WHETHER BY PURE spontaneous combustion, or because I had inadvertently taken aboard too large a segment of ice-cream, the old Havershot wisdom tooth had begun to assert its personality.
I had had my eye on this tooth for some time, and I suppose I ought to have taken a firm line with it before. But you know how it is when you’re travelling. You shrink from entrusting the snappers to a strange dentist. You say to yourself: “Stick it out, old cock, till you get back to London and can toddle round to the maestro who’s been looking after you since you were so high.” And then, of course, you cop it unexpectedly, as I had done. So next day I was in the dentist’s waiting-room, about to keep my tryst with I. J. Zizzbaum, the man behind the forceps.
Across the room in an arm-chair, turning the pages of the National Geographic Magazine, was a kid of the Little Lord Fauntleroy type. His left cheek, like mine, was bulging, and I deduced that we were both awaiting the awful summons.
He was, I observed, a kid of singular personal beauty. Not even the bulge in his cheek could conceal that. He had large, expressive eyes and golden ringlets. Long lashes hid these eyes as he gazed down at his National Geographic Magazine.
I never know what’s the correct course to pursue on occasions like this. Should one try to help things along with a friendly word or two, if only about the weather? Or is silence best? I was just debating this question in my mind, when he opened the conversation himself.
He lowered his National Geographic Magazine and looked across at me.
“Where,” he asked, “are the rest of the boys?”
His meaning eluded me. I didn’t get him. A cryptic kid. One of those kids, who, as the expression is, speak in riddles. He was staring at me enquiringly, and I stared at him, also enquiringly.
Then I said, going straight to the point and evading all side issues:
“What boys?”
“The newspaper boys.”
“The newspaper boys?”
An idea seemed to strike him.
“Aren’t you a reporter?”
“No, not a reporter.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to have a tooth out.”
This appeared to surprise and displease him. He said, with marked acerbity:
“You can’t have come to have a tooth out.”
“Yes, I have.”
“But I’ve come to have a tooth out.”
I spotted a possible solution.
“Perhaps,” I said, throwing out the suggestion for what it was worth, “we’ve both come to have a tooth out, what? I mean to say, you one and me another. Tooth A, and Tooth B., as it were.”
He still seemed ruffled. He eyed me searchingly.
“When’s your appointment?”
“Three-thirty.”
“It can’t be. Mine is.”
“So is mine. I. J. Zizzbaum was most definite about that. We arranged it over the ’phone, and his words left no loophole for misunderstanding. ‘Three-thirty,’ said I. J. Zizzbaum, as plain as I see you now.”
The kid became calmer. His alabaster brow lost its frown, and he ceased to regard me as if I were some hijacker or bandit. It was as if a great light had shone upon him.
“Oh, I. J. Zizzbaum?” he said. “B. K. Burwash is doing mine.”
And, looking about me, I now perceived that on either side of the apartment in which we sat was a door.
On one of these doors was imprinted the legend:
I. J. ZIZZBAUM.
And on the other:
B. K. BURWASH.
The mystery was solved. Possibly because they were old dental college chums, or possibly from motives of economy, these two fang-wrenchers shared a common waiting-room.
Convinced now that no attempt was being made to jump his claim, the kid had become affability itself. Seeing in me no rival for first whack at the operating-chair, but merely a fellow human being up against the facts of life just as he was, he changed his tone to one of kindly interest.
“Does your tooth hurt?”
“Like the dickens.”
“So does mine. Coo!”
“Coo here, too.”
“Where does it seem to catch you most?”
“Pretty well all the way down to the toenails.”
“Me, too. This tooth of mine is certainly fierce. Yessir.”
“So is mine.”
“I’ll bet mine’s worse than yours.”
“It couldn’t be.”
He made what he evidently considered a telling point.
“I’m having gas.”
I came right back at him.
“So am I.”
“I’ll bet I need more gas than you.”
“I’ll bet you don’t.”
“I’ll bet you a trillion dollars I do.”
It seemed to me that rancour was beginning to creep into the conversation once more, and that pretty soon we would be descending to a common wrangle. So, rather than allow the harmony of the proceedings to be marred by a jarring note, I dropped the theme and switched off to an aspect of the matter which had been puzzling me from the first. You will remember that I had thought this kid to have spoken in riddles, and I still wanted an explanation of those rather mystic opening words of his.
“You’re probably right,” I said pacifically. “But, be that as it may, what made you think I was a reporter?”
“I’m expecting a flock of them here.”
“You are?”
“Sure. There’ll be camera men, too, and human interest writers.”
“What, to see you have a tooth out?”
“Sure. When I have a tooth out, that’s news.”
“What?”
“Sure. This is going to make the front page of every paper in the country.”
“What, your tooth?”
“Yay, my tooth. Listen, when I had my tonsils extracted last year, it rocked civilization. I’m some shucks, I want to tell you.”
“Somebody special, you mean?”
“I’ll say that’s what I mean. I’m Joey Cooley.”
Owing to the fact that one of my unswerving rules in life is never to go to a picture if I am informed by my spies that there is a child in it, I had never actually set eyes on this stripling. But of course I knew the name. Ann, if you remember, had spoken of him. So had April June.
“Oh, ah,” I said. “Joey Cooley, eh?”
“Joey Cooley is correct.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of you.”
“So I should think.”
“I know your nurse.”
“My what?”
“Well, your female attendant or whatever she is. Ann Bannister.”
“Oh, Ann? She’s an all-right guy, Ann is.”
“Quite.”
“A corker, and don’t let anyone tell you different.”
“I won’t.”
“Ann’s a peach. Yessir, that’s what Ann is.”
“And April June was talking about you the other day.”
“Oh, yeah? And what did she have to say?”
“She told me you were in her last picture.”
“She did, did she?” He snorted with not a little violence, and his brow darkened. It was plain that he was piqued. Meaning nothing but to pass along a casual item of information, I appeared to have touched some exposed nerve. “The crust of that dame! In her last picture, eh? Let me tell you that she was in my last picture!”
He snorted a bit more. He had taken up the National Geographic Magazine again, and I noted that it quivered in his hands, as if he were wrestling with some powerful emotion. Presently the spasm passed, and he was himself again.
“So you’ve met that pill, have you?” he said.
It was my turn to quiver, and I did so like a jelly.
“That what?”
“That pill.”
“Did you say ‘pill’?”
“‘Pill’ was what I said. Slice her where you like, she’s still boloney.”
I drew myself up.
“You are speaking,” I said, “of the woman I love.”
He started to say something, but I raised my hand coldly and said “Please,” and silence supervened. He read his National Geographic Magazine. I read mine. And for some minutes matters proceeded along these lines. Then I thought to myself: “Oh, well, dash it,” and decided to extend the olive branch. Too damn silly, I mean, a couple of fellows on the brink of having teeth out simply sitting reading the National Geographic Magazine at one another instead of trying to forget by means of pleasant chit-chat the ordeal which lay before them.
“So you’re Joey Cooley?” I said.
He accepted the overture in the spirit in which it was intended.
“You never spoke a truer word,” he replied agreeably. “That’s about who I am, if you come right down to it. Joey Cooley, the Idol of American Motherhood. Who are you?”
“Havershot’s my name.”
“English, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“Been in Hollywood long?”
“About a week.”
“Where are you staying?”
“I’ve a bungalow at the Garden of the Hesperides.”
“Do you like Hollywood?”
“Oh, rather. Topping spot.”
“You ought to see Chillicothe, Ohio.”
“Why?”
“That’s where I come from. And that’s where I’d like to be now. Yessir, right back there in little old Chillicothe.”
“You’re homesick, what?”
“You betcher.”
“Still, I suppose you have a pretty good time here?”
His face clouded. Once more, it appeared, I had said the wrong thing.
“Who, me? I do not.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll tell you why not. Because I’m practically a member of a chain gang. I couldn’t have it much tougher if this was Devil’s Island or the Foreign Legion or sump’n. Do you know what?”
“What?”
“Do you know what old Brinkmeyer did when the contract was being drawn up?”
“No, what?”
“Slipped in a clause that I had to live at his house, so that I could be under his personal eye.”
“Who is this Brinkmeyer?”
“The boss of the corporation I work for.”
“And you don’t like his personal eye?”
“I don’t mind him. He’s a pretty good sort of old stiff. It’s his sister Beulah. She was the one who put him up to it. She’s the heavy in the sequence. As tough as they come. Ever hear of Simon Legree?”
“Yes.”
“Beulah Brinkmeyer. Know what a serf is?”
“What you swim in, you mean.”
“No, I don’t mean what you swim in. I mean what’s downtrodden and oppressed and gets the dirty end of the stick all the time. That’s me. Gosh, what a life! Shall I tell you something?”
“Do.”
“I’m not allowed to play games, because I might get hurt. I’m not allowed to keep a dog, because it might bite me. I’m not allowed in the swimming-pool, because I might get drowned. And, listen, get this one. No candy, because I might put on weight.”
“You don’t mean that?”
“I do mean that. It’s in my contract. ‘The party of the second part, hereinafter to be called the artist, shall abstain from all ice-creams, chocolate-creams, nut sundaes, fudge, and all-day suckers, hereinafter to be called candy, this is be understood to comprise doughnuts, marshmallows, pies in their season, all starchy foods and twice of chicken.’ Can you imagine my lawyer letting them slip that over.”
I must say I was a bit appalled. We Havershots have always been good trenchermen, and it never fails to give me a grey feeling when I hear of somebody being on a diet. I know how I should have felt at his age if some strong hand had kept me from the sock-shop.
“I wonder you don’t chuck it.”
“I can’t.”
“You love your Art too much?”
“No, I don’t.”
“You like bringing sunshine into drab lives in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati?”
“I don’t care if Pittsburgh chokes. And that goes for Cincinnati, too.”
“Then perhaps you feel that all the money and fame make up for these what you might call hideous privations?”
He snorted. He seemed to have as low an opinion of money and fame as April June.
“What’s the good of money and fame? I can’t eat them, can I? There’s nothing I’d like better than to tie a can to the whole outfit and go back to where hearts are pure and men are men in Chillicothe, Ohio. I’d like to be home with mother right now. You should taste her fried chicken, southern style. And she’d be tickled pink to have me, too. But I can’t get away. I’ve a five-year contract, and you can bet they’re going to hold me to it.”
“I see.”
“Oh, yes, I’m Uncle Tom, all right. But listen, shall I tell you something? I’m biding my time. I’m waiting. Some day I’ll grow up. And when I do, oh, baby!”
“Oh what?”
“I said ‘Oh, baby!’ I’m going to poke Beulah Brinkmeyer right in the snoot.”
“What! Would you strike a woman?”
“You betcher I’d strike a woman. Yessir, she’ll get hers. And there’s about six directors I’m going to poke in the snoot, and a whole raft of supervisors and production experts. And that press agent of mine. I’m going to poke him in the snoot, all right. Yessir! Matter of fact,” he said, summing up, “you’d have a tough time finding somebody I’m not going to poke in the snoot, once I’m big enough. I’ve got all their names in a little notebook.”
He relapsed into a moody silence, and I didn’t quite know what to say. No words of mine, I felt, could cheer this stricken child. The iron had plainly entered a dashed sight too deep into his soul for a mere “Buck up, old bird!” to do any good.
However, as it turned out, I would have had no time to deliver anything in the nature of pep talk, for at this moment the door opened and in poured a susurration of blighters, some male, some female, some with cameras, some without, and the air became so thick with interviewing and picture-talking that it would have been impossible to get a word in. I just sat reading my National Geographic Magazine. And presently a white-robed attendant appeared and announced that B. K. Burwash was straining at the forceps, and the gang passed through into his room, interviewing to the last.
And not long after that another white-robed attendant came and said that I. J. Zizzbaum would be glad if I would look in, so I commended my soul to God, and followed her into the operating theatre.
Extract from “Laughing Gas.”