Terence, this is stupid stuff.
—A. E. HOUSMAN
Right. I don’t do p.r. I used to do p.r., but now I do pictures. Simple as that. Only when I got a picture in trouble, I do the p.r. Also simple as that.
For openers, this is a lousy town for p.r. I hate this town. This whole country started off on the wrong coast. Next time Paul Revere operates out of San Diego, and we send all the wagon trains east. The Donner Pass is Holland Tunnel. The last place those who survive reach is New York City.
Some reporter asks me today—guy from Esquire, or the Daily News maybe—what about my maybe doing a horror film sometime in New York City? “It’d only be a travelogue,” I tell him. Can you see it? Shoot live in the streets. Eight, what is it, going on nine million monsters? And all you got for a hero is Mayor Lindsay. He’d let them hold Werewolf Week.
“Nobody’s safe,” I tell them. “Why do you think Kong climbed the Empire State Building?” Watch that stuff. Need a good press. Maybe get up a luncheon for them with Simon? Too risky. All want to know, has he flipped. Who’s to say? If he’s crazy, he’s a crazy crazy.
This afternoon, I go up there, first thing I say to him, polite but firm, “Before we discuss anything, better give me that finger.”
“Oh?” he says.
“It goes to the lawyers,” I say.
“Oh?” he says.
“For return to the rightful owner,” I say.
“But I have possession …” he starts to tell me. The network people are all around us with spears, the whole country wants him tied down to an anthill, and he’s telling me possession.
“Possession is going to be nine tenths of both our asses,” I tell him, “if we don’t settle this thing.”
“I’m curious.” He’s curious. “In this country, does a man retain a property right in his severed parts?”
“Got to have a signed release, same as anything else.”
He gives me a look, a shrug, a laugh. “You can have it.” Just like that. “I’m through with it.” Starts patting his pockets. “If I can find it.”
So we search around his suite. He goes into the bedroom, pulls back the cover, lifts up his pillow. “Had it under here last night,” he says. “Maybe the maid …” I don’t believe a word, but he’s still making me queasy. He points back out into the living room. “Go check on the coffee table. See if I put it in the cigarette box.”
I’m being cooperative. Above all, I’m cooperative. I go.
“The nail’s loose,” he says, “so be careful.”
I pick up the top by its milkmaid-milking-a-cow handle, and only cigarettes. White filters. But look like a bunch of stuffed fingers. Only for a second.
He comes back out, pats all his pockets again, then says, “We’d better check behind the sofa cushions.”
That I can’t do. I’ll look for it, but I’m not feeling around for it. He pokes under a few cushions, then remembers. Faking, any odds. Goes into the bathroom this time, and comes back out with the goddamn thing in a drinking glass with his toothbrush. “Must’ve left it in there this morning,” he remembers.
I know what he’s trying to do. I know. I just keep swallowing back, take out my handkerchief. He pops it on there. Stinking gray, almost black, but I wrap it up without really looking, stuff it in my breast pocket. I think what gets me most is knowing he’s had his foot all over it. Send it off to L.A. tomorrow, registered.
“Sit down,” I tell him. “We got things to discuss.”
We both settle on the sofa, him smiling like death, me doing most of the talking from here on out. Looks a lot older. He really does. Getting fired by Papp must’ve been a big blow. But he’s all smiles. “Nice of you to come by, Terry,” he says. “An unlooked-for visit.”
I called him. He knows why I flew in. I point to the bulge in my breast pocket. Unsightly bulge. “That ends it,” I tell him.
“Good.”
“Good, bad, or indifferent, we’re not discussing.”
“It’s been good.”
I tell him shit, “What I’m here to discuss is getting you out of this town.”
“Oh?”
“And out of this country.”
“Oh?”
“We are, in fact, discussing your funeral.”
That I catch him with. “You always seem to be offering me last rites, Terry.”
“I’m not offering, Simon. You’re having.”
“Careful. Don’t push.”
“I’m pushing. You can call it the finale to this sick-o-rama you been running.”
I’m getting to him. “You said we’re not discussing …”
“We’re not. It’s done. All I’m saying, for the record—and there’s going to be a record—is I didn’t send you here to dry-fuck my picture.”
“You didn’t send me here at all.”
“I am now.”
“That we will see.”
I get tough. “You are in trouble, Simon. Get that good. So we are in trouble with the picture. Even before it’s opened. I’m getting us out of trouble.”
“How?” Like he didn’t think it could be done, and proud to think he’d fixed it that way. Damn near has.
“Through your funeral.”
“When is it to be?”
Putting me on, but I act like as far as I’m concerned, everything is settled. “Here’s the schedule. Monday you arrive by special air freight from Transylvania, in a sealed coffin, courtesy of the Rumanian government. Or we put it out that you do.”
“Stupid. Everybody knows I’m here.” Grin. “That’s why you’re here.”
Am I ever. Because do they ever. But I say, “You got a contract. It says p.r. We do p.r. my way.” Why didn’t I talk to him like this on set? “I want a fresh start. We’re re-importing you. From the source country.”
“To where?”
“Out at Kennedy. From there you are taken by hearse to the Edgar Allan Poe House below Washington Square to lie in state Monday night, all of Tuesday, most of Wednesday. The public will be allowed in to view the body—”
“What body?”
“The one you’re sitting in, right here next to me,” I thumb at him. “Just listen, we’ll get to all that. You’re on view from dawn until midnight Tuesday, and from dawn Wednesday until the body’s removed at eleven P.M. to the stage of the Pentagonal Theater on Upper Broadway.”
“Whose body am I supposed to be?”
“Your own.”
“Ordinary human?”
“Not the way you’ve been playing it. Whatever kind of dragon-assed zombie suck … you tell me if you think you’re ordinary human.” But I don’t want to go into that. “We put it out that you’re still dangerous. The public, for instance, will not be permitted inside the Poe House after midnight or before dawn because during those hours you are likely to rise and seek a victim. We cannot be responsible, right? I’m thinking maybe we release a bat out the window around midnight. To suggest to people you’re maybe still out doing … the kind of things you’ve been doing.”
“You’re back to bats?”
“I’m not giving away a plot point.”
“Tell me. Is it really Edgar Allan Poe’ s house?”
“He used to live down there. Carmine Street. We got a house near where he maybe was.”
“Really?” He liked that.
“Now about the cortege. It winds up Lower Fifth Avenue, around Washington Square, over to Broadway, then up through Times Square to the Pentagonal. The coffin is placed on stage. You know the Pentagonal?”
“Not that well.”
“It’s been redecorated. Quincy did it. There’s a small circular lip stage now. That’ll be the catafalque. The audience will be supplied with small souvenir crosses to protect themselves against you.”
“When I rise at midnight.”
“Only you don’t.”
“No?”
“We give them better.”
“What might that be?”
“We open the curtains part way. A clock is projected on screen, showing the seconds to midnight. At precisely a minute to, this madman rushes up from the first few rows. He’s got a stake and a big mallet. He jumps right up on the coffin and drives the stake through the lid, you, the coffin, everything. Some Broadway lunatic. The police arrive. When they drag the madman off the coffin, break it open, there’s nothing inside but your dry bones. Maybe a little dirt.”
“How does that happen?”
“Two coffins. We switch them. I’ll get to that.”
He looks at me, ready to hoot, but gives me a slow zinger instead. “What happens when my avid fans tear the theater apart?”
I smile. “If they’re that glad to see you gone, I can’t object. I’m just as glad.”
“Idiotic,” he says. “But you know that. Why do you want to do this?”
“I’ll be frank with you, Simon. You got to vanish from the face of this earth before we can get that film on screen.”
He begins finally to see I’m serious.
“What is this now? The film is pudding.”
“It’s you. You know that. People are out for your blood. They think you’re abominable. Nobody ever disgusted them more.”
He beams. “Why should I desert such a triumph?”
“I think I can give you reasons.”
“For disappearing? At this moment?” He stiffens up. “You don’t realize how hard I’ve been … Wrong. Of course you realize. And you think you can stop me.”
“I think I can give you better things to do.”
“Do not mistake me.”
“And somewhere better to go.”
“Do not mistake me. I’m devoting myself, my sunset years to public service.”
And he means it. He really thinks he’s been doing good, by fanging the world in the ass. This is where I really smile. Above all, I smile. P.r. “This fits in with that, Simon. I’m offering you the best way. Let me break things down for you, and you’ll see.”
“I don’t see.”
“You don’t really mind coming out to Kennedy, do you?”
“That I can manage.”
“You buy Tuesday at the Edgar Allan Poe House?”
“Yes …”
“But what?”
“I don’t like playing dead.”
“You’re good at it.”
“Not that long.”
“I can’t play you live, Simon. You’d probably be killed.”
“I don’t like dead.”
“Look. We can provide help.” I’d gotten hold of a few of his old favorites. Tossed them down on the middle cushion between us.
He looks at them, like I stole them. “You would put me back on these to do this?”
“If they help.”
“Never.”
“Do you know that story about Raymond Chandler and how he wrote The Black Dahlia?” Love this story. “They started shooting before he’d finished the script. Still didn’t have an ending. Chandler kept trying for one, but he had a big drinking problem. I mean, the problem was he wasn’t drinking. Cold sober, brain dead. So he goes to the director and admits he knows he could find an ending, but it’s going to take a big personal sacrifice, a lot of outside understanding. So the director helps him get back on the bottle. Kept him drunk for three days. Dead drunk. That’s what saved the picture.”
“Why do I want to save your pudding picture?”
“You’re in it.”
“To my sorrow.” He glowers at me. “I’ve seen the cuts.”
“But you’re still in it.”
“To what purpose?”
“To be seen. And if you’re not seen, Simon, you’re really dead.”
That gets him thinking. He pushes the pills into a tiny pile, one at a time, trying to make them look smaller maybe. “Go on.”
“Do you buy the cortege?”
“Yes. I like that.”
“The coffin on stage?”
“Yes.”
“The clock ticking on screen?”
“If I rise.”
“The madman?”
“No madman.”
“Why not?” As if I didn’t know.
“And no stake. I rise.”
“You can’t, Simon. This is where you got to vanish.”
“Don’t tell me that.”
“For a while. For your own good.”
He gets angry. “You’re worse than them.” He is pointing to the pile of pills. “But you don’t do me in either. I am fighting for my own. And I’m getting my own. You’re only here because I am turning people pale in this city. Tomorrow the world. So why should I vanish?”
It seems about the right moment, so I tell him. “I have something to offer you.”
“Maybe you should hear first.”
“Nothing.”
“Another picture, Simon.”
He laughs, real bad. “Another picture? A sequel? More you, more Quincy?”
“This is different. Your own picture.”
“Like Mouth of Evil?”
Tough tootsie, Simon, but I tell him, “I’m talking all your own picture. Everything.”
“And I’m to believe you?”
“You can.”
“How?”
“Because you already made the picture.”
“I already …?”
“That’s right.” I let him think about it a minute. “That’s what I mean.”
“I do not believe you.” But it takes him time to say it.
“I can get it released.”
“How?”
“I’m a producer, Simon. I have friends.”
“In Germany?”
“Some. But more here.”
Now it’s taking him even more time to say things. “They’ll never do it.”
“What would you say if I told you it’s already agreed?”
“Why?”
“I convinced them it would serve our vital interests. In a roundabout way.”
“It won’t.”
“It’s however I make them see it. Our policy toward East Germany, all that wall shit.”
“Brecht tried things like that with them.”
“He didn’t have my contacts. You can go back there, Simon. If you’ll go quietly.”
“Quiet as the dead.”
“Only for a while. Until you finish editing whatever you’ve got.”
I get tight now, counting on him thinking he has enough, hoping he thought he could still pull it together. Hoping big. Tense moment.
“Who’d distribute?”
Still tense. “My company.”
“You don’t have a distributing company.”
“What’s one more company?”
The longest time yet. “You would really do this?”
I’m nervous this close, what’s exactly the right thing to tell him? “What do I lose?”
“Money.”
“On an unknown early Moro classic?”
“It’s too political.”
“These days?”
“Then it’s too religious.”
“Same thing goes.”
“Really?”
“It’ll run for years.”
He looks me up and down, finally says, “Break things down for me again.”
I don’t show a thing. I just go into details. “We’re set at the Pentagonal. I got film of the last five minutes to midnight. Off CBS News. We’re already moving stuff into the Edgar Allan Poe House. Manuscripts, some ravens from a taxidermist. You know they want three hundred dollars for a stuffed raven? And a big collection of old opium vials. We’re not attributing anything, but some of them say ‘E.A.P.’ We can offer Kinney a deal on a hearse, get Western Union in on the flowers—”
“No.”
“No flowers?”
“No Kinney.”
“They’re good. They’re in the business.”
“I’ll get the hearse.”
“You’ll get …?”
“And the coffins.”
Fantastic. Too much.
“I’m watching my end of it. Very carefully.”
“You should. I want you to.”
“Two coffins.”
“Both the same.”
“Twins.”
“Identical. And both simple. Pine even. Something we can get a stake through.”
That gets him thinking again.
“You understand?” I keep pressuring. “We switch inside the hearse. At the marquee. Quincy and the other pallbearers—”
“Quincy?”
“This is p.r., Simon. Not your friends.”
He is still thinking.
“I’m making it easy for you. Quincy takes the one with the skeleton into the Pentagonal, and you go straight back out to Kennedy in the hearse. Then air freight to Tempelholf. No passport control, Simon.”
“I see,” he says, at last.
“You’re an item on the cargo manifest.”
“And everything else?”
“Will be arranged.”
“Which Berlin?”
“Either.”
“You can really do this?”
“You maybe don’t dig my films, but they go everywhere.”
He shakes his head. “The madman?”
“I’ll get one.”
“Where?”
“I got a call out for Saturday.”
“A real one would be better.”
“I’ll come as close as I can.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“You got somebody already in mind?” I sneer.
“No, I was just wondering …”
“What?”
“Who would want to attack me like that?”
After what he’s been giving the public. After all the zaps and zingers he’s been handing this city, his one-man-show guerrilla theater, and that sick TV stunt … Curb Your Zombie …
“Guess he’d have to be crazy, Simon.”
“Perhaps.”
“Anything else?”
“My agent?”
“I already talked to Robbie. There can’t be a contract, but like I said, there’ll be some kind of record.”
“Where?”
“On tape.”
“Money?”
“Either Berlin.”
“One more thing.”
“Give.”
“How does this really help you?”
“What don’t you believe?”
“None of it. All utterly idiotic.”
I take him up on that. “You start something, you’d better end it, Simon. People want an ending.”
“Do they?”
“A clean ending. Happy, unhappy, believable, fantastic, impossible—”
“Idiotic, absurd, stupid, ridiculous—”
“As long as it’s an ending. End clean, Simon. Otherwise you make everybody feel dirty.”
“Perhaps.”
“That’s what you’re doing. In my view. All you’re doing. You’re being a dirty, wet, loose end. And I can’t open the picture while you’re still straggling around in public.”
“I see.”
“I want people to know they’re rid of you.” I go further. “Also, I frankly don’t mind just plain getting the hell rid of you myself.”
“I find I am similarly disposed toward you.”
“Then we’re agreed?”
Done. Makes me want to cut him in on things a little more. “You want to help me pick the madman?”
“No. I’ll be gone the weekend.”
“You will?”
“Getting the coffins.”
“Let’s say Monday then. Ten o’clock. Out at Kennedy.”
“In a hearse.”
“Come on around behind air freight. We’ll unload you, run you through customs, slap on a few stickers, then bring you out to meet the press.”
“Open coffin?”
“Closed. We’ll open it two minutes for pictures.”
“I don’t say anything, do anything?”
“You’d better not.”
He nods. “You want me quiet.”
“That’s the whole point. We’ve had your act. We want your lifeless remains.”
“Death’s dreary sleep.”
“Whatever.”
He pushes at the pills again. “Another terrible role.”
“You can win awards later. At the Berlin Film Festival.”
“But a very hard role.”
“Play it with those.”
“All of them at once?”
“Hilarious.”
He smiles. “On Monday, try to guess whether I have.”
There’s going to be a record, so that’s the record so far. To the best of my recollection.
Also, I’m keeping another record, my own record. Why not? Whose tapes are these? Today, after I left Simon, I crossed over to the CBS Building, got down into that dry moat they dug all around the place, and did my first squeegee ever against a window of the Ground Floor. I held it maybe fifteen seconds, and caught a lady right in the middle of spooning up her chocolate mousse, maybe three feet away from the glass. She was still staring when I pulled back. But when I walked in to meet the Esquire guy, she was reporting it to the head waiter. He interrupted her to take me to the right table. They never think it could be anybody they’d allow in.
You working now?”
“Just finished.”
“Doing what?”
“Spot. For Gillette.”
“That why you got half a face?”
“I want you to see I’m a good beard.”
“I see that. You can shave and start over. You still got four days.”
“If.”
“Okay. If.”
“This likely to lead to anything?”
“It could.”
“What?”
“I’m looking for types.”
“I been types.”
“You got any kind of a psychiatric record?”
“Yeah?”
“It’d help if you do.”
“I’ve done therapy.”
“What for?”
“A weak ego.”
“Where was it weak?”
“All over.”
“What kind of therapy?”
“Acting classes.”
“Acting classes?”
“Too complicated to explain.”
“Who with?”
“A real genius.”
“I know most of the geniuses.”
“Not this one.”
“You like secrets.”
“I keep some things to myself.”
“No problem. I do the same. Your ego got all its strength back now?”
“It can hold its own.”
“What about your physical state?”
“If you want me to run, the knees aren’t too good.”
“I don’t need you to run. I need you to drive a stake.”
“The arms are first-rate.”
“Here.”
“What’s this?”
“What’s it look like?”
“A big tent peg.”
“Close enough. Try this for size.”
“Yeah?”
“Go on. Heft it.”
“Heavy son-of-a-bitch.”
“Butcher’s mallet.”
“I don’t know though.”
“What?”
“I could drive this peg better with a hand sledge.”
“You’d split it.”
“What kind of wood?”
“Hawthorn.”
“What am I driving it into?”
“Pine.”
“Touchy. How thick’s the pine?”
“Half inch, maybe three quarters.”
“What else am I going through?”
“Nothing.”
“If I take it slow.”
“You can’t. Very important.”
“Why not?”
“Has to be done quickly. Five or six good, hard, fast blows.”
“Maybe you better give me the whole scene.”
“No. That’s not how I work.”
“My piece of it then.”
“From the top.”
“Vroom.”
“You enter from the back of the theater, proceed down the center aisle, take a seat in about the third row. You’re part of the audience. No different from any other jack-off.”
“Carrying these?”
“Under your coat.”
“What kind of coat?”
“Seedy.”
“Vroom.”
“On stage, there’ll be a coffin.”
“Whose?”
“Let that go for the moment. On screen, a clock is running. You watch it, begin to sweat, get dizzy. Maybe there’s a buzzing in your head. You can’t stand the whine, the ticking. At exactly one minute to midnight, you jump up, leap on the stage. You’re waving the stake in your left hand, the mallet in your right, and you’re screaming.”
“I’m a lefty.”
“Trade hands then. You straddle the coffin. Look for a small red circle we got marked on the lid. Set the point of the stake there. We’ve already started the pine, so pound like fury. You drive that stake straight down into the coffin, right through the splinters. You keep pounding until they pull you off. You never stop screaming.”
“Who pulls me off?”
“The police.”
“Where’d they come from?”
“Out front. Hired for the evening.”
“Why am I screaming?”
“From the top again.”
“Vroom.”
“You’re this failed actor, a real bum, a stewpot, and a little screwy.”
“Beard, seedy coat, rotgut breath.”
“You got it. This is a theatrical funeral for your great rival you’re attending. You half imagine. The two of you started out together, tried for all the same parts. He got them. But thank Christ, for two seventy-five, you at last get to see him laid away in his coffin.”
“He’s Barrymore. I’m me.”
“But the funeral is only a trick. You half know this, you half don’t. He’s not dead. He’s playing a sleeping vampire. At midnight he’s going to rise again and be better than ever. He’s maybe going to be one of the immortals. You’re going to end up his dresser if you’re blind lucky. Unless, wild hope, you can stop him. What is this mallet suddenly doing in your hand? Unless, mad thought, you can knock a stake through his fucking heart, and finish him off. Like forever. There’s your motivation.”
“I’m screaming blood.”
“You are.”
“Vengeance-is-mine crap.”
“That’s your piece of it.”
“If.”
“If what?”
“What’s really inside that coffin?”
“Nothing.”
“What nothing?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“That’s not friendly.”
“It’s how I work. I want a certain reaction.”
“What reaction?”
“The surprise you’re bound to show.”
“When?”
“When you find out what’s inside.”
“You’re worrying me.”
“No need.”
“I worry, I might miss and hit my thumb.”
“Bang your thumb all you want. If you’re really thinking murder, you’ll still keep pounding.”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s five hundred dollars.”
“Maybe. If I see you show the right kind of surprise.”
“No rehearsal, no nothing?”
“Total impromptu. I don’t see you again until you go on stage. Read the papers, and stay out of touch.”
“I don’t know.”
“I like what I seen of you so far.”
“I don’t know.”
“Your yellow-bellying on TV. I got that in mind.”
“Hell, this is just a peg job.”
“How you do it is what’s important. If you react, we’ll all react.”
“Tell me this much.”
“Ask.”
“Who’s my great rival actor?”
“Didn’t I say?”
“You’re sparing me everything.”
“Simon Moro.”
“Vroom.”
“Yeah?”
“Vroom, vroom.”
Good thing too. He’s the only one who answered the call.
Confess. Sunday in NewYork I don’t know anybody. Monday through Friday I know everybody. Through somebody or other. Saturday I still got contacts. But Sunday I’m a power failure in this town. Nobody to talk to except this tape. Tape’s Last Crap.
Earlier I put on the sneaks and went out squeegeeing. Nothing else to do. Fifth Avenue, not much of a risk on a Sunday. Stores closed, call it practice. I did the Doubleday Bookstore window at Fifty-third, all the book jackets, gave Jacqueline Susann a real thrill. Then I did one of the Saks window dummies in her p.j.’s. Then a pair of glass feet in T-straps at I. Miller. Then a giant Teddy bear in F. A. O. Schwarz. “Go on,” I growl at him. “Report me.” On Sunday you can even do Tiffany’s, but it’s only jewels blinking at your jewels. Not much in that, and the plate glass, like everything else in this town, is witch-tit cold.
I found myself following a route. Circling around St. Patrick’s, thinking how some day I’m going to squeegee a stained-glass window. I am. Find some church where they’re cleaning the stone, climb up the scaffolding, do it while the organ booms. But I’d quit on that for the day, pretty much. Wandered all the way over to Lex, then up to Fifty-third, then down Park, to Fifty-first, up to Fifth again. Where was I going? Guess. My last trip to New York, a few months ago. That line for Bobby. What else? I was following it again, down along the white police barriers, all those popped drinking cups, everybody in their shirt sleeves. A hot night, but nobody mad because they had to wait. Nobody. I never saw a line like that before. That long, that patient, that lined-up. That’s what I want out front of the box office some day.
And if you think about it, they didn’t even get to see the show. It was a good show, I saw it, Andy Williams was terrific, but they had to go all the way back home to the Bronx, Jersey, wherever, turn on the TV to catch it. What did they come for? The inside of St. Patrick’s, free any day? A few celebs, McNamara or McGeorge Bundy if they were lucky, even knew one Mc from the other? The coffin? That coffin was strictly a black-box deal. No, you don’t get to see what’s inside, we tell you what’s inside. What’s more, the show’s tomorrow, folks. Move along, we got to get you all through and out of here before it starts.
At least I’m not giving them that kind of a fast shuffle. Hell of a thought, though, to think where your thinking comes from.
Yeah, that Bobby thing still gets me. You better be part of your time, somebody said, or you won’t have lived. But to be part of this time, you got to get yourself killed. Face it, that’s where the line forms.
I’m anti-violence. I am. Violence is as American as cherry pie, the sambo says, but I’m just as anti-cherry-pie. I hate cherry pie. Nigger food. But if I were in the pie business, I’d make a lot of cherry ones. I would. I’d have to. Same thing if you’re in the movie business. Got to give them violence.
With or without the pits though?
That’s the question. That’s where Simon and I differ. He’s pro-, I’m anti-pits. Who’s going to eat a cherry pie with the pits in it? But okay, this time, this once we try it pits and all.
Still worries me. Totally my idea, but he’s got hold of it, and that worries me. Really does. You plan a thing like this, you got to be freewheeling, but if anybody’s a hair off, it’s a mess. It’s like afterwards, everybody says, why did Bobby have to go out through that kitchen? Or, how come that crazy Arab ever got into the kitchen? But think of the poor guy, beforehand, who had to be sure both of them were in the kitchen at the exact same right moment. I don’t mean there was a guy. I’m just saying that if there was a guy, he had one bitch of a job.
This thing is like that. It’s so tight. That’s okay, if I can get it set up right. But I can’t play with it too much. No room, no time. What can I do? Make some notes? Who do I read them to? It’s bad enough I’m letting myself talk to this tape. I should be erasing what I got down already. But if there’s going to be a record, it’s going to be my record. I don’t mean I want anybody to know there was a guy, but if it ever comes down to that, I want them to know who the guy was, how it really happened. Shit. If I keep this up, I’m. going to Zapruder myself.
Things can go haywire. So easily. And you never know who’s looking at you. Just now. I’m corning back to the hotel, walking up Fifty-first past Schrafft’s. Low windows all along there, a few people eating their three-seventy-five Sunday dinner. An old couple smack in the middle of nothing but empty tables, pretending it’s as good as home. Or Europe. One girl alone, right beside the third window, just back behind the curtain. She’s got big shades, a scarf over her head, and she’s leaning way down over the steam from her coffee. I can tell she’s letting it clear her head. Some hung-over broad, just got up from being sexually humiliated right up to noontime. I decide I can’t miss this one.
I do it with a slide motion. I’m against the window, but still behind the curtain. Then I slip along onto open glass, so it comes up on her slow, like something live.
She bobs up from her coffee steam, sees it. Nothing happens. She keeps her shades turned on it, and I can see my …its reflection in the lenses. That never happened to me before. It looks like something on the side of an aquarium. Like some big pink snail’s hairy ass. I’m stopped, stuck there. Then she pulls down the shades, no panic, never shows it’s anything to her but just another guy’s squashed bird, and it’s Hazel Rio.
I think I got away. Maybe in time. You can’t trust this fucking town. Save that stuff until I get back out to L.A.
That’s where they should have kept Bobby. He would’ve had an even bigger line.
I’m just back from Kennedy in the hearse, sent it on downtown with Simon. I’m encouraged.
For a while there, though, it was close. A lot of press, even Leonard Lyons, and Simon is over an hour late. They’re throwing it all on me. Especially the L.A. Times.
“I just checked over at the Rumanian Air Terminal.” He points to TWA. “They say this flight is a hundred and seven hours overdue.”
“He’ll be here.”
“They tell me it got hijacked.”
“Yeah?” pipes up the Hollywood Reporter.
“Some fang is making them fly him to Graustark.”
“You can’t land a jet at Graustark.”
“You can land, but you can’t take off.”
“He’ll be here,” I tell them.
“Maybe you should call around to the other airlines,” says the Hollywood Reporter. “The last vampire I met came in on Albanian.”
“I’ve been in touch with him,” I lie. “They hit traffic. He’ll be here.”
“How soon?”
“Soon.”
“I still got to file.”
“Our graves open three hours earlier in California, remember.”
“Get yourself a drink, Herb. We’ll let you know.”
But the Famous Film Monsters guy is worse. He’s serious.
“This is a mistake. You are playing with many people’s deepest beliefs.” He’s wearing this big flying-saucer ring, about a trillion-billion facets. Shine it right in some poor Venusian’s eye.
“Let me reassure you,” I tell him.
“Individuals need faith. Especially our young people.”
“I agree.”
“We have been planning a Simon Moro issue for some time. But no. Not if the present course of disquieting events continues.”
“We haven’t been doing a thing. It’s all been Simon.”
“He owes us an explanation.”
“I’m with you.”
“There are Moroites everywhere on this planet.”
“Terrific.”
“He cannot expect us to accept his more recent behavior.”
“Tell him that. When he gets here, tell him that.”
“We will communicate in our own way.”
What gets me about these outer-space kooks is they’re all such fucking snobs. Take you and me light years just to get a foot in their goddamn galaxy. I go get myself a drink, try to stay out of his force field, flack the New York Times guy a little. I’m telling him double what the gross is likely to be, maybe triple, when the hearse drives up. At last. But it’s not supposed to drive up. It’s supposed to pull around back. Right. So I start waving to the driver, try to turn him until I see there is no driver.
“How did you work that?” the New York Times asks me.
“I don’t know.” I don’t know.
It’s coming toward us, down on us, and there’s only this spook in the death seat, in a wing collar, top hat, staring out the windshield, deadly mean, like when he gets to us, how badly are we going to cut the tires? Swerves right through, trying to take a life here and there, but doesn’t get anybody. The guys bang a few fists on its fenders, yell at whoever the hell. The hearse stops, lets out a whopping big backfire. Didn’t think hearses ever did that.
Then maybe I never saw a hearse before, if this is one. It’s some kind of ancient Chrysler, very early gangster. Old enough to have wooden spokes in the wheels, some of them cracked, and the wheels almost up to your waist. The shades in the back windows are stitched, tasseled shade pulls. Up front the windshield rolls out on runners, knobs, and there’s a finger vase on the dash with ferns in it and one dead white rose. On the front of the hood, this Grecian-looking silver thing is tearing her streaming hair out, and on the front bumper, there’s Kiwanis, the Grange, Four-H, and a volunteer fire chief’s emblem. The back bumper’s got a rusty trailer hitch and a lot of hay stuck in it. It’s as muddy as it is black, and there’s still no driver.
It’s this spook who gets out, and all I can think is, where did Simon find him? A real old country creep. When he’s not working funerals, he must scare crows. In the same outfit. Looks like he keeps it hanging in a silo. Mud, no, red clay on the striped pants, even the cravat. The L.A. Times takes one long look, yells over to me, “Is the Rumanian ambassador prepared to answer a few questions?”
The spook takes off his top hat, reaches inside for something, and damned if he hasn’t got a death certificate all filled out. Then he opens his mean mouth. Altogether maybe three yellow teeth hanging there, still on the cob. “Who gets this?” he wheezes.
I break through to him. “Inside there,” I tell him.
“Which one?”
“Which what?”
“The empty, or the full?”
I catch on. “The full.”
He turns, puts on his top hat again, signals a lot with his hands through the car window. The door on the driver’s side opens. We can see it open. What gets down is about three foot seven, with a head like a field pumpkin. But somebody forgot to turn it while it was still on the vine. He is wearing regular gum boots, this trog, and regular suspenders, and the suspenders are either way down in the boots, or the boots are way up on the suspenders, whichever way you want it. He heads at the crowd, already kicking himself a path through, clomps around to the rear of the hearse.
“Hey, driver!” the photographers are yelling at him for a picture, but he doesn’t seem to hear them, pulls open the tail doors, climbs in.
“One of the Little People?” the Hollywood Reporter asks me.
Shit if I know, but before I need to answer, he comes back out again, and he’s carrying the coffin. Single-handed, on his neck along that flat side of his head, keeping it steady with his dinky little toothpick arms. He even jumps down off the back bumper with it. Quivers a little when he lands, but stays up. The spook aims him toward the entrance to air freight, and the flash bulbs really start popping. Great, couldn’t be better. But they bother him, and when the Post tries to get too close, he takes a swipe at the guy. With the coffin.
Wild. Almost gets stuck going through the doors, like a burro. The spook backs him up, works him through. I guide them over to the right guy at the counter, pull out a bunch of stickers I want to slap on. The trog hefts around, slings the coffin up on the counter at a tough angle. The customs guy has to lean out over the counter to see who even put it there.
The spook comes up, snarls, “We’re next of kin.”
“Yes, very good,” says the inspector, looking over the death certificate—from somewhere in Jersey, for Chrissake—also looking over at me since it’s my fifty bucks. I’m licking fast, “Nach Deutschland” and “Via London,” and pasting them down on the lid, which I wish I’d done before they got that trog doing his overhead carry. “What relation are you to the deceased?” the guy asks them.
“His only kin.”
“I see. You’re bringing your … relative into this country for purposes of family burial?”
“The sooner he’s under, the better.”
“Of course.” The inspector looks at me again. “In this case, however, I’m instructed to make a brief inspection. There is some question about the cause of … you will allow me?”
“Who minds?” Then the spook gives another hand signal.
That trog is fast. He’s got the lid off while I’m still standing there with a wet Trieste label on my tongue.
And there is Simon, eyes shut, out of this life altogether.
Shocks even me. Like he was found under some dunghill after the pigs had been at him. And mossy. Or moss over enough of him so they can still print the pictures.
Nobody moves. But the L.A. Times has got to mouth off. “Wow. Some jet lag.”
That starts everybody. “Pictures. Let them up front,” I yell, but the pencil press are on him already.
“You been in touch with the network since the show?”
“Mayor Lindsay said today you might represent a health hazard. Any comment?”
“Whose finger was it? You prepared to say?”
“Are you an actual practicing vampire, Mr. Moro?”
“Was it just that finger, or can we expect the rest of a body?”
“Hazel Rio told Earl Wilson you leave a real hicky. Anything between you two?”
“How much blood you drink a day?”
“When can we expect to hear something definite from you, Mr. Moro?”
“Hey, Terry, how much blood are you saying he drinks a day?”
“Louder.”
“Did you really bite that woman on the subway?”
“Ask him to do his grin.”
“Can’t hear back here.”
“What’s the purpose of this visit, Mr. Moro?”
“Any truth to the rumor you’re thinking about entering politics?”
“What do you consider your chances if you tried walking the streets tomorrow?”
“Louder.”
They’re shooting him close, all angles, and the spook is posted there with his top hat over his heart for some reason, and the trog is waving his six-inch arms, keeping off flies. I’m getting all I want. Simon hasn’t moved a muscle. I can’t even see how he’s breathing. Back gills, or through his skin maybe. “Okay, boys, we’re closing up.” But before I can get closed up, I get something even greater.
The flashes don’t bother Simon, not a reflex out of him, but out of nowhere, this terrific light zap hits him, right smack on his shut left eye. Focuses down, pinpoints like the sun through a magnifying glass, damn near burns his eyelid. He has to flinch away.
“Moro lives!”
It’s the Famous Film Monsters nut, giving him super zing off that power station on his knuckle.
“Simon Moro! Rise and live!”
He gets squeezing-through room from the press, moves forward, leading with that ring, like his own asteroid. The worst type. A sci-fi Holy Roller.
“Return to us! Remember what you once were. The stern reptile. The vengeful moth. The whirring robot, and the honest strangler. Let us hear again a great stirring in your restless grave. Live, Simon Moro!”
Simon is trying to take all this zap, not budge once, and the press is getting on the kook.
“You wouldn’t shit us now, would you, moon man?”
“Question, question!”
But he’s still got half a sermon to go.
“Do not fail us, Simon Moro. Do not stay the false slave of earthling media. Rise. Leave the screen’s prison. Youth needs your guidance. Rise, Simon Moro. The planet lies in shackles. Live! Lead us!”
I can see Simon is gritting his teeth, his whole body even, trying to stay dead. Tense. But then the spook waves once, and that’s all it takes. That trog is damn fast.
Great pictures. He goes for the kook with his head down, gets him, at that height, right in the balls. The kook yells, real human, folds up, but the trog keeps after him. In the stomach, in the ribs. It’s like he’s kicking him senseless with his flat head. Brutal. Guys are shouting him away, but it’s clear now the trog is a dummy. You got to pull him off to make him let up.
But time to get the lid on. The spook and I slip it over, bang it home, and the customs inspector smears on the paste, slaps down his declaration. Then the spook and I each take an end and head for the doors. We’re trying to run, trotting, but what gets me is it takes the two of us, breathing hard, all our strength, full grown men, to heft that coffin back into the hearse.
I shut the tail doors from inside, and the spook goes back for the trog. The press come pouring out after them, those that aren’t still interviewing the kook. The trog jumps behind the wheel. Under it, really. I’m watching through the little cab window, and he’s really standing on the pedals and swinging from the wheel, when you come right down to it. The spook tells him where to head with quick hands, and we gun out of there, both gum boots on the gas pedal.
The empty is the only place to sit down. The whole back of the hearse is old horsehair, maybe even old porcupine. When we get out on the highway, Simon bangs on his lid. I open him up, help him out, let him have my raincoat, which he makes moss green all over the inside lining. We sit together on the empty.
“Who was that Dummkopf?” he says to me. “One of yours?”
“One of yours.”
“Never.”
“That’s what doing for yourself gets you.”
“He’s none of my doing.”
“Says he’s a Moroite.”
“A what?”
“You tell me.”
“Whoever they are, I’m not one of them.” He shivers, either cold or shaky, maybe just old. “But he is right about this planet.”
“Is he?”
“We had better locate another one. For asylum.”
“So now you don’t like Earth.”
“The new one would be Earth.”
“What would this one become?”
“America.” He shivers again. Age. “America hasn’t got room for Earth any more.”
“You better dress more warmly,” I tell him.
“I plan to. Evening clothes.”
“How did it feel to you?”
“Workable.”
“Didn’t need the pills?”
“Didn’t need the pills.”
“When do you breathe?”
“When nobody’s looking.”
“How can you tell that with your eyes closed?”
“I peek.”
“Also when nobody’s looking?”
“Exactly.” He kicks across at his coffin, the one with the labels. “Plain, good, country workmanship. And cold as an ice chest.”
“It’ll do fine.”
“You found a madman?”
“Not as crazy as the two you got.”
He smiles. “Thought you’d like them.”
“Can we keep them around?”
“They never leave my side.”
I tap a knuckle on the lid of the empty. Very hollow. “I’ll get a skeleton put in here tomorrow.”
“That’s half-inch poplar. Should give easily.”
“Who made them for you?”
He nods up front. “Cosmo.”
“Which one’s he?”
“The mean one.”
“Who’s the dwarf?”
“Not a dwarf. Too tall. And keep away from him.”
“Friends of yours?”
“I’ve worked with them.”
“In what kind of act?”
“It’s too long to go into.”
I nod across at his coffin. “You could do with some cushions in there. Maybe a little satin.”
“No. The starker, the better.”
“At least for the trip to Germany.”
“I’ll take the pills for that.”
“Good.”
We don’t say anything for a while. I take a peek out from behind the shade at the traffic, and it’s swinging wide, passing us fast, avoiding us. Maybe only because of the way we’re weaving, that trog and his driving, but it adds to the effect. We’re a real midnight hearse.
“Simon,” I tell him, “this is going to work.”
“One way or another.”
“And I hope you do a great film.” Yeah, I say that. What’s it cost me?
“Do you?”
“An epic.”
“You understand. It is not a very family film.”
“We’ll art-house it.”
“There is one scene in particular. You will be interested. A very long one where I strap down this Fräulein and pull out all her teeth.”
I say nothing.
“Very lovingly. One by one.”
I still keep my peace. “You’re in luck. I don’t show that.”
“No. You wouldn’t.”
“I show Quincy going out into the cemetery, a close-up of a pair of silver pliers in his hand. Then a psychedelic montage. Mostly a lot of big, red boulders rolling out of the mouth of this cave.”
“You would.”
“So it doesn’t matter.”
“Nothing does with you.”
“We can still work together, Simon.”
“Yes.” He shivers badly. “Our cross-purposes cross.”
About had enough of his shit, but we’re getting the coverage, and we’re getting a line outside the Poe House.
Not exactly a Bobby line, but it’s holding. When I left tonight, this morning really, there were even a few people starting to camp out on the street. Mostly hippies, some signs. “DON’T DIE, SIMON!” “WE ARE ALL SIMON’S SIMPLES,” “SIMON STILL SUCKS!” One freak’s got himself a body paint job like Ghoulgantua, and another one’s telling everybody she’s pregnant by him, slept with him as a bat in mid-air. Hardly your sedate crowd of mourners. They don’t have to be there either, that’s what gets me. I’m not paying them, and nobody’s had to wait more than five minutes all day. But like the man said, the last sometime got to be first.
The big thing early today, yesterday now, is putting pennies on his eyes. I got down there a little late, wanted to read through the papers first. They mostly played it Martian Attacks Monster, Dwarf Fells Martian, but enough hard news to get people to get a move on. Lot of Macy’s shoppers and mamas on the way home from taking the kids to school when I get down there myself. Cosmo meets me at the door, hands me a fistful of copper.
“What’s this?”
“Twenty-seven cents,” he says. “So far.”
The odd penny is one somebody even put on his nose.
“How’s he taking it?”
“Hasn’t blinked.”
The trog’s been picking them off real careful, Cosmo tells me. We decide to move the ropes back so he’s well out of arm’s reach, but maybe we should’ve left it the way it was, because now they start pitching them at him. Finally I put up a jar marked “Donations,” and get Cosmo to tell the trog to hustle any penny-slinger right the hell out of there. That’s a risk too, but so far he hasn’t put his head down at anybody.
You wonder, how does a thing like that get started? One guy does it, they all do it. Only I’ll bet it wasn’t any guy. Some blue rinse, a lot of loose change in her purse, but pennies is all she can spare. Reaches out, presses them down on his eyelids. Not too hard, but hard enough to pay her respects, feel to see for sure if he’s really dead.
Opinion seems to be widely divided on that. We won’t know how widely, of course, until this pollster who shows up around eleven gives us the final breakdown on his figures. Nobody I arranged. An independent. Comes up to me, “Do you mind if I ask your viewers a few questions as they come out?” Why should I? He stands on the sidewalk with his clipboard, and asks them first, do they believe Simon Moro is alive or dead in there, and second, would they prefer he were alive or dead? It’s a four-way cut when you knock out the no-opinions. Dead-dead, dead-live, live-dead, and live-live.
“But it’s all over the map,” he tells me. “There seem to be more people who wish he were alive who believe he’s dead than there are people who wish he were dead who think he’s alive. But you don’t really get that many people thinking he’s alive who necessarily want him alive. You got significantly more people who think he’s dead and are glad.”
Somewhere in there is about the way I feel too, but I suggest to him that maybe he’s talking to too many women.
“Opinion,” he says, “is women.”
They got strong ones all right. Some press are also hanging around, picking up goodies. One granny comes out shaking her cane, tells the Daily News, “Been dead for weeks. Swallowed that finger, and choked, and gone to hellfire, and serves him right.”
Then there’s one we have to pull out of there when she starts singing hymns over him. “Rock of Ages,” real slow and weepy, and plenty drunk.
“We never married,” she keeps telling us. Stuffed with booze, but acting like she just came from choir practice, or maybe right from the church door. “Set my cap for him, but we never married.”
The Post tries to get her name.
“Mrs. Simon Moro.”
“Ma’am?”
“Should’ve been. Ask my daughter.”
“I take it you think he done you wrong.”
“He’s gone to his rest. May it be a peaceful one.”
“You consider he’s dead then?” the pollster asks her.
“Been dead to me for years. But I still have a daughter. Praise be the Lord, I still have my daughter.”
“Are you saying she’s his, lady?” the Post wants to know.
She raises herself up like a stack of Bibles. “How could I be? We never married.”
The cops get her at the corner, but nicely, only for jaywalking.
Actually, we get a lot of them coming through in the morning who say they knew him. He used to be that strange janitor in their building, or the foreigner who was always trying to breathe on them in the Seventh Avenue. “You won’t credit this, but I said to my husband years ago when we first saw him in the movies, and now I’m sure. He’s the one that sold us that marriage manual with all the pages stuck together.” But around noon, the crowd changes, and this big tub of guts comes through who sounds more like he’s for real.
“Of course he’s alive. This is all a silly stunt,” he tells the pollster. “But he wishes he were dead.”
“You prefer him dead?”
“Not I. He.”
“Why do you put it that way, sir?”
“He was once a patient of mine. In Vienna with his string of girls, like alley cats.”
The reporters move in.
“When I knew him, he was all but unable to function. He is simply trying to return to that state.”
“What would you say was wrong with him?” the Times asks, very seriously. “First the public insults, now this …”
“Professional ethics, of course, prohibit me from saying. But I might comment more generally.”
“Any way you want to say it.”
“Actors are a peculiar psychological group. Theatrics are an excellent occasional outlet for most people. I employ them often in therapy. But actors become addicted to theatrics. And withdrawal can go very, very hard.” He waggled a finger about the size of a shoehorn and put a lot of shove on what he was saying. “There is nothing more desperate in this world, gentlemen, than an exhibitionist who feels he can no longer exhibit.”
But most of the noontime crowd is secretaries, a lot of them eating their lunch in line. Cosmo holds things up some by making each one finish before he’ll let them in, but then they pretty much rush through and get out. A lot of no-opinions. Real irritated. “It was just something to do.”
An hour later it changes over to the school kids, and a few teachers. The teachers are trying to tell the kids about the Great Writer whose home they’re visiting, look at how careful his handwriting was. But the kids couldn’t care less. Half of them can’t hear through the rubber monster masks they’re wearing anyhow. Gila Man seems to be the favorite, the Moth next. They’re really there to scare him back. Begins to sound like a Coney Island ghoul-o-rama in there around four o’clock, and most of them tell the pollster they know he’s just asleep.
But then, all of a sudden, the noise dies down, and kids start coming out with their masks off, a little shaky, plenty pale.
I get hold of Cosmo. “What’s happening? He’s not doing anything to them?”
“Got his eyes open.”
“Yeah,” says a kid, on his way out fast. “But you can’t see them.”
I take a quick run through there myself, and I got to admit he’s pretty gruesome. He’s doing his backward eyeroll, nothing but the whites showing. How the hell he holds it for as long as he does, I’ll never know.
I stop at the coffin, think maybe I’d better go under the ropes and say something to him. After all, it’s my basic audience he’s fucking with now. But you don’t really want to say anything to him in there. All that Poe shit, and the crazy rainbows off the opium vials. Not much daylight, heavy curtains, heavy double doors, and big stand-up candles on both sides of him. Eerie. Movie-lobby eerie. He’s got on white tie, with this red-lined cape underneath him, also makes a lining for the coffin. His boiled shirt’s about three sizes too large for him, and wired up inside, so there’s plenty of chest room for him to breathe without showing any movement. That’s one way he pulls that no-breathing trick. But the touch that gets me is keeping the lid still halfway on, lengthwise and across the bottom, so it’s like you’re looking at him behind a crooked door. Looking in on him, and him looking back at you, only with no eyes. And if what you see is that bad, who knows what you don’t see? Down at the bottom of the coffin maybe he’s got bare feet and blood under all his toenails. At least that’s his expression.
Also I don’t say anything to him because right behind me, a couple of kids back, is this female phantom coming through. She’s wearing a black lace mantilla down to her knees, but her skirt’s right up to her crotch, black tights and big black shades. Mysterious mourning lady, right out of Poe maybe, but I know Hazel Rio now when I see her, and I don’t want to see her right now.
There’s a let-up after she comes out, looks over at me, lifts her shades, deliberately? Lasts until six o’clock when we start getting what I’d call the real horror crowd. Devotees. Mainly hippies, sure, but not limited to any one class of people. They all have this zonked look, like they’re in the Presence, and the line slows down to a creepy crawl. I tell Cosmo to hurry it up, but he can’t, or won’t. Some of them have wild garlic when they go in, no wild garlic when they come out, and when I take a quick peek in there, wow, some whiff.
“What are they doing with the garlic?” I ask Cosmo.
“Rubbing it on themselves. For protection.”
“You’re kidding.”
“The heads.”
“You’re kidding.”
“They leave him the stems.”
I go back and look again, and around the coffin are a lot of stems I missed, some on the lid, a few on his boiled shirt. I tell Cosmo we’d better stop it the same as the pennies.
“It’s all right,” he says.
“It is not all right.”
So I go back in there once more. He’s got his eyes closed again, and the room’s darker now, but if you look very close, he’s showing just a little bit of a shit-eating grin.
“I don’t like this.”
“It’s all right,” Cosmo says, meaner than ever.
What’s all right? Outside they’re giving the pollster answers that make me think you can get high on garlic.
Is he alive or dead?
“Either way, man.”
“In this life, who lives?”
“He’s the only one who knows, my friend. Really knows.”
“It’s like it is. He’s living the dead life. Live it up, Simon baby!”
“Neither. He’s in there getting born.”
And some of them think they’re here to help him get born.
“That’s why we’ve come down here.” No hippie, this one. A straight, working on his Ph.D. at NYU in demonology, he says, although he also says he has to work under the psychology department, “It’s not that easy, you know, for a vampire to rise. He has to do everything for himself, and on most occasions, alone, and in entirely isolated circumstances. The traumas are similar to those you’d find after any unassisted birth. With the same catastrophic effects on personality, I happen to think that most vampires are, to a large extent, autistic.”
“You believe …?”
“Not a question of belief, is it? A matter for investigation, continued research into the occult.” He looks at me with this screwy pair of eyes. “He shouldn’t be here. He should be at the medical school.”
I figure about then it’s been a long day and I got plenty to do elsewhere, I’ll come back around closing time. I don’t dig this crowd much, where are all the people who hate his guts? You can’t even call this crowd Moroites. They’re too loose, elbows for brains, and it’s bigger than that, and kookier. Doubt their Simon, they wouldn’t try to argue. Just go for you with bare hands. Simon starts these things up in people, I don’t care what he thinks he’s doing, really. It’s superglow fink-worship. And a lot of hostility goes right along with it. We’re here to pay our respects, folks, and gang-bang the corpse. I see a good example of that, which I don’t want to see, just before I take off. Lars Syndor—and what’s he doing here?—comes through the line. I don’t see him go in, but I catch him coming out, in a big huff with a nasty new beard. He winks at me when the pollster stops him, and he’s very loud with his answer.
“Alive, and I’d like to see him dead, baby, dead. Vroom.”
And the crowd starts hissing him. Like snakes and witches and warlocks. It’s lucky he’s a goddamn skulk, shies out of there fast, or we’d have had a scene. The commune would’ve divvied up his balls. I don’t like it. I think he’s crazy to show himself, but he doesn’t know that much of it, keep in mind, and he’s sure working on his piece of it, I give him that. But I decide to set it up a little safer.
“If he comes around again,” I tell Cosmo, “turn him away.”
“Already been through twice.”
“Okay. But not again.”
“He knows he’s not wanted.”
I leave it, and head back here to the hotel. In my room I order up a ham sandwich and some lousy Brooklyn brew, sit there a while, wondering if I can keep control of it. Or is it going to be the goddamn ravens all over again with him? But no use wondering. Just thank Christ I got him playing dead, and not wild-ass. I pull out the suitcase with the skeleton in it, the same one he tried to ruin the picture by throwing a fuck at. Somehow appropriate, I think, that it’s now going to be his. Then I taxi over to the parking lot on Eighth where they’re keeping the hearse.
“Somebody’s delivered these today,” I hear right away from the attendant. It’s the three bags of potting soil, leaning up against his shack.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Bring them along.”
We take them and the suitcase back to where the hearse is parked. By just being parked there, that hearse makes the whole lot look like a junk yard. I open the tail doors, reach in and pull forward the empty.
“Who’s in there?”
“Nobody yet. Tear open one of those bags.”
We dump it into the coffin, then another. Two of them cover the bottom, but it takes the third bag to create any depth. Then I haul the skeleton out of the suitcase, lay it out straight, push the skull, some of the bigger bones down into the dirt far enough so it won’t rattle.
“Now who’s in there?” he still wants to know.
I give him a freebie. He reads it through and through.
“That guy I saw on Johnny Carson?”
“But so far,” I tell him, “only you and I know.”
“Can I tell the wife?”
I give him another freebie, and slip the lid back on. Then we both heft it to see how it handles. It’s about the same weight as the full now, everything the same except the labels. But I can forget them. It’ll look better on stage without.
“They’ll be here for the car tomorrow night,” I say. “Around ten.”
“I’d offer you a rate, but they already paid.”
“Just keep an eye on things.”
He helps me shove the coffin back. He’ll remember doing all this, some excuse if I ever need one. What excuse? I played it straight with you, Simon. Ask anybody. I’m still ready to distribute. It’s your Germans who messed up. But if you want back to America, swim. Something like that.
I tip him big, then head over from there to the Pentagonal, just to check. The souvenir crosses have arrived, stacks of boxes in the lobby. But I wonder, do we really need them? People seem to have their own souvenirs. What if they all bring garlic?
By then it’s eleven-thirty, and I figure I can face that gang at the Poe House again. But I can’t find a taxi, so by the time I get down there, it’s midnight, we’re closed, and those hippies are staking out for tomorrow’s opening at dawn.
“Don’t go in there, man,” says the Ghoulgantua paint job. “He’s thirsty.”
“Show him a little love,” says the bat girl.
Reminds me I was going to release a bat. Out that window. Forgot to get hold of one. Can’t think of everything. Tried to think of everything, Simon. I can’t help it if you Krautheads got lousy security. Something like that.
The trog opens up for me. Only the hall lamp’s on, over the copy we got of Murders in the Rue Morgue. Cosmo is standing in front of the double doors, back in the dark. They’re closed too. I figure I’ll just go in and say goodnight to Simon, show a little interest, then come back to the hotel and do this tape. But when I go up to the doors, Cosmo is very much in the way.
“The Master,” he says, “will see nobody.”
I look at him.
“He has retired for the night.”
“What’s this Master shit?”
Cosmo gets stiff. “I have instructions for you.”
I look at him. Doesn’t even talk the same. Still the old scarecrow, but with this dreamy, bugged look, like somebody stuffed him with wet daisies and cowshit.
“You just stand aside there, Cosmo.”
But he doesn’t. He makes with the hands, and there’s the trog, right behind me, in a crouch.
“Look,” I tell him, “we’re all friends here.”
“You are to lay the skeleton in the empty coffin.”
“Already done it.”
“The lid is to be left open.”
“Oh, is it?”
“The Master wishes to check everything himself.”
Doesn’t trust me. That’s what all this is about. Dangerous, last-minute screwing around, and I don’t like it one bit. “He’s gonna nail himself shut? Or leave that to you two fuckheads?”
Cosmo stiffens even more, meaner.
“Do not come here tomorrow.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Until eleven o’clock.”
“What is this shit?” I’m thinking maybe it’s crowd infection from all those creeps coming through.
“You trouble the Master.”
“Don’t you guys know?”
“We will prepare him for you.”
“He’s not paying you. I’m paying you.”
“He will be made ready for you by eleven.”
“That’s exactly how it just better be, Cosmo.”
“He will be waiting for you. Outside, in the hearse, under the labeled lid. Ready for transport,”
“Right. And you make damn sure about two things.”
I get a lot of choke-weed eyebrow from him. “Yes?”
“That he’s taken his pills.”
“We will see that he takes his pills.”
“And that he’s emptied his bladder.”
That ought to knock a little crap out of this act, I figure. Master’s got a long way to go, I tell them to remember, we don’t want Master to wee-wee. But Cosmo answers, and not a twitch. “We will empty the Master’s bladder.”
What in Christ-almighty-hell is Simon trying to pull with these two zilch-pickers? But I’m not about to rush in there and ask him with that itchy hammerhead behind me. Besides, I don’t really see how they’re harming my own plans any.
“You guys are a riot. Okay, look. I got plenty to do myself tomorrow. You’d be helping me out if you’d handle things down here. And if Simon wants it that way, we do it that way. Only just be goddamn sure you know who’s really running this show, or I’ll shit-list you from here to the Mummers’ Day Parade.”
Cosmo gets a little more straw-footed then, shuffles around, and the trog trots back off down the hall. Going to open the door for me now, real polite.
But as I’m leaving, Cosmo again.
“I’ve been told to ask.”
“What?”
“Do you have any message for the Master?”
I turn around on him. “Tell the Master to go suck himself.”
This is where it gets rough. There is where I win the Academy fucking Award for an on-the-spot p.r. original, or the whole thing falls flat as a dried kumquat.
Right now, right this minute, I’m talking from the back of the hearse, riding uptown, sitting on Simon’s coffin. It’s shut. And nailed. So’s the empty, over there opposite me, with the skeleton planted in it. Those fuckheads do tight work. The trog bangs them in with the flat of his head, then Cosmo countersinks them with his best of three teeth, right? Maybe. Anyhow, this one’s labeled, ready for shipment, and that one’s ready to go on stage, just the way I told it to Simon last Friday. So far, and no farther. Like I’m not saying how far I’m really shipping Simon, or what he’s going to find when he gets there. Never mind. Up front, they’re now driving us past … when I peek out the window, which I hardly dare do, I see we’re just passing Fourteenth Street, I thought we’d maybe get a few more blocks north before … no, the rabids are starting to pick us up, come after us, bound to happen …
A goddamn pothead bike rally, that’s what this is turning into. But it figured. Some cortege. They zoom up, work in close, pound die sides with their fists, even kick at us. That slamming noise in the background … I’ll tell you what it’s like. As if you couldn’t hear, but I’ll tell you what it’s like anyhow. A long time ago I heard this old radio program. This U-boat is sneaking across the Atlantic Ocean, heading for Buenos Aires, with guess who for chief passenger. Only, halfway there, it gets mysteriously grabbed with a lot of thumping, and dragged to the bottom. Dead souls, on leave from the ovens, out to finish him. That’s what this is like …
Only they really love Simon, these bang-ass kooks. If I sneak back a shade even an inch, they spot it, bunch up, give me the finger. They give me the finger with their little fingers. That’s the latest. A love token, a folk tribute to what is now called around the networks … Finger Night. Even I can’t keep up with the latest shit.
Keep curtains closed, and a quick word about today. I spent most of it running around to the theater, to the cops, to the Mayor’s office, trying to get ready for this. We should’ve known, we knew, but we didn’t really, right? … I’m going on secondhand reports. It didn’t come to bust at the Poe House, but almost. Word got out that his eyes were open. Really open, not just rolled back for the kids. They came in hordes, and a lot of them I guess after bad trips. Some of them anyhow. Enough of them. And Simon milked it for all it was worth. First one eye, then the other, but never, of course, both eyes open at once. Always leave them wanting more. The cry is, “Rise, baby, rise! Get up and get out!” The Post says, mid afternoon, there hasn’t been anything like it since they tried to levitate the Pentagon.
My own opinion, Simon was druggy. They came to see his goddamn eyes, eye dilate. He’s sure out now. When I bang on his lid … what’s one more bang inside this kettledrum? … I don’t get a scratch.
“The Master sleeps,” Cosmo tells me when I arrive down there for him at eleven.
“Damn right, the way I hear it.”
“The Master says from here on, we’re in charge.”
“He means I’m in charge.” But I try to enlist him a little. “The Master get to see his skeleton?”
“We helped him sit up in his coffin.”
“Then he saw?” Probably saw a whole boneyard, dancing on a marimba.
“Yes.”
“And he approves?”
“Everything.”
They had the hearse hidden behind A & P delivery, a block from the Poe House. They slipped him out the back to get him away from the rabids. Looks to me like that trog had to carry him over at least one garden wall, somehow. A cop is up the alley, and both coffins are lined up in the back, one on each side, ready for let’s call it dispatch. I hop in and sit down on Simon.
“Listen,” I tell Cosmo. “How about this time if somebody besides your short friend does the driving?”
Cosmo shakes his spooky head. “I have no license.”
“And he does?”
“The Master said we are in charge.”
Fucking hayseed. I give up. I tell him the route. We’ve got an escort anyhow, once we’re down the alley and out onto Carmine, but I don’t think enough of a one to handle what’s closed in on us since Fourteenth. Not just bikes. On every corner, I swear I see three, four of his zombies, ready to rush us. Some friends he’s got, where is the fucking enemy? You figure these things, but you never figure them right. If they ever head us off, it could be worse than Nixon at Caracas. Can’t worry about that. My job is to …
Thought we’d had it there for a minute. Wow did I. But count on that trog everytime.
They are lying down in front of us when we get to Twenty-eighth Street, two deep, all the way across. If it’d only been Cosmo, a good bet we’d have rolled right over them, but the escort chickened and hit the brakes up ahead of us.
What I can see of it is only what I can catch through the windshield from the cab window. Not much of a view, but I’m not about to pull up any shades. I can hear zombies all around me. There’s even one up on the roof, banging on my head. It’s like they’re trying to bail the hearse by hand.
But that trog. So cool. Makes it look like a drill. He skins up over the steering wheel onto the dash and hunches down. Cosmo unscrews the knobs, pushes out the windshield just far enough so the trog can slide under, roll onto the hood. He stands up. Mighty Mite. Cosmo hands him through a bunch of something. He takes them, swings his puny arm around twice, then lets fly out over the zombies who are blocking the wheels.
Freebies. Maybe a hundred of them. Probably Simon’s. They flume out, break apart, flutter around in the air a second, and then it’s a zombie riot to grab one before your fellow corpse beats you to it. Good thinking.
Next the trog climbs up top after whoever’s on the roof. I hear stomping around up there, and then the banging stops. Not just on the roof. On the sides too. He must’ve done something. Has he ever. I see when he pulls her down over the windshield onto the hood, head first. He’s got her by her long dirty hair, twisting it around his wrist like a greasy rope.
She’s maybe half again his size, clawing at him, wild, screaming, so are the zombies, but who hears? Not that trog. He just holds her out away from him, like a yowling cat, keeps working her along the side of the hood. You can’t really tell what he’s trying to do to her until he gets her around front, and then it’s hard to credit. He tries to tie her to that hood thing, get her dirty hair knotted around its silver tresses. Drive right through the mob with her dangling over the grille, I guess. What a mind.
It’s the cops who rescue her, hand her back over to the zombies. The trog shrugs, kicks at a few heads, slides back under the windshield, and drops behind the wheel again. No problem now. Nobody tries to stop us. Who wants anything more to do with us?
He’s that bloodcurdling. He almost puts me off what I know I have to do. And there’s only ten blocks left, chop chop, let’s get cracking …
Done. An ending. You got to have an ending. And I’ve done all I can to set one up. Done all a man can.
I’m going to say, very quickly, just what I did. It’s of interest.
I didn’t go over to the empty first. No. First I lay down on this lid and stretched out full length. He’s four inches taller than I am, the bastard, so I slide up a little toward the head of the coffin. We must be lying almost face to face, lying together like two loving queers except for the lid between us. Thin wood. Quincy would be jealous. I reach under my own chest, feel where my heart is beating against the wood. It’s beating hard. I put my thumb on that spot, keep it there and sit up again. Then I shift the thumb about three inches to the right. My heart plus his own black heart, lying to my right, his left. The spot is on one corner of the “Nach Deutschland” label.
Then I say, right out loud, “If only it could really be you, Simon baby … with a big chopstick bunged through your stove-in, red-running heart!”
But you can’t have everything in this world. So I move over to the empty. I mark about that same spot with a red pencil and draw a tiny circle in red around the mark.
Then I take out my pocket knife. It’s got five different blades from the days when we were all Boy Scouts, and one of them is an awl. I turn the awl slowly inside the tiny red circle until it pushes through to the other side of the soft poplar.
Then I blow away a very small screw of sawdust.
That’s all I do. It looks like a toy bullet hole. Took me six, maybe seven blocks. Only a few more to go now. What else can I do? When we arrive in front of the theater, I’ll unlatch the tail doors from inside, but I’ll leave it to Quincy to open them. Have to leave a lot to Quincy. He’ll find me sitting here on Simon. He’ll direct the pallbearers. He’ll pick up the bones. He’ll, he’ll, he’ll …
And then, Simon baby, we ship you out.
I’m getting too excited. Sound a little strange, even to myself. Got to stay contained. Plenty still could go wrong. The switch is on, but the switch is still to come. And if I let up for a moment, these last few couple of blocks, I know what I’d probably do. I’d rip up the shades, rip down the zip, and squeegee all of good old fucking Broadway.
I’m talking now from the balcony of the Pentagonal, about ten rows back, way over on a side aisle. The angle’s bad, but the place is packed, and I’m trying to keep out of people’s hearing with this tape. There’s a runty little couple two rows ahead who’ve been staring back at me, but they’re starting to argue. An old routine, you can tell. Why did they come, it’s what he says she said she wanted to do, but she says he never says what he wants to do, why doesn’t he say if he doesn’t? They’ve got it memorized. Ought to last until the clock starts running, and if I keep it low, I should be okay.
I love this theater. Yes I do. The hell with that Esquire hack. Incidentally, he’s down there. I can see him in about the fourth row front, squinting at the coffin, taking notes. Trouble is, I don’t see Lars anywhere yet. But maybe it’s the angle. That’s the one thing wrong with the Pentagonal. You get a lousy view from the sides, even downstairs. But you can’t knock the feel of the place, if you like a little decor. Black onyx mirrors in the lobby. Purple railings on the escalators. Moons in the ceiling for your house lights. Black seats, scarlet arm rests. And that wide-o-rama curtain, red with black sparks, yards and yards of it, but a lot of cute cape-play when it takes the out-curve around the lip stage. Of course that’s Quincy.
Catching up here. First on Quincy. Didn’t tell me what he was planning to wear, but when he pulls open the tall doors, terrific. There he is, head to foot, in a black domino. The peaked hood, the works, and three monks for pallbearers. Menacing. It cows the zombies outside the marquee, suits the occasion. With that hood, I can’t see his face when he picks his coffin. Not that I’m looking. All I’m doing is sitting. What else can I do? But I’ll bet Quincy is loving this. He’s rid of the bastard too, and we can open Mouth of Evil next. Big. Wide enough to see its tonsils.
He takes the head, and the three monks take two sides and the foot, and they’re on their way through the lobby. Hazel follows along behind in her same get-up. The only mourner. Widow, bimbo, grief-stricken starlet? Who knows? At least she’s got that mantilla pulled down over her shades, showing a little respect.
I don’t see the rest of the procession because I’ve still got dealings with Cosmo and his pal. I hand the spook his seven hundred dollars in fifties and twenties, more than enough, and tell him how to get to Kennedy from here.
“You don’t want us to wait?” he says.
“What the shit for?”
“The Master says make sure you don’t want us to wait.”
Cosmo is looking cow flop at me again, and I just don’t have the time.
“You want the Master to get where he’s going, or don’t you?” I tell him.
“We’ll get him where he’s going.”
I get secretive. “We’re supposed to be shipping a stiff to another country, Cosmo. That’s serious business. So get on it.”
“Hell no. Get on it, and then get lost!”
He smiles for some goddamn spooky reason. I’m getting nervous, everybody around. Can’t control it. Then I notice the trog.
“What’s the matter with him?”
“He’s that way at funerals.”
His tears are huge. Big blubbering baseballs.
“Tell him it’s not helping.”
Cosmo starts with his hands, but there isn’t time.
“No. Just get him away from here. Move it.”
“The Master says then to bid you farewell.”
“Fuck off.”
“Farewell.”
“Fuck all.” I nod hard back toward the shaded windows. “And the same to your Master.”
The last I see of them, the last I ever want to see of them, is that trog weeping all over the steering wheel, then driving off with one hand so he can, Christ almighty, give me the little finger with the other. Him too, just barely up over the edge of his window.
I can’t think about it, or I’ll chase them with cops all the way out to Kennedy. Instead, I check the cops, and then once I’m inside, before I come up here, I check the audience. Not all zombies, a much better crowd. Like that Bobby thing again. For the real show, I guess you always get a different class of people. There’s a lot of press, and some families, and even a few religious. Then again you never know who’s going around as a nun these days. I tell the usher to watch the sister for any trouble.
“There won’t be any trouble,” he says.
“No?” That worries me.
“Not with the lights up.”
So I get them turned down a little. Half moons instead of full.
That helps, but from up here, I can see the usher’s got a point. Sure, there’s plenty of ugliness down there, and not just the zombies. The good folk came to see the big, bad, nasty man too. With their jaws clenched. Some of them even picked up crosses. There’s edginess down there, there’s grinding of teeth, there’s even real trouble down there. But it’s all gone fucking sedate. They’re sitting on it. This town will sit on anything.
Am I surprised? No, I’m pleased. I am. Leeway for good p.r. Means that Lars should make it to the stage without a lot of brouhaha, and then we’re clear of Simon, and then everybody enjoys a good, clean, humping American movie, right?
Only I wish I could spot Lars. I’m standing up now and scanning each row down there, trying to find that chin rubbish of his. Hell, if I can pick out that parking attendant in the seventh row, I should be able to spot where … What the fuck is he doing in the balcony?
I don’t believe it. I do not believe it. He actually wanted to try it from the balcony. Knew he couldn’t. It’s a hundred-foot drop, and he’s still got on the overcoat. But he’s up here blocking out a whole John Wilkes Booth scene for himself.
“Why the fuck aren’t you down front?”
So he has to tell me, from the top, vroom, how he leaps on the stage, Sic semper tyrannis, how great he could have been.
“You realize,” I hiss at him, “Booth broke his fucking leg.”
Then the clock hits the screen.
“Vroom,” he says. “We do it downstairs. I still got five minutes.”
“Only four, less than four to get there. Remember?”
“I’m going, I’m going.”
Why can’t I get rid of the geniuses in my life? It’s Simon all over again. You hire a nothing for a simple, walk-on stunt. You hire a nothing because he is a nothing. You tell him to stay a nothing. And he turns up Raymond Massey trying to be Mighty Joe Young …
I don’t see him yet, and honest to God, I don’t know if he can make it now.
Don’t know if I can make it myself. I’m so goddamn uptight and nervous, finally. That clock is coming up to two minutes, and this shitbrained audience is too much. A few zombies are big and loud for him to Rise, Baby, Rise! … you can hear it … but most of it’s this incredible, stupid, polite moaning. Why are they being polite, when he’s nothing but disgusting? But I know the last time I heard that same type moan. That New York moan. Only time I was ever in Times Square for New Year’s Eve. That same goddamn sick-sad, scream-mutter-mumble, piss-it-away whine that gets going under all the good-cheer farting when it’s almost midnight, because who the hell knows whether it’s going to be a happy new year or just another three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day lifetime hangover?
And these bastards are pulling the same heartbreak shit … he didn’t break your hearts, you goddamn morons, he knocked out your brains! … for a sadistic, washed-up, toothless, bone-fucking, eighth-rate, Nazi vampire …
There’s Lars. Thank Christ.
Don’t try to find a seat first, you fuckhead! Just go on up and do your thing …
I know what this is like. This is like shooting a quickie, five days straight, and it’s been five days straight too, this one, exactly, and all that comes back from the lab is the audio—
Jesus. That usher.
And what the fuck good’s the audio? You can’t hear that coffin on stage. Bet I haven’t even mentioned it. You can’t hear Lars’s too-goddamn-big overcoat. You can’t hear that usher’s uniform. You can’t hear the straight faces on the zombies, or the crazy faces on the goodies, or, Jesus, the face on that nun. All you can hear is my mouth, and them starting to count that fucking clock backwards.
Deck him, Lars. Just deck him, drop the coat, take your tools and get up there …
Goddamn but it’s the goddamnedest thing, he’s got himself caught in the sleeve of his coat, but he’s still pounding. He’s pounding like a jackhammer, and it’s splitting up like kindling, but it’s going in like a fencepost, and the cops are coming in like vultures, but he’s still banging away like a madman. It’s working. The arm whipping, the overcoat flying, but whack home everytime! Go it, Lars! Drive it down! What you can’t see is the cops grabbing him, the zombies climbing over the seats, the goodies kicking the zombies, everybody, everybody in the aisles, the moons blinking, great, great, just great! What you can’t see really, I can’t see yet, soon, soon, is where that beautiful, beautiful stake went down, down, down …
So bone-fucking voyage, Simon baby! This part of the tape is specifically for you. You’ll be hearing more of it, the parts I want you to hear after I edit, but this much, when Robbie sends it along to you, wherever you end up in the world, you can believe is straight …
Which, remember, Simon baby, no matter what you’re thinking, is how I played it right along. I said I’d distribute. I’ll still distribute. Bonn agreed to release. They’ve released. We left nothing standing in your way, including the U.S. government.
Only first, you better find the fucking film, right? Try either Germany. That’s arranged too. Wander all of Europe. Tour the Mediterranean. Visit Africa, Russia, China, Mars. And tell you what. If you can find even three feet of that film, any three feet, Simon baby, any three scratchy, out-of-focus, over-exposed, pissant feet, I promise you a week-long festival at Lincoln Center. And a promise is a promise.
Meanwhile, I hope you’re finding work in somebody’s Bavarian home movies for beer and sauerkraut, because the word is, and no p.r. this time, the word is you just did your last picture. For me, or anybody. And I am going to help spread that word because it’s going to help the picture. People will love going to Your Last Picture. In fact, we’re going to roll it right now, you shit, just as soon as they get the lid off down there on stage and dump you out!
That’s what I don’t want you to miss, Simon baby, even though you can’t be here. This wonderful moment. I am here in the balcony for the pleasure of telling you, firsthand, exactly what little is left of you. You, your career, your menace, your goddamn fad, your anything at all but a few freaky stills in some fag critic’s old movie album. Down there is your finish. Your bleached bones. Do you dig? No more flesh to flash, Simon baby. No more makeup miracles, not on dead bones, baby. And no more fucking artwork with your goddamn eyes. Down there they are holes. What we are about to see, Simon baby, is your dried-up fossil in a busted-up German cigar box, with a big pin already stuck through you for a goddamn Has-Been label! And you know something, Simon baby? It’s going to be so goddamn awful … they’re pulling off the lid now … so goddamn awful I hardly dare to look almost as much as I’ll bet you can hardly bear to listen …