by Paul Theroux
It was exactly how I felt most of the time, had even said those very words in my upstairs room at Gaga’s. He was talking about me.
‘– and because they imagine that they don’t matter, anything they do is okay. They think to themselves, “Who cares?” ’
I had said that, too.
‘And every night before they go to sleep they think about themselves and the world, and they cry.’
So had I, and I wanted to tell him, but he was still peering at pieces of food on his fork, and still talking.
‘I suppose it does them a lot of good, in a way. After dark, most people in America murmur to themselves, Am I alone? and they weep because they know the answer. So they eat themselves silly and they get fat and drunk. The shapes of people! The way they swell and stick out – all the bags and bulges! Did you see that poor man who brought this food up to us, how paunchy he was?’
I nodded and I knew I was learning.
‘You’re too young to be able to imagine how they hate the way they look. And when they get sick they’re glad because they enjoy feeling sick, the way guilty people do.’
He sniffed his food and ate slowly, chewing the way people chewed gum.
‘Do fat people ever think about being fat?’ He swallowed and answered his own question. ‘Yes, they sorrow every waking second of the day. And at night they have nightmares about it. They resort to quackery, they take big multicolored capsules – Fat Blockers, Fat Melters, Fat Magnets, Dream Away diet pills that are supposed to draw fat off while you’re asleep. They wear “diet sunglasses” that project appetite suppressants on the retina. They sweat inside rubber sauna-suits and become dehydrated. But nothing works – they stay fat. They keep eating, they’re afraid of starving.’
Millroy kept eating, and his own eating made him look patient and sensible and strong. But the fat people he was talking about sounded sad and addicted. What they were doing was out of control, and demented and beyond eating.
‘They’re abused for being fat. Because they are seen as self-indulgent sinners it’s okay to mock them. People go out of their way to watch them eat, they grunt at them, they make mooing noises, they go “oink-oink.” They throw food at them.’
‘The kids used to throw food at Shannon Slupski in the school lunchroom. She was huge.’
‘They threw food at me, angel. And it made me sick, body and soul. Like most other chubbies, I didn’t think I deserved to feel well. And that’s why when I meet someone like Floyd Fewox or the Reverend Baby Huber, who looks like a turnip, I understand them – I can deal with them. I know their pain.’
The only thing I could think of to say was, ‘Couldn’t you help them get healthy?’
He was chewing as he said, ‘It would take too long. They’re too old. They’d try and drag me down. No, there are other ways, sugar.’
He put his fork down. All the food he had rejected he had pushed to the edge of his plate.
‘Health, strength, will-power, wit and nutrition. The Book saved me. I’ll tell you all about it sometime.’
He had finished eating. He would now, I knew, be very quiet, digesting his food, settling his stomach. The last thing he said before he squatted on the floor was, ‘But consider this. Was Jesus ever under the weather? Does the Book ever speak of Jesus coughing or afflicted by gas or pneumonia? Was the Savior ever sick? Think about it.’
Soon he was snoring softly in his own separate room. He needed sleep, he said. Magic came from strength.
When I was alone with the flowers and the tree in my big bed I thought of how Millroy had said Americans cried at night. I had been frightened at times but I was glad to be with this man, no matter how strange this set-up might seem to someone else. But I did not want to hear him say he was alone, because that would have meant that I was too.
I was now used to his speaking up in the darkness. That night, after the lights were out, he said in a clear voice, ‘Don’t you think America should know what I know?’
13
In each different place and sometimes at different times of day I could see that Millroy was a different man and an odd man, odder than anyone I had ever known in my life. The next morning it was another place and another Millroy. We were in a yellow taxi going from the hotel to the studio for the audition – my first taxi, my first hotel, and what was an audition? – and Millroy turned to me and said, ‘Who are you?’
Just like that, in a stranger’s voice, with a big face near mine, and with his eyes on me, waiting for my answer.
I blinked back at him. His eyes were dark and depthless and gentle, but they did not help me. He looked straight into me. The very way he asked a question and set his eyes on you could make you feel secure, or else the opposite – make you squirm. I was worried, verging on desperate, and he knew it.
‘I can wait,’ he said. ‘I’ve got all day.’
I was so glad there was a pane of glass between us and the driver. Tears came to the edges of my eyes because I was thinking again, I am no one, and then I said it.
‘That’s not true this morning,’ Millroy said, so sure of himself that I blew my nose and brightened up.
But I also thought again, as I did every time I got worried, What am I doing here? Whenever I felt stupid I realized I was in danger, and never mind who I was, who was Millroy?
That was his next question.
‘You are Millroy the Magician,’ I said. ‘You made me disappear, you live in Pilgrim Pines Trailer Park in Buzzards Bay.’
‘What else, son?’
That stopped me. I blinked at my tears, I pushed my hands against my blue jeans to wipe the dampness off my palms, and said, ‘You’re my father.’
‘And who are you?’
‘Alex?’
‘You’re learning,’ Millroy said.
He leaned back in the seat and glanced out of the taxi window at a cop directing traffic.
‘Do you realize that every minute I am with you I am breaking the law?’
My hair was cut short and felt like a shoe brush. I was wearing boy’s clothes and sneakers. Millroy was a wizard, but there was so much to remember, because of the way we lived. Now I was worried again. He could calm me one minute and make me fret the next.
‘But the law is ignorant and the world doesn’t know that I will never hurt you.’ He was frowning at the taxi driver, and he added in a whisper, ‘That man has been eating a Danish pastry ever since we left the hotel.’
At the TV station, Millroy paid the driver and said, ‘I am not trying to scare you or exaggerate for effect, but that Danish pastry will do you more harm than smoking dope. Next time you feel a craving for pastry, say to yourself, “I think I’ll have an apple!” ’
‘Let me worry about that,’ the driver said.
‘I would, except that you’re not worried at all,’ Millroy said. ‘And you should be, with that dangerous thing in your hand.’
But the man drove away angry and Millroy smiled again, a fatherly smile of pity and protection.
It was lucky that Millroy had that talk with me in the taxi, because almost the first thing the woman at the TV station said to me was, ‘I bet you’re real proud of your dad.’
‘I sure am,’ I said, and I was. I also realized that it was easy calling him Dad, because I had no other name for him.
Millroy was at that moment saying, ‘You have the most interesting name, Mr Mazzola. I want to hear all about it.’
‘My ancestors were Italian, as you might have guessed,’ the man said, and began describing how poor and miserable they had been when they came to America.
‘Europe’s still a very unhealthy place,’ Millroy said.
I was looking at Mr Mazzola’s hair, the way it was lopped, strand by strand, across the top of his head, from back to front, and arranged there and stuck down like an ornamental plant. I knew Millroy was studying it too, and that afterwards he would say, as he had of Floyd F
ewox, Hair! It’s the great give-away. Never mind that hair loss is directly traceable to poor diet, bad circulation, and iron deficiency. Imagine the amount of time such a person spends in front of the mirror! The top of that man’s head is an alarm bell, signaling deep insecurity.
Millroy also claimed he had many reasons for shaving his own head, which he did every few days with a buzzing razor, and one of those was that it gave other men a sense of superiority.
Meanwhile he was encouraging Mr Mazzola, who was head of the whole TV station, calling him ‘Eddie,’ and walking down the corridor towards the studio they were laughing like old friends, though the man was doing all the talking.
Then Sondra Spitler the producer was introduced to Millroy and he said, ‘I’ve got an uncanny feeling that your birthday is October twenty-second.’
‘Right! That’s amazing,’ Miss Spitler said. ‘How did you guess?’
‘It’s not a guess. I knew. I’m psychic – you probably hate that word! And that’s my birthday, too.’
The woman was so pleased she patted the chair beside her and said, ‘Tell me more.’
‘You’re so kind,’ Millroy said. ‘The number three’ – he was waggling his fingers in the air and squinting, as though he were getting signals from the sky. ‘I am receiving that number from your pulsations. Three has a strong meaning for you.’
‘I have three children,’ Miss Spitler said.
‘The third one,’ Millroy said. ‘You are very concerned about your third child. I am receiving a “T.” ’
‘His name is Thomas.’
‘Yes. That would be it,’ Millroy said. ‘I am sensing a sharp pain in the stomach – here,’ and he touched the front of his shirt.
The woman said, ‘My son Tom has been diagnosed as having diverticulitis. I haven’t slept since I heard. I almost didn’t make it here today – and I’m supposed to be running your audition.’
‘It is very important that you came today – that we met,’ Millroy said, and took the woman’s hand. He had once held my hand that way, and it was as though he had tugged my soul out from my fingertips. ‘I want you to stop worrying about your son.’
‘I keep picturing him in pain, and all those antibiotics,’ Miss Spitler said. ‘And drinking barium.’
‘I can feel that,’ Millroy said, closing his hand on her fingers. ‘But you need a second opinion. Your own opinion.’
‘All I know is what the doctor told me. I don’t know anything about diverticulitis.’
‘Your doctor is overweight,’ Millroy said. ‘What would he care about bulgy pouches in his colon?’
The woman said nothing, but she was looking slitty-eyed and thinking, Yes, our doctor is kind of fat.
‘Massive gas build-up? Rectal tenderness? Constipation? Crampy gut? Nausea? Bloating?’
‘Tom’s had just about all of those symptoms.’
‘Diverticulitis is a Mclllness, and Tom is full-figured, too,’ Millroy said. ‘He likes fat burgers with big soft buns, hot dogs, Froot Loops, fizzy drinks, sugary snacks. He’s like most youngsters, and like most youngsters this low-residue diet is not reaming his colon.’
‘The doctor has him on antibiotics.’
‘Bitter herbs – sound familiar? Numbers nine-eleven. The inner bark of pau d’arco is a natural antibiotic. Boil it and get him to drink buckets of it. After the inflammation has eased and his colon’s open get some whole food into him. He needs fiber. He needs garlic. No sugar, no fat.’ Millroy had lowered his head and was looking into the woman’s eyes. ‘Diverticulosis is precipitated into full-blown destructive diverticulitis by diet – too much junk food, not enough roughage. If Tom is ill –’
But then another woman approached him and said, ‘We need you in make-up, Mister Millroy.’
‘Doctor Millroy,’ he said. ‘But you can call me Uncle Dick.’
Before he was led away to the make-up room, Millroy turned to Miss Spitler and said, ‘Don’t worry, dear. No doctors.’ He released her hand and touched her head like a priest touching someone at the altar rail, and he said, ‘We’ll want to get his weight down, first of all. And I can tell you the treatment in two words.’ He smiled and said, ‘Dietary control. Feed him.’
That woman, Miss Spitler, and Mr Mazzola and two other men waited at the studio entrance for Millroy. When I peeked inside I saw what an audition was – a roomful of kids, and those four adults on their way in. He would get the job if he managed to please all these people.
There were seventy-five or a hundred children in chairs surrounding the studio stage, and they were restless and fidgety, all colors, all ages up to fifteen or so.
‘You’ll have to sit in the peanut gallery for now, angel,’ Millroy said to me, when he came out of the make-up room with his face rouged and his mustache combed straight, and a dustiness on his bald head. ‘But you know what to do.’
At the doorway, Mr Mazzola introduced Millroy to the two other men, Otis Godberry and Mr Phyllis, who because he was still wearing his smock from the make-up room, I did not at first recognize. Then I saw his pink socks.
Otis Godberry said, ‘We’ve got some kids here from the projects in Dorchester’ – he said ‘projects’ in a certain way, meaning ghetto – ‘and I’d appreciate it if you could make them feel especially welcome. They find it awfully hard to fit in with the other kids.’
‘Because they’re horrid little beasts. You might have to employ persuasion,’ Mr Phyllis said. And puckered his wrinkly mouth. ‘Like a massive clout on the earhole.’
‘They’re part of our target audience,’ Mr Mazzola said in a stern voice.
‘I’ll keep them in mind,’ Millroy said.
‘You’ll be lucky if you can just shut them up,’ Mr Phyllis said. ‘Paradise Park has never had a live audience before, and I don’t see any reason to start now.’
‘This’ll just be a pilot program,’ Miss Spider said. ‘See how it goes.’
‘And who do we have here?’ Mr Phyllis asked, turning his wrinkly face on me. ‘You’re quite the little charmer.’
‘This is Alex, he’s going off his bird,’ Millroy said. ‘You know how impatient youngsters can get.’
Then we all walked into the studio, and Millroy went to the center of the stage, opened his box of tricks, and took charge, silencing the studio by dropping his chainsaw and making an enormous crash.
‘Excuse me, this is my first day with my new hand –’
He plucked off his hand and screwed it in again and flexed his fingers. He now had everyone’s attention. He started the chainsaw and juggled it, with a bowling ball and a flaming torch, all the while telling the children how hungry he was.
‘But I brought my lunch.’
He stopped juggling and licked all the flames from the torch, guzzling the fire. He swallowed a sword – shoved a two-foot sword into his mouth and pulled out the handle and a few inches of the blade (‘I needed some iron in my system’), and then found his chicken Boobie in a small girl’s purse. He did his chicken-pot pie trick and ate some of that. He turned a studio technician’s cellular phone into a banana, peeled it and ate it, and produced the sound of a ringing phone in his stomach. He made a little boy named Darren disappear in the Indian basket. Darren turned up in a bureau drawer at the other side of the stage, wearing a Harvard sweatshirt and a crimson beanie, looking confused.
Millroy next produced a puppet, and the puppet conjured Boobie the chicken, feathers and all, out of the pie. The puppet clapped a silver dome over Boobie – shrieked ‘Lonny!’ – the name of a boy in the front row – and when he removed the dome there were ten pieces of fried chicken where Boobie had been. The children loved it, and cheered, but Millroy said that greasy chicken was no good for you, and after more business with the puppet and the lid, made a pile of plums appear where the greasy chicken had been.
‘If you eat what I eat, you’ll be able to work magic like me,’ Millroy said
, and did twenty one-arm push-ups while pinching a spoon behind his back and bending it.
He had placed the puppet on a table where it lay limp and lopsided like a broken doll. Millroy said the puppet had been so helpful, he wanted to make it into a real kid. The puppet wore a red shirt and a baseball hat and blue jeans.
‘He deserves to be a real boy,’ Millroy said.
I knew my signal, and where to go and how to vanish by bunching myself up in the box off stage. I did not see Millroy make the puppet disappear, but I could hear him asking the kids whether he should make the puppet into a real boy.
The children screeched ‘Yes!’ over and over and went on squawking like parrots as Millroy persisted with his questions, winding the kids up, and the next thing I knew Millroy was whacking the top off my box with a hammer. I stood up, dressed like the puppet, whom I resembled, in the red shirt and baseball hat and blue jeans I had put on in the box.
Millroy calmed the cheering and whistling, while I dropped out of sight, and he said that Uncle Dick had some questions for them – Uncle Dick’s history lesson.
‘How many of you know what grandparents are?’
A boy in the front row answered that they were your Dad’s and Mom’s parents.
‘And what are their parents called – your grandparents’ folks?’
‘Great-grandparents!’ Several children competed to shout this.
‘And if you’ve got four grandparents and each of them has parents how many great-grandparents does that make?’
Eventually they got it right – eight great-grandparents.
‘Now Uncle Dick has a real interesting question for you youngsters,’ Millroy said.
Even the adults were listening closely to this – Mr Mazzola, Miss Spitler, Otis Godberry and the frowning Mr Phyllis.
‘How many of you can say that all eight of your great-grandparents were born in the USA? If one of them was born in Ireland or Puerto Rico or Italy, or somewhere else, just sit there. But if you know that all eight of your great-grandparents were born in the USA I want you to stand up.’
There was a little shuffling and then – how did Millroy know this? – twelve black children stood up, smiling proudly. And a big person was standing, too, the last man on the judging panel, and he was black too, Otis Godberry.