“I didn’t mean—”
“Nobody has any idea how hard it was for me coming up. It’s taken for
granted now, kids like you come around, they grew up loving the crab and
they figure everybody always loved the crab, the crab must have been some
kind of overnight success. Sure, right, but that overnight lasted ten years,
no more, no less. Ten years slugging it out on the circuit, little clubs,
appearances at lodge dinners and state fairs, riding in the undercarriage of
tour buses. I paid my dues a dozen times over and I still feel it right here.”
The crab reared up, propping on his huge, closed claws, and tapped two
legs assertively on his lower shell, as if miming a gut check. “Then you guys
come around here talking about Buster Fucking Keaton. Like it was some
kind of party for me, this fershlugginer career. ‘Hmmm, why, I think I’ll
just allude to Buster Keaton, that ought to make the eggheads cream their
panties.’ Tell you the truth, I never saw Buster Keaton when I was coming
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INTERVIEW WITH THE CRAB
up because I was too busy busting my chops trying to entertain you people.
Never saw Buster Keaton until a couple of years ago and then when I did
I didn’t see anything I thought was all that great.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest that your work was in any way derivative—”
“Keaton ever do a show about a crab living in a human family?”
I was silent.
“I’m asking you because I want to know. You seem familiar with Keaton’s work,
so I’m putting the question to you in great sincerity. Anything with a crab?”
“No.”
“Right, that’s what I figured. My material is entirely my own. I came to it
the same way maybe your precious Keaton or Vigoda came by their own—
pure suffering, forged into something of value to others, like crushing a coal
into a diamond, at great cost of effort and personal sacrifice, a process you
wouldn’t know too much about since everything to you is just a big pile of
slippery postmodern allusions and references with no soul to speak of, not
even any notion that it might be missing one, that there might be something
to mourn the loss of—a soul, I mean.”
I knew it was not my place to defend myself, here—to point out that it
was precisely that essence of existential suffering, or soul, if he preferred that term, which had drawn me to his work, made me seek for a description
for how such an uncanny and timeless thing had broken out in the vacuous,
tinselly environs of network situation comedy. Even as he berated me he
was inviting me inside, it appeared to me. My task was to selflessly accept
that invitation.
“You say your material is entirely your own. That suffering and sacrifice you
speak of lies so close to the surface of your humor. How close were the
Foorcums to a portrait of your own family?”
“What are you, like the one guy in the United States with no Google?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’ve said a thousand times if I’ve said it once: I haven’t spoken about—or
to—my family in over forty years. What makes you think I’m about to sing for
you? What was your name, Lehman?”
“Lethem.”
“Mr. Lethem, with all respect, go fart on a Wheat Thin. What makes you
think today’s the day some kid sashays in here and I’m just suddenly in the
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JONATHAN LETHEM
mood to break my silence for you on a whim, when I wouldn’t even sing for
that fucker Larry King? Even if I wanted to, my lawyers wouldn’t let me.
Every single person who ever knew me in that shitheel town has tried to
sue me at some point, let alone the members of my beloved goddamn
family. Rule one: We speak of the Foorcums as the Foorcums alone, or this
is O-V-E-R.”
“The Foorcums, then. Are you in touch with Richard Drimpet and Joan
Cranewood-Freehan, who played your on-screen parents?”
“These are your questions?” The crab scratched with a single leg against
the tile in one direction repeatedly, away from his body, as if trying to strike a match or dislodge something stuck to a foot. His claws, though, lay totally
inert, draped before him. “Drimpet and I were off speaking terms by season
three, another item you could’ve peeled off a fan site. Joan used to call me
from time to time. She tried to get me to do a guest appearance on that
Snowbirds show, kept pestering me to come on. But what am I going to say to a bunch of old ladies in a mobile home, you know? ‘Follow the sun, chickadees!
You haven’t got that long to live!’”
“Was it difficult between you and Reg Loud? His embodiment of Feary
Foorcum was so memorable, but the two of you were pitted against one
another continuously throughout the show. And his behavior after the
cancellation was rather bitter.” I hoped the crab could follow my leads
without having to take offense. Reg Loud had, of course, been jailed for
narcotics possession several times after his difficult child-stardom found its
nadir in the years following Crab House Days. For the crab, I could only assume the ferocity of the character’s portrayal of his brother, combined with
the young actor’s very public woes, resonated deeply with ancient, real-life
traumas. I was still circling what seemed to me the main, and perhaps
tenderest subject, of Delia Watertree, who’d played Pansy Foorcum.
“Difficult? The opposite. Sometimes in this crazy fucked-up world of
show business you meet someone with a real beating heart, someone who
matters to you, who knows what it’s all worth. Rarer than you might think,
unfortunately. Reg is the only thing that kept me going on that show as
long as I did.”
“I’m surprised to hear you say that. Because his character was usually seen
as the crab’s tormentor.”
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“I’ve taken my licks. That’s the business, that’s the character. Don’t confuse
show business for real life, Lethem. Compared to some licks I’ve taken, that
show was all cake and candy and ice cream.”
“He flooded your room with sulfur oxide in an attempt to cause you to molt
six months early,” I said.
“Heh heh. Yeah, that was a good one. One hundred percent the kid’s idea,
too. Good head on his shoulders. You know, a lot of the best bits came from
him and me working together, batting stuff to the writers, free of charge.
We’d improv in rehearsals—he was always cutting up, making me pee my
pants. Talk about bitter, Loud never got credit for any of that stuff. Head
writer walked off with two Emmys. Reg deserved better, much better.”
“It’s an incredible story. Does he know how you feel about it?” I couldn’t
recall the last turns in Reg Loud’s quite miserable tabloid spiral, except that five or six years earlier he’d resurfaced in a brief stint as a local morning
talk show host, spewing right-wing survivalist bilge over the airwaves of
some medium-sized Midwestern city, Indianapolis or Cedar Rapids.
“Fuck you trying to imply? Of course he does.”
“No offense. I’m glad to hear it.”
“None taken.”
“I wonder if I could get
a chance to talk with him for my story. Do you
know how I could get in touch with him?”
The crab fell momentarily silent, but cinched the glistening stump of his
amputated leg deep under his lower shell, as if he’d now been involuntarily
made to recall some particular hurt.
“He wouldn’t care to talk about Crab House Days,” said the crab. “He’s moved on.”
“What about Delia Watertree?”
“That bitch.”
Delia Watertree, launched to fame as the coarse but irresistible Pansy
Foorcum, was the only member of the cast who’d ascended to greater heights
since the show’s cancellation. The entirety of her subsequent career seemed
a kind of long renunciation of the broad and overtly sexual appeal of the
Pansy Foorcum character; in her stage and screen roles (she’d never glanced
back at television work) she relentlessly played against her natural, peaches-
and-cream beauty, favoring roles in glasses or bruise makeup or pants suits or
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JONATHAN LETHEM
buckskin, playing lawyers, frontier settlers, sexual-assault victims, suicidal
writers, vanished aviators, and the like. Nevertheless, a measure of Pansy
Foorcum’s innocent lustiness thrived almost subliminally within the shell of
her prestigious career, confirmed by its apparent absence, as though she and
her audience were together rising above prurient thoughts in rewarding her
with Oscar and Tony nominations for her nobler roles. Too, her quiet,
reflective mannerisms still recalled the poignancy she’d evoked in spells of
gentleness toward her sitcom sibling, the housebound crab.
“She was lovely to your character,” I said, speaking softly now. “A viewer
would have thought you and Pansy were full of feeling for one another. You
often seemed united against the others—Feary and your parents. As if you
two alone shared a sense of dreamy possibility about what might lay outside
the space of the house—beyond the circumscribed sensibility of the
Foorcum family.”
“You go on telling yourself what you want to hear,” said the crab. “Meanwhile
I’ll bet you watched her like the rest of America’s teenage boys, with one
hand in your pants and your tongue pressed to the screen.”
I chose not to point out the impossibility of the physical arrangement he
proposed. It occurred to me that it might, in fact, be possible to watch a
television screen while lapping at it with one’s antennae. “I remember when
you asked her not to go to the prom, since you couldn’t go—”
“Listen. You want the skinny on Delia? That little floozy used to cavort
around the set with no underwear on, just to drive me crazy, knowing
nobody else could see, knowing I’d never say anything. Believe me, the
carpet did not match the drapes. She’d put her foot up on a chair and start re-lacing her high-tops, right in my face, trying to get me to flub lines.”
“That’s astonishing.”
“Believe it. You know what else? At night, after the whole rest of the cast
and crew had gone, she’d bring guys back and do them, sometimes two at a
time, real marathon stuff, right in the next room, so I couldn’t get a minute
of sleep. What a mouth on her, too, always crying out ‘make me your little
whore’ and telling these guys it was the biggest thing she’d ever seen, how she was so frightened it would hurt her—”
Now I was certain the crab was confused. “But, you didn’t really live in that room—” I began. I wondered whether in fact his memory had slipped back to
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INTERVIEW WITH THE CRAB
an earlier time, to that other family of which he’d sworn he’d never speak.
Perhaps Pansy Foorcum had merged in his mind with an unnamed sister in
another house, long ago. The difficulty, of course, was that it was equally
likely that in his confusion he’d conflated Crab House Days with Crab Sex Dorm. That short-lived reality show had been notoriously lavish in its use of crab-point-of-view camera placements.
The creature appeared not to hear me. He carried on muttering about
Pansy’s sexual theatrics, reproducing what he’d supposedly overheard
through the wall, playing both voices aloud as if performing a Punch and Judy show—a private litany aired, it seemed to me, for reasons having nothing to
do with our interview. At last he reached a pitch and then quit abruptly, his
words replaced with the high whining sound he’d treated me to earlier, and
then with the distinct yawn. “Keep that in mind next time you see her begging
for money for African famine relief,” he concluded. “She’s probably got
nothing on under her Florence Nightingale costume, either. That dame gets
her jollies from pity.”
I opted to chalk the crab’s freewheeling animus up to show-business envy,
at the prestige accorded to the sole performer who’d shaken the career curse
of the franchise. “What’s in the cards for you?” I asked, not wishing to hear
more. “Is this a firm retirement? Do you long to reconnect with your
audience?”
“I get calls every day, believe you me.” The crab stirred a claw, his minor
rather than major, which still lay un-moving. He ratcheted the smaller pincers
wide and turned them toward his face, as if miming a telephone receiver.
“I’m sure you do.”
“I’m telling you, some of the pitches I’ve heard. Crazy stuff. Hoo-wee. I had
some rappers out here the other day. Everything nowadays is gangsta, gangsta,
gangsta. Those guys are revitalizing show business, if you ask me. But I don’t
really see a place for myself in the mix.”
“So, you’ll rest on your laurels,” I suggested.
“What fucking laurels? You see one goddamn laurel around here? If you do, it
probably blew over from the next yard. Hah. Sorry, I just hate that word— laurels.”
“I only wondered if you’re content not to practice your art.”
“Listen, I’m keeping busy.” The crab withdrew and shuttered his claw now,
seeming to grow reflective.
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JONATHAN LETHEM
“I didn’t mean anything—”
“I know you didn’t, kid.”
“You’ve got nothing to prove to anyone,” I said softly.
“Don’t patronize me.”
I fell to silence. The crab shifted, sighed, rattled. The day had turned, too,
clouds deflecting the high bleaching sun, and announcing themselves as gray
mountains in the oscillating mirror of the pool.
“Look, Lehman. You want a scoop? I’m hatching a major comeback. You
can be the first. I’m saying major major. You understand? When this thing
blows, there’ll be no keeping a lid on it, I promise you.”
“A premise for a show?”
“Big show, of sorts.”
“Please.”
“Follow me. I’d tell you to walk this way, only you’ve heard that one before.”
Startlingly, the crab was on the go. He moved awfully fast for a being that
had seemed wrought in rusted ironwork a moment before. Clicking his way
off the tile-work, he slid across the grass, past me, and toward the left side of the house. The lawn dipped to a basement door there, portal to a half-submerged, windowless lower level with the appearance of a garage or
workshop, perhaps. I stood, stuffed my
pad and ballpoint into my pants
pocket, and hurried to join him.
“Go ahead, open the door,” he said.
I tried the handle, which turned easily, and pushed the door inside. The
darkness was enough that from the brightness of the day I couldn’t make
anything out, within. I stepped back, uncertain.
Crab House Days had, of course, made much of the conceit that its title character was trapped in his bedroom, yet I recalled from some footage from
Crab Sex Dorm how he could transverse human doorways by tipping himself dexterously on one side. The crab did this now, gripping the doorframe
neatly with his claws and virtually rolling himself through the doorway.
Inside, he dropped back to the unpainted cement floor. I followed, leaving
the door open behind me. The basement was cool and conveyed an intense
marine smell, like that of an aquarium. Low fluorescent fixtures shone a dim
green light, from what appeared to be special bulbs, perhaps like those for
illuminating plants or animals in a zoo display of creatures unused to direct
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INTERVIEW WITH THE CRAB
sunlight. As my eyes accustomed themselves to the dark I saw that we were
surrounded by dozens of immense water tanks, the murk and silt within
them glowing in the greenish light.
Another figure stepped from the rear, startling me. It was Feary
Foorcum—or rather, Reg Loud. Loud was cloaked in a white lab coat, and
still wore his hair in his signature ragged punk cut. He was also still of a
childish stature, though he’d grown stocky, and his once brattish features
were withered and creased with deep lines of cynicism and age—he seemed
still too young to be an adult, and far too old to be in his early forties, as a quick calculation suggested he ought to be. But then perhaps he had been
playing younger than his real age on Crab House Days, like so many child stars have done.
“Reg, this is Mr. Lehman. He’s come to have a look at my quote-unquote
comeback.”
Reg Loud stuck out a horny, trollish hand. “Pleased to meet you,” he said
in the terribly familiar voice, a sort of parroty squawk, with which he’d
hectored both his parents and crab for all five seasons, filling their ears with his crank Libertarian views. “You’re one of the first to see the babies.”
“Babies?”
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