by Yoram Kaniuk
He got up, embraced me and embraced Oved and I felt a tear falling onto my lapel, then he turned his back on us and said, It’s been a long time since we had such honored guests, it has nothing to do with money, I mean what you’ve brought from your country, but I’ve got no choice. Business is business in America. It’s not about doing or accepting favors. And that’s how it really was. I was disappointed, but not Oved. He said this was proof the system worked, we’d made it onto their list, which meant that we’d get rich yet, we just had to bide our time because with us it was the other way round, we’d beaten the house but lost the table. Next time we’d come with more money and instead of here we’d go to Reno or Europe and play for a short time for big money and get out before anyone invited us to take a nap in some hole in some desert even there are no deserts in the south of France but look there are plenty of lonely mountaintops nearby and those Nazis, added Oved, who was already thinking about the Mayans and Mexico and Guatemala where he would spend most of his life, those Nazis will shoot us one way or the other.
After about two hours the Packard following us disappeared from the rearview mirror and in the middle of nowhere we saw a small town: a gas station and a diner, a few houses, a small street with stores, a police station and a bus station; we saw that the town was called Mojave. We bought a cold drink. It was very hot. From behind the station appeared a cop wearing a huge wide-brimmed Stetson and who looked like Gary Cooper. He went over to Oved who was at the wheel and said he wanted us to get out of the car because he wanted to ask us a few questions. There was no point in arguing. He pulled out a notebook and wrote down Oved’s name and asked where he was from and Oved said he was from Gedera, California. Then the cop said that the car had Kansas plates. Oved said, Right, that’s where the plates must be from, and that he’d been in Kansas too, once. But they’re 1949 plates, the cop said, and it’s not enough to be somewhere to get plates from there, I’ve been to Arizona but I’ve got Nevada plates, and Oved said he’d been to Arizona too, and the cop gave him a long look and Oved added, It’s good you noticed, but 1949 was just a good year, you know? Especially in Gedera, California. We still feel that way today. And the cop was taking a liking to Oved, you could see it, and he smiled and said, Okay, so where’s your license? Oved looked and said that for some reason he couldn’t find it. The cop looked sympathetic and asked about the insurance. Oved said he’d left it in Las Vegas. Tell me, asked the cop, have you got any papers at all? Just one piece of ID? Oved showed him his tattered passport with the Jewish National Fund stamps and the United Jewish Appeal stamps and stamps from the honorary consuls in Italy, Mexico, Guatemala, but the cop said it was written in a language he couldn’t read and asked, Have you got a single document proving that this is your car and that you are you and that you live where the license says, wherever it is, because if you do, I’ll help you out. Oved said he did have those documents, but that the cop would have to let us drive on to Los Angeles in order for Oved to find them, and that he didn’t understand at all who’d taken off the California plates and replaced them with plates from Kansas through which he’d passed only once and he’d seen wheat and corn fields and the moment he got to Los Angeles he promised he’d bring the papers to the nearest police station. The cop spoke from such a height that I had to stand on tiptoe to hear him. He was the most decent man I’ve ever met in any desert. He really tried to help, and asked questions like, Have you got enough money to get a license right now so you can keep driving? And, Have you got insurance, which Oved had already told him he hadn’t. In the end the cop told us sadly that even with the best will in the world he had to impound the car at the police station and if Oved brought him proof of ownership and a driver’s license at the very least, even without the right plates, the car would be returned to him. Meanwhile you should wait because there’s a bus in two hours’ time. Oved asked him, Who takes the bus home from Vegas? And the cop said, You. And he laughed.
The car was put into the yard behind the diner and the cop had to take off on his motorcycle after receiving a message on his radio that a Ford driven by a drunk had been spotted doing a hundred and fifty, and he left, but not before he apologized. We only had enough money for a few sandwiches because buying gas had swallowed up most of our winnings. Eventually a bus arrived packed with people who it turned out had all gambled and lost their cars and their money and their watches and rings and fancy suits and their savings and their daughters and wives and children and jobs, and they sat defeated, downcast, bent over, smoking and mumbling. Some tried to snap out of it and shouted, What am I going to tell my wife? She’ll kill me, and she’s right to, because I also mortgaged her brother’s house! We arrived in Los Angeles a few hours later and Handsome David came to pick us up after Oved called him. Hanoch had apparently wanted to come over too, but a search of his wife’s purse—she already knew where not to keep her money—yielded nothing. Paul came to ask what about Guatemala and when would we make some money and I managed to get a small loan from Nick Conte, an amiable actor I had befriended, and I bought some paints, brushes, and canvases and did a few paintings and to these Hanoch added two of my paintings he already had and we put up an exhibition in Billy Wilder’s apartment, who said his name was Shmuel and was a warm and funny man and I told him that my father had only seen one movie in his entire life, Wilder’s Ninotchka, after which whenever anyone asked him if he wanted to go to the movies he would say, but I’ve already seen Ninotchka, and then repeat the joke about I want coffee without cream and the waiter who comes back and says, I’m sorry sir but we have no cream, would you like it without milk. And Wilder asked about some of his friends from Vienna who had come to Israel; I knew one of them, he had a clothing store in Tel Aviv and they gone to high school together and Wilder bought a painting from me and said Israel was a good thing because he had been pretty lucky to make it to Hollywood and survive after he first fled to Paris, but others couldn’t come and he lost his family over there. He had a friend, a Jewish doctor who lived in the hills above Hollywood in a neighborhood where Brecht and Thomas Mann used to live and where Stravinsky still did. Wilder took me to this Doctor Morrison; he was an austere man with a silent rage in him and a bitter smile and he owned four private hospitals in Los Angeles, and he was nice to me and bought two paintings and we talked about the war. He said Brecht was egotistical and devious but he liked Thomas Mann. I envied that he’d known Thomas Mann and he invited me to a garden party. It was pleasant. Japanese paper lanterns suspended from ropes. Several guests arrived in Swabian peasant dress, and an orchestra played on the never-ending lawn. I finished selling my paintings and Oved vanished to Mexico but not before I gave him money for traveling expenses to get the car back from Mojave, and I flew to New York.
In New York, everyone had disappeared. Gandy had gone to Florence and found an artist there, a woman called Jocelyn, and he loved her, and they got married and went to live in Vermont, where he found peace and painted and taught to the end of his short life. We saw each other infrequently after that but we corresponded and I always remembered how he painted like Bud Powell played. He’d start in a whisper, searching for the right note, then make the most of it, crushing it, letting the eighty-eight keys of the piano bring back his faith and his hands would caress the keys like velvet, repeating a musical phrase, the way Bird sometimes ran through variation after variation and only then played the theme. His face would be stuck to the keys, then he’d smile because he’d found something good and he’d rise with the note, put rhythm into it and change both the melody and the beat, bring in the theme and wring it dry and emerge from the depths of something deep like a barrel of manure and suddenly shout, I’m playing clouds, because Bird once said that the clouds are the only artists who make art out of their own forms, they change constantly, they’re the only artists in entire world whose shape is their art, is all their art, and that’s how Bud Powell played, he’d extract from within himself and transform himself with his playing and beat the keys or stroke
them like a butterfly and ravish the music and love it and beat the living daylights out of himself to reach for and realize the tenderness he held in his eyelids though he didn’t know it because he was crazy. That’s how Gandy Brodie painted; he’d go into a painting and conquer it and let the painting kiss him and he’d celebrate, skip, let the painting come into being. It’s a shame that he didn’t get an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery until after he was dead. Gandy had wanted to be exhibited at Sidney Janis’s his entire life.
I hadn’t found Pat. Sandy was hospitalized near Boston. Adele had disappeared. I had another exhibition but suddenly my heart was in writing, what did I have to do with contemporary painting, I couldn’t see myself in contemporary painting, I didn’t like my paintings, Lee was in a run of West Side Story in Philadelphia. I called and she wasn’t nice to me at all.
I went to see a movie at the Museum of Modern Art. The who’s who were there in force but only a few real cinema lovers. They were there so that everyone would know they how interested they were in High Art—they and a few intellectuals and wiseasses, there was giggling and laughter and a kind of chuckling or affected throat-clearing at the emotional and touching scenes, what they probably called kitsch, and kitsch of course makes cultured people laugh. They were showing Lewis Milestone’s 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front, adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s novel. I had once been a soldier. I had been wounded. I knew what despair was. And the people around me were clearing their throats to seem “in.” Suddenly, without thinking, as if in an epileptic fit, I got up, grabbed one of the throat-clearers, with all his choked laughter still in his throat, I wasn’t thinking, it just happened, I didn’t know I had this violence in me, the stunned man flapped his legs, he was twice as big as me, and I dragged him outside, threw him onto the sidewalk, went back inside, people murmuring angrily. Somebody went out and came back in; two policemen came and asked me to accompany them. They took me to the police station and asked for an explanation. I said I had been a soldier and I’d gone to see a war movie that had touched me because I knew what it was all about, and sitting next to me were these intellectuals who were laughing because otherwise nobody would know that they were such big mavens. The Irish officer couldn’t resist asking me if I’d used force on the man in question and I told him that I’d barely touched him and he’d fallen right into my arms and I thought that maybe he was overheating so I dragged him outside because there was air there and a sidewalk that maybe he would enjoy resting on. The cops looked like they weren’t the biggest fans of the MoMA crowd and couldn’t really care less what happened to what they called those snooty faggots, and the officer told me that if I ever threw anyone like that out of a movie again on Thursday at four-thirty in the afternoon, if I ever threw anyone like that out of a movie called, what was it called? All Quiet on the Western Front, I replied, if I ever threw anyone like that out on Thursday at four-thirty in the afternoon when they were showing, if they ever showed All Quiet on the Western Front again, they’d be forced to haul me in front of a judge. I asked what about Wednesday and the officer said, We’re busy on Wednesday. And Tuesday too.
I went to see Lee in Philadelphia. She wasn’t happy to see me. She said she was busy with the show and if I wanted to see it I could stay but she’d only talk to me in New York and only after the premiere. I could see there was no point in arguing with her. I felt she was planning on leaving me and I didn’t like being left. I saw the show that night and afterward Leonard Bernstein took me and the actor playing Tony, Larry Kert—the brother of Anita Ellis, she who sang Gilda’s song—to a restaurant. In the restaurant Leonard and Larry hugged and looked at me as though I was someone lost who didn’t know what love was and I said how moving the show was and how lovely the music was and how wonderful the choreography was and Larry said that Jerry Robbins, who’d never been with a woman in his life, had proposed marriage to Lee. I said that he’d once proposed to Nora Kaye too but Larry said that this time it was serious and that his love for Lee was touching. I felt betrayed and tried talking about it to Lee, but she refused to talk and said we’d speak only after the premiere and when we got back to New York, and then only at our apartment.
In the meantime Sandy Sachs wrote me asking me to visit her in the psychiatric hospital near Boston. I went, thinking about Lee cheating on me with Jerry Robbins. In the hospital there were catatonics limping along and Sandy said I was a lowlife because I’d never loved Lee but I told Sandy that now I was sure I did. Sandy said I was a typical macho man with abandonment issues and that she was being treated by a young doctor who played a twelve-string guitar and was apparently even crazier than she was. They’d had a brief affair and she suggested I meet Hughie, who people said had discovered oil in Alaska by using telepathy. I went with her and her doctor to another wing of the huge building. I met an elderly man, Irish, who was being treated with LSD by Sandy’s doctor, because this doctor was one of the first to use hallucinogens in therapy. In the hospital’s opinion, Hughie was the sickest patient they’d ever had, and now he was recovering, not because they had cured him, but—said the doctor with a certain sadness—because there’d been a miracle. Hughie was what Americans call a con man, a guy who could sell refrigerators to Eskimos. He was uneducated, clever, charismatic, imaginative, and an unstoppable rhetorician. A kind of Chan Canasta whose freakishness and greatness had found their outlet in illness—he was a genius at being sick. When he got sick, he got sick because he had decided to get sick, announcing his intentions in advance. He decided that on a certain day he would have diabetes, and so he got diabetes. He thought about heart disease and then he got it. He elevated his blood pressure and had been in the hospital for ages now, empowered by his madness, enraged at the world. He was funny and pitiful, cursing everyone around him and at the same time always getting everyone on his side—his day was night. But what had happened was that quite by chance he met the second-worst case in the hospital, a boy-dog. The boy was tied up with a rope in a room that had become a kennel. He was covered with a sheet. He barked instead of talking. He hadn’t straightened up since he was four and ate on all fours. He was incapable of standing on two feet. The only treatment the hospital had come up with for him was to let him make up his own mind whether or not he should remain a dog—and so a dog he remained. But then Hughie ran into this dog. He started taking an interest in him. I said that maybe he was jealous because he thought that the boy was sicker than him. Hughie showed me his diaries, which were almost entirely incomprehensible, but they had a few lucid sentences relating to how Hughie had sneaked into the dog’s room with an electric shaver and then with a battery-operated radio and later with a typewriter and how he’d taught the dog to type and how the dog made contact with the world through the machine and how Hughie and the dog had corresponded and how, a year later, Hughie had taught the dog to talk—but also how every time Hughie made progress with the boy-dog he’d make himself sick again and insult the boy and both of them would withdraw but then Hughie would go back and get interested in the dog again almost in spite of himself, and I learned how, with his power, he finally made the boy stand up and afterward recover completely and at the same time Hughie recovered as well. This story about how two lonely dogs cured themselves captivated me. I sat in the hospital mesmerized. The boy, who had recovered after a four-year confinement in the stench of his own isolation, tied up and speechless, left the hospital healthy, with his parents waiting for him. Hughie was happy and went to the cafeteria with me, took a glass, asked how much it cost, and the guy behind the counter said thirty cents, so Hughie paid and threw it against the wall and said, That sonofabitch will be healthy!