Stay Interesting

by Jonathan Goldsmith

  I thought, Oh my God. What did I just see? This is going to change the world! Surely I had been drugged.

  I had so many questions for Dr. Benji.

  “Where’s the blood?” I asked.

  “No blood,” he answered. “Cauterize from the mind.”

  “Why is the cyst still there?”

  “Only hematoma. Swelling. Will disappear, two, three days.”

  I smiled in delight. Dr. Benji was a revolutionary shaman. He could change the course of civilization, transforming modern medicine and healing those who could not afford costly surgeries.

  He turned to me.

  “You have problem?” he asked.

  “Yes, since I’ve been in the Philippines, I have a problem with my stomach,” I said. Just like everyone else who visited the Philippines. “I have some discomfort.”

  “Let me see,” he said, placing his hands against my stomach, pushing here and squeezing there.

  “I fix,” he said.

  “Intestine twisted.”

  “How are you going to fix?”

  “I remove.”

  “You are going to surgically remove?”

  “With mind.”

  I stifled a laugh. Despite what I had seen, the jury was still out for me.

  “Dr. Benji, thank you,” I said. “I’m going to be in Beverly Hills in two weeks. I’ll go to my doctor.”

  “Okay, but I can fix,” he said.

  “No, no. But thanks,” I said, and inspected the next patient: a man who had a cyst on his cheek. And the next: a young girl with a tumor on her breast. After getting permission from his patients, I watched the procedures. Each performance was similar. The same blue bowl, the same smoldering ball of cotton, the same organ with entrails and blood on it. Wait just a minute. Something was off. How could each bit of excised tissue look the same, from entirely different ailments?

  “Nancy, I want that,” I said, pointing to the tissue that Dr. Benji had placed in the blue bowl for the third time.

  “What?” she said.

  “I want that material that he took—that he excised from this girl’s breast.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “I want it analyzed.”

  “I have to ask the doctor,” she said.

  “Go ahead.”

  She walked over to Dr. Benji. He said that I could keep the matter and not only have it analyzed but share it with any doctor I wanted to back in the United States. I believe he thought I was a financial pipeline, as he hinted a few times that I would get a good deal on treatment if I was to share my amazement as to his miracle surgeries back home.

  “Just don’t let them tell you it’s chicken guts,” he said.

  Don’t ask me how, but I got the tissue back to the United States fresh and untainted. In those days, you could fly with anything. I dropped it off at the office of a veterinarian I became friendly with and whose wife, Kay, knew the county medical examiner. She agreed to have the organ tested for me on the sly, and I anxiously waited for the results.

  “We got the tests back in,” the vet said a few days later.

  “What’s the verdict?”

  “Not of human origin. We’re pretty sure it’s chicken guts.”

  Dr. Benji was no miracle worker. But he was as good as any sleight-of-hand expert I had ever seen. The animal parts were arranged in the blue washcloth, placed there surreptitiously by my blond friend. I thought of all those patients who went home to die from what could’ve been a simple routine operation. That’s the simple explanation.

  What’s harder to explain is the others who had terminal prognoses who had made incredible recoveries from such procedures and went on to lead long and productive lives. Some people pray their ills away. Some go to modern hospitals. Some have Dr. Benji produce chicken guts out of thin air while breathing cotton smoke and listening to Bible readings and Tagalog chants. Was he a charlatan? Or a savior?

  Like most of us, I think he was a little of both.

  Some Good Guys Are Just Good

  The French Connection was a marvelous film, garnering a number of Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Gene Hackman. He played a cop who closed the largest drug bust of all time in those days, a whopping 112 pounds of heroin. Hackman played the wonder cop credited with this arrest: Popeye Doyle, based on the real-life New York police detective Eddie Egan.

  The truth was that it had little to do with great police work. In fact, the bust was actually an accident. How do I know this? Because once he made the bust and became famous, Eddie Egan moved to Hollywood. And that’s where we met and became very, very good friends. (He was, in fact, the godfather to my son David.) He was the funniest guy I ever knew.

  I met him at Warner Bros. Studios. We were working on different shows. I was walking through the cafeteria on my lunch break and this big hand grabs my wrist.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

  I knew who he was. In those days, everyone did. But I had no idea why he was looking for me.

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

  He was putting together a film—a continuation of The French Connection, how the 112 pounds of dope was stolen from the police locker by crooked cops and sold—yep—right back to the drug dealers. It was a great story.

  Eddie wanted me to play his partner, Sonny Grosso, so perfectly embodied by Roy Scheider in The French Connection. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Eddie Egan was the real McCoy, and he wanted me. At that moment, he was a hot property, wanted by everyone.

  He was also a world-class bullshit artist. A charming one, with a story, to be sure. But a bullshit artist. He had the tale and the way to tell it. He just needed money. For some reason, he wanted my help raising it.

  I knew there was a catch.

  But hey, who in Hollywood doesn’t want to be both an actor and a producer? I took the bait, and we got to work. We set up our first unofficial office at Houlihan’s Bar in Encino. Eddie already had his own table, after all, which was surrounded by a group of hangers-on. The office was always open, for some strange reason, commensurate with happy hour. We worked long, hard hours, so we could often be found at the office on Saturdays and Sundays too.

  We were close on seed money a few times. But truthfully, we were usually being hustled by even greater bullshit artists than we were. But Eddie kept attracting people. He was, truly, one of the greatest storytellers I have ever met. Everyone within earshot was spellbound by his tales.

  Maybe that’s why even the mob considered funding us. No, not a mob. The mob.

  They were rightfully indignant. One hundred twelve pounds of heroin is stolen from the police evidence locker and sold back to the public at a massive profit? They would’ve been happy—and quiet—if the heroin had gone to them. But it hadn’t. And they wanted to clear their good name. An emissary was sent to Sonny Franzese’s office, graciously offered rent-free at the Leavenworth federal prison. For some reason, he declined. Maybe because Eddie had put away so many of his business associates.

  Somehow, we opened a real office across from CBS Studios in the Valley. We had plans and we had great support from actors and crew, all of whom were under Eddie’s spell. They were willing to work for nothing, they said, and wanted only a proverbial “piece of the back end.”

  There never was a back end. Not for lack of trying. As his partner, I tried everything and took every meeting. A wife of a well-known swindler who raised dachshunds and helped her husband launder money through a kennel near Tijuana? Sure, I took that meeting. A well-known boxer who could hardly speak but would front cash for a guaranteed role? I took that meeting.

  Then, finally, a real break: A lawyer in New York phoned and said he had investors. They wanted a meeting. I rushed to Houlihan’s, our branch location. Eddie was surrounded by the usual wannabes.

  “I got someone! A whole bun
ch of someones!” I declared.

  Eddie was overjoyed. Especially since I was so sure. And even more so because I offered to pay my own way.

  “Where you staying? I like the Wyndham. Across from the Plaza, very reasonable. And the Oyster House is just a block away.”

  Reasonable and oysters made sense. I boarded a plane the next day.

  I walked into the lobby.

  “Jesus, you kept me waiting,” Eddie said, standing up. I had no idea how he got there that fast, but there he was. Off to our meeting, together. It couldn’t fail.

  Or maybe it could. And it did. It was poorly attended, to say the least. Even the lawyer who arranged it hadn’t shown up. But walking down the street with Eddie in New York was an experience I’ll never forget. Beat cops and cruisers stopped to shake his hand, like he was a celebrity. After the oysters, I went back to the hotel and Eddie went out on the town. He arrived back at the hotel penniless—the New York cop, the famous cop, had been mugged.

  Did we make the movie? No. Was it worth it? Yes. Eddie moved to Florida and opened a bar, which he’d always wanted to do. He was more than just a cop who did (more or less accidentally) a lot of good: He was good. And sadly, like all the good ones, he died far too young. And Eddie was a real good guy.

  Some Bad Guys Are Also Good Guys

  Domenic was a bad guy. I mean, a really bad guy. He had been a hit man for the mob. I met him for the first time in Los Angeles, when I hired him to build a barbecue in my backyard. One of his many talents—masonry. His other talents were intimidation, assault, and murder. He was an enforcer for Tony Provenzano, a capo in New York’s Genovese family. He didn’t confess that to me at first. Frankly, it would have been a terrible way to start a construction project. But once we got to know each other, he opened up. I was fascinated by Domenic. I had made a career playing characters like him. I tried to capture his strange high-pitched chuckle, his mannerisms, his idiosyncrasies. He was an incredible character: funny, violent, and yet very compassionate.

  “You ever kill a guy?” I asked him once, as we lit our cigars.

  “Yeah.”

  “Really? More than one?”

  “Yeah.”

  I looked at him questioningly, in shocked silence.

  “Twenty-two,” he said, very matter-of-factly.

  He had large hands, just massive paws, which I imagined he used to manhandle and hurt his victims. He had been a boxer, a middleweight contender, and later was a security guard at a bank. Even on that bank job, he tried to start a fight every day. He just liked to fight.

  Domenic had a sense of justice too. He’d been ordered to kill the mistress of a man who thought his secret was soon to be made public. A standard assignment: eliminate the girlfriend. So he went to the mistress’s house, pretending to be a friend of a friend. He waited on the stoop in the late afternoon. A woman got off the bus with a little girl in a Catholic school uniform. They started talking—she was a friendly woman.

  “Hey, it’s cold. Can we’s go upstairs?” he asked after a bit.

  The woman couldn’t have been sweeter, and she welcomed him inside. She was cooking, and he was hypnotized by the aroma of sautéed clams. She sent her daughter to do some homework and asked Domenic if he’d like wine. How gracious.

  “Would youse like to join us for dinner?” she asked.

  “What do you got?”

  “Vongole.”

  “Perfect.”

  The whole apartment was barely more than a room, and the window got all steamed up. As the room grew warm with the stove on, she took her sweater off. The mistress had a housedress on underneath. That’s when Domenic saw the bruises.

  “What’s that?” he asked her.

  “Nothing, it’s nothing,” she said, but she was clearly upset.

  He insisted she tell him.

  She’d gotten mixed up with the wrong guy, she explained.

  “It’s not all the time. Just sometimes, when he drinks . . .” She trailed off, trying to downplay it.

  Domenic was enraged. Apparently, he had no problem with killing an innocent woman on behalf of a stranger. But he did take umbrage at the fact that his client had beaten this sweet woman now making this lovely meal. There was a code, Domenic’s code, which had been broken.

  “I forgot I have to run an errand,” Domenic announced abruptly. “Keep it hot.”

  “Okay . . . ,” she said, confused.

  “I won’t be long.”

  He went out, found the guy—his own client—and took care of him. Then he returned for his share of the linguine vongole. It was still warm.

  Domenic’s universe of morals was so twisted up, I never even knew where I stood with him. So one day, I asked him.

  “Domenic, I’m just curious—if you got a contract to kill me, would you do it?”

  He started to think about the question.

  “No, Domenic, seriously. Do you really have to think about it that long? I’m supposed to be your friend.”

  Finally, he answered.

  “Johnny, business is business,” he said.

  I stared at him in shocked silence.

  “But I promise ya yous’ed never know I was there. I’d be right behind ya. You’d never know no fear.”

  Thanks, Dom. I feel much better now.

  He had a young daughter with a disability to whom he was completely devoted, taking her to every doctor he could find, completely doting on her. And he had a profession that required him to have no remorse. After he died, his mistress contacted me. He had left me something, she said. It was a book of poetry with a page marked. The poem on that marked page was about the importance and value of friendship.

  Be Happy with What You Have

  I instructed Captain Ed to prepare Celebration, my sixty-foot Gulfstar sailboat, for a journey from Trinidad to Miami, Florida, where she would be berthed for the remainder of the season. Captain Ed and I had sailed through the Caribbean often, though we’d never made a passage as long as this one. I could have sailed on to Alaska. I didn’t care. In that boat, which I occasionally lived on throughout the years, I was so damn happy. The boat seemed to deliver me mystical experiences. Once, I was with Robert Styx, a director and professor of film studies. We were sailing on the backside of Catalina during the time when the whales were running. It was October, kind of chilly. Full moon. We were drinking and having a good time. The waves were huge: long rollers way out to sea, the land far out of sight. We were heading out to San Nicolas, one of those outer islands off the coast of California. All of a sudden there was a roar and the boat rose fifteen feet in the air. A huge whale exploded from the sea. He had surfaced to spy on us. His eye looked like a plate, brown and beautiful. In that eye, I could see the moon, swinging like a pearl. He went up, then splashed down with that magnificent tail. He hit the water like a freight train and we got drenched. We sat in stunned silence. If the creature had hit us with his tail, it would have smashed my boat and us with it. But at that moment, when I looked right into the whale’s eye, there was a connection, and it was magical.

  That boat was an endless adventure. I found her for sale in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She had a special history, once the personal yacht of the very talented designer and boat builder Bill Lazzara. She carried a full complement of sail. I don’t remember the exact tonnage, but she was close to sixty thousand pounds, heavily built, designed to handle long and distant passages in comfort, safety, and luxury. In spite of her weight and sixteen-foot beam, she went to weather high and proud. She had some years on her, and it was a rare day when the air-conditioning, water maker, and refrigeration were all working at the same time. If the weather fax worked consistently, it might have spared us some close calls as we cruised between the islands on our way to and from Miami. She was strong, though, and her ability to handle a tempestuous, angry sea saved my life on two occasions.

 
This was one of those occasions.

  I was an experienced sailor, but to properly handle a boat like Celebration and a long passage through the Caribbean, it would have been foolish to attempt the trip myself. A reliable captain is hard to find, and I was blessed to have Captain Ed. (He refused to go by anything else—I once called him Eddie and we almost came to blows.) Captain Ed was more than just the best sailor I’ve ever known. He had earned his doctorate in metallurgy and could repair most anything on the boat and off it. He was also a teacher. Listening to him tell his stories about traveling the world as a vagabond—like the time he worked the Alaska pipeline, hitchhiked through India, found his way to an opium den in China, or survived an infestation of crabs in his eyebrows on a two-day bus trip through the Andes—were reminders to me that life should be lived fearlessly and passionately. Not so passionately that one ends up with crabs in one’s eyebrows, perhaps, a story of which I never got the full details. Among my fondest memories of my time with Captain Ed were sharing the view of many starry skies at night under a Caribbean moon, and laughing about the time we were boarded at gunpoint by the Bahamian navy.

  Here’s what happened: We had forgotten to light the anchor lamp before going to sleep, and because our vessel had no markings, the Bahamian navy suspected our dark ship of being a smuggling boat. Why else would we not have our lights on in these busy, very shallow waters? These Bahamian navy officers approached our boat with their guns raised. I sensed the commanding officer had a sense of humor.

  So I suggested it would be most unfair to shoot us both.

  “Just shoot the captain,” I said, pointing at Ed.

  We defused the situation with a few gifted bottles of rum and a case of beer, which we proceeded to drink together. The navy officer was even kind enough to let me photograph Captain Ed in their handcuffs, between two huge crewmen with their machine guns. We finished our beers, saluted our new friends, and sailed on. These were among the best days of my life, out to sea with a stiff breeze right on the beam, making eight to nine knots, the rigging humming a symphony of joy. Beside us, porpoises galloped across the sea like puppies at play and birds glided in muted adagio against a painted sky.