So garbled was my secretary’s mind, that early in the morning, that I had to call Western Union later in the day, and have them read me the telegram again; even then, in the clarity of a monotoned operator’s recitation, the message barely made sense. It read:
CAMPAIGN MATERIALIZING TO ROCKET YOUR FORTHCOMING MOVIE “THE LATTER LIFE OF GOD” INTO INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL GOLD MINE.
I had her read it again, and then asked if they would deliver the telegram itself to my hotel. She said Western Union would be pleased to accommodate, and then she said, “This telegram was sent from here in town, by night letter last night, sir.” I asked her if it was signed, and she said, “Yes, it’s signed G. Barney Kantor, American Association of Fan Clubs.”
More bewilderedly than I had any right to feel, I thanked the operator and racked the receiver. I sat there on the edge of the bed in my hotel room in Cleveland, and I tried to make some sense out of the histrionically phrased nonsense I had just heard.
True, one of my magazine short stories, “The Latter Life of God,” had been picked up by an independent outfit for production…but the script hadn’t even been written yet, which was why I was on my way to the Coast, having stopped off in Cleveland merely to see my sister and brother-in-law. Who the hell was G. Barney Kantor, and what the hell was the “American Association of Fan Clubs”?
“Bernice,” I yelled into the adjoining room, “do I know a G. Barney Kantor?”
Bernice, festooned with sheaves of press releases, with a pencil behind each ear, emerged from the other room and stood poised in the doorway, cocked onto one hip, thinking. “Not that I know. Is that the business with the telegram this morning?” I nodded. “Dumb sonofabitch whoever he is,” she snarled, “waking me up at eight jeezus o’clock! I’d like to get my hands on his throat!” She went back to her room, to that ever-waiting extension of her right hand, the ominously silent telephone, back to ponder arrangements for a local interview show I was going to do over Cleveland television.
It wasn’t that important, really, because I knew it had to be a gag, but the peculiar manner of phrasing struck a dim note in my mind, and though I had other things to worry about—the local tv appearances, finishing an article long overdue, the final payment of the option money—for some inexplicable reason my thoughts kept worrying the telegram and the name of G. Barney Kantor, like a dog with a rag doll.
And finally, it came back to me, who he was, and how I’d met him, and what image of him I’d relegated to the back part of my memories. And despite myself, I was forced to smile. After all this time, that he should remember me; I’d been just a kid when I’d met him, however briefly; I’d been perhaps sixteen, seventeen. Now, ten—no, thirteen—years later, Kantor was back in my life.
If anything had saved me from becoming a real flip, from wasting my life and what little talent I had, after my father died and my mother and I moved to Cleveland, it was the science fiction people. I had bought a pulp magazine whose cover had shown a huge robot firing bolts of flame (or something) from its fingertips, and almost immediately had become an aficionado. In due course I met the other science fiction fans in Cleveland, and we formed a club, the Solarians. Not only were they good people, and kind people, but there was a swirl of wonder about them, an unpredictability of imagination that turned my world of mourning sadness and widow’s tears into a golden time and space of hyperspatial rocket ships, alien life-forms and concepts of the universe that I’d never even suspected existed.
Inevitably, one of the Cleveland newspapers came to the club rooms to do a feature on us. It was the usual cheapjack yellow pap, tongue firmly in cheek and ridicule replacing reportage. The article appeared in all the editions of that day’s paper, and we were more mortified than flattered. Someone suggested iron filings in the reporter’s coffee cake. Saner heads prevailed, scolding me for such an uncharitable thought.
All of this was background, however, for the new magic soon to enter our lives, in the person of G. Barney Kantor.
So. On this night that lives in memory, an otherwise undistinguished meeting night, Al Watson (in whose apartment we held meetings) reported a phone conversation he’d had earlier that day. He seemed enthusiastic and genuinely pleased. “So he said his name was Kantor, with a ‘K,’ and that he was prepared to, uh, how did he put it, ‘Lift us from the realm of mediocrity and anonymity to the heights of public awareness.’”
We all stared at Al, and Al beamed back at us. (We sometimes cocked a quizzical eyebrow at Al; he was a member of the Fortean Society, as well as a practitioner of dianetics.) “Isn’t that swell?” he asked. “This guy says he has contacts all over the world, and he’s coming over this evening to meet us and find out our potentialities for greatness.”
Ben Jason, one of the more lucid minds present, had the intemperate presence to ask, “Our potentialities for what? Is that another of his remarks?” Al nodded.
We stared at one another, prepared to believe the wildest things.
None of this prepared us, as it turned out, for the actual physical presence of G. Barney Kantor.
At nine-thirty the doorbell rang, and we scurried, rearrangingourselves into positions of respectability and sober world-view sanity, as Al went to answer the door. All we could see when the door was opened was Al, standing there with his hand outstretched in greeting, and then a convulsive widening of the eyes, and the tiniest gasp of disbelief and consternation. We heard Al mumble welcoming words, and then he stepped aside, and for the first time I saw G. Barney Kantor.
As a writer I am affronted by the sterility of imagination and talent that forces some authors to describe their characters as “looking exactly like Gregory Peck, with bigger ears.” This recourse to mass consumption identity has always struck me as highly suspect and just short of auctorial bankruptcy. Yet I am compelled, in describing G. Barney Kantor, to take the shortest route to total recognition, by stating simply that G. Barney Kantor looked, looks, will always look, precisely like Groucho Marx.
Kantor entered the room, and for an instant I thought his brothers would follow him. He stalked, not walked, in that indescribable half-crouch Marx has patented for the “Captain Spaulding, the African explorer” number (did someone call him schnorer?); his moustache was a black, rectangular brush, his hair was wild and manelike. He wore glasses. He smoked a thick, obscene-looking black hawser of a cigar. He was midway between massively impressive and downright comical.
After the first shocking moment wore off, it was possible to detect small ways in which G. Barney Kantor was not Groucho Marx, but so studiedly had Kantor sought to mock the Brother’s appearance, at no time during the fantastic evening were we free of the impulse to burst into laughter.
(I was later to learn that the RKO Palace Theater in Cleveland occasionally hired Kantor as a sandwich man, strictly on his appearance.)
“A decidedly good evening to you, fellow roamers of the vast, uncharterated Universe!”
No bull, no flummery, that is the way G. Barney Kantor talked. Silver fleeting words of sometimes meaning that were here and gone before you could assemble them in precisely their proper order. Flamboyant phrases slapped together to give a general impression of garrulity, pompousness, absolute phoniness. It has always confused me how people could be gullible enough to be taken in by Kantor, for in the first words from his mouth, it has seemed to me, any rational person could detect sham and the quicksilver maneuverings of the born con man.
Stunned as we all were by this brash and obviously hammy individual from out of nowhere, Ben Jason again made his mark by stepping forward, shaking Kantor’s hand and introducing himself. Then he led Kantor around the room, introducing him to Honey Steel, Frank Andrasovsky, Earl Simon and after all the others, finally, me.
“This is Walter Innes,” Ben said. “Walter, Mr. Kantor.” I took his hand. It was the handshake of the man who is testing the flesh of your body to see if you have worked for a living, or are subsisting on gratuities from a wealthy family. A fleeting thought passed me, and I was glad I wasn’t wearing any rings. “Walter is the editor of our club magazine,”—Ben beamed at me; Walter, the mascot—“and quite a promising little writer, too.”
Kantor’s deep blue eyes stared down at me and he deluged me with words. “A remarkable young man, Mr. Jason. Remarkable. I can tell he has an intuitive grasp of matters both cosmical and naturalistic from the glint of supernal awareness in his lustrous eyes. Remarkable! A man to watch, indeed, a man to watch.”
Then he passed on, leaving me stunned to the core, and awash in words whose meanings I was only barely able to fathom.
And so it went all that evening. Kantor the monologist, Kantor the financier, Kantor the bon vivant waving his silver-headed walking stick. Amused, bemused, confused and nonplused we sat and listened to his meandering reminiscences of the world in which he had moved, his aspirations, his love of science fiction (and his total unawareness of even the leading writers in the field)…and we waited for the kicker.
Finally, it came. When we were all wasted and spent by the mere effort of listening to him.
“Fellow Solarians,” he blurted, during a three-second lull in what had been entirely his conversation, “and I hope I am of a full-hearted enough nature, borne up with recondite camaraderie and bold effusion for you good people of the stars and the night, to call myself so…fellow Solarians, I am prepared to make you well-known, nay, say responsive to the plucked chords of fickle public sentiment, as you have long adhered to be! Why should men and women of your ilk, your pluck, your boldishness, men and women with so much to give to a world crying out, pleading for light and guidance, be relegated to positions of obscurantivity and idle activity? You, you are the brave new future of this land, and I am prepared—for a small fee—to hoist you by the petards of your own magnificence and—”
We were readers of Startling Stories, where the hell was he getting this saviors of mankind crap from?
Eventually, we told him we would get back in touch with him, watched the variousness of him exeunt flourishing, and fell back as a group, in absolute exhaustion.
Earl Simon it was, who very simply said it, in a quiet voice, as we all slumped there, drained and confused. “Hey, that guy’s a crook.”
No one bothered to disagree. We were too exhausted.
And now, thirteen years later, after I had gone my way, the Solarians had gone theirs, and G. Barney Kantor had, presumably, gone his, I was the recipient of a telegram, like a rainbow voice out of the past, like a many-flavored bird of passage that once every thousand years lights and casts its gay gloom over anyone lucky enough to be around.
I put Kantor and his officious, nonsensical ’gram out of my mind till later that night, when we were at one of the local nightclubs, one of the few left in Cleveland’s now-ghost-towned downtown. I was with Bernice, my sister Beverly and her husband Jerold, the optician, and we had been joined by the headliner of the show (a well-known male singer who prefers I do not use his name), and three girls out of the go-go chorus.
How Kantor came up, I don’t recall now, but I told them of our meeting thirteen years before, when I had been in high school and had not yet written the first book. “And you know, every once in a while,” I told them, “when I’d be downtown, I’d see him on the street. He was a sidewalk photographer most of the time. I suppose that’s where he made his living.”
One of the go-go girls, memory piqued by my comparison of Kantor to Groucho Marx, told me how he had been a sandwich man.
Then my brother-in-law, who is frankly too nice a guy to be married to my sister, added, “You bet your life he remembers you, Walt. When you were in town three years with your book, uh, which one was that—”
“NO MORE FLAMES,” I reminded him, always ready to tout my own work.
“Right. NO MORE FLAMES. Well, when you were at that autograph party at Burrows’, he found the write-up in the Press, with my name in it, and he came around to the shop, and introduced himself. Said he was a good friend, and really came on with me. I managed to get him out of the store, I had a couple of patients, and he was yelling and making an ass of himself.”
I grinned, imagining G. Barney Kantor’s capers in mild, good-natured Jerry’s optical shop.
“But now every time he sees me on the street,” Jerry Rabnick continued, “he follows me for blocks with that damned camera of his, yelling at the top of his lungs, ‘HEY, THERE GOES DOCTOR RAB, THE BROTHER-IN-LAW OF AMERICA’S FINEST NOVELIST! HEY, DOCTOR RAB, HOW GOES IT?’”
Jerry’s voice had climbed in imitation of Kantor’s yowl, and heads were turning toward us in the club. He flushed and fell silent. I found myself laughing, at just the mental picture of that colossal fraud, that monstrous charlatan, G. Barney Kantor.
Then my sister chimed in, “We were having a Temple benefit, and he called me, offering something or other, I don’t remember what it was now, but I called the Better Business Bureau to check on him and so help me, when I mentioned his name, the girl groaned and flashed the switchboard and said, ‘Refer this call to the Kantor Department.’” I broke up completely, then. The singer—who had been listening carefully—also got his jollies, and we sat there for at least a minute till the tears ran down our face, we were laughing so hard.
“He sounds like a real creep,” one of the go-go girls commented. “He musta been in an’ outta jail a million times. He sounds like a real crook.”
I was reminded of Earl Simon’s remark so many years before, and it started the juices flowing. “Perhaps not,” I replied. “Perhaps G. Barney Kantor lives in his little world of pretense and tomfoolery, believing he is a press agent extraordinaire. Perhaps he’s fooled himself into thinking he’s a big man, and these little hangups with the police and people shunning him are just the stupidity of the mass. People who don’t recognize his greatness.”
I thought that was damned perceptive of me.
Then Bernice shook me by saying, “I think he’s pathetic. I feel sorry for him.”
“Now what the hell brought that on?” I said, the big-time writer who was on his way to Hollywood. “You’re the one who wanted to kill him for waking you in the middle of the night.”
“It wasn’t the middle of the night, it was the early morning, and I feel sorry for the poor little guy.”
I snorted. “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, for Christ’s sake. Do you take in stray cats and puff adders, too?”
Bernice stuck her tongue out at me. “You’ve just become too big a deal to remember people like him. Not everybody makes it. This little guy apparently lives a lie, but it’s all he’s got. I think you stink.”
And that was what formed my decision. “All right, Miss Humanitarian, I’ll tell you what let’s do: let’s find out where he lives and go pay him a visit. You’ll see him for himself, as he really is, stripped of all the sadness and tarnished glory. He probably lives in some fleabag hotel on Prospect, with crotch shots out of Playboy on the walls, and a card file on how to fleece suckers like you.”
So we looked it up, and it was in the phone book, but it was an address out on the West Side, in a not too pleasant section of the depressed area. A section getting Poverty Program money.
There were ten of us by the time our cavalcade got to Kantor’s street. We had picked up two of the musicians from the combo that backed the Well-Known Male Singer, and all ten of us, in three cars, had turned it into quite a little party. We were all pretty smashed by the time we got out there and it was four or five in the morning.
The street was dark and the houses were paint-peeling, sad-faced, a bit too grim for us really to laugh much. But so intent were we—all of us except Bernice—on revealing G. Barney Kantor as a fraud and a poltroon, that not even the slim neighborhood could really dampen us.
We found the house, and stopped in front. “Here, let me get a couple of my books out of the glove compartment,” I said. We had brought them along for the tv show earlier in the day, and I’d shoved them in the compartment when the director of the show said he already had them. “I’ll use them to reestablish our ‘friendship.’ After all, it has been thirteen years.” The others in the car all smiled and egged me on. All except Bernice.
We got out of the car and walked up the weed-spotted walk, the tiles of the pavement thrust up and cracked from too many changes in temperature, too few repairs.
I rang the bell and didn’t really pay any attention to the fact that it was five o’clock in the morning and the house was black. A light came on somewhere inside, and after a moment the door opened a trifle. I looked down at a woman’s face. “Yes?” she asked, half-frightened.
“We’re friends of G. Barney Kantor. Is he here?”
I thought it must surely be a rooming house.
The door opened a little wider.
“Barney? No, he’s out this evening. May I help you? I’m Mrs. Kantor.”
She was built like a muffin, and had her hair up around her head in a large braid. She was wearing a faded housecoat and a pair of bedroom slippers from which the fuzz had departed. Another figure, a young girl, came to stand behind the older woman.
I suddenly felt very foolish.
“Well, uh, my name is Walter Innes. I’m a writer, and, uh, a friend of Barney’s; I—uh—I thought I’d drop by to—uh—” I looked around at the nine others, trying to find some help. They had suddenly developed Little Orphan Annie’s Disease: blank eyeballs.
“Oh, Mr. Innes!” the little woman chirped. “Oh, my gosh, yes! Barney has spoken of you many times, won’t you come in, it’s so cold out there.”
She opened the door wide and admonished the young girl to, “Gwen, run and turn on the lights and put on some coffee!”
We came in and she led us into the living room. It was furnished in Early Squalor. I wanted to get out of there very badly.
And yet, at the same time, I was really angry at G. Barney Kantor, really infuriated. Here was his wife and what was apparently his daughter, living in a dump and consigned to a life of poverty, while he ran around Cleveland wasting money sending night letters and playing the poseur. I wanted to tell her what I thought of her blasted husband and his ridiculous antics. I was perhaps a bit too drunk.
“Oh, Mr. Innes, it’s such a pleasure to meet you at last. Barney has told us many times how he gave you your start. I’m just sorry he can’t be here to see you; he’s out on a very big promotion tonight.”
I was too amazed by having learned G. Barney Kantor had given me my start to say anything. But the daughter, Gwen, chimed in, “Daddy always said you were his finest hour. Daddy always talks like that.” Coffee was apparently on.
I nodded dumbly, and beside me I heard Bernice moving up to whisper, “You bastard!” in my ear.
“Well, uh,” I said, apropos of absolutely nothing.
“Please sit down, won’t you all,” G. Barney Kantor’s wife said. I then realized no one had introduced the small army she had let into her living room this wee small hour. As I went around introducing everyone, telling who they were, the two women’s faces lit up. They recognized The Singer, immediately, and when he said, “I’m sorry we missed Barney, Mrs. Kantor. He’s been a great help to me whenever I play Cleveland,” she practically erupted in joy.
Well, it was an agonizing hour and a half. We sat there and heard what a great man G. Barney Kantor was, how this was only a temporary accommodation, how they were going to hit the big time soon, how Barney had connections in Hollywood, how the mayor was thinking of citing him for civic contributions, and on and on and on.
Finally, we made ready to depart. I took out my pen and signed the two books: To my dear friend, G. Barney Kantor, for all his invaluable help and for showing me a special part of the universe. Walter Innes.
I gave them to her, and she stood on tiptoe to kiss my cheek. She said good-bye to us all, and we left.
Bernice didn’t say anything all the way back to the hotel, but when we left the car with the doorman, and he said, “We watched you on tv today, Mr. Innes. You were great,” Bernice snorted and gave me a knowing grin that told me I’d either have to fire her or marry her.