I don’t know whether he’d sold them once upon a time or they were lobby cards, but it’s true they were outdated now. It was a weird gift, but one I wanted.

He wrote on his pad, though I hadn’t asked, Through my feet I feel the drums. That’s how I dance.

Farnsworth finally fired me that night, onstage—he made it a joke, I think to see if I’d go off in character. The audience figured I got axed this way every night. “Go back to Des Moines!” he bellowed, and I exited stage left, vowing that I wouldn’t. A local reference! The audience applauded. I walked straight out through the wings to the stage door and kept going, even though Farnsworth owned the dusty Hebe suit.

I thought of myself like Walter Cutter then, proud and downtrodden. I was so proud I would not take Walter’s advice, which came in the form of Lucky you. I wouldn’t go to Des Moines until vaudeville took me closer, and I could show my father I hadn’t made a terrible mistake. I planned my return, honest to God I planned it, but pride—

—not pride. I know that now. In my case it was cowardice, and in Walter’s case it was necessity, and that at twenty I thought we were going through similar things shows you what being twenty does to the brain. I isolated myself. I cast myself out. The tragedy of Adam and Eve, the reason we can love them, is their eviction. They had to leave, and they left weeping. They didn’t pack up and sneak away. That’s the ugliest thing in the world, I’ve come to believe, though at twenty I wasn’t done trying.

There’s an old bit—Abbott and Costello did it later on film, and the Three Stooges: two guys onstage, one of whom is driven insane by some words. Sometimes it’s Susquehanna Hat Company, sometimes Floogle Street. In the most famous version it’s Niagara Falls. When the straight man hears a certain set of unlikely words, he gets hypnotized and violent. He repeats the phrase in a strangled voice, and then he beats the comic. Then somehow the straight man catches hold of himself and pulls away. But the comic is a comic: if there’s something he shouldn’t do, he can’t help doing it. He says, “I ain’t gonna say those words again.” Straight man says, “What words?” Comic: “Niagara Falls.” And the beating starts again, and stops again, and starts.

When you travel alone, you pick up your own set of words. If asked, you’d say you never wanted to hear them again: Niagara Falls, Miriam, Mimi, Savant, Louisville, Valley Junction, Iowa. But that’s not true. You wish some innocent stranger would say them, so you can act in self-defense. You stare at people; you dare them to say the words. Comedy is not realistic: the straight man stops and lets the comic live, three, four, five times—he beats him silly but not bloody. In real life you wouldn’t stop, you’d keep pummeling until you’d thrashed those words right out of the world. They’d be gone, and you’d be the one who banished them.

I took the train back to Chicago, to try my luck at another talent show. From there, I got a job assisting a morphine-addicted magician who seemed bent on setting me on fire. Then suddenly I was in Duluth again, dancing alone in my boardinghouse to keep my legs up. Someone knocked at the door, and for a moment, still dancing, I imagined who it might be: Miriam, come to ask my forgiveness. Boris the seal, honking that fish tasted sweeter from my fingers than anyone else’s. Florenz Ziegfeld and George White, fighting over whether I’d be the headliner in the Follies or the Scandals.

It was the landlady, a red-nosed woman in a striped housecoat. “You’re keeping everyone awake,” she said. Then she thrust an envelope into my hand, a telegram from the hungry agent that said, Can you dance? Learn Pantages Minneapolis tomorrow.

Could I dance? I could fly. I packed my case and caught a train that night. “Lucky guy,” I told myself as we pulled out of Duluth, and then wondered when I’d started talking aloud. That is, I said, aloud, “When did you start talking to yourself?” The guy next to me sighed, then changed seats.

All the way to Minneapolis, I shined my shoes. When I got there, I had to dirty them up again, because the skinny guy in charge of the tab show wanted a Dutch comic who could dance—the one they’d booked had a bum appendix. He’d been taken to the hospital in his costume but left behind his wig. Afterward, I was fired again. The beginning of the end, I thought. Time to listen: vaudeville was dying. I should leave before it killed me too. I stood in the wings and watched the girls onstage, lovely in their skimpy costumes, the light off the umbrellas they turned hitting my face like rainwater. Maybe that’s why the agitated comic behind me—his straight man vomiting in somebody’s purse—noticed me. Probably I was just close up. He was a stout man whose suspenders seemed in danger of pulling his pants to his chin, and he was doing a small dance of impatience in the wings.

“You’ll do,” he said to me.

Remember: the Pantages, Minneapolis, September 1931?

This is where you came in.