Mr. Vertigo (21 page)

He didn’t say a word, of course, and since I was looking none
too healthy myself, he managed to keep the spotlight on me throughout the breakfast.

“Eat up,” he said. “You’ve dwindled to a stick. Chomp down the waffles, son, and then I’ll order you some more. We’ve got to put some meat on your bones, get you back to full strength.”

“I’m doing my best,” I said. “It’s not as though I got put up in some ritzy hotel. I lived on a steady diet of dog food with those bums, and my stomach’s shrunken to the size of a pea.”

“And then there’s the matter of your skin,” the master added, watching me struggle to get down another rasher of bacon. “We’ll have to do something about that, too. All those blotches. It looks like you’ve broken out with a case of the chicken pox.”

“No, sir, what I’ve got is the zits, and sometimes they’re so sore, it hurts me just to smile.”

“Of course it does. Your poor body’s gone haywire from all that captivity. Cooped up without any sunshine, sweating bullets day and night—it’s no wonder you’re a mess. The beach is going to do you a world of good, Walt, and if those pimples don’t clear up, I’ll show you how to take care of them and keep the new ones at bay. My grandmother had a secret remedy, and it hasn’t failed yet.”

“You mean I don’t have to grow another face?”

“This one will do. If you didn’t have so many freckles, it wouldn’t look so bad. Combine those with the acne, and it creates quite an effect. But don’t brood, kid. Before long, the only thing you’ll have to worry about is whiskers—and that’s permanent, they stay with you until the bitter end.”

We spent more than a month in a little beach house on the Cape Cod shore, one day for every day I’d been locked up by Uncle Slim. The master rented it under a false name to protect me from the press, and for purposes of simplicity and convenience
we posed as father and son. Buck was the alias he’d chosen. Timothy Buck for himself and Timothy Buck II for me, or Tim Buck One and Tim Buck Two. We got some good laughs out of that, and the funny thing was, it wasn’t a whole lot different from Timbuktu where we were, at least as far as remoteness was concerned: high up on a promontory overlooking the ocean, with no neighbors for miles around. A woman named Mrs. Hawthorne drove out from Truro every day to cook and clean for us, but other than kibbitzing with her, we pretty much kept to ourselves. We soaked up the sun, took long walks on the beach, ate clam chowder, slept ten or twelve hours every night. After a week of that loafer’s regimen, I was feeling fit enough to try my hand at levitation again. The master started me off slowly with some routine ground exercises. Push-ups, jumping jacks, jogs on the beach, and when the time came to test the air again, we worked out behind the cliff, where Mrs. Hawthorne couldn’t spy on us. I was a little rusty at first, and I took some flops and spills, but after five or six days I was back in my old form, as limber and bouncy as I’d ever been. The fresh air was a great healer, and even if the master’s remedy didn’t do all he’d promised (a warm towel soaked in brine, vinegar, and drugstore astringents, applied to my face every four hours), half my zits began to fade on their own, no doubt from the sunshine and the good food I was eating again.

My strength would have returned even more quickly, I think, if not for a nasty habit I developed during that holiday among the dunes and foghorns. Now that my hands were free to move again, they began to show a remarkable independence. They were filled with wanderlust, fidgety with urges to roam and explore, and no matter how many times I told them to stay put, they traveled wherever they damn pleased. I had only to crawl under the covers at night, and they would insist on flying to their
favorite hot spot, a forest kingdom just south of the equator. There they would visit their friend, the great finger of fingers, the all-powerful one who ruled the universe by mental telepathy. When he called, no subject could resist. My hands were in his thrall, and short of tying them up in ropes again, I had no choice but to give them their freedom. So it was that Aesop’s madness became my madness, and so it was that my pecker rose up to take control of my life. It no longer resembled the little squirt gun that Mrs. Witherspoon had once cupped in her palm. It had gained in both size and stature since then, and its word was law. It begged to be touched, and I touched it. It cried out to be fondled, yanked, and squeezed, and I bowed to its whims with a willing heart. Who cared if I went blind? Who cared if my hair fell out? Nature was calling, and every night I ran to it as breathlessly and hungrily as Adam himself.

As for the master, I didn’t know what to think. He seemed to be enjoying himself, and while his complexion and color undoubtedly improved, I witnessed three or four stomach-clutching episodes, and the facial twinges occurred almost regularly now, at every second or third meal. But his spirits couldn’t have been brighter, and when he wasn’t reading his Spinoza or working with me on the act, he kept himself busy on the telephone, haggling over arrangements for my upcoming tour. I was big stuff now. The kidnaping had seen to that, and Master Yehudi was more than ready to take full advantage of the situation. Hastily revising his plans for my career, he settled us into our Cape Cod retreat and went on the offensive. He was holding the chips now and could afford to play hard-to-get. He could dictate terms, press for new and unheard-of percentages from the booking agents, demand guarantees matched by only the biggest draws. I’d reached the top a lot sooner than either of us had expected, and before the master’s wheelings and dealings were done, he’d
booked me into scores of theaters up and down the East Coast, a string of one- and two-night stands that would keep us going until the end of the year. And not just in puny towns and villages—in real cities, the front-line places I’d always dreamed of going to. Providence and Newark; New Haven and Baltimore; Philadelphia, Boston, New York. The act had moved indoors, and from now on we’d be playing for high stakes. “No more walking on water,” the master said, “no more farm-boy costume, no more county fairs and chamber of commerce picnics. You’re an aerial artist now, Walt, the one and only of your kind, and folks are going to pay top dollar for the privilege of seeing you perform. They’ll dress up in their Sunday finery and sit in plush velvet seats, and once the theater goes dark and the spotlight turns on you, their eyes will fall out of their head. They’ll die a thousand deaths, Walt. You’ll prance and spin before them, and one by one they’ll follow you up the stairs of heaven. By the time it’s over, they’ll be sitting in the presence of God.”

Such are the twists of fortune. The kidnaping was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and yet it turned out to be my big break, the fuel that finally launched me into orbit. I’d been given a month’s worth of free publicity, and by the time I wriggled out of Slim’s grasp, I was already a household name, the number-one cause célèbre in the land. The news of my escape created a stir, a second sensation on top of the first, and after that I could do no wrong. Not only was I a victim, I was a hero, a mighty-mite of spunk and derring-do, and beyond just being pitied, I was loved. How to figure such a business? I’d been thrown into hell. I’d been bound and gagged and given up for dead, and one month later I was everybody’s darling. It was enough to fry your brain, to sizzle the boogers in your snout. America was at my feet, and with a man like Master Yehudi
pulling the strings, the odds were it would stay there for a long time to come.

I’d outfoxed Uncle Slim, all right, but that didn’t change the fact that he was still at large. The cops raided the shack in South Dakota, but other than a mess of fingerprints and a pile of dirty laundry, they found no trace of the culprits. I suppose I should have been scared, on the alert for more trouble, but curiously enough I didn’t spend much time worrying. It was too peaceful on Cape Cod for any of that, and now that I’d bested my uncle once, I felt confident I could do it again—quickly forgetting how close a shave I’d just had. But Master Yehudi had promised to protect me, and I believed him. I wasn’t going to stroll into any movie theaters on my own anymore, and as long as he was with me wherever I went, what could possibly happen? I thought about the kidnaping less and less as the days wore on. When I did think about it, it was mostly to relive my getaway and to wonder how badly I’d hurt Slim’s leg with the car. I hoped it was real bad—that the fender had clipped him in the kneecap, maybe hard enough to shatter the bone. I wanted to have done some serious damage, to know that he’d be walking with a limp for the rest of his life.

But I was too busy with other things to feel much desire to look back. The days were full, crammed with preparations and rehearsals for my new show, and there weren’t any blanks on my nighttime dance card either, considering how ready my dick was for dalliance and diversion. Between these nocturnal escapades and my afternoon exertions, I didn’t have a spare moment to sulk or feel frightened. I wasn’t haunted by Slim, I wasn’t bogged down by Mrs. Witherspoon’s impending marriage. My thoughts were turned to a more immediate problem, and that was enough to keep my hands full: how to remake Walt the Wonder Boy into
a theatrical performer, a creature fit for the confines of the indoor stage.

Master Yehudi and I had some mammoth conversations on this subject, but mostly we worked out the new routines by trial and error. Hour after hour, day after day, we’d stand on the windy beach making changes and corrections, struggling to get it right as flocks of seagulls honked and wheeled overhead. We wanted to make every minute count. That was our guiding principle, the object of all our efforts and furious calculations. Out in the boondocks I’d had every show to myself, a good hour’s worth of performing time, even more if I’d felt in the mood. But vaudeville was a different brand of beer. I’d be sharing the bill with other acts, and the program had to be boiled down to twenty minutes. We’d lost the lake, we’d lost the impact of the natural sky, we’d lost the grandeur of my hundred-yard sallies and locomotion-struts. Everything had to be squeezed into a smaller space, but once we began to explore the ins and outs of it, we saw that smaller didn’t necessarily mean worse. We had some new tools at our disposal, and the trick was to turn them to our advantage. For one thing, we had lights. The master and I both drooled at the thought of them, imagining all the effects they made possible. We could go from pitch black to brightness in the blink of an eye—and vice versa. We could dim the hall to squinty obscurity, throw spots from place to place, manipulate colors, make me appear and disappear at will. And then there was the music, which would sound far more ample and sonorous when played indoors. It wouldn’t get lost in the background, it wouldn’t be drowned out by traffic and merry-go-round noises. The instruments would become an integral part of the show, and they’d navigate the audience through a sea of shifting emotions, subtly cueing the crowd on how it should react. Strings, horns, woodwinds, drums: we’d have pros down in the pit with us every night,
and when we told them what to play, they’d know how to put it able. Undistracted by the buzzing of flies and the glare of the sun, people would be less prone to talk and lose their concentration. A hush would greet me the moment the curtain went up, and from beginning to end the performance would be controlled, advancing like clockwork from a few simple stunts to the wildest, most heart-stopping finale ever seen on a modern stage.

So we hashed out our ideas, batting it back and forth for a couple of weeks, and eventually we came up with a blueprint. “Shape and coherence,” the master said. “Structure, rhythm, and surprise.” We weren’t going to give them a random collection of tricks. The act was going to unfold like a story, and little by little we’d build up the tension, leading the audience into bigger and better thrills as we went along, saving the best and most spectacular stunts for last.

The costume couldn’t have been more basic: a white shirt open at the collar, loose black trousers, and a pair of white dance slippers on my feet. The white shoes were essential. They had to jump out at you, to create the greatest possible contrast with the brown floor of the stage. With only twenty minutes to work with, there was no time for costume changes or extra entrances and exits. We made the act continuous, to be performed without pause or interruption, but in our minds we broke it down into four parts, and we worked on each part separately, as if each was an act in a play:

P
ART THE
F
IRST
Solo clarinet, trilling a few bars of pastoral fluff. The melody suggests innocence, butterflies, dandelions bobbing in the breeze. The curtain goes up on a bare, brightly lit stage. I come on, and for the first two minutes I act like a know-nothing, a boob with a stick up my ass and pudding
for brains. I bump into invisible objects strewn about me, encountering one obstacle after another as the clarinet is joined by a rumbling bassoon. I trip over a stone, I bang my nose against a wall, I catch my finger in a door. I’m the picture of human incompetence, a stumbling nincompoop who can barely stand on the ground—let alone rise above it. At last, after several near misses, I fall flat on my face. The trombone does a dipping glissando, I get some laughs. Reprise. But even clutzier than the first time. Again the sliding trombone, followed by a thumpity-thump on the snare drum, a boom on the kettle drum. This is slapstick heaven, and I’m on a collision course with thin ice. No sooner do I pick myself up and take a step than my foot snags on a roller skate and I fall again. Howls of laughter. I struggle to my feet, tottering about as I shake the cobwebs from my head, and then, just when the audience is beginning to get puzzled, just when it looks like I’m every bit as inept as I seem, I pull the first stunt.

P
ART THE
S
ECOND
It has to look like an accident. I’ve just tripped again, and as I stagger forward, desperately trying to regain my balance, I reach out my hand and catch hold of something. It’s the rung of an invisible ladder, and suddenly I’m hanging in midair—but only for a split second. It all happens so fast, it’s hard to tell if I’ve left my feet or not. Before the audience can figure it out, I release my grip and tumble to the ground. The lights dim, then go off, plunging the hall into darkness. Music plays: mysterious strings, tremulous with wonder and expectation. A moment later, a spotlight is turned on. It wanders left and right, then stops at the place occupied by the ladder. I stand up and begin to look for the invisible rung. When my hands make contact with the ladder again, I pat it gingerly, gaping in astonishment. A thing that isn’t there is there. I pat it again,
testing to make sure it’s steady, and then begin to climb—very cautiously, one agonizing rung at a time. There’s no doubt about it now. I’m off the ground, and the tips of my bright white shoes are dangling in the air to prove it. During my ascent, the spotlight expands, dissolving into a soft glow that eventually engulfs the entire stage. I reach the top, look down, and begin to grow frightened. I’m five feet off the ground now, and what the hell am I doing there? The strings vibrate again, underscoring my panic. I begin to climb down, but halfway to the floor I reach out with my hand and come against something solid—a plank jutting into the middle of the air. I’m flabbergasted. I run my fingers over this invisible object, and little by little curiosity gets the better of me. I slide my body around the ladder and crawl onto the plank. It’s strong enough to hold my weight. I stand up and begin to walk, slowly crossing the stage at an altitude of three feet. After that, one prop leads to another. The plank becomes a staircase, the staircase becomes a rope, the rope becomes a swing, the swing becomes a slide. For seven minutes I explore these objects, creeping and tiptoeing upon them, gradually gaining confidence as the music swells. It looks as if I’ll be able to cavort like this forever. Then, suddenly, I step off a ledge and begin to fall.