THREE DAYS LATER, Friday, I have lunch with Guido in the Russian Tea Room.
I am early, as always. I sit in his booth (it’s the third booth to your right as you enter), smoking my cigarette and drinking my Bloody Mary and waiting for him to show up. Neither the drink I’m drinking nor the drinks which, I know, will follow will have any effect on me, but it will please Guido, my last friend and a confirmed alcoholic, to see when he arrives that I’ve started drinking already.
It’s a strange thing to be down to one last friend. It’s hard to decide while I sit there if this predicament is something I enjoy or not. It’s hard even to find the basis for deciding. My mind oscillates between two polar opposites. I enjoy it. I don’t enjoy it. It keeps on oscillating like a metronome, the oscillation precluding any need to decide one way or the other.
But something about the phrase, “my last friend,” something about the very sound of those words, is compelling. It’s as if I had a whole, ever-growing list of lasts, and the last remaining measure of my personal growth as a human being is to be found in this ever more bountiful list of my depletions.
I light another cigarette and turn to more pressing questions. Where in the world am I going to get a date for my dinner with Cromwell? I need to come armed with a beautiful woman when I have my dinner with him.
Every restaurant I frequent in New York has its own sound which, were I blindfolded and led inside, I could recognize. The musical pitch of the plates and the silverware is different in each, and so is the tempo, the tone, the din of the crowd. I think I could distinguish the din of the Russian Tea Room from the din at Orso’s the way more discerning ears could distinguish if a piece of music was recorded live at Carnegie or Avery Fisher Hall.
I see Guido coming toward me.
He’s a big man, almost as tall as my Billy, but beefy. A jock with a strong pitching arm, he was drafted out of high school by the Chicago White Sox and ruined his arm on their farm team. The rotator cuff, or something like that. A snappy overdresser, the way former jocks tend to be when they become successful in another line of work, he still retains, despite the booze and the years and the excess weight, an easy athletic grace and lightness of foot, which makes it seem he’s dancing through the Tea Room toward me. He knows a lot of people and touches a lot of shoulders on the way, never once stopping, scattering remarks over his shoulders like New Year’s confetti. He is wearing a huge grin. It wraps around his head like the grin of a porpoise.
“Good to see you, you sonovabitch,” he says and drops a big paw on my shoulder. He shakes me with it. Shakes me hard.
We’re now both smoking and drinking. Guido is telling me about some movie screenings he saw in LA.
Ever since we’ve known each other, we’ve both been active alcoholics and heavy smokers. From time to time, we used to take turns counseling each other about the need for changing our ways and ridding ourselves of our addictions. Nothing, of course, was further from our minds. Our friendship was cemented by the unspoken vow that neither one of us would ever change. To talk of change was admirable. To try to change was heroic. But for either of us actually to change would have been construed by the other as nothing short of betrayal. It was during Guido’s short-lived attempt to move to LA that I dared to try and stop smoking and, thanks to that Hungarian hypnotist, actually managed to succeed for a number of weeks. By the time Guido came back, I was smoking again and my flirtation with quitting was a story I told him. He loved the story. He told it to others. Attempts at change, so long as they resulted in complete failure, made the bonds of our friendship even stronger.
That’s what made it so difficult to get together with Guido since the onset of my drunk disease. Guido was not just an active alcoholic, he was, in his own way, a brilliant alcoholic.
I do the best I can, I sham the symptoms of an intoxication I don’t feel, but it feels treacherous to be fooling a man I consider to be my best, last friend.
Were I to tell him that I have been rendered permanently sober by some mysterious disease, I fear that our friendship would end. And I fear that it would suffer before it ended. He would feel constrained by my revelation, aware of every word he said, overly eager to demonstrate, but now in an artificial way, that he was still found of me and that we were still the best of friends. In short, he would feel just as I am feeling now. But there’s a big difference between the two of us. Guido has many other friends. I have none left but Guido. So I keep my disease a secret and play drunk.
We met years ago, when I was still an up-and-coming rewriter. We met at a party where we were both drunk out of our minds and terribly delighted with ourselves and each other. As a result, I dropped the agent I had at the time and Guido became my agent.
This proved disastrous.
Either because he truly believed in me, or because he felt obliged to make me think he did, he kept telling me over and over again that I was too talented to be a rewriter and that I should write something of my own. An original screenplay. An original adaptation, if nothing else.
I tried explaining to him that I was a hack, a happy hack, a rewriter who was only capable of rewriting. That I had no coherent point of view and that a point of view was the minimum requirement of someone who would put an empty page into a typewriter to write something of his own.
But Guido persisted. He continued to press the issue until finally, worn out by having to defend myself against his faith in me, I decided to call it quits. I left him and his agency and never got another agent. It turned out that I didn’t really need an agent for the kind of work I did. My reputation preceded me. The demand for my services, if anything, only grew after I left Guido.
The fact that we remained friends despite the breakup of our professional relationship convinced both of us, I think, that we were much better friends than we thought we were. It raised what had up to then been a pretty good friendship to a whole new level. For a while, we became inseparable. We went out together every night. We got drunk together. We cheated on our wives together. We went on vacations to strange places with strange women together. I did things with Guido that I have not done with any other man. I even went bowling with him once, in the middle of the night.
Out of that togetherness, and inspired, perhaps, by visions only drunks can behold, a new faith was born between us, which we embraced with a passion of two besotted souls clinging to a common dream. Our faith had no name as such, but the object of our worship did. It was the Family.
We became, or rather came to think we were, family men extraordinaire. Fathers who not only loved their children, but lived for their children. If there was such a thing as a Fundamentalist Family Man religion, then Guido and I were its founding fathers.
True faiths, as everyone knows, are immune to reason and empirical evidence. Those are things reserved for cynics and unbelievers. So even though Guido and I seldom saw our own families, even though our families were never the beneficiaries of our newfound religious fervor, our faith in ourselves and in each other as Family Men was impervious to such piffles of reality. And when we found ourselves separated from our wives and estranged in more ways than one from our children, our faith in the Family was stronger than ever. Freed from the everyday burden and petty details of our earthly families, our faith was allowed to soar, to become totally spiritual, as all great religions are.
So it wasn’t mere friendship that made me cling to Guido, my last friend. We had founded a faith together.
He’s rip-roaring drunk now, and roaring with laughter. Tears stream down his face.
The two stories I told him, in the order in which they occurred, were both big hits. Guido’s response to them was so contagious that even I laughed while finishing the second.
I began with the story of the old man in my father’s overcoat. Even to tell a story, you need a point of view. I chose a poignant point of view, intent on telling a poignant story. But as soon as I got to the part where I thought the old man was my dead father, Guido started laughing. The explanation for my mistake, the overcoat, only intensified his laughter. And when I said it was a camel-hair overcoat, Guido for some reason found that so funny that he started gagging and banging on the table.
“Camel hair!” he roared. “It was camel hair!”
Seeing how things were going, I dropped my poignant point of view and went with Guido’s hilarity for the rest of the story.
The story of my physical examination was an even bigger hit. Just the mention of GenMed made Guido laugh. The name of the doctor was even funnier.
“Kolodny, his name was Kolodny!”
By now I knew that I had a real winner in the wings by the name of Elke Höhlenrauch. And sure enough, when I got around to her, Guido exploded.
“Elke what?”
The more authoritatively I pronounced her last name, umlaut and all, the more he laughed.
Even the denouement was funny, even the fact that I sat there now completely uninsured was hilarious.
“No GenMed for you,” Guido, drunk as a skunk, advises me. “It’s too late, pal. It’s too late for insurance for you, my friend.”
Our lunch arrives. Two salads. Caesar’s for Guido, chef’s for me. And a flashing V sign from Guido to our waiter for another round of drinks for us both.
“I knew I had something to tell you.” Guido bangs the table with his hand, irritated that it had almost slipped his mind. “I must be getting old,” he says, and he says it in precisely the tone of someone who thinks that by admitting to something he automatically escapes the consequences of the admission.
“You’ll like this,” he assures me, then pushes away his salad and lights a cigarette.
I do likewise.
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard what that scumbag pal of yours did recently?”
“Scumbag pal” is Guido’s official designation for Jay Cromwell. He knew, of course, that I had worked for Jay, and he knew as well, because I like to advertise such things, that I would never work for him again.
Guido is a discerning disseminator of Hollywood dirt. He is aware, I’m sure, that examples of Cromwell’s treachery are so commonplace that nobody bothers mentioning them anymore unless it’s something truly satanic.
We’re both smoking. Guido’s talking. I’m listening. Listening also are the three men and one woman at the table across from us.
Cromwell, it turns out, didn’t do anything out of the ordinary in itself. It was his choice of victim that made the gossip sickening.
Using a fine-print clause in a contract, Cromwell, as a producer, had taken away a completed film from its director. But the director in this case wasn’t just any director. He was part of the history of American films. Arthur Houseman. The grand old man of movies was so respected and loved that everyone simply called him the Old Man.
He had retired some years ago and then, I remember reading, he had decided to come out of retirement to make one last film so that, as he put it, he could go out “on a note of grace, God willing.”
That was the last I had heard of him until now. According to Guido, not only was his film taken away from him but the Old Man was very ill as well.
Guido is outraged. “I mean, to even think, to even contemplate doing such a thing would be criminal, but to actually do it when it’s the Old Man’s last movie and he’s sick and possibly dying, it’s … it’s …” He paws the air with his hand in quest of some damning word.
“It’s monstrous,” I say.
“That’s what it is.” Guido bangs the table several times in rapid succession. “That’s exactly what it is. It’s monstrous. It’s fucking monstrous what he did.”
“He’s evil,” I tell him, “he’s out-and-out evil. I’ve met other people in my life who had an evil streak in them, but Cromwell …”
I go on.
Then Guido pitches in.
Then it’s my turn again.
Then our table becomes a free-fire zone, where the two of us alternate firing away at Cromwell at will, like a couple of freedom fighters with Uzis. We berate the scumbag sonovabitch.
I say, or Guido says—it’s hard to say after a while who’s saying what—but one of us says: “Somebody should put a bullet through his head.”
I don’t tell Guido that I’m planning to have dinner with this very Jay Cromwell we’re tearing to shreds. The timing is all wrong for such a piece of information. It would put a damper on our outrage, and our outrage is so animated and freewheeling that it seems a shame to undermine it when it’s going so well. It seems to me much better to wait. It will make a much better story that way. The story of my harangue delivered in that monster’s face.
We’re on a roll. So we just roll on with our outrage, feeling ever more invigorated, rejuvenated, refreshed, remoralized by our indignation at this evil man.
My lunches with Guido in the Tea Room, and over the years there have been many of them, are as bound by tradition as a three-act play. Over drinks, he tells stories or I tell stories; jokes are allowed. We laugh and smoke and make disparaging, male-type remarks about each other’s appearance, and that roughly is Act I. Over the lunch itself, which varies but tends to be a salad of some kind, we try to become concerned citizens of our city, state, country, the world, and find an issue that can trigger our sense of public outrage or moral indignation, and that’s Act II. Act III, ever since we cofounded our religion, is reserved for the glorification of family and family life.
The waiter clears away the lunch debris and sweeps the cracker crumbs off our tablecloth. We have said all that we could say about Cromwell. We have divested ourselves fully of our outrage, and our mood is reflective now.
Our waiter knows us well and because he does, and because he knows what pleasure it gives us to refuse, he asks:
“Some dessert for the two of you today?”
We dismiss the offer out of hand. Dessert? For us? We don’t even dignify his offer with a verbal rejection. We just shake our heads in the austere, preoccupied manner of two men on a mission. Just coffee.
The waiter nods and departs.
Over coffee, decaf for Guido, regular for me, we light our cigarettes and begin.
Sometimes I begin. Sometimes he does. For all I know, there is a definite pattern here, whereby we take turns from lunch to lunch, invoking the topic so close to our hearts.
This time Guido begins.
“How’s Billy doing?” he asks.
“Ah.” I leave the cigarette in my mouth, because I need both hands for the gesture I make. Arms half raised, hands spread out, my shoulders shrugging in delight. “He’s wonderful. He’s just wonderful. I think he’s really found himself at Harvard. While you were in LA, I drove up there to see him,” I lie, “but I didn’t tell him I was coming. You know. Didn’t want him altering his schedule. And the damnedest thing happened. I knock on his door and he shouts, ‘Come in, it’s open.’ So I come in, and there he is with a telephone in his hands. ‘Dad,’ he shouts, as if he can’t believe it’s me. And do you know what he was doing?”
“What?” Guido smiles, anticipating something wonderful.
“He was on the phone, calling me. Can you believe that? I mean, there he was on the phone, calling me in New York, and the door opens and there I am.”
Guido claps his hands, basking in the warmth of my story.
“Some people don’t believe in this,” I go on, “but I just had this feeling that he wanted to see me. It was just a feeling, but when it’s your own child, you somehow just know.”
“Of course you do, are you kidding? It’s the parental instinct in you,” Guido tells me.
“Maybe that’s what it is.”
“No maybe about it, pal. The parental instinct is older than the pyramids. It’s older than civilization. It’s older than history. It’s prehistoric.” He points drunkenly toward the back of the Tea Room, as if that’s where prehistory is to be found, and goes on:
“It’s nature’s way.” He’s beginning to shout, to bellow. He’s feeling inspired. “Every living thing on this planet of ours which we call the Earth, every living, breathing thing on it, cleaves to its own.” His big arms wrap around himself in a vivid demonstration of what he’s talking about. Cradling himself in his own arms, he goes on. “Dogs cleave to their own. Cats do. Kangaroos in Australia. Wolves in the tundra. Polar bears in Alaska. Squirrels in Central Park. They all have this need inside of them. This family need. Even trees! Even goddamn trees grow in groves and what’s a grove but a family?”
“What, indeed,” I reply.
“They say that no man is an island, but I say, what’s an island? That’s what I say, Saul. What is an island? Think about it, pal. Even an island, an inanimate object, when you think about it, but even this inanimate island isn’t just an island. It doesn’t just float on top of the water like a bunch of scum. It’s connected, right? It’s anchored to the rest of the earth. It cleaves, is what it does. It cleaves to the earth in the midst of the turbulent sea the way you and I cleave to our darling children, our families.”
What all those Bloody Marys I drank have failed to accomplish, I now come close to achieving in another way. I begin to feel the symptoms of virtual intoxication. I get high on our own fiction of family and fatherhood. My faith soars, taking me along with it.
What does it matter that Guido and I are living alone, that he sees his daughter Francesca almost as rarely as I see my son, and even then, following my lead, never alone. Those are mere facts and faith is not sustained by facts.
“My daughter Francesca called me on the phone last night,” Guido tells me. He reaches across the table and places the full weight of his left hand on top of mine. “It was late when she called. I was in bed, but not asleep. Do you know what she said?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Papa,” she told me, “I’m just calling to see how you are and to tell you that I love you.”
His big chin begins to tremble. Tears well up in his drunken eyes. A sob escapes.
“How about that, Saul? What a girl, right? My angel. My sweet angel. My Franny.” He squeezes my hand, weeping.
I know, because I know Guido, that no such telephone call took place, but knowing that does not prevent me from being moved by his lie. I find his need to fabricate that phone call probably far more moving than if it had actually occurred as described. Truth, it seems to me yet again, has lost its power, or the power it once had, to describe the human condition. It is the lies we tell now that alone can reveal who we are.
“Oh, Saul,” Guido cries out, “how lucky we are to have the children we do. How lucky we are to be smart enough to know what really matters in life.”
“Yes, my friend,” I pick up the chant, “how lucky indeed! How fortunate beyond words we are to be loving fathers of loving children. Because when you come right down to it, what is life without love, and what is love without children and family? What would be the point of even getting up in the morning if it weren’t for …”
I’m on a roll.