Niagara Falls All Over Again Read online

He grimaced. Then he wrote, They won’t. He put the pencil on the table and pointed a long finger at his temple and shook his head.

  “What?” I asked.

  He tapped his ear, and shook his head more empathetically.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t get you.”

  He sighed, silently of course, and picked up the pencil. He held it for a few minutes like it was a burning match he wanted to let singe his fingers, and then wrote, in big block letters, with none of the usual elegant flourish:

  DEAF.

  He pointed to himself.

  I said, “You don’t seem so.”

  Eyebrows up. A shake of the head. On the page, I read lips. Have since I was a child. A teacher showed me. Scares people.

  “Scares people? Why?”

  Either I can hear and am just pretending or it’s magic. So says my parents. They were frightened of me. He went back and crossed out were and changed it to are.

  From his suit pocket he drew out an old picture on a gray cardboard backing, a theatrical shot from the end of the last century: himself, in full tramp dress, including what must have been a red nose, no cork, just a big shaggy false beard and a matching wig bristling out from under his stovepipe hat, the familiar look of educated seriousness on his face. His hands were full of rubber balls, and he offered one at the camera, as though it was the fruit of knowledge and he thought you better not take it, in case you became as wise and desperate and down at the heels as he. At the bottom of the cardboard it said, CUTTER THE GREAT COON JUGGLER—THE GENUINE ARTICLE.

  He wrote on the pad, Me at fourteen. Then he picked up the picture and put it in my hand and gestured, For you.

  “No,” I said, “I can’t take this.”

  He pulled out several from his pocket, to show that he had plenty. I don’t know whether he’d sold them once upon a time or they were lobby cards, but it’s true they were outdated now. It was a weird gift, but one I wanted.

  He wrote on his pad, though I hadn’t asked, Through my feet I feel the drums. That’s how I dance.

  Farnsworth finally fired me that night, onstage—he made it a joke, I think to see if I’d go off in character. The audience figured I got axed this way every night. “Go back to Des Moines!” he bellowed, and I exited stage left, vowing that I wouldn’t. A local reference! The audience applauded. I walked straight out through the wings to the stage door and kept going, even though Farnsworth owned the dusty Hebe suit.

  I thought of myself like Walter Cutter then, proud and downtrodden. I was so proud I would not take Walter’s advice, which came in the form of Lucky you. I wouldn’t go to Des Moines until vaudeville took me closer, and I could show my father I hadn’t made a terrible mistake. I planned my return, honest to God I planned it, but pride—

  —not pride. I know that now. In my case it was cowardice, and in Walter’s case it was necessity, and that at twenty I thought we were going through similar things shows you what being twenty does to the brain. I isolated myself. I cast myself out. The tragedy of Adam and Eve, the reason we can love them, is their eviction. They had to leave, and they left weeping. They didn’t pack up and sneak away. That’s the ugliest thing in the world, I’ve come to believe, though at twenty I wasn’t done trying.

  There’s an old bit—Abbott and Costello did it later on film, and the Three Stooges: two guys onstage, one of whom is driven insane by some words. Sometimes it’s Susquehanna Hat Company, sometimes Floogle Street. In the most famous version it’s Niagara Falls. When the straight man hears a certain set of unlikely words, he gets hypnotized and violent. He repeats the phrase in a strangled voice, and then he beats the comic. Then somehow the straight man catches hold of himself and pulls away. But the comic is a comic: if there’s something he shouldn’t do, he can’t help doing it. He says, “I ain’t gonna say those words again.” Straight man says, “What words?” Comic: “Niagara Falls.” And the beating starts again, and stops again, and starts.

  When you travel alone, you pick up your own set of words. If asked, you’d say you never wanted to hear them again: Niagara Falls, Miriam, Mimi, Savant, Louisville, Valley Junction, Iowa. But that’s not true. You wish some innocent stranger would say them, so you can act in self-defense. You stare at people; you dare them to say the words. Comedy is not realistic: the straight man stops and lets the comic live, three, four, five times—he beats him silly but not bloody. In real life you wouldn’t stop, you’d keep pummeling until you’d thrashed those words right out of the world. They’d be gone, and you’d be the one who banished them.

  I took the train back to Chicago, to try my luck at another talent show. From there, I got a job assisting a morphine-addicted magician who seemed bent on setting me on fire. Then suddenly I was in Duluth again, dancing alone in my boardinghouse to keep my legs up. Someone knocked at the door, and for a moment, still dancing, I imagined who it might be: Miriam, come to ask my forgiveness. Boris the seal, honking that fish tasted sweeter from my fingers than anyone else’s. Florenz Ziegfeld and George White, fighting over whether I’d be the headliner in the Follies or the Scandals.

  It was the landlady, a red-nosed woman in a striped housecoat. “You’re keeping everyone awake,” she said. Then she thrust an envelope into my hand, a telegram from the hungry agent that said, Can you dance? Learn Pantages Minneapolis tomorrow.

  Could I dance? I could fly. I packed my case and caught a train that night. “Lucky guy,” I told myself as we pulled out of Duluth, and then wondered when I’d started talking aloud. That is, I said, aloud, “When did you start talking to yourself?” The guy next to me sighed, then changed seats.

  All the way to Minneapolis, I shined my shoes. When I got there, I had to dirty them up again, because the skinny guy in charge of the tab show wanted a Dutch comic who could dance—the one they’d booked had a bum appendix. He’d been taken to the hospital in his costume but left behind his wig. Afterward, I was fired again. The beginning of the end, I thought. Time to listen: vaudeville was dying. I should leave before it killed me too. I stood in the wings and watched the girls onstage, lovely in their skimpy costumes, the light off the umbrellas they turned hitting my face like rainwater. Maybe that’s why the agitated comic behind me—his straight man vomiting in somebody’s purse—noticed me. Probably I was just close up. He was a stout man whose suspenders seemed in danger of pulling his pants to his chin, and he was doing a small dance of impatience in the wings.

  “You’ll do,” he said to me.

  Remember: the Pantages, Minneapolis, September 1931?

  This is where you came in.

  5

  Good-bye, Freddy, Good-bye

  The morning after we met, like a couple who gets drunk in a strange town and wakes up with rings on their fingers and a few faint happy memories of the evening before, Rocky and I went out to breakfast to take a gander at what we’d gotten ourselves into. What had roused me from bed was rolling over and getting stabbed by a pin that affixed a note to my shirtfront: Meet me at the Busy Bee 10 A.M. Your partner.

  My partner!

  Said partner, I had thought, was a dark-haired clown in makeup and baggy pants. A patsy. An overexcited fat man. I looked around the Busy Bee, and all I saw was a blond guy in a good suit, puffy from drink but handsome, who waved at me. Then he waved a little harder.

  When people ask me what he was like, I always want to say the one thing they won’t believe: he was good-looking. They have eyes, these people, and they’ve seen the party in question plenty. Dark hair sticking up, sloppy fat, useless with his hands and feet, squeaky, breathless. With rare exceptions, if you wanted to make it in the movies you had to choose between funny and handsome: Fred Astaire and Stan Laurel could be brothers, but which one’s the heartthrob? Even a voice makes a difference in how good-looking you are, and Rock’s real voice was knowing and slow. He could have made a living off of it, if things had gone differently. The stuff he colored his hair with washed out. (Rubbed off, too, I learned later. I was the one who told
him to either dye it or give up: I was tired of finding bootblack on my good clothes.) He was handsome the way Babe Ruth was handsome, a combination of confidence and being glad to see you. A backslapping man. A handshaker. A kisser of babies and pretty girls. Just like Babe Ruth, he’d peek past a curtain at the one old lady who hadn’t smiled for anyone and point: She’ll be laughing hysterically by the time I’m done.

  So there he was, my sandy-haired partner with the big hands.

  “Hey!” he said. I couldn’t believe that anyone who’d drunk as much as we had the night before could look so pink and bright: healthy, really. He stood up and gave me a quick hug, surprising both me and the waitress, who had arrived with his breakfast. “How do you feel?”

  “Like a wrung-out sponge,” I told him.

  “You need to eat.”

  “I need not to.”

  “That’s okay too.” He sat down in front of his just-delivered plate, which was filled with a jumble of food. “Do you mind,” he said, picking up his fork. He took a couple of quick bites before I replied. Each time he lifted the fork with his left hand, he brought his right hand up delicately, palm down, beneath it. After the third bite I realized he did this to protect his shirtfront.

  Then he set the fork down. I thought he was formulating some elaborate question—he had an expression of concerned concentration on his face—but all he said was “So?”

  “So?” I answered.

  His deep-set eyes—on film they looked comical, like buttons on an overstuffed mattress—were round and complicated, halfway between brown and green. He tapped his fork on the edge of his plate. “So. Still a good idea, the two of us striking out?”

  “We have a contract,” I said seriously.

  “I know that.” He smiled and patted his shirt pocket. “I was just wondering whether I’d have to take you to court.”

  We did have a contract, drawn up at some point overnight. The terms: Rocky would get sixty percent, I would get forty, but on the tenth anniversary of our partnership the terms would reverse, and then reverse again ten years after that. Rocky put that clause in: he claimed it’d give us incentive to stick together. For all I know, the percentages were nothing but misdirection—Pay no attention to this, which says you’ll get less, but to this, which says you’ll get more. Later I found out that for Rocky, the future was like Mozambique: he believed in it, he just had no interest. What were the chances he’d get there?

  Now he took the sorry thing out of his pocket. Even the paper had a hangover: it was crumpled and mottled with whiskey, nearly illegible.

  “You think it’s valid like that?” I asked.

  “It looks like the Magna Carta. If anything, it’s more valid.” He read it over nostalgically. “Someday,” he said, “this will be an important historical document.”

  “Aha,” said a nearby voice, but not loud enough that I thought it was directed at us. Then louder, “A-ha!” Fred Fabian. I felt like a correspondent in a divorce case. Who knows how he found us. Maybe Rocky had pinned a note to him too. He had the look of a man who had slept too much or too little.

  Listen, before you feel sorry for Freddy Fabian, I insist he wouldn’t have had a career anyhow. Though in real life his face was unobjectionable, it would have photographed terribly, all dark circles and sunken cheekbones. Also his teeth were awful: they looked like they’d been carved out of a block of cheese. What’s more, he had no ambition. He was always trying to talk Rocky into traveling less, and solely around Chicago, where his family lived. An itchy man, Fabian; he constantly pulled his clothing away from his skin, first at his wrists, then at his shirtfront, then, hands in pockets, from his hips—a sideways flick of the wrist—and his crotch—forward. Maybe he could have found work in the movies as a heavy, I don’t know. He certainly looked like a two-bit mobster as he stood by our table.

  “Signor Fabiano!” Rocky said. “Sit down.”

  Freddy wouldn’t look at us. Instead, he spun one of his square cuff-links, occasionally lining it up with his shirt cuff. “I’m not sitting down,” he said. He had the kind of accent you get from an Italian neighborhood.

  “Get some gravy and biscuits,” said Rocky. “That usually settles your stomach.”

  “No,” Fabian said, in a voice that meant You know nothing about me and gravy and biscuits. Even standing still, he wobbled slightly. Maybe he’d started to drink again when he’d gotten the middle-of-the-night call from backstage. “I hope,” he said. “I hope.” What did he hope? He was hopeless, a man—like all spurned men—who did not know whether he wished that we’d be happy together, or that we’d choke on our breakfast, or that somehow he’d be asked back as part of a team, even an overcrowded one. He shook his long bony head, and then tried to steady it with trembling fingers. “I thought we were funny,” he said plaintively.

  Rocky slid over in the booth, but kept one arm on the back. “Sit down, Alfredo. You’re making me dizzy.” Fabian collapsed on the seat. Rocky’s hand settled on his estranged partner’s far shoulder. “Look: You don’t even like show business. You throw up before every curtain.” Fabian nodded sadly. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, but then you drink so you’ll forget how much you hate it, but that’s not all you forget. So what’s the point? You got money, I know you do, because you’re cheaper than hell, so why not go home and sell that cheese you like so much?”

  “Boof-falo mozz’rella,” said Fabian in his soft accent. The name alone made me want to throw up, but it seemed to calm him.

  I regarded the two of them, and tried to decide that Rocky and I looked funnier together. Close up, the recently dissolved team of Fabian and Carter came off like a pair of toughs, one Irish, one Italian, both a little hangdog and worked over.

  “Hey,” said Fabian to me. “New guy.”

  “Mike,” I told him.

  “Mike,” he said. Then he stared. “So. You’re Jewish?”

  Not the question I’d expected, especially since I was usually mistaken for something more exotic, but I was game. “Yes. You?”

  “Not.” Fabian picked up a fork and began to eat directly from Rocky’s plate, halfhearted bites. “We’re Catholic,” he said, pointing at Rocky and then himself with the butt end of his fork. He turned the plate a quarter revolution, and examined what the orbit had brought him. The fork he held in the air, as though it was an instrument with which to repair Rocky’s breakfast.

  “Okay,” I said agreeably.

  Rocky slapped Fabian on the back. “Jews are funny,” he said.

  “Maybe,” said Fabian. “Sometimes. I was just wondering.”

  “Why do you care?” I asked.

  “Did I ask to see your horns?” he said with some real meanness. “I’m just trying to figure out what’s funny about you.”

  “Jews are funny,” Rocky repeated, “as long at they’re not too frum.”

  “Too what?” I asked nervously.

  He smiled broadly. Then he laughed. “Very good,” he said, though at the time I didn’t get my own joke: frum was Yiddish for observant.

  Fabian didn’t get it either. He was staring me down. “Barney Sullivan,” he said. “Manny Lane. Ted Mathis—”

  “Freddy,” said Rocky.

  Freddy eyeballed him. “Joe Hatch. Lee Schmidt. Harry Ray. That everyone?”

  “That’s it, sure,” Rock said wearily.

  “His straight men,” Fabian said to me. “Of the last two years. Don’t get comfortable. Every time he meets someone new—that’s it.”

  “I’ll chase after anything in a nice suit with good timing,” Rocky said. “Freddy, Freddy. Do not pin this on me. You—”

  “Remember this,” Fabian told me. Now I really felt like I was busting up a marriage. He rubbed the side of his face. I couldn’t tell whether he was preparing for tears or preventing them. He said, in a small voice, “Please, Rock. Where else am I going to get a job? As a friend—”

  “A good straight man can always get work,” Rocky told him.

 
You could hear in the silence that followed a full report on Fabian’s merits as a straight man.

  Rocky slapped his ex-partner’s arm again, this time cajolingly. “You’ll do okay. You’ll do fine. Do you need money?”

  Fabian was still holding the fork, which he stared into as though it would show him his future. Beg more? Beg less? He let his shoulders drop. “Do you need money, is more like it,” he said, a little too late to be cutting.

  “I’m set. Boof’lo mozzarella,” Rocky said musingly.

  Fabian dropped the fork and stood up. “Look.” Now he tried to play the big man. “I wish you much success. All the success in the world. This is disgusting. See you around.”

  “We’ll call when we’re in Chicago,” Rocky said.

  Fabian raised himself to full height, and I thought, Yeah, now I can see it, he’s got something. “What,” he said, “makes you think I’ll be there?” He pointlessly threw some dollar bills on the table, for the meal he’d never ordered, and muttered, “I always wanted to be a singer, you fat idiot.” Then Freddy Fabian exited the Busy Bee, trying to look significant. The bell jangled when he left, same as it had when he walked in.

  Rocky turned to me, smiling. “Ah, Freddy,” he said. “He’s been calling me that since before I was fat. You nervous? Don’t be. You got talent. He didn’t.”

  “What about the other guys?”

  “Let’s see.” He closed one eye and thought. “Barney Sullivan: died—of old age—in Cleveland. Manny Lane. Married a hoofer and wanted to put her in the act, but there wasn’t room for three of us. Ted Mathis—can’t remember what happened to Ted, exactly. Hatch became a junky. Probably not my fault. Lee Schmidt stepped on my lines. Lots. Really not a straight man, more of a singer or monologist or something. Harry Ray suffered from stage fright. Freddy Fabian: couldn’t hold his liquor. Plus whenever we play Chicago, the guy works days in his father’s store and comes onstage smelling of groceries. He figures the customer’s always right, but it’s not funny if the customer’s always right. What are you worried about? You’re good. You got some things to learn, sure, but you’ll learn them. I mean, Freddy wasn’t all wrong: I will be famous. I’m funny, and I will succeed, and I’ll tell you right now, Mose Sharp, that I am not someone who sticks with a lousy act just because I like the other guy. I’ll be his friend forever, but I am a comic, not a captain. I will not go down with the ship. You and me, we won’t have that problem. You’re good. Stop! Don’t worry. You’re good, and I’m good, and together we’re better, and that’s all you need to know.”