An American Love Story (6 page)

One night she was at a disco with some friends when suddenly the music stopped. The tiny dance floor cleared. “And now,” a disembodied amplified voice said, “the number one hit from America.” Everyone sat in reverent silence, not even thinking of dancing, as Bobbie Gentry’s voice poured through the speakers singing “Ode to Billy Joe.” Why was the number one hit from America so important, Susan wondered, when she was here to find out what everyone in America wanted to copy about Swinging London?

She had been away long enough never to have heard that song before. This boy killed himself. And before that he and the girl threw something off the bridge. What did they throw? Nobody knew, even afterward when she asked everyone, everywhere, nobody knew. Was it flowers? Drugs? No, you wouldn’t throw drugs away. A dead baby? Their aborted baby? Things weren’t so swinging back home in those little towns. You couldn’t just have a baby with your boyfriend, even now. The question and the image haunted Susan for a long time afterward.

Back home again she continued to pursue the life she had planned for herself, always trying to be a better writer, often working at her typewriter in the middle of the night when it was very dark and still so she could get closer to her feelings and use them honestly. Two years went by. She knew that in many ways she was lucky. She was in her twenties and self-supporting and free and busy and on her way; she had friends and acquaintances, people to laugh with and complain to, her own queen-size bed, an air conditioner, a stereo, a wall full of filing cabinets, grown-up dishes and stainless flatware that she had paid for herself, a case of nice red wine under the sink; she was pretty and lively and well regarded; she even knew when she walked into a party that if there was a man there she wanted she could almost always get him, at least for a week or so—and there was a hole of loneliness in the middle of her heart and the middle of her life that never went away.

Sometimes the pain was very quiet, waiting, so that she thought
it was gone, but then it came bouncing back to overwhelm her and repay her for having felt safe. It was her dreaded destiny, the punishment.

She was so lonely.… And loneliness was one thing people didn’t want to hear about. If you complained of that, too much or too long or too seriously, you would end up really alone.

Dana was being pursued by a successful (and married and middle-aged) actors’ agent named Seltzer. He was very debonair, dressed well, was a foot shorter than she was, and had a German accent. Dana persisted in referring to him as The Nazi, even though he was Jewish, which was probably a comment on her opinion of his profession. Her boyfriend with the good job didn’t seem to mind this friendship; she went out at night without him whenever she pleased, and was not obliged to tell him what she did.

“I had dinner with The Nazi again last night,” Dana said in her daily phone call to Susan. “He wants to go to bed with me. I’d rather kill myself. But he is also considering being my agent. I’d like that. You know what a bitch my agent is; I can’t even get her on the phone, and then when I ask her to send me to an audition I should have gone on in one second she doesn’t seem to remember who I am. I want to ask: How’s your lobotomy? So anyhow, The Nazi wants me to go out of town with him to this club in New Haven to see Gabe Gideon, who’s a client of his. We’re to stay overnight, so I want you to come along to protect me.”

“You don’t have to stay overnight,” Susan said reasonably.

“He says we do, because we have to wait to see the second show too. That’s the one where Gabe Gideon gets really filthy.”

Susan knew who Gabe Gideon was—who didn’t? He was more than a nightclub comic, he was a cult figure; beloved and hated, banned in Boston, considered both a foul-mouthed destroyer of morality and values and a perceptive protector who warned that the emperor had no clothes.

“I’d love to see him,” she said. “When is it?”

“Tonight.”

“It’s wonderful the way you always give me so much notice,” Susan said, which of course meant yes.

The nightclub in New Haven was small and dark, with black velvet walls, and it was nearly full. They ordered drinks and Seltzer looked at his watch. “Son of a bitch is late again,” he said.

“Isn’t it nice the way our agents talk about us behind our backs,” Dana murmured.

Then Gabe Gideon came running into the spotlight on the tiny stage. He was younger than Susan had expected, with a boyish exuberance; slim, lithe and medium sized, blond curly hair, an altarboy’s face, black Nehru jacket and jeans. He had a midwestern accent, and looked as if he’d grown up somewhere like Ohio, with a basketball hoop on the back of his parents’ garage door, and had been devastated when he didn’t grow tall enough to make the team.

“This is the Beelzebub of the bars?” she whispered.

“Wait,” Seltzer said.

In the next five minutes Gabe Gideon must have said “fuck” twenty times. He had also mentioned every bodily protuberance and orifice in the terms usually reserved for rest room graffiti, insulted everything people continued to hold sacred, and seemed to want to overthrow the world. But somehow Susan didn’t find him repulsive, or even annoying. He was very funny, he was obviously an enemy of hypocrisy, and she thought he was right. At the end of twenty minutes the entire audience was in his hand, even the ones who were shocked, except for one elderly couple who had walked out.

Then Gideon said, “Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” and walked off the stage.

“Son of a bitch!” Seltzer said.

“What’s he doing?” Susan asked.

“Son of a bitch.”

“He’s taking drugs,” Dana said calmly. “He’ll be back.” Seltzer’s face was purple.

“In the middle of a show?”

“Actually,” Dana said, “nobody really knows. It could just be one of the crazy things he does.”

“If he goes to jail again I’m leaving him there,” Seltzer said.

The minutes crawled by, and no one seemed to know what to
do. Then Gideon came back, looking happy and relaxed, and went on with his monologue. He was a little looser and wilder now; there was an air of euphoria, as if this time he might just for the fun of it go too far and say something that would pull everything down around him. Susan was relieved when the first show was finally over without disaster.

They went to his dressing room during the intermission, and Seltzer introduced them. Gideon had his black jacket off and was wearing a white T-shirt; he looked more than ever like that nice blond kid from the Midwest, but now he no longer looked happy; he seemed rather damp and sad.

“Hey, man, guess what,” he said to Seltzer, to all of them really, “it’s my birthday today.”

“I didn’t know that,” Seltzer said.

“And I’m all alone. I have no one to celebrate my birthday with.”

“You have us,” Susan said. The words just came out of her mouth. She didn’t even know this man, and he was a cult figure, which should have been intimidating, but she felt so sorry for him, he seemed so lonely and gentle, and nobody should ever have to be alone on his birthday. “We’ll go out and have a party for you afterward. Ice cream, and cake with candles on it, and champagne.” She looked at the others. “Right?”

“Right!” they all said in unison. Gabe Gideon smiled at her.

“Tell me your name again,” he said.

The second show was exactly as Susan had been warned it was. This time the club was packed. It was the late show that the true fans liked; the one where Gabe Gideon could at last detonate and sail off into orbit. If he had been obscene and outrageous the first time, this time he was bizarre. Sometimes he didn’t even make sense. When he did, he was devastating. More people were walking out, some were cheering, and some were just sitting there in shock. For once Seltzer didn’t get angry, as he was obviously used to it. And when Gideon excused himself in the middle of his monologue and walked off the stage again Seltzer just shook his head. The fans waited calmly for his return, obviously used to it too.

“Is this a schtick or is it real?” Susan asked.

“You never know,” Seltzer said.

They had the birthday party in the hotel bar, where a votive candle in a bowl of pretzels served as the birthday cake. The hotel did not have twenty-four-hour room service and the kitchen was closed. The bar did, however, have several bottles of champagne, which the four of them drank happily, making toasts. Gabe, as Susan was now calling him, smiled with innocent pleasure. “It’s so nice of you to have a birthday party for me,” he said. “I hate to be all alone, and I almost always am.”

“Everybody’s alone,” Dana said. “It stinks.”

“You have me,” Seltzer said. “You’re not alone.”

Dana raised an eyebrow. “I’m alone.”

After a while Seltzer and Dana got up and went upstairs.

Gabe turned to Susan. “Do you want to see something I care about very much?”

She nodded. He reached into his jeans pocket and took out a well-worn-looking envelope, and from it a photograph of a pretty, towheaded little girl. “My daughter. She’s almost four. She lives with her mother … my wife … well, ex-wife soon. My wife is twenty. She wants her own life, and I can’t blame her. We got married because she was pregnant and we were in love. It wasn’t dumb then, but it seems dumb now. I miss my daughter a lot.”

“I’m sorry,” Susan said.

“A lot of people don’t understand what I’m trying to do with my work, and it makes me feel badly because of my daughter and what she’ll grow up thinking of me after I’m gone.”

“Why would you be gone? You’re thirty something.”

“I don’t think I’m going to live long,” he said.

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “I just know it.”

Susan looked at him, long and hard. He wasn’t faking. Behind the comedy and the outrageousness there was so much sadness in him. Loneliness. She could certainly identify with that. “Could I interview you?” she asked.

He chewed his lip. “I guess so. My gig is over the end of the week and I’ll be back in New York for a while.”

“Maybe for
Esquire
,” Susan said. “Or that new magazine,
New York.
I want to hang around with you for a while, is that okay?”

“Sure,” he said mildly.

She smiled. “I think I’ll call it ‘Gabe Gideon: Laughter on the Dark Side of the Moon.’ They’ll change it of course.”

“I hope they don’t,” he said.

When a man started vacuuming the bar carpet they finally left and went to their separate rooms. Dana wasn’t in the room she was supposed to share with Susan in order to be protected from the lech. Susan wasn’t a bit surprised.

A week later Susan was in her apartment when Gabe Gideon called. “Can I come over and visit you?”

“Sure.”

He arrived in his black jacket and jeans, but this time he was wearing a white clerical collar, not a Nehru collar. He wandered slowly around her apartment looking at things, touching them curiously as if they were unusual.

“Why are you wearing that collar?” Susan asked.

“I like it.”

She had a glass paperweight on her desk holding down papers; it had tiny colored flowers in it. He picked it up and looked at it, then he looked through it, and then he walked to the window and looked through the flowered paperweight at the trees outside, as if it were a telescope. He seemed like a man underwater, or in another space altogether from where she was. “Man!” he said softly. “This is beautiful. Look at it.” He handed her the paperweight.

She looked through it at the trees. The view
was
beautiful; a bit like looking into a kaleidoscope. She thought Gabe was a little like a child, and she wondered if he was a genius or stoned, or perhaps both. She put the paperweight back on the desk.

“People complain about my act,” he said, “because they don’t understand what I’m trying to do. Okay, society decided
fuck
is a dirty word. So if I say it often enough and long enough it becomes meaningless. Then it isn’t dirty anymore. For this I get banned in Boston, in big clubs, I have to work in cellars. I don’t care where I
work as long as people come to see me and understand what I’m trying to do. Do you take notes, or what?”

“I used to, but it made people nervous,” Susan said. “Now I just remember. I have a very good memory.”

He nodded. “Humor exists to keep away fear. Our deepest, most primitive fears—if you can turn them around and make them ridiculous, then you’re not so afraid of them anymore. But we’re all afraid of so many things.”

“I know,” Susan said.

“You don’t even have to make something ridiculous to make it funny,” Gabe said. “You can just say something true. If it’s absolutely true it can be funny or scary; it’s how you put the sentence together, where you hang the last word. The punchline is the one that opens the door and says ‘You’re safe now.’ ”

“Yes,” she said. Agreement was how she always worked when she was interviewing someone: the agreement, the rapt attention, her soft compliance like a gentle sponge, and, if they wanted it, her near invisibility. Sometimes she offered something of her own life, her own feelings and thoughts, like a friend; which in fact she felt she was. She almost became that other person after a while, with no preconceptions, and no conclusions until afterward when she was writing all her discoveries down.