The Man Who Cancelled Himself (18 page)

“And what’s that?”

“Make people realize you’re dangerous if you don’t get your way,” he replied, with an eerie calm that made my stomach muscles tighten. “Doctor Buttwipe’s response was to put me on Thorazine, which is probably my biggest problem in life, Hoagy. Because every time I didn’t toe the line, every time I got a little uppity, they’d solve it by doping me. Doctors have been getting me stoned forever. You name it, I’ve been on it—Thorazine, lithium, Prozac. I’ve had ’em all. I’m a really addictive personality, okay? I can get hooked on work, food, sex. They got me hooked on drugs. They always doped me.
Always
.” He was getting louder now, and waving his arms. “When I got old enough, I just went right ahead and doped myself. Any kind of dope I could get my hands on. Alcohol, grass, hash, coke … That’s what I was
conditioned
to do. The Deuce Theater, that was me
not
drugging. Finding a positive way of dealing with my anxiety. At least compared to drugs it was. I didn’t hurt myself. I didn’t hurt anyone else. But did anyone understand that?”

“Did you honestly expect they would?”

That caught him short. He glared at me angrily. “I expected them to try.” He heaved a sigh, calmed himself. “They checked me into a psychiatric hospital after that little incident. The bin. Spent two weeks there in a dormitory with a bunch of other rockheads. They gave me the usual tests. Then they stroked their beards and told the parents that maybe I belonged in some kind of full-time residential treatment facility—a boarding school for wackoes. Now this really appealed to Herb and Aileen,” he recalled sardonically. “Because it meant they could get me the hell away
and
do it with a clean conscience. For my own good, was how they put it. Bullshit. They wanted me gone. No matter the price. And it wasn’t cheap. We’re talking ten, fifteen thou a year. Major bucks in those days. They didn’t care. No price was too high. They wanted me
away.”
His voice was husky now, his eyes remote. “They tried to make me into somebody I wasn’t. They couldn’t. I was too tough for ’em. So they threw me in a dungeon.”

“Is that why you hate them?”

He let out a short, harsh laugh. “I ain’t even getting warmed up yet.” He broke off. “You were asking me before about love. I’m sure, in their own sick way, Herb and Aileen thought they loved me.” He kept speaking of them in the past tense, as if they were dead. I had to keep reminding myself they weren’t. “But they didn’t. They were ashamed of me, Hoagy. Ashamed of what I represented—their own failure as parents. If they’d really loved me they would have accepted me for who I was. Instead, they bailed out on me. Sent me far, far away. That’s not what love is. Love is Katrina telling me, ‘Don’t you eat the food, Pinky.’ That’s what love is. Love is …” Lyle’s eyes widened. He struggled to his feet, towering over me. “Geez, we gotta hear that!” And with that he went barreling out the door. I followed.

He made straight for The Boys’ office, burst inside, and roared, “We need it in the script! We need to hear him say, ‘Don’t you eat the food, Pinky’!”

There was very little reaction to this pronouncement. The Boys just kept right on gazing at their computer screen, Marty seated at the keyboard, Tommy perched on his right shoulder with a pencil between his teeth. Bobby kept right on pacing. Annabelle, who was stretched out on the sofa, kept right on scribbling on a yellow legal pad. Lulu, who was curled up at her feet, didn’t so much as stir.

“Don’t eat which food, Lyle?” Tommy finally asked, wearily, after several long seconds of silence.

“When Rob and Chubby are fixing the dishwasher,” Lyle explained excitedly, waving his arms for emphasis. “And they’re talking about why he’s not married. We need to say—”

“ ‘Don’t you eat the food, Pinky’?” Marty quoted, mystified.

“Don’t ya get it?” whined Lyle, exasperated. “I mean he’s gotta … they gotta … Shit, it made total sense a second ago. Tell ’em, Hoagmeister. Tell ’em what I mean.”

Great, now I sounded like a home beer-brewing kit. I tugged at my ear. “I think he means that what a man misses when he’s not in a good relationship is someone who’s looking out for him.”

“Exactly!” cried Lyle.

“ ‘Don’t you eat the food, Pinky’? ” Tommy repeated, still perplexed. Not that I blamed him.

Lyle nodded. “Put it in the dishwasher scene,” he commanded. “When we’re talking about finding the perfect girl. Those exact words. And give ’em to Chubby, not Rob. I want Katrina to hear me say ’em. As a gift from me to her. I wanna see her face when I do. Okay?”

The Boys just stared at him in bewildered silence. All four writers did, Bobby blinking furiously.

“Aw, Christ,” Lyle growled, stung by their lack of enthusiasm. “Do whatever the fuck you want. We’re going to dinner.”

“Enjoy,” exclaimed Marty, greatly relieved.

“I’m, like, yeah,” Annabelle chimed in, happily.

Lulu yawned and jumped down from the couch, ready for dinner herself. Or maybe she’d just had enough shpritzing for one day.

“Have you made her laugh yet?” I asked Marty.

“Not even close.”

“She’s killing us,” Tommy confessed. “Has she ever laughed?”

“Never in my presence,” I said. “But we have much different senses of humor. Martin and Lewis, for example.”

“What about them?” asked Tommy.

“She doesn’t get them.”

“This is hopeless,” he muttered. “Totally hopeless.”

The picketers had gone home for the day. The blue barricades and a lone cop were all that remained. The night air was sticky and still. It smelled like rain. We walked, Lyle waddling along beside me, sandals clopping, his arms swinging mightily. Lulu ambled along ahead of us, nose to the pavement.

I suggested Periyali, a Greek place on Twentieth, where it was quiet, and the fried octopus wasn’t terrible.

Lyle shook his head. “Nah, I’m more in the mood for pasta. Lotsa pasta.”

I glanced at him. “You’re joining me?”

“Dinner time, ain’t it? I’m starved.”

“What about ‘Don’t you eat the food, Pinky’?” I asked.

“Hey, it’s not like I’m married to the cunt,” he snarled viciously. “And I sure as hell ain’t married to
you!
So back the fuck off!”

“My mistake,” I said stiffly.

“Hey, no sweat,” he said cheerfully. “Can happen to anybody.”

I suggested Umberto’s on Seventeenth. We walked in silence. I don’t know what he was thinking about. I was thinking what an asshole he was. I was thinking about Herb and Aileen, wondering what they’d done to make him hate them so much. I was thinking. Lulu, she just wanted to get to the restaurant.

Umberto’s is ultramodern, Milanese sleek. High ceilings. Lots of tile. The dinner crowd was the usual media mix of fashion, publishing, and advertising. Most of the tables were full. We got noticed as we stood there waiting for the ma”tre d’. Lyle was hard to miss. And, as we were led to a nonsmoking table in the back, he got a reaction, too. It started small—a smattering of applause. A few lusty cheers. But it didn’t let up. By the time we reached our table everyone in the restaurant was on their feet cheering Lyle Hudnut. They cheered him because he was a victim. They cheered him because he was a survivor. It was downright stirring to witness, until I recalled that people had also cheered John Gotti, David Begelman, and Ollie North.

“Never been in this place before in my life,” Lyle blubbered, deeply moved. He blew his nose loudly in his napkin and asked the ma”tre d’ to give every table in the place a bottle of his best wine and to put it on our tab, which came to three thousand and change, in case you’re interested. The show paid for it. I ordered the angel’s hair pasta puttanesca followed by a grilled veal chop. Lulu had fried calamari. Lyle ordered two different bowls of pasta for starters, two more for his main course, and another for a side order. It was the largest quantity of pasta I’ve ever seen an individual shovel away in a single sitting, though I must admit I’ve never eaten Italian with Dom DeLuise. Lyle drank only Pellegrino water, two big bottles. I had a bottle of Chianti Classico.

“Exactly where did Herb and Aileen send you?” I asked him, as we ate.

“Place called the Allen School on the north shore of the island,” he replied, his mouth and both cheeks full of pasta. Oil and tomato sauce flew, splattering the white table cloth, his arms, gloves. “It was this humongous Locust Valley estate that had been converted into a ‘special’ school for ‘special’ kids. Had a red brick manor house with something like thirty-seven bedrooms. Stables, tennis courts, pool, twenty acres of grounds. Like a fucking country club. Some rich dead guy left it to ’em. The kids were ages twelve to seventeen. Me, I’d just turned eleven, but they let me in anyway. A lot of ’em were rich kids from Manhattan. But they were all rockheads just like me. Kids who didn’t fit in. Kids whose parents had decided they were bad news and needed to be stuck somewhere. The headmaster, Mr. Mitchell, was a shrink. So was his wife. They ran it together. Actually, I dug it there, if you can believe that. The Mitchells were totally righteous people. Their attitude was, hey, there’s nothing wrong with you. Be yourself. It was nice to hear that for once. I never had before. They taught us how to express ourselves, instead of shutting it all inside. Not a lot of that boring classroom shit either. At Allen, I learned about photography by developing pictures in a darkroom. I learned about music by playing the drums. I loved banging on them drums. A few of us even used to jam together. Of course, they kept us real busy. We all had to pitch in. Do the dishes, clean the stables, make the beds. Plus we had therapy, individual and group. But I never felt any desire to run away from Allen. I never felt trapped. I guess because I was finally someplace where people weren’t coming down on me just because they were too narrow-minded to hear where I was coming from. I didn’t feel strange or wrong. None of us did. The teachers understood us. And we all understood each other. And that was really cool. First time I made friends, really. No, we were more than friends. We were brothers and sisters. We watched out for each other. We were there for each other. Because, hey, our parents sure as hell weren’t.”

A young couple all dressed in black stopped by our table to thank Lyle for the wine and get his autograph. They lingered a bit too long, but he was extremely gracious about it. His recollections of Allen seemed to have put him in a jovial mood. Or maybe he just got contented when he was fed.

“Tell me about your friends,” I said.

He wiped his pasta bowls clean with the heel of our second loaf of bread, then stuffed that in his mouth and pushed the bowls away. “I made ’em for life,” he said, sitting back from the splattered table. It looked like it was left over from a mob rubout in Ozone Park. “There was Erin Sudbury, who was my first fuck. Her mother had committed suicide and her stepmother hated her. Erin was sixteen. I was fourteen. She was the one who taught me how to laugh. Had a totally twisted sense of humor. Ended up marrying an ear, nose, and throat man out in Northern California. We’re still in touch. Then there was Trevor Bernstein. Trev was a great, great sculptor. Gay, which his parents couldn’t deal with. I have a couple of his pieces at the beach. He died of AIDS three years ago. I guess he and Erin were the best friends I’ve ever had. I named the
Uncle Chubby
munchkins after them. I mean, we were
close.
Holidays, I’d have to go home to Herb and Aileen, but I’d feel trapped the second I walked in the door. I couldn’t wait to leave. Allen was home now, and Erin and Trevor were my family. Herb and Aileen never gave me what I got from them. I was happy there. The happiest I’d ever been.” He cackled. “Especially after Trev’s older brother, Joel, started sending him grass and hash from the city. This was, what, maybe ‘66, ‘67. The three of us would sit up all night getting stoned and rapping on the true meaning of life.”

“And what did you decide it was?”

“Be yourself,” Lyle replied. “No matter what other people think. No matter if it puts you against the flow. Be who
you
wanna be. I still believe that,” he declared, punctuating it with a loud fart. “Ahh … that was a good one.”

Lulu let out a low, unhappy moan of dissent from under the table.

“Allen was the best four years of my life. I was totally bummed when I had to leave. Man, that was hard.”

“Why did you?”

“Because I was ready to start high school, and they decided I was ‘well’ enough to go to my regular high school back home in Bay Shore. Time to plug me back into their repressive system. Time for me to be Herb and Aileen’s good little boy.”

“And were you?”

He guffawed hugely, turning heads at neighboring tables. “No way, pal. Once a rockhead, always a rockhead.” He gulped down some water. “They were scared of me, Herb and Aileen. Physically scared. Because I was a big fucker now. Much bigger than they were. And they were just really afraid to piss me off. So they kind of tiptoed around me, avoiding confrontations. Which was cool. And I had to admit the setup was cool. Herb had redone part of the garage as a bedroom for me, so I could come and go as I pleased. He soundproofed it, bought me a drum set. He wanted me to feel like my own man, he said. They steered clear of me, pretty much. They were at the store all day, and in the house at night. I went to school when I felt like it. Saw a therapist three afternoons a week—another geek without a clue. Mostly, I hung out. Banged my drums half the night. Played my stereo ultraloud. I loved Jimi Hendrix.” He was growing more animated. “I was a major Grateful Deadhead, too. The early shit-kicker stuff, when they were still a Hell’s Angels biker band. My idol in life was Pigpen. Had posters of that ugly dude plastered all over the garage. I even dressed like him—black leather jacket, black T-shirt and jeans, steel-toed jackboots, bandanna over my head … Couldn’t wait until I turned eighteen so I could get a chopper. My favorite movie was
Easy Rider.
Saw it two hundred times. That was me, man. An
outlaw.”

“How did you get along at school?”

“The coaches wanted me to go out for football, because I was so big. But I wasn’t having any of that. What I got into was drama. They had this really cool drama teacher, Mr. Schoen, who was into expressing yourself, like the teachers at Allen had been. Improv was his thing. First day, he says to me, okay, you’re an ape. And to this girl, he says, you’re a lion, and you two are in a cage together. Get it on. Right away I start sniffing her bum, like I figure an ape would, right? And the kids in class totally lose it. That’s when I discovered that performing for people, making them laugh, was a real high for me. It was a license for me to be
me
and get away with it … The whole atmosphere around school was different. I mean, I hadn’t changed, but the times had. It was ’68. Revolution was in the air. Being a rockhead like me, anti-everything, was now considered
okay.
Hip, even. I mean, I wasn’t alone anymore. There were other kids around who were like me. Antiwar people, flower people, stoners, greasers. My garage, it became the neighborhood place to hang out, get stoned, fuck your girlfriend. Especially over the summer. Couple of guys started bringing guitars by. We’d play “Louie, Louie,” shit like that. Called ourselves the World’s Worst Garage Band, because we were. We didn’t care. We were stoned all the time. I was still getting dope from Trevor’s brother, Joel, in New York. Pounds of grass, chunks of hash. He mailed it to me disguised as books—he worked in the mailroom at one of the big publishing houses. Runs the whole company now. I dealt around the neighborhood. Not to make a fortune. Just enough to break even on what I smoked with a little money left over for records and concerts. The most amazing thing was when the straight kids started knocking on my garage door, wanting to buy weed for the prom. I thought that was really cool.” He crackled. “I know Herb and Aileen were pleased to see how well I was starting to fit in.”