The Dead Celebrities Club

by Susan Swan

  One report was especially enticing. There, in Nurse Easto’s cramped writing, was a long-winded description of the nocturnal habits of that crypto-sadist, the prefect Thompson. According to Nurse Easto, eighteen-year-old Thompson still wet his bed, and the prefect had to sleep on a rubber mat placed tactfully under his flannel bedsheets. In Thompson’s medical file, there was a pile of old laundry bills with a scribbled note: “Send to Mrs. W.H. Thompson, 42 Forest Hill Rd.”

  Soon afterwards, an idea came to me about how Earl and I could use Dr. Wilkes’s reports to alter the game of chance in our favour. Full disclosure: Mrs. B. had only six months to live, while old Cootes might linger on, the way tiresome and undeserving people often do. If the boys knew the truth about Mrs. B.’s situation, they would vote for her, so it behooved us to improve the odds. Yes, daring was called for, although daring brought punishment. I stole an empty medical form from the drawer in the hall and jotted down in what I hoped resembled Dr. Wilkes’s beetle-like scrawl a summary of Cootes and his Parkinson’s diagnosis. I used the adjective terminal several times and, only once, the damning sentence Not expected to live out the year.

  Chances are Dr. Wilkes never wrote anything as definitive as “Not expected to live out the year,” but my schoolmates hadn’t combed through each sick boy’s medical form, an experience that led me to appreciate the gravitas of medical terminology. At first, I went overboard forging Dr. Wilkes’s report, tossing in phrases like idiopathic parkinsonism and the substantia nigra, which, after all, is just a harmless region of the midbrain. In the end, I kept in idiopathic, meaning no known cause, and threw out the other unpronounceable medical words. My forged report was a samizdat document, and I put in just enough snippets of medical knowledge to impress my downtrodden schoolmates.

  Earl showed my samizdat report to a few of the boys in junior school, swearing them to silence; it was a bargain they couldn’t keep. And sure enough, several days later, the boarding school seethed with rumours about pervy old Cooties departing for the big schoolhouse in the sky. Soon the older boys were asking if they could see the damning report, and Earl and I showed it to them after they swore an oath of secrecy. We were especially pleased to offer a peep to Thompson. When he swaggered off, looking like the proverbial cat that lapped up the cream, we knew our ruse had worked.

  The report began to look dog-eared. Earl kept it neatly folded under his pillow. Then, just as we expected, it disappeared. By that time, all of the boarding school was betting on Cootes.

  When Mrs. B. died first, Earl won the jackpot of $900 and I took an administration fee for the same amount.

  The sums appeared in the reporter’s story, and in other accounts by hacks in the world’s most impecunious trade. Mother cried her eyes out. How did Pater react? He used his own belt to strap me. And when the swelling went down, I felt a tingling sensation that brought with it a sense of euphoria.

  14

  EARL SAID NUGENT was the one who told on us because Nugent worked as a stringer while he was a student at Munson Hall. Every few weeks, he supplied tidbits of gossip to a Toronto daily that unfairly scrutinized well-to-do families like my own. And it was true that Nugent seemed pleased when I was expelled and Earl was sent to a military college near West Point. About three weeks after I was obliged to leave Munson Hall, Meredith stole into my bedroom and whispered that a R-E-P-O-R-T-E-R was waiting downstairs.

  I found the witless scribe lounging on Mother’s chintz sofa. The man’s head loomed dangerously close to Pater’s beloved fox hunting print, The Master and the Hounds, and when I pointed this out, the reporter sat forward obligingly as if I were a bona fide truth teller.

  Reporter: Some of your friends say Mr. Cootes is overly fond of his students.

  Self: We don’t take old Cooties too seriously. He enjoys caning us boys. When he applies himself, his hearing aids spring out of his ears.

  Reporter: Old Cooties! (laughing) That’s a good one. I understand you have something called the zebra award for the most canings.

  Self: That is correct. My friend Earl Lindquist has second place.

  Reporter: Did you bet on the death of Mr. Cootes because he was disliked?

  Self (trying to keep a straight face): We bore him no malice.

  Reporter: And the headmaster’s wife? Did you expect her to die first?

  Self: No. She was thirty years younger than old Cootes.

  Reporter (laughing again): All right. I see. Did the boys like Mrs. Bellwoods better than Mr. Cootes?

  Self: Mrs. B. took the place of the infirmary nurse on weekends, so she knew which of us had wet his bed. And sometimes she spanked the offender with a wooden spoon.

  Reporter: It sounds like you boys felt malice toward her too.

  Self: May I kindly suggest that you are missing the point, good sir? Our candidates could have been any one of our teachers.

  Reporter: And then Mrs. Bellwoods died.

  Self: Yes.

  Reporter: Did you go to the funeral?

  I lowered my eyes and didn’t answer.

  Reporter: It would have been a nice thing to do, don’t you think?

  Self: I guess so.

  Mother suddenly appeared with the tea tray. The look on her face suggested she disapproved of the underhanded way the reporter was leading the witness.

  Mother: My son’s schoolboy prank didn’t cause that woman’s death. It’s time for you to leave.

  The reporter stood up quickly. Mother, gloriously disapproving in her designer slacks, ushered the gormless scribbler out while I gobbled down the petits fours.

  15

  Tim Nugent

  THE LIGHTS ARE winking off in the Metropolitan Life Tower. It happens every evening around this time. Yet the sight always affects him. It’s as if God in person is flicking the switches.

  He gets up and puts on the kettle for a pot of green tea. Tim didn’t realize ghosting the memoir meant Dale Paul would include Tim in the stories about their childhood. And now he has written that Tim squealed on his friends. What a jerk Dale Paul could be! If his old friend stopped to think, he would know that squealing was the last thing Tim would do, although maybe he should have told a prefect or a kindly master. Instead good old Pilot kept his mouth shut and watched Earl and Dale Paul rake in the money.

  Of course, Dale Paul has never shown much curiosity about Tim or Tim’s life outside school. All the Pauls were like that. They assumed the world stopped at the edge of their velvety lawns. For instance, Dale Paul didn’t ask about Tim’s summers. Meredith did, though, and she was the only one in the family he told about his job as a two-way man on the North Bay Nugget, his hometown newspaper, which has devolved into an information rag. He had written for the paper and taken the photographs that accompanied his stories. It was a kind of apprenticeship no newspaper journalist would experience now.

  If Dale Paul paid any attention, he would know that unlike Dale Paul, Tim had been brought up to do the right thing. That meant putting the other person before himself. It was the Nugent family ethos. Don’t put yourself forward — listen to what the other person has to say. Better to be a yes-man, to see success as pleasing people … to stay in the background so others like Dale Paul could frolic in the limelight.

  He thinks back to his arguments with his father, who wanted him to take over the family dental practice in North Bay. Tim wanted to be a novelist, but his father said Tim had a good second-class mind so he shouldn’t aim too high. Dale Paul’s ambitions hadn’t been dismissed like that. And just look where Tim’s boyhood training has led him. He became a journalist, a job that was about making other people look important.

  Of course, he is an author now, which is a step up from journeyman reporter on the New York Post. But ghosting the memoir is forcing him to remember who he used to be, and he dislikes the picture of the boy he was almost forty-five years before. Impressionable, callow … now there w
as a Dale Paul word, callow. It wasn’t a word he would normally use. Maybe ghosting the book is some kind of reckoning.

  He thinks back to the Sunday evening when he and Dale Paul and Earl had been sitting on one of the uncomfortable wooden benches in the Munson Hall Common Room. They were talking in lowered voices about their schoolboy bet, About to Die. At the pulpit, the headmaster, Rolly Bellwoods, was reading from the Bible, oblivious to how he was boring everybody. Once in a while, one of the prefects in the front row would throw a stern look at the three boys, who were conferring about the best way to circulate Dale Paul’s fake doctor’s report on Mrs. B.’s health. The report would squelch the rumour that Mrs. B. was going to be the first to die.

  In his fake report, Dale Paul had declared: “Last week, the problem in the minuscule duct in Lannie Bellwood’s bountiful mammary gland was resolved by a medical operation. At forty-two, Lannie is a fine figure of a woman, robust and firm-breasted, with healthy menses. When last measured, her strapping breasts are thirty-eight inches round following the circumference of her bra strap …”

  Earl had been interested in her breast measurements, so Dale Paul had put that last sentence in for his benefit.

  What’s menses? Earl asked. Tim and Dale Paul exchanged a glance before Tim muttered: A woman’s time of month.

  Oh, okay, yeah. Earl nodded, looking thoughtful.

  Then Tim dropped his bombshell. I don’t want to be part of this.

  Don’t be a goody two-shoes, Dale Paul hissed.

  Woman Nugent, Earl growled. Are you going to squeal on us?

  Tim’s face had turned red and he heard himself say okay, he wouldn’t drop out.

  IN THE MORNING, Tim carefully puts away Dale Paul’s account of About to Die.

  I don’t think your boarding school story is going to work, he wrote in an email to Dale Paul. So far, the only setting I’m working with is the prison, and although there are certain similarities, it may be confusing for the reader to hear what you did at Munson Hall. He didn’t really mean confusing, he meant incriminating, but he isn’t going to put that in writing. In fact, there could also be legal problems mentioning the celebrity dead pool that Dale Paul has described to Tim. His editor, Alexis, told Tim to let Dale Paul blurt out his story. The lawyers will worry about its implications later. Alexis also said the same thing about Tim’s descriptions of “the condition” affecting Earl Lindquist: We’ll fix it — if and when it needs fixing. Alexis is either reckless or distracted, Tim decides, but he isn’t going to argue with her.

  In an email, Dale Paul writes back that Tim is dead wrong about wanting to keep their schoolboy lottery out of the book. Remember what P.T. Barnum used to say? Dale Paul asks. There’s a sucker born every moment and most of them live.

  If that’s the way you feel I won’t stand in your way, Tim replies. It’s your memoir.

  Well said, Pilot, Dale Paul answers. I’m exceedingly grateful you are such a smart amanuensis!

  And there it was all in one sentence, Tim thinks. The insulting school nickname implying that Tim is like a pilot fish that feeds off the leavings of sharks, the insincere flattery and arcane words that camouflage Dale Paul’s childish determination to get his own way.

  16

  Dale Paul

  Blessed with deep pine forests, softly rounded mountain peaks, and isolated islands set on quiet lakes, the Adirondacks region offers endless days of adventure for outdoor lovers.

  — THE NORTH COUNTRY TRAVEL GUIDE

  THE WARDEN IS as free as a forest ranger in a tower. While I wait in his office, I gaze at his vista. There isn’t a house or a church steeple to be seen. The mountains in this vast parkland are treed to the top so the view from his third-floor window resembles a colourful autumnal rug that some woodland troll has unrolled toward the wall of the sky. A confining wall, in my case.

  My eyes turn to the warden’s bookshelves, which appear to be stacked with texts about rehabilitating prisoners. The books express his benign intelligence. In the parlance of Inmate dot com, Nathan Rickard is known as Mr. R.; the R stands for reasonable because he is a prison apparatchik for whom no outrage is too horrible to understand, a teaching guy warden, who is far and away more desirable than the custody type, who likes to apply the lash of punishment. Nathan Rickard cares about his boys, in other words.

  Among the books, I spot a leather-bound ma thesis with the words Edmund Bergler: Freud’s Forgotten Disciple, by Nathan J. Rickard. Bergler is the name of the psychologist the warden mentioned at our tea. I pull out the thesis and flip through the pages, shaking my head incredulously at sentences like: The gambler is a neurotic who gambles to lose.

  Behind my back, there is an unexpected susurration, like a hospital door hissing open on its hydraulic hinges. When I turn around, the warden is looking at me speculatively behind the rimless wafers of his spectacles, and I wonder if I am about to hear something unpleasant. Note to self: No matter what he tells you, Nathan Rickard has a palpable desire to demonstrate that he is immune to your celebrity. But who you are still impresses him. Put his conflicted feelings to good use. Let him know he is your equal, a desire true of any man, any man at all.

  You agree with what this shrink says? About gambling being masochistic? I ask as I stick his thesis back on the shelf.

  The warden smiles enigmatically, and from a metal box on the shelf behind his desk, he extracts a letter.

  You got clearance for a workshop, he says and hands the letter over.

  October 7, 2012

  Dear Sir:

  We received your request for another new recreational program at Essex Correctional Institute. As you know, Essex already has a dance program and extra costs are involved in the establishment of a workshop on financial literacy. However, we have decided to tentatively approve a workshop for a one-year period. In a few weeks’ time, your prison will be visited by a New York City psychologist, Ms. Trish Bales, who will study the afficacy of the program you set up. Please cooperate fully. She will answer any questions you have.

  Afficacy. Surely, the bop official means efficacy. How pleased Bailey will be to know he shares the habit of hideous spelling with the prison admin.

  Can you design the program for my boys? Nothing fancy. They will have to relate to what you say or it will be a waste of time.

  Good sir, I am honoured by your trust!

  Glad to hear that, Dale Paul. The warden strokes the wiry stubble of his Vandyke. Heck, the past few months must have been hard on you. Just as you’re getting adjusted, you lose your kid. Maybe it’s time to check this out? He hands me a book from his shelf.

  You saw my thesis about Bergler? The shrink is out of favour, but he’s still got a few things to say. There’s red meat about gamblers in these pages.

  The title reads Principles of Self-Damage by Edmund Bergler. Clearly, Nathan Rickard doesn’t understand how much I dislike psychotherapy, that juvenile North American folly. You pay a dollar and buy your way to self-improvement. Pure codswallop. There is no cure for someone such as myself, or him, for that matter.

  Okay. I’ll level with you, the warden says. His eyes grow sad. My brother played the numbers, and Bergler’s books helped me to see why. We grew up in the South Bronx, he added, in case I didn’t understand the humble nature of his origins.

  I don’t know your brother’s story. But I have gambled to win and won. Nobody can deny my success.

  He stands up and shakes my hand, smiling his odd, secretive smile. Okay, that’s it for today, Dale Paul. Report back to me when you have your course designed.

  He doesn’t need to tell me twice.

  17

  THAT NIGHT, LYING in my bunk, I mull over the celebrities I will put in my dead pool. There’s my erstwhile friend Earl Lindquist, who won’t return my phone calls, and the Hollywood actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, whose blond hair rides her shoulders in bountiful curls, along with Leo
nard Nimoy, alias Mr. Spock from Star Trek. I doodle their faces using the felt pen I bought at the commissary. It cost five dollars, a horrendous sum for a man living on inferior means. Above me, Bailey is falling asleep counting what-ever a man from his background counts while Derek is reading a yoga magazine.

  One-two, skip to my Lou, and over you go. The celebrities fly through the air like fluffy sheep.

  The next day, after our prison jobs are done, I walk over to Cat Alley, where John and Aldo are grooming the huge marmalade tabby. My new friend is using a large purple comb with the word Furminator embossed in silver on its side. Aldo holds the cat by its shoulders so Mr. Jack can comb the mats out of its coat. The sight triggers the sensation I felt on my first morning at Essex, that I have stepped into a prison movie, and what I see in front of me — the handsome gangster stroking the cat in the languid Blofeld manner, Aldo nodding obsequiously at everything the gangster says, the orange tabby stretching and arching its back, its haunches twitching with pleasure under the touch of the gangster’s hand — all these actions are tinged with the air of cinematic exaggeration. America is a screen-loving land, after all, and possibly John Giaccone is more talented than I give him credit for being. Sooner or later, when we know each other better, he will drop his guard and initiate me into the charade he performs for the other scofflaws.

  We’re going to bet on dead celebrities, I announce. To qualify, you need to be in the news and about to die.

  The warden approved your dead pool, guy?

  In a manner of speaking. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, John. Here’s how it will work. The men will bet on which of our old or frail celebrities will be the first to leave the planet. And we’ll use handicaps to come up with our list of candidates. Take the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor. I loved her movies when I was a boy. Maybe you remember her?