by Jerry Stahl
The magician drew more gasps when he revealed that he would pay 10 real dollars—and three free restaurant meals—to his brave subject. My hand shot right up. Of course I wanted the money. But what I wanted more was to be transported to another world. I wouldn't have said this to a soul—Daddy taught all his kids not to snivel—but even the cosmic ether had to be better than Santa Ana, with no father, a sickly Bible-quoting Mama, and the daily sadness and aggravation of kids throwing stones and calling me "The Prince of Whales."
Tyndall's routine was pretty cute. Roll into town, get a store to let him use their display window in return for free goods and publicity, then find a shill, usually a little kid willing to look gaga in public for a ten spot.
I've had a checkered career in entertainment, but no job was ever more suited to my temperament. After Marvo hypnotized me, my instructions were to climb into the window of Mason's Department Store, lie down on the display bed, and pretend to sleep. And I didn't even have to pretend.
Unfortunately, when I missed supper, poor Mama, weak as she was, was driven to throw on her shawl and drag her sickly self around town to find me. Which wasn't hard, as there weren't a lot of other boys who weighed a tenth of a ton snoring away in a department-store window. The crowd of hypnosis fans watching me saw logs drew Mama over. I had never laid down on an actual mattress before, and I promised myself, as Mother dragged me by the earlobe back to our house, that someday I'd have one of my own to sleep on. Though preferably with a little more privacy. Mother claimed I was touching myself in an unseemly way when she came upon me. (An accusation that strangely presages the one to come.) But, of course, I'd been transported and could not recall.
Will No One Help the Widow's Son?
Less than a year after these first performances—and a dozen more, as everything from oaf to orphan girl, at the Grand Opera House, where I'd first met Mr. Bacon—dear Mother succumbed to her infirmities and left this world for the next. For a time I stayed with my sister Norah and her husband, Walter St. John. But they had an infant of their own, and once baby Al began to crawl around the tiny bungalow, it was feared that his 200pound uncle, ever graceful on stage and unwieldy off, might accidentally step on the toddler's head or puncture his soft spot. Thus it was decided that I would be shipped off with a box lunch to San Jose, where I would live with my father and my brother Arthur. The pair had apparently purchased a hotel in that romantic and faraway city, and I was to help them maintain it.
The box lunch, donated by the Ladies' League at my mother's church, contained two ham sandwiches, three deviled eggs, some johnnycake, and a hard green apple. The apple was sour, but I ate it anyway. The train ride to San Jose was five hours. I polished off my charity vittles a quarter mile out of the station.
By the time the porter hopped up the aisle shouting "Next stop, San Jose!" I felt like I was being transported to a different world. Only this one did not promise to be as pleasant as the cloud-soft window-display bed to which Marvo had dispatched me. Now I was staring out another window, only no one was watching me back. The image in my head, as the train pulled into the station, was the exact one I didn't want there. I was unable to stop remembering Daddy, his burning eyes when he shook me awake by the shoulders at five in the morning, his fist waggling in my face like a cobra's head in a snake-charmer act, his whiskey-stench breath singeing my nostrils.
I squeezed my eyes shut, but the memory came anyway. The train's screeching brakes set off sparks inside my head. Buried in the grinding squeal of metal on metal was Daddy's voice, mocking and nasal: "Betcha yer so fat ya can't see yer weiner, can ya, Senor Lardo? I betcha yer so fat yer weenie's like a toothpick pokin' out of a stoat's bee-hind." Then his hands on my pants, his fumey grunt when he tugged my skivvies south of my baby hippo knees. "C'mon, pull down yer pants. Show Daddy whatcher packin' . . ."
His hacking laugh booming in my head, Daddy marches me outside, naked; and parades me around the street. As neighbors come out of their houses, cackling, he begins to bellow, in his drunken slur: "Boy's so fat he can't see his weewee. Has to pee sittin' down." And then, roaring, "You got a dick under them trousers, son, or you been gelded? Huh?" Pinching me, hard. "This castrato fat? Huh, Pansy-boy? Am I squeezin' femme-lard?"
Recalling all this, on the train, I had to pinch my own thigh through my pocket until tears came, to create an outside pain big enough to blank out the pain inside, the pain in my fat boy's heart.
The funny part—when he wasn't around, I could love Daddy. But when he was, all I could do was fear him. Fear didn't leave any room for love, except in fuzzy retrospect. Stepping off that train in San Jose, the fear froze me. Just to be able to walk, I played make-believe with myself. What if the memories were just a bad dream? Or, better, just scenes from a play whose run had ended. A play that was never going to be revived. Yes! I was going to step off the platform into a new production.
In this version of the Roscoe Revue, debuting in San Jose, the man who played Daddy would be glad to see me. He would not get drunk and show me what belts were for. He would rub my head and call me by my real name, Roscoe, instead of the other. Instead of Fatty. The Daddy in this play would muss my hair, take my suitcase out of my hand, and toss it to my big brother Arthur, who used to say that all you need in life is a wink and a nickel. We'd walk off, the three of us—the proud Arbuckles!— almost like a family.
For a while I stood on the platform in the blazing sun, afraid that if I stepped into shade for a second Daddy and Arthur might not see me. It never occurred to me that if they didn't spot me straightaway, they would look. It was like some unwritten rule inside my head. You have to hurt yourself for other people . . . Finally I got dizzy and found a shady bench. I watched the people who got off the train with me being greeted by loved ones. I pretended their lives were my life. That I was the young soldier being hugged by his gingham-clad Mom and overalled Dad. That I was the tall blond boy meeting his sweetheart. But that only worked for a few minutes, then I just got even sadder. So I started staring at people's feet, the way their shoes raised little clouds of dust. I studied the whirling dust and thought: I am the only person in this whole station who even notices these teeny tornadoes. The only person in the world . . .
I never minded the dark, but my whole life I had a fear of being alone. This was the most alone I had ever felt. And what I remember about it, along with the fear and the hunger and the urgent need to evacuate my bowels, is the clench-jawed vow I made to my little-boy self: Come hell or Tabasco sauce, as Daddy used to say, I was not ever going to be alone like this again.
Then the last straggler was hugged and led off the platform by someone who loved him. The train was so far out of the station it was only a speck. I studied my hands on my knees, trying to catch my fingers moving when they didn't think I was looking. I whistled. I pretended I was made of butter, like the stage-ladies used to say, and that if I just waited long enough, pretty soon I would melt into a nice warm puddle and—"Son?"
"DADDY!"
I didn't even know I was crying until I felt his grip on my shoulder. It was like being stabbed by happiness. But it wasn't Daddy. It was a bald man in a clerk's visor with milky eyes. Sniffling badly, I asked the visor-man if he'd seen my Daddy, and he said he didn't reckon, but maybe I should tell him who my Daddy was. . . .
So I told him about the hotel, how Daddy and my brother and I were all going to live there. For a moment the stranger regarded me. Then he sighed and pushed the visor up on his head, revealing a pate dusted with freckles and shiny with perspiration. I memorized every detail of what I saw to block out what I was hearing.
"I know the establishment," the clerk said. "Would your daddy be William Arbuckle?"
"Yes, sir!"
Relief flooded through me like sugar-milk. Then I saw how the man was looking at me. Like he wanted to say more, but he didn't want to at the same time. He was plainly trying to hide how aghast he was. At last he wrung his hands together and stared off down the tracks. "Your Daddy sold
the hotel three days ago, son. Then he left town. Saw him get on the train myself."
After that I didn't even cry. I was stranded, lost, alone in a strange city with 200 pennies in a rolled-up hanky and a cardboard suitcase. Something like this was too big to cry over. I thought may be Daddy'd forgotten I was coming. But he hadn't forgotten. This was even worse. He'd known. That's why he left. Right then I remember thinking, What would Marvo do?
The Lost Boy of San Jose
My pants sweat when I get nervous. Well, not my pants, really, but me, inside them. Especially on the posterior. Following the railroad clerk to the hotel, I hoped the San Jose heat would undampify me. I was scared, but I was hungry, and hungry was always stronger. At the hotel, the railroad fella handed me off to a natty, sharp-faced man in spats. He whispered something in the natty man's ear while they both looked at me.
The clerk wished me good luck and left, and the natty man in the suit stepped toward me. "Bill Booker," he said, eyeing me up and down and pumping my hand. "Bought the place from your Pa. Will didn't say anything about a bruiser like you being part of the deal."
"Where's Daddy?" That's all I wanted to know. By now the hotel staff had stepped into the lobby. I raised my eyes from the carpet long enough to see a few girls holding dishtowels and a swarthy fellow in shirtsleeves waxing his mustache and eating a tomato like it was an apple.
"No forwarding address," Bill sighed, looking over my head the same way the clerk at the station did. Like he couldn't stand to see the effect his words would have on me. Later on, I noticed the same phenomenon—how people couldn't look you in the eye when something terrible happened to you, even if it wasn't your fault. Especially if it wasn't your fault. They kept their eyes somewhere else. Like maybe your bad luck could crawl off you and sneak into them through their eyeballs. I always figured that's why people liked the movies. They could see terrible things happen to you. But since they were watching at the nickelodeon, they couldn't catch your bad luck. They could enjoy your calamity right in front of you. Of course it would be a while before that little nugget came in handy.
I shifted my gaze from Bill Booker to a portrait of Lincoln looking ill on a white pony hanging behind the lobby bar. Life gets bad and stays that way, Abe's big yellow eyes seemed to be saying. Before I could even respond to news of Dad's unknown whereabouts—he didn't just run away this time, he ran away from me—a pretty girl with the curliest hair I'd ever seen bounced over and threw her arms around me. "Oh, Daddy, can we keep 'im?" she baby-talked. "I think he's ado-wa-ble!" She must have been 18, and I couldn't take my eyes off her ringlets.
"You ain't my daughter and this ain't a charity ward," Bill replied, but not unkindly.
Then the guy chomping the tomato wiped off his mustache and piped up. "Only vacancy's the dumbwaiter, and I don't think Fat Boy can fit."
"I am not going to let you call him that," cried the ringlet girl, squeezing me close. "He's got a name."
They all looked at me, and it was all I could do to stammer out "Roscoe." Adding, for no apparent reason, "Like Roscoe Conkling. He was a big man in Kansas."
"Well, you're a big man in those trousers," said one of the girls, and it went back and forth like that, all the hotel girls and hotel men saying their assorted pieces—like they were honing their material—until Bill declared "Enough!" Then he clamped his meaty hand on my shoulder and asked if I knew how to sweep and clean. I said I'd done plenty. And he said I'd just bought myself a ticket out of the state orphanage.
Tomato-Mustache brought me out a plate of stuffed cabbage and barrel dill pickles. Then Bill tossed me a blanket and said he'd let me stay in a broom closet for free in return for doing odd jobs. I spilled my cabbage catching the blanket. But instead of yelling, they just watched while I got down on hands and knees and ate the food off the carpet.
"You don't crap on the carpet, too, do you?" Bill wondered drily. I said not unless it's part of the act, which seemed to tickle the hotel's vaudevillians.
Pansy Lessons
The curly-haired girl turned out to be a piano player named Pansy Jones, and she became my guardian angel and de facto talent agent. Pansy'd done some salty entertaining in her day. Lots of nightclub types stayed at the hotel. Pansy's job was to play piano and sing, tell a story or two—anything to keep the guests and visitors entertained and running a bar tab. ("Fella asked me the other day if my name was really Pansy Jones. I said, 'No, honey, it's really Smith, but I think Pansy Smith sounds too common . . .'" That kind of stuff.)
A week or so after I went from The Lost Boy of San Jose to humble hotel resident, Pansy heard me singing falsetto as I scrubbed a stew pot. Next thing I know she had me at the piano, learning songs. The plan was for me to show up on amateur night at the Viceroy Theater. If I won five dollars, Pansy said, she'd keep two of them. As agents go, I've had worse.
The night of the show, Pansy dabbed me with rouge so the stage lights would pick up my face. The emcee—a dialect comic named Goody Gunter who said unt instead of and—recited all the acts on the bill to the audience before the show. Then he waved his long wooden hook over his head, to let everybody know what happened to acts that couldn't cut the mustard. I paced behind the curtain, as wet and nervous as I've ever been. Sometimes, along with wet-seat, I got what Mama used to call "nerve rash," and I'd have to wedge a compress of cold cornstarch between my bum-cheeks. But there was no time for cornstarch now! Blushing, I whispered my problem "downstairs" to Pansy. She took me by the shoulders and looked me right in the eye. "You wanna be a professional, you gotta learn to play with an ass-rash," she said.
And I would! I did. This wasn't just a performance, after all. This was for Pansy. (Of course I was sweet on her—which half meant I wanted her to be my Mom.) My slot was between a trained monkey act—the chimp's suit was better tailored than mine—and a German by the name of Eddie Meyers, who billed himself as "Tires Meyers, King of the Unicycle." When the emcee finally introduced me, I felt my heart sink. "Unt now, ve hafa young blimp, I mean boy, named Fatty, I mean Roscoe R. Butthole, I mean Arbuckle, who vill sing you a very lively tune . . ."
Why was he so mean? I turned to Pansy, in a sweat. She made kissy-lips and gave me a gentle shove from the wings. Actually, it wasn't that gentle. I stumbled, then caught myself and zombie-walked out in front of the lights. I started singing right away. When I hit center stage, I clasped my hands in front of my heart, swaying left and right the way Pansy'd said the pros do.
I thought things were going fine, but halfway through "Tell Mother That You Saw Me" I saw Goody, standing just behind the curtain, waggling that long hook at me. I didn't want to stop, so I sidestepped him. He tried to hook me a second time, and I broke into a crazy didder-jig, spinning around with my finger poked into the top of my head like a ballerina. I thought this got some laughs from the front-seaters. But I wasn't sure. The blood was so loud in my head it drowned everything else out. Goody took another swipe with the hook, nearly catching me, and this time I definitely heard some stomping and hollering. Finally, when the emcee ran right out onstage with the hook and had me cornered, I stopped singing altogether and took a tumble into the orchestra pit.
I landed on a pine-top piano bench that ended the evening as firewood, but I didn't feel a thing. Even Goody was laughing, though I could see Meyers stewing on his unicycle, spinning around in tight, angry little circles just offstage.
I won the five dollars. As promised, I gave Pansy two. She gave me a smooch when we got back to the hotel, and my heart felt like a burst pumpkin. It was all I could do to breathe. She waved goodbye with her pinky, the way fast girls did at that time, and scampered off toward the bar while I slunk to my cubbyhole.
Later that night, emboldened by a half-full short dog of rye I found in the Men's latrine, I left the broom closet and went searching for Pansy in the lobby. I saw her in a dark corner, sitting on a man's lap. The man looked distinguished. Even his lap looked distinguished. I was 13, and not distinguished at all. I started back for my c
loset, hoping she hadn't seen me, but Pansy called me over. When I'd skulked across the lobby to their couch, she introduced the distinguished gent as Mr. Grauman. "Of the Grauman theater chain."
I'd never crossed paths with an important man before, and when Mr. Grauman took my hand, I didn't know whether to shake or just let him hold it. But Mr. Grauman grinned. "Heard about your stunts, son. Pretty fast on your feet for a husky fella. You and I may be doing business someday."
You hear that, Daddy} I thought to myself, then wondered if I'd said it aloud, and looked at Mr. Grauman. But he was still smiling—like any man would with Pansy on his lap. When she pecked his distinguished forehead, Grauman winked at me. "I'm not kidding, son. I'll be watching out for you." Between Grauman's wink and Pansy's pecking, I felt like I was having my heart broken and my hope lifted all at the same time. The combination made me dizzy. Though it may have been the rye I found in the bathroom. The inside of my head felt stuffed with dead little animals.
Spilled Meat and Chihuahua Fear
Events after this take on a speedy and peculiar turn. I'm driving a meat wagon for Bill, picking up prime steaks and cutlets, when a giggly girl with a chihuahua in her purse hops out of a doorway onto the seat. I didn't even see her!
The rule was no riders. Especially female riders. (Pansy told me the last meat-boy had a habit of trading ground round for a round on the ground. I had no idea what this meant, so she explained that he gave girls free meat if they were nice to him. I often felt that she was entertaining me at her expense, but how could I mind?) Only it wasn't the female that got me into trouble. It was her pipsqueak pup.
Right away, the horses got skittish at the smell of dog. Rounding the corner in front of the hotel, they bolted. The cart tipped over and skidded, sending the meat spilling into the gutter. Giggling wildly, the girl jumped out, holding her Mexican hairless to her breast like a baby. She scampered off at the exact moment Bill came tearing out to see what the ruckus was. Plenty of hotel guests saw the accident, and those who didn't heard progressively inflated versions of it. (In one I was riding bareback, throwing chunks of prime rib at a pack of lady bandits.) Those ignorant few who ordered steak at dinner found themselves picking grit out of their T-bones.