NOT MUCH OF note in my waking life. People get sick or don’t, people die or don’t, I watch TV or don’t. Sometimes I smoke without remembering lighting up. I continue to go to a deranged hypnotist and try to recall a film by a deceased African American gentleman. I sell collapsible clown shoes. I eat Slammy burgers. In my waking life, I am not a novelizer. Nor will I be many other people, as I will in the dreams. I am, while awake, in fact, not even fully me. I believe if I had the courage to be completely me, I would be a somewhat more interesting person. I believe people would be drawn to me. I believe I would not be lonely. I cannot bear to believe that what I am while awake is the entirety of me. I unstrap myself from my sleeping chair and perform my morning ablutions. Then head for Barassini’s.
Tsai is acting as receptionist today, and I find it difficult to even look at her, so far has she fallen in my estimation.
“Coffee? Water?” she offers.
I shake my head, sit, and bury my face in an old copy of Hyp-Notice, a kind of Pennysaver for hypnotists. Some guy is selling a pair of swirling hypno-eyeglasses, never worn. It’s the saddest ad I’ve ever seen.
“Tell me.”
Now I follow Molloy, skinny and stern, walking down a quiet Glendale street, mouthing a routine under his breath, playing both parts, working it out.
“You know, Molloy, the world is full of all sorts of people with strange customs.”
“You mean like how the English put suitcases in their boots?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
He arrives at a small Spanish bungalow, knocks. Marie answers the door, smoking, sullen, blocking his entry.
“Hi, Chick.”
“Bud in?”
“No.”
But Molloy hears Mudd in animated conversation behind a closed door somewhere. He pushes past Marie, following the voice. He swings opens the door to Marie’s smoking room. Mudd and Joe Besser, laughing, look up from a table strewn with papers. Mudd stops mid-laugh.
“Chick,” says Mudd.
“That’s Chick?” says Besser. “Jesus Christ, he looks like you.”
“What’s going on here?” asks Molloy.
“Joe, would you give us a minute?” says Mudd.
Besser looks at Mudd, then at Molloy, then back at Mudd. He stands, passes Molloy, too close.
“I’ll hurt you,” Besser whispers, and exits, closing the door behind him.
Mudd looks down at the table. Molloy waits.
“Look,” Mudd says, “I thought it was over. The doctors said you weren’t ever coming out of that goddamn coma. I had to make plans. Marie wants to start a family. What was I supposed to do, Chick?”
“So you replaced me with Besser?”
“Joe’s not a replacement, Chick. It’s a whole new act. Nobody could ever replace you.”
“Mudd and Besser. That sounds ridiculous.”
“I know. We were thinking maybe Bud and Besser.”
“You can’t do your first name and his last name. That isn’t done. No one does that. No one has ever done that.”
“But it’s got the two B’s. So…I don’t know. The eggheads call it alliteration. Maybe Bud and Joe. Joe and Bud. I have a list written down somewhere here.”
Mudd shuffles through the papers on the table.
“Ah, here it is. Mudd and Joe is another idea.”
“I’m ready to work again, Bud. Say you’ll still be my partner.”
“Jesus, Chick,” weeps Mudd. “You don’t know what I’ve been going through! The guilt! Why wasn’t I hit by one of the lights instead of you? You know how many nights I lie awake wondering that? Questioning the existence of God? Thinking about fate? Why wasn’t I the one in the coma for three months? Why didn’t I wake up fat and funny instead of you waking up skinny and dull? It haunts me.”
“I need to get back to work, Bud. Patty and I are through. I have nothing.”
There is a long silence. Finally, Mudd speaks:
“What do I tell Joe?”
“Besser always lands on his feet. One of the Stooges will die. Maybe Abbott and Costello will split up. Besser will be in the wings, ready, waiting. Besser is always there.”
“He’s not a bad guy, Chick. He always asked after you. How’s Chick doing? Does it look like Chick’s coming out of the coma? That sort of thing.”
“A vulture circling. Can’t you see that? A fat, bald buzzard.”
“Isn’t that redundant, Chick? A bald buzzard?”
“Not all buzzards are bald, Bud. There are many varieties of buzzard. The Madagascar buzzard has feathers on its head, for example. Archer’s buzzard. Upland buzz—”
“I stand corrected, Chick.”
“Maybe you can call yourselves Bud and Buzzard. That’s alliterative as well.”
A time cut and Molloy sits at the table in Marie’s smoking room, staring at a wall. Mudd paces. There occurs a long and tedious silence, perhaps twenty minutes. Real time. Finally, Mudd speaks:
“Look, maybe we go back to the earlier routines. The doctor sketch? Maybe the plumber sketch.”
“OK. But I play the plumber this time,” says Molloy.
“Chick, that’s my part. You can’t play the annoyed plumber.”
“I can’t play diffident tenant anymore. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“I don’t even know what diffident means! Where are you coming up with these words?”
“It means timid, Bud.”
“Well, say timid then!”
“I just did.”
“Well, say it in the first place!”
“I can’t go back in time, Bud. You’ll just have to live with the fact that I said diffident the first time. One can’t go back in time. The world only moves—”
“Great. Fine. I get it.”
Mudd paces. Molloy stares at the wall.
“OK, what if we’re both vexed plumbers?” Molloy says.
“Vexed?”
“Annoyed. What if we’re both annoyed plumbers?”
“Where’s the gag?”
“We’re identical twin vexed—annoyed—plumbers. We have the same personality. The same opinions regarding plumbing solutions.”
“So we don’t fight?”
“No. Because we agree on everything. Everything!”
“I don’t get annoyed with you?”
“No, that wouldn’t make sense. You get annoyed about plumbing problems, maybe about having to make an emergency call in the middle of the night. But so do I. I’m exactly as annoyed as you are. Exactly. Because we’re twins.”
Molloy laughs hysterically. It’s the first time Mudd has heard him laugh since before the accident. It’s different: high-pitched, manic, otherworldly. An African wild dog. Mudd looks terrified.
“I don’t get why that’s funny.”
“You don’t get it, Bud, because it’s new. It’s revolutionary. It’s the future of comedy.”
“But if I don’t get it, how will audiences?”
“We’ll force them, against their will at first, into the alien, uncomfortable landscape of the world of tomorrow.”
“I don’t know, Chick. This is not sitting well with me.”
“Maybe you want to go back to Buzzard Joe. You can both pick at my carcass.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“I took a serious blow to the head for us, Bud. For us.”
“I know.”
“Don’t forget that.”
“I would never.”
“We’re a team.”
“We are.”
“It’s going to be a comedic augury.”
“It is,” agrees Mudd.
“Don’t you want to know what augury means?”
“Not really,” says Mudd.
“Listen, Bud,” says Molloy, “comedy is nothing if not philosophical, conceptual. Something is funny because it’s wrong. Wrongness can only be appreciated if there is a developed sense of rightness. So expectations may be dashed. A dog does not think a man slipping on a banana peel is funny because a dog does not have any expectation that this man was not supposed to slip on the banana peel. Of course, the dog is wiser than the human in this regard, but also stupider.”
“Right,” says Bud. “I kinda get that.”
“My head trauma caused certain personality changes.”
“I do see that.”
“For the better.”
“Yes.”
STUPIDLY, OR PERHAPS arrogantly, I had not bothered to research the existence of Mudd and Molloy, assuming incorrectly that they were a product of Ingo’s fevered imagination. The exhaustive research I had done for my monograph Slowly I Turned: The True Horror That Was Humor in 20th Century America led me to believe I was familiar with all the players, however minor, in the malicious genre of physical injury and mental anguish known as comedy. Were you to ask, I could rattle the complete credits, birth dates, death dates, and children’s names of every forgotten third-tier second banana. Folks like Bobby Barber or Marty May. As far as I was concerned, Mudd and Molloy never existed. But I was in the Mukhwak Library of Comedy on Joey Ramone Place off 2nd Avenue earlier today, just to get out of the cold and shoot the breeze with my favorite librarian, Tubby Vermicelli, who had been the foil in several comedic shorts of the fifties (almost always as the bellicose chef).
“You look terribly,” he said.
“Eh. I lost my job. Lost my apartment. Sleeping in a chair. Working on an impossible project.”
“Sleep chair?”
“Indeed.”
“Been there. What’s the project?”
I explained a little bit about the lost film, then mentioned Mudd and Molloy.
“I remember them,” Tubby said.
“Wait. What?”
“Mudd and Molloy. Sure. Very weird act. The Two Abbotts, right? Winchell dubbed them that after the accident, yes?”
I was speechless.
“Yeah. That’s them,” I managed.
“I never saw them, mind you. You’d just hear stories every now and again. They were always off touring Podunks. Trying to get by. I think they just kind of disappeared at some point,” said Tubby.
“Did you ever hear that Abbott and Costello tried to kill them?”
Tubby laughed.
“Never heard that one before. That sounds like a comedy in and of itself.”
I asked him if he could check if there is any reference to them in the stacks. He nodded and headed off, returning about an hour later.
“Not much so far,” he said. “Did find this.”
He handed me a review for a show called Heck-a-Tomb! from a 1950 Arkansas newspaper.
Then he said: “And of course they did that one movie.”
“Here Come a Coupla Fellas? But they never finished—”
“No. The Mandrew Manville pic.”
“Mandrew Manville the giant exists?”
“Um. No. What? Mandrew Manville the light leading man exists. Existed. What do you mean by giant?”
“Jesus.”
“What?”
“Listen, is there a computer I can use?”
I sat in a carrel to study Mandrew Manville’s IMDB page. Fifty-three movies. Some of them mentioned in Ingo’s film, but not one of them had I heard of in the real world before. Manville was married to Bettie Page. Holy cow. I know all about Bettie Page, having written a monograph on photographer Irving Klaw entitled From Klaw to Richardson: White Rooms and the Horror of Sexual Subjugation in Photography. So I know everything there is to know about Page, certainly who her three husbands were. Joe DiMaggio. Arthur Miller. Richard Burton. Mandrew Manville was never one of them.
I LEAVE AND soon find myself in a drunken argument with Tony Scott at Pimpernel’s, the film critic hangout on West 19th.
“First do harm (to bad filmmakers) is my credo.”
“But—” says Scott.
“No buts, Tony. Bad films are not a minor nuisance. They infect the human psyche, pervert thought, demean humanity from the inside out. Like brain-eating spores from the future!”
“But, I mean—” says Scott.
“There needs to be a continued war against this kind of cultural malfeasance.”
“I don’t—” says Scott.
“Bam!” I say, pounding the table. “Checkmate, Scott! I’m Audi 5000.”
I stumble toward the door. The knowledge that Ingo’s fictional world seems to be bleeding into my own has made me mean. It’s every man for himself now.
On my walk uptown to Barassini’s, I find myself almost strutting as might a young John Travolta, filled as I now am with piss and vinegar at my vanquishment of A. O. Scott. Never will he write again. Of this I am certain.