Harry Fudge’s Museum

Harry Fudge lives on top of a foothill in Orange County. One of those lush semimountains that humps itself out of the earth and you see them all rolling and beautiful from the freeway on the days without smog and you wonder who could possibly live up there and live like that.

There’s a guard at the gates and I’m about to give our name, but Sergei leans over me to the driver’s-side window.

“Advance to go,” he says to the guard.

The guard nods and the gate swoops open.

As we climb the driveway the house looms down on us like Xanadu in the opening shots of Citizen Kane. It seems huge from a distance, and it only gets bigger as we’re up near the front doors, which are bordered by two Roman columns thick as sumo wrestlers and twenty feet tall. A thin man in what looks like the last Nehru jacket in California steps out and is backlit by the light from the entrance.

I stop in front of him and have Sergei roll down his window.

“I am Paulo,” he says. “Park anywhere.”

“I’ve got a pretty vicious oil leak,” I say.

Paulo considers for a moment, then points over by the jacaranda tree, which is strung with white lights all along its branches. “Pull it up under the tree—over by the lawncrete.”

“Lawncrete?”

I look over, and there’s only grass beneath the tree. He points, and I do my best to position it where he wants. I get out and I see what he meant. From a distance, it looks like grass, but it’s really grass in diamond-pattern patches on a bed of concrete.

Maggot Arm Joe looks down. “Lawncrete?”

“Who knew?” I say, and the three of us head toward Paulo, who’s standing on the front steps of Harry Fudge’s mansion.

We reach the steps, which are concrete inlaid with what looks like costume jewelry, round colored stones big as noses.

Paulo says, “This way, you come.”

We follow him through an entrance room with twenty-foot ceilings and marble floors. The house is on some huge scale, the hallways as wide as rooms I’m used to, the rooms like gymnasiums, and I feel like I’m in a scene from The Incredible Shrinking Man. Paulo leads us to what looks like a study filled with dark woods and stained red leather chairs that creak softly as the three of us sit and wait, as ordered, for Harry Fudge to join us. Everywhere I look, there’s something about the Titanic. Models, posters, tickets under glass, paintings, you name it, he seems to have it.

Harry Fudge rolls in to the room in a wheelchair a moment later, looking as if he’s taken a horrific bad turn since we last saw him. He barely resembles the thick, threatening man I met on the Queen Mary just a couple days back. Of course, two days ago, Sergei could smile and my face wasn’t full of cuts. Time changes things, sometimes quickly and sometimes for the worse.

Harry Fudge’s wheelchair has a caddie on the back for a green hissing tank labeled OXYGEN that leads to a mask that’s hooked into this thing that looks like a harmonica holder in front of Harry Fudge’s mouth. If he needs a hit of oxygen, he leans forward into the mask and takes a whiny suck that’s frighteningly shallow. His face is the color of pickle juice, his fingers are the blue gray of clouds at night and his voice is quiet, and everything he says sounds like he’s got something in his throat.

My head throbs and I wish I’d had a drink before we came.

He wheels behind his desk and turns left and right, jostling a bit to fit himself into proper position. “Gentlemen,” he says. He nods to Paulo, who unwraps a cigar and hands it to Harry Fudge, who licks it a couple of times before putting it in his mouth for a moment. He takes it out. “Can’t light them—I’ve had an unfortunate attack. The flavor, though—can’t live without, you see.”

“Of course,” Sergei says. “Man need comforts.”

Harry Fudge frowns. “What’s wrong with your face, boy?”

Sergei says, “Slept on it.”

“You say you slept on your face? Who doesn’t?”

“Make very stiff,” Sergei says.

Harry Fudge looks at me. “And your face, son. What the hell happened?”

I tell him it was a car accident.

Harry Fudge shakes his head, and when he does, his cheeks bump the edges of the oxygen mask and leave little spittle lines on them. He points with his cigar at Sergei. “You foreign boys, you’re strange,” he says. “When I first got into the oil business, it amazed me how different foreign people were from the people I knew.”

Harry Fudge coughs, and even though I can’t stand him, it hurts me to watch it. I worked waiting tables in a retirement Community once and it changed me, being around that much decay and death. And what I’m seeing now, I’ve seen before, it’s the gray tightness of emphysema and it’s killing Harry Fudge and it’s something almost no one deserves to have ever felt.

Paulo comes over behind the desk and wipes Harry Fudge’s face after his coughing spell. Harry Fudge nods him away, and Paulo takes three steps to the side and stands at attention.

“I don’t have long, from what I’m told,” Harry Fudge says. “And I need some business taken care of before I go. There is a new sense of urgency. I need you boys—what you have.” He nods to Paulo, who takes an envelope out of his breast pocket and hands it to Sergei.

Maggot Arm Joe says, “We may not have what you need. We may not have the people you’re looking for.”

“True,” he says. “But you’re my best chance. I will not die without seeing justice done.” He looks toward me and takes a big suck on the oxygen while his eyes stare at me and it’s disturbing. He gathers himself after moving his head away from the mask. “This has nothing to do with me—this is about setting things right.”

I could argue, but it wouldn’t do any good. I look over at the envelope Sergei’s holding and wonder if it’s possible that we could get lucky enough to not have any of their names on our computers. There are a lot of criminals in this world, they don’t all have to be on our lists. I’d love to bring Harry Fudge the bad news.

Harry Fudge says, “I will give you twenty thousand dollars for every name you can match from the list I will give you. You tell me where those men are—-twenty thousand apiece.”

Maggot Arm Joe nods and Sergei, still-faced and wooden with his head full of toxins, does the same. I try to look coolly impressed, but I’m getting tired of this world of men who are like scratch lotto tickets: they swell with the promise of big money, but I’m still broke every time we part ways.

“I want to show you boys something,” Harry Fudge says. He jiggles his hand guide a couple of times and his wheelchair kicks and starts and we stand and follow his electric hum down several of his immense halls. We take enough turns that I’m lost. I’d need a guide to find my way out of this house. We come to an elevator that’s big and wide, like the ones they take the gurneys onto in hospitals. The doors are brushed metal, like a Viking stove, and I see my bleary shadowy reflection in them before they open.

“Go ahead of me,” Harry Fudge says.

We walk in, followed by Harry Fudge and then Paulo, who walks like Jack Webb in Dragnet, stick-up-his-ass straight with his arms at his sides. He corners at ninety-degree angles, stiff and military, and he pivots after he’s in and hits the down button.

The smell of chlorine and a wash of cold air—like a walk-in freezer—hits me as the elevator doors open on a room that’s as big as an airline hangar. There’s an Olympic-size swimming pool and I can hear the gurgle of a filter under the sound of our footsteps and Harry Fudge’s wheelchair.

Harry Fudge wheels over to the side of the pool, which is dark. You can hear light sloshes against the side. There are lights near the side of the room, dimmed halogens that allow you not to kill yourself walking around. He zips forward and jerks back like he’s parallel-parking. He motions us to three chairs set up next to him. I see my breath.

As we sit, Harry Fudge says, “What do you boys know about the Titanic?”

“Big boat—hit an iceberg,” I say. “Didn’t they make a movie about it?”

I can’t see his face too clearly, but I’m guessing that Maggot Arm Joe’s giving me a dirty look.

“That atrocity of a film,” he says, “nearly ruined my life.” Harry Fudge goes on to explain that he had spent a good-size hunk of his nest egg, his rainy-day mad money, and boy is he mad, on what he calls a “mass media project” meant to inform the public at large of the greatest story of the century: the sinking of the Titanic.

“I had vision,” Harry Fudge says between labored breaths. “This was an enormous story—a story too big to bring to the public, you had to bring them to it.”

So Harry Fudge, fifteen years ago, began turning his mansion into a Titanic museum. This took hours from days and days from what was left to a life but it was, he takes pains to tell us, a calling.

We’re still sitting in the semidark in this wet and cold room. The filter hums and gurgles. I think Paulo’s still in the room, but I don’t see or hear him. Maggot Arm Joe says, “So what’s the beef with Cameron?”

“I have studied the Titanic for forty years,” he says. “It is, among other things, one of the most witnessed disasters of the century. Seven hundred and five people survived to tell a story, and nearly half of those stories are mutually exclusive. Seven hundred and five people were there. Historians, shipbuilders, naval architects, professors of every discipline have studied it—and we know so little about it. More facts are known about the Titanic’s sinking than any other disaster, and yet we still don’t know what happened that night. You add up the facts and you don’t get the truth, you just get story after story after story.” Harry Fudge pauses, coughs, and spittles a bit before taking some oxygen. I hear the mild suction when he pulls his face away from the mask.

He says, “It is the most elusive, irreducible, unknowable event of the modern world. You do not take such a majestic tale and make a second-rate love story out of it. Cameron used the greatest story of the century to tell a piece-of-shit, wrong-side-of-the-tracks love story. He cheapened the deaths of fifteen hundred people.”

“It’s just a bad movie,” I say.

“It’s not,” Harry Fudge says. “It’s an event—it occurred. People suffered, people died, because of the decisions and mistakes of others. It’s not some story, some movie.”

I try to look casually at my watch, but I can’t see it and I momentarily curse myself for not getting a glow-in-the-dark face one for a couple bucks more from Benny the Mole. It must be around one in the morning. I’m tired—weighted-down tired—the kind of weariness where sounds blend and roll over one another in waves. What I would like, what I need, is a beer or two and a warm bed.

“How many black people died on that boat?” Maggot Arm Joe asks.

“Ship,” Harry Fudge says.

“Ship,” Maggot Arm Joe says.

“Honestly,” Harry Fudge says. “None. But that shouldn’t minimize the event’s importance to all peoples.”

“Why not?” Maggot Arm Joe says. “The U.S. Army blows the shit out of hundreds of black men—its own soldiers, mind you, not some fucking enemy—and charges the survivors, charges them with treason, for not wanting to let the army finish the job. No one gave a shit about that—no one talked about its importance to all peoples. Tuskegee—you don’t hear about how all people should be caring about that.”

Sergei says, “Shut up—you squeaky wheel, you.”

Harry Fudge laughs softly. “No, let him speak his mind.” He pauses. “Point taken, son. You were a fine lawyer, you know that?”

“I do,” Maggot Arm Joe says.

“But sit back and learn something,” Harry Fudge says.

Harry Fudge tells this story:

His grandfather, Moses Fudge, was a hired deckhand on what is known to Titanic scholars as the “Undertakers’ Ship.” This ship, the Mackey-Bennett, was hired by the White Star Line out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. This is hours after they learned about the sinking, about all those dead people out there floating on the surface of twenty-eight-degree water. Harry Fudge tells us that they hired the Mackey-Bennett in hopes of finding some survivors, but they knew what turned out to be the truth, there were hundreds of frozen dead bodies floating on the surface, along with tables, chairs, broken pieces of wood, and—this is among the most troubling for some reason—over thirty dogs. People were traveling, people were starting new lives in this great new America, bright and fresh as factory chrome. Everything was on the surface: their things, their children, their pets, and them.

The Mackey-Bennett’s job was simple. They would pluck the dead from the water and judge, from their clothing and jewelry, whether they were first-, second-, or steerage-class passengers. The first-class bodies were embalmed. The steerage class were weighted down to drop to the bottom.

Moses Fudge wrote this all down in a diary and then never spoke about it again before he hanged himself in his backyard in Latrobe, Pennsylvania in 1934. The diary, among other papers, was willed to his grandson, young Harry Fudge.

“And as a boy, I read those descriptions of his over and over. How they came across the bodies from a distance in the early morning. The sun gleamed off of the ice field and all the boys on deck were placing bets on which was the fatal iceberg. The first thing they hooked, at least the first thing my grandfather hooked, was a Scottish terrier. When he saw what it was, it scared him and he dropped it and the sound, he said, was like a block of ice. It slid along the deck and slammed into the side of the ship and they chased it down and threw it over. Then the bodies of the passengers appeared on the horizon. Over three hundred people left—left in the water. And, gentlemen, this did not need to have happened.”

Harry Fudge claps twice and a bank of lights come on over the far right side of the pool. In the pool is a four-foot model of what I’m guessing is the Titanic. There’s a tremendous amount of detail, the ship’s painted. There are several little people gathered on the decks.

“This is the ship at twelve-forty-five, sixty-five minutes after striking the iceberg. Captain Smith, at this point, knows the ship is doomed. Notice the forward list. At this point, lifeboat number seven, which can hold sixty-five people, leaves the ship with twenty-eight people.”

Harry Fudge claps again and an audiotape starts running. There’s the clamor of voices and ship’s horns and buzzers.

“What you’re hearing, gentlemen, is an approximation of the noises that would have accompanied key moments in the ship’s sinking.”

Harry Fudge says, “Next,” and the lights go out and it’s difficult to see the model. Then another bank of lights comes on maybe ten feet to the left of the first lights and there’s another model of the Titanic. It looks worse, farther down, there are several small lifeboats off the sides of it, and there are more little people on the decks. The noise increases from the tapes. There’s a swell in the panic of the voices. The buzzing of general fear. Feet scurrying. More horns and buzzers, the desperate croaks of authority and order.

The Titanic in the pool looks doomed. The water is up to its name on the side.

“One-ten A.M.,” Harry Fudge says. “Lifeboat number eight—there are thirty-nine people aboard in a lifeboat with a capacity for sixty-five. The Titanic has one hour and nineteen minutes left.”

Along with the sound of people running and moaning and yelling are the gentle cuts of lifeboat oars in the water, a deep, plunky peaceful sound under the human voices.

The lights go out. More lights come up another twenty feet left in the pool. The ship here is even worse off, it’s like a time line of despair. If the people on it had any doubts that they were going down, they must have been answered at this point. There’s water all over the front of the ship. It looks to be a third of the way down.

The screams and noise on the audiotape are much louder. The people sound more like they know they might die. I wonder how Harry Fudge got all this down. Did he hire actors? The sound system’s incredible, the noises get louder with every change of the lights, and now it’s rock-concert loud. My ears will be ringing tomorrow. That kind of loud.

“Two-oh-five. Collapsible D is sent off with forty-four people and a capacity for forty-seven. The boats are filling now—there’s a desperation in the crew and passengers that was lacking at midnight. Remember—many people thought this ship could not sink. It was generally thought to be more dangerous to be cast adrift on the Atlantic in a lifeboat.”

Around Harry Fudge’s doomed model of the Titanic are fourteen little lifeboats—scattered like thrown gravel around the ship. Some look far away, if everything’s to scale, maybe a half mile or more. The voices on the tape are joined by the industrial suffering of the ship itself, metal racking against metal. Creaks and breaks, thunderous crashes that I can feel inside me, that’s how loud it is.

Paulo brings Harry Fudge a microphone, and his voice comes above the noise and damage. “The ship’s lights flicker and go out.”

The next section of the display is lit, on both sides of the pool, it reads: 2:20 A.M—SHIP FOUNDERS. It sounds like a thousand car wrecks.

The lights go out and come up on several lifeboats surrounding the spot where the Titanic was. The sound of the ship, of the metal, of the crashing and tearing, is gone. All that’s left is the steady whine of human voices. It’s an unrelenting sound, like an amplified hornets’ nest. It sounds a little like when the Grand Prix hits Long Beach, and for three days, there’s the constant whine of cars in the distance under everything you hear.

Harry Fudge holds the microphone to his wet lips. “What you are hearing is the sound of those left on the surface. The sound of the three hundred and eighteen dead my grandfather came across the next day. Several of the boats were close enough to go back and pick these people out of the water. None of the voices you’re hearing survived.”

And I know that the voices I’m hearing did survive, they are actors doing what Harry Fudge told them to, but still, it’s eerie. Under the steady but thinning screams of the dying is the plunk, plunk, plunk of oars hitting water, taking the passengers farther and farther away from the screams that must have sickened them.

We listen for what seems like fifteen minutes. I feel my heartbeat hard in my chest and ears and fingers. The voices thin, the lack of sound is the sound of people dying. After the fifteen minutes, there are only a few voices under the sound of water, you can make them out. It’s hard to tell if they’re men or women, it’s the sound of near-unconscious pain, but there are three of them left. Then two. Then one voice, moaning in the water, and then none. The slosh of water.

Harry Fudge says, “It’s important, if you are to do business with me, that you understand human suffering.” He pauses and I wonder if we are supposed to say something. A light comes on at the far left end of the pool. There’s nothing to see in the water. It must represent the sea when everything sank.

Harry Fudge wheels over to that end of the pool and we follow. Fudge tells us that this is a saltwater pool, held at twenty-eight degrees. He used the salt because fresh water would freeze at the proper temperature.

“It’s essential that you understand suffering,” Harry Fudge says. “Know that the men on your list will suffer like this and no one will pull them out of the water. They will know pain and suffering. But know that it pains me to take this measure of justice against them.” Harry Fudge coughs and gurgles a bit. I can hear a rattle in his chest. “Know that I understand the nature of suffering before I take my justice against these men. I know what a voice sounds like before it is silenced—know that it hurts me to do this.”

He backs up a bit, then jerks forward. “I look forward to hearing from you.” His wheels make a rubbery gripping sound on the wet concrete as he pulls away.