Niagara Falls All Over Again (11 page)

A straight man is the fellow who spins the yo-yo. The yo-yo's the fun part, you keep your eye on the yo-yo, but you lose interest the minute it doesn't come back.

PROFESSOR: So here's your salad fork, your meat fork, your fish fork, your oyster fork, your salad knife, your meat knife, your fish knife, your soup spoon, your fruit spoon. What's the matter?

ROCKY: All this hardware, and nothing to stir my coffee with.

PROFESSOR: Pay attention. (SMACKS HIM) Coffee comes later.

ROCKY: Good. Can I have some cream?

PROFESSOR: Sure, sure.

ROCKY: And some sugar.

PROFESSOR: Okay, but pay attention.

ROCKY: I like sugar in my coffee.

PROFESSOR: Sure, who doesn't?

ROCKY: And a doughnut.

PROFESSOR: A doughnut?

ROCKY: A cup of coffee's sad without a doughnut.

PROFESSOR: (SMACKS ROCKY) Are you going to pay attention?

ROCKY: And maybe another doughnut.

PROFESSOR: Another doughnut?

ROCKY: To keep the first doughnut company.

PROFESSOR: You're being ridiculous.

ROCKY: Poor lonely doughnut.

PROFESSOR: Rocky!

ROCKY: I feel sad for that doughnut.

PROFESSOR: Look. You come into the dining room. Here's the beautiful table. What do you say to your hostess?

ROCKY: What, no doughnuts?

PROFESSOR: Now why would you say a terrible thing like that?

ROCKY: I don't mean to be rude.

PROFESSOR: You'll hurt her feelings, you say something like that.

ROCKY (NEAR TEARS): I'm sorry.

PROFESSOR: Okay.

ROCKY: This is the saddest story I ever heard.

PROFESSOR: What are you talking about?

ROCKY: That poor woman, and no doughnuts!

PROFESSOR: Now, look. It's time to sit down.

(ROCKY SITS. PROF SMACKS HIM.)

PROFESSOR: Not yet! There are ladies.

ROCKY: There are ladies?

PROFESSOR: Yes, there are ladies.

ROCKY: Maybe they're out back eating the doughnuts.

PROFESSOR: No, no. I mean imagine there are ladies.

(ROCKY WOLF-WHISTLES)

PROFESSOR: What's that for?

ROCKY: I got a good imagination.

Success seemed always around the corner. We got reviewed in
Variety
. We became headliners, our salaries grew, people in the business knew our names. Any minute now, we'd hit it big. We barely felt the Depression, if only because we had struggled all our working lives for jobs and lodging.
What are you complaining about?
I heard my father say.
You have a job when many do not.
I knew that. And still we wanted more. We worked and worked—winters in vaude houses, summers at beach and lake resorts. If there were a movie version of our life—there hasn't been, just a lousy TV special starring guys who looked like us if you squinted—our ten years in vaudeville would be described by all the usual clichés: the pages falling off a calendar, footage of a locomotive racing diagonally at a camera, us onstage doing the act, a spinning newspaper announcing the stock market crash or FDR's election, calendar (year change), train (other direction), stage (same old team, new costumes). I kept waiting to show up at the theater to see Rock shaking hands with some keen-eyed straight man in a good suit. He had a history of leaving, I had a history of being left. But he didn't: he stuck it out.

Our agent forwarded letters from Annie, who wrote me weekly letters full of news. Rocky read them aloud admiringly. “What a family you have!” he said. “Let's visit them.”

“Visit your own family,” I told him.

“That's different.”

“Why?”

“I'm in love with
yours
,” he said, sticking the latest missive in his pocket. We were a team: my letters were his letters. “Rose especially. She's my dream girl—”

“You leave her alone,” I said.

We played all kinds of theaters. Some small-time vaudeville took place in mildewed tents. The audience sat on wood benches, and you could hear them shift their weight. In the right kind of quiet you could almost detect seats of pants prying up splinters. Applause sounds different in a tent: not so good. It doesn't have that rising, heated sound.

In real vaude houses, the velvet seats were the color of the insides of bonbons, cherry red or yellow cream. Some houses were painted like Versailles, some in the newest Deco designs, celluloid green trimmed in black. Chandeliers big as bedrooms—bigger!—hung in the lobby. I liked touring the houses themselves, sitting in the seats, pretending to be part of the audience. The balcony was my favorite, of course: I'd never seen vaudeville from the orchestra. Up in the cheap seats, I could hold still, and imagine the dark, and then the girl on the horse taking the stage, and finally, Hattie fidgeting beside me—she hates that horse, and that fake girl covered with shoe polish to make her look Navajo—and so I worked to take up only my rightful half of the armrest, and when I turned and she was gone, I could pretend she'd just stalked out and was waiting for me, fed up, in the lobby. “I got somebody you
have
to meet,” I wanted to tell her, because Rocky made me miss Hattie more than I had in ages, more than Miriam ever did.

“Stay out of the seats,” he finally told me, when he caught me wool-gathering there. “This isn't amateur hour. Time to stop thinking like an audience.”

Ixnay on the Uckfay

Rock talked me into drinking more than I might have, but since I went on the road I'd picked up the habit of a drink now and then. We were young, we believed all the alcohol gave us more energy. I still do. How do you stay up until five in the morning without a drink in your hand? Sober, I'd go yawning into bed after the second show, but drunk I was always up for an adventure. These adventures usually meant chasing after more booze, it's true. Where's the next drink? It's in some chorus girl's purse, and I hear she's got a crush on you, Mose, so let's go. It's in a private club downtown. It's in the backseat of a car that's driving south to Missouri, we'll get back somehow, we'll find another backseat and another bottle. One of my oldest pals in the world lives just outside town, and he's always up for something; one of my biggest fans runs a restaurant here, and so what if this is a dry county—for me it isn't, for me this county is sopping wet.

Why do you fellows drink so much, some girls wanted to know. Well, it depended on what time of day you asked us. I never drank in the morning till I teamed up with Rock, and then only sometimes, and if I hadn't been drinking too much the night before, but it was one of my favorite things, a drink before lunch, sweet brandy cut with coffee or cream. It makes you feel like a kid snowed out of school: no rules, just something syrupy to soothe your throat. You feel like your fever's breaking. You're idle but hopeful and fooling your mother, who, wherever she is, is giving you sympathy you don't deserve, the best kind. If you drink in the afternoon, you're trying to stretch the hours out. Think lazily about the dinner that will sober you up before your first show, there's plenty of day ahead of you. If you drink in the evening, when decent people drink, you're just trying to get drunk. For us, anyhow, it meant we weren't working.

We only got fired once. This was 1934, and we'd finally been booked in New York, but first we had to play Providence, Rhode Island. Rock and I were having a conversation backstage about a certain dancer in a flash act that I had just taken out between shows. There was a list posted by the stage door of all the words you weren't allowed to say inside the theater, backstage, onstage, anywhere. The manager, a hatchet-nosed high-waisted college boy, was a stickler. He had knocked on dressing-room doors after the first show with a list of changes: the aforementioned dancer had to replace her flesh-colored stockings. The monologist had to cut a joke about a softball game between the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of Columbus. Rocky and I never worked blue; the manager warned us to keep it that way. This may have been why Rocky, in full sight of this kid, loudly asked me a question that he should have known I'd never answer.

“Did you fuck her?”

“Rocky,” I said. I was a rogue, but I was a gentleman.

“Educate me, Professor,” he said. “I'm a young man trying to make my way in this world. In this
particular
world. Did you fuck her?”

I saw the manager scowling at us, tapping his foot in a near parody of disapproval. A kid that young ought to know not to fasten his belt that tight. “Listen,” I said to Rock, “ixnay on the uckfay.”

The manager advanced on us. We'd shown our lack of class at last, he thought. Some in-one act was playing, so there were layers of velvet and canvas and comics between us and the house.
“Gentlemen,”
he said, and Rocky said, amiably, “I'm just asking my associate Professor Sharp, who is keeping company with a young lady—
that
young lady”—he found her flexing her shoulders in the wings, warming up, and pointed—“whether or not—and I think you'll find the answer educational too—he fucked her.”

“Out,” said the manager. “I don't care how funny you sons of bitches are supposed to be.”

“Such
language,
” said Rocky, tipping his prop hat.

“We'll go to the club,” he told me, once we'd sent our stuff to the hotel in one taxi and climbed into a second. (I was always shocked by his willingness to hail a cab. Why not a streetcar? Why not a bracing walk? “Because we make enough money,” he'd say, his fingers already on their way to his mouth for a whistle.)

“What club?” I asked. We passed a distant ostentatious white-domed building. I missed the flash-act dancer, a sweet nonsensical Polish girl who did not wear underwear of any kind; the manager had only worried about her flesh-colored stockings because he lacked imagination. She had a beautiful habit of pronouncing “think” as “sing”:
I sing you are handsome. I sing you are funny
. In bed, in the coarsest language possible, she repeatedly demanded that I do to her what I thought I was already doing anyhow. We weren't at the theater, so she didn't get in trouble. I'd planned a week of meeting her between shows.

“The club,” said Rocky. “My club. The Swans. What, you think we got canned by accident? I'm thirsty.”

We'd been fired around 10:30; now it was 11:00. Even if I had to sleep alone, bed did not sound like such a bad idea. “Next time you get fired on purpose, could you ask me?”

“Relax. It's
Providence
. Next week we're in New York, and who'll care about Rhode Island?”

“I guess.”

“Don't guess,” he said. “Believe.”

The club was a local chapter of some kind of vaudeville fraternity, one of those dark-doored joints with no windows, filled with smoke and drink and an exhausting forced hilarity. Some of the guys I recognized from the circuit, but Rocky seemed to be bosom pals with every last one. “This is Mike Sharp,” he said, dragging me by the neck. “Be nice.”

“I'm always nice,” I said, and everyone laughed.

“
We
aren't,” said some guy in a chalk-striped suit. There was a game of billiards going, and I watched and realized that Ed Dubuque could have made a fortune here. Also there was a cat, the president of the club I was told, and when the cat jumped up on the billiard table the game had to stop until he felt like getting down. It was a club with rules like
that
. Now I can say it: I never really cared for theater people. Theater men, anyhow. I was fond of merry oddballs like Jack Robertson the monopede dancer, or quiet geniuses like Walter Cutter. Essentially I didn't like comedians, except Rocky. I thought he was the funniest guy in the world, and there was nothing I liked less than watching him in a room full of funny guys, trying to claim his title.

The membership at the Swans had armies of ants in their pants. Every story, every bit, involved springing up at the very least, and possibly balancing on a chair or the bar or the billiard table. You had to grab sleeves or shirtfronts or pant seats; you had to feign anger or terror or a fainting spell. This crowd fainted more often than a cotillion of corseted debutantes. I wasn't the only one who noticed.

“Siddown!” said the ham-faced bartender. “Sweet Jesus, you lot are up and down like a whore's nightgown.” They all applauded. He must have said this every night.

Late in the evening Rocky, pink cheeked with drink, rolled up his shirtsleeves. He leaned in and grabbed my shoulder. His breath had that gin smell, rotten sentimental flowers.

“I am going to teach you how to tango,” he said.

I said, “Rocky, I hardly know you.”

“Nevertheless.” He suddenly scratched his nose with the flat of one palm, and then shouted, “Somebody give me a rose!” For half a second he attempted to hold a pool cue between his teeth. On the bar, the club president napped in a furry ball on top of a discarded newspaper, the tip of his tail schoolmarmishly tapping a headline. Rocky removed him—surely a breach of the club charter!—and commandeered the paper. He rolled up a sheet and artfully tore one end into petals: a rose.

“Tastes terrible,” Rocky said, giving it a nibble. And then he began to dance by himself. We all pom-pommed in an Argentinean way. At first it was a joke, and then it wasn't. Rocky held the air, and you knew exactly what his imagined partner weighed. Small, especially compared to him, and so he was deferential; he danced on his toes, his feet back, to give her room. You even knew that she tried to get away from him, and then she got more forgiving and passionate. He loved her; she had a temper, she was still making up her mind. Well, I thought, this was worth getting fired for.

He tilted her into a dip. I swear I could see her hand wrinkling the back of his shirt.

Later, he showed me how to cultivate that newspaper flower. I hadn't noticed that the actual fashioning of it was part of the trick, like Charlie Chaplin making do with a shoe for dinner, two dinner rolls on forks for entertainment, a gag he'd stolen from Fatty Arbuckle anyhow. “Here,” Rocky said to me. He inclined his head toward the rose that emerged from the local editorial, petal by petal, his face undisturbed, curious, watching it bloom.