The Man Who Cancelled Himself

by David Handler

  “He’s Very.”

  “He’s edge.”

  “No, that’s his name. Romaine Very. He’s a cop.”

  “I’d like to undress him with my teeth.”

  “Jesus Christ, Annabelle,” muttered Lyle. “Get your fucking hormones outta the gutter, will ya?”

  “Sorry, daddy-waddy.” She rolled her black button eyes mockingly.

  “As if that greaseball Lorenzo isn’t bad enough. What is it with you and low-class gorillas anyway? Hairy knuckles make your pants itch?!”

  “It was just an observation,” she objected heatedly. She was genuinely pissed. “And I’m, like, Lorenzo’s not a—”

  “Can we talk about my show now?!” Lyle broke in. “Do you mind?!”

  She said nothing more, smoldering.

  Lyle resumed pacing, all energy. “Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. We go back to the pool hall. But we play down the gambling angle. Deirdre doesn’t hustle the milkman. Just shoots pool with Rob. Give the two of ’em their scene together, the same way we were gonna do it in the Japanese restaurant. Only do it in the pool hall, okay?” He clapped his hands together. “Better get on it.” He started off for the living room set. The fire department was leaving, the crew drifting back to work.

  “Wait, what about the network?” Marty called after him.

  “What about ’em?” Lyle demanded.

  “Shouldn’t we clear it with them first?”

  “What the hell for? It was the gambling they had the problem with, not the pool hall.”

  “She mentioned the pool hall, Lyle,” Tommy pointed out dryly.

  “No, she didn’t,” Lyle insisted. “She was cool with it. Am I right, Hoagy? Tell ’em I’m right.”

  “She mentioned it, Lyle.”

  He gave me The Scowl. “So what if she did? You guys gotta learn how to handle a network. You clear it with ’em after, not before. Otherwise, they’ll interfere in every single thing ya do. She’ll find out tonight at the run-through. She’ll have to swallow it because it’ll work fine and because it’ll be too late to change it. Leo!?” he bellowed. “Get the pool hall back from the warehouse!!”

  “Right, Lyle!” she called out.

  “Let’s rehearse! Time’s a wasting!” He looked around the sound stage. “Where’s the Chadster?!”

  “Here, Lyle,” Chad piped up, from the living room sofa, where he sat reading over the script.

  Lyle marched over to him, rubbing his hands together. “Okay, pal. Today, you drive this car,” he declared loudly. “Let’s you and me get to work—just us two.”

  “Great!” exclaimed Chad, grateful for his master’s attention.

  I stayed there with the writers. “Bobby still in Boston?”

  Annabelle nodded. “He flew up there late last night. He’ll get in before lunch.”

  “Were you three together when it happened?”

  “Yup,” said Marty.

  “I don’t suppose one of you stepped out for coffee just before it happened.”

  “Nope,” said Tommy.

  The three of them seemed quite unfazed by the bombing and the devastation. I guess they were so used to Lyle’s eruptions that nothing could shake them.

  “Any idea who did it?” I asked.

  Marty: “Don’t look at me. Loud noises scare the shit out of me.”

  Tommy: “Me, either. I haven’t tossed a live grenade since I was six.”

  Annabelle said, “Maybe Lyle’s not wacko after all.”

  “Great punchline,” cracked Tommy. “But what’s the setup?”

  “Seriously,” she said. “What if someone really is out to destroy him?”

  “Then I wish that individual would come forward,” Tommy intoned solemnly. “Because I’d like to buy him or her a brand-new luxury automobile.”

  “Where were you when it went boom?”

  “Right here,” Fiona Shrike replied, gurgling.

  Right here was her dressing room, where Lyle’s ex-wife sat perched, cross-legged, on her love seat with her shoes off. She wore linen pants of a shade the catalogues would probably call asparagus, and a loud, baggy Hawaiian shirt that made her seem even more fragile than she was.

  “Doing what I’m doing right now,” she added, clawing at the cuticles of her left hand with the nails of her right. She was already in need of two new Band-Aids. Busy morning.

  “Which is what?” I asked, averting my eyes. I don’t like to see people draw blood, especially their own.

  “Trying to learn this awful script.” It lay open on the love seat next to her.

  “You were alone when it happened?”

  “I concentrate better when I’m alone.” She patted the sofa. “Have a seat if you’d like.”

  I sat. The glass coffee table set before the love seat was heaped with fashion magazines and mail and different drafts of the script. A stick of fruity head shop incense burned in a ceramic holder. Lulu stayed outside in the hall. Incense clogs her sinuses. The door to Fiona’s much-coveted private bathroom was discreetly shut.

  “Don’t like this week’s show?” I asked.

  Fiona tilted her head forward so her hair shielded her fine-boned face. “What’s to like? It’s not funny. It’s not intelligent. It’s not … anything.”

  “According to Lyle, it’s the most original, most brilliant half-hour in the history of series television.”

  She let out a girlish snicker, covering her mouth with her hand. “The truly amazing thing about Lyle is he believes it, too. The man has an endless capacity for self-delusion.”

  “Bobby thinks it’s just a device Lyle employs to psych everyone up, himself included. He thinks Lyle knows, deep down inside, that Uncle Chubby isn’t that good.”

  Fiona shook her head vehemently. “Bobby doesn’t know Lyle. Trust me, Lyle believes it. Once, when we were leaving the theater after a Woody Allen movie—I forget which one—Lyle turned to me and said, ‘Woody’s not as good as I am.’ And he meant it. He was completely serious. See, Lyle has no perspective. In order to have perspective, you have to be tethered to reality.”

  “And Lyle isn’t?”

  “Lyle isn’t tethered to anything,” she replied. “He’s a man who has no core. At least, that’s what Noble thinks.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think he’s a born liar,” she said with quiet bitterness. “And that he believes his own lies.”

  “Can we talk about your early college days? When the two of you first met at N.Y.U.?”

  “Sure, only they’re my college days, not Lyle’s. He was never enrolled there. Or anywhere. I grew up in Scarsdale. My father was an insurance executive. I had an extremely boring, antiseptic upbringing. My house was clean, quiet, and safe, I was clean, quiet, and safe. And I didn’t want to be. I got interested in the theater when I was in high school, and I talked my parents into letting me go to N.Y.U. drama school. Mostly, I wanted to escape to Greenwich Village and be artistic. Write sensitive poetry, drink espresso at Café Figaro. And I did, too. I found a cute little apartment on West Twelfth Street. I wore peasant blouses and jeans and no bra, not that I’ve ever needed to wear one. I listened to Joni Mitchell. I marched in antiwar marches. I worked part-time in a record store on Bleeker and had sex with a lot of guys who I was friends with, which was no big deal then. If you liked someone,” she recalled a bit wistfully, “you slept with him. Only it never seemed particularly special or meaningful. Not sex, not school, not my life.” Fiona shuddered, so convulsively she shook the love seat. “I wasn’t sure why.”

  “And then you met Lyle?” I suggested, to nudge her along.

  She nodded, hugging a throw pillow tightly to her chest. “In line at the Bleecker Street Cinema. I was by myself, waiting to see La Dolce Vita, and Lyle was working the line. He was a street performer in those days—Fucko the Clown, he called himself. He wore a big red wig, red nose, and white-face, and he carried a drum. He’d bang on it and crack terrible jokes and badger people until they’d
give him a quarter so he’d go away. He was gigantic and brash and loud. He was eighteen years old.”

  “Did you think he was funny?”

  “I thought he was horrible. You know what Lyle Hudnut’s first words to me were? ‘I’d like to stick my tongue up your ass.’ That’s what he said to me. And then he honked his nose. I ignored him completely. I mean, I was absolutely appalled. Then a few days later I was in acting class and this big, redheaded guy who was sitting in that day kept, well, grinning at me. Like he knew me. I didn’t recognize him, naturally, since he wasn’t wearing his Fucko the Clown makeup. After class he came up to me and said, ‘I’d still like to.’ I said, ‘You’d still like to what?’ And he said, ‘Stick my tongue up your ass.’ Well, I really let him have it. I told him you do not talk to a girl that way—it’s sexist and demeaning and crude. To which his response was: ‘I’m just being honest. Maybe you’d like me better if I lied.’ I said, ‘It certainly couldn’t hurt, because right now I don’t like you at all.’ And do you know what? He got so hurt he started to cry. Genuine tears rolled down his cheeks. We ended up having coffee together, and from that moment on Lyle Hudnut was a major part of my life.” Fiona paused, gulping for air. “Lyle was …” She shuddered again, this time practically lifting the entire love seat up off of the floor—I’m talking Linda Blair in The Exorcist here. “He was a wild man. A total free spirit—impulsive, reckless, spontaneous, and wonderfully liberated. He threw himself full-tilt into everything he did, as if he were alive for that moment and that moment alone. He had no past and no future. Only now. And because of that, he made now so much more vivid and exciting than anyone I’d ever known. He was utterly mad, of course, but for this repressed little twenty-year-old girl from Scarsdale, aching to bust out, he was a dream come true. He had this huge motorcycle, a Triumph, on which he zoomed around the city with total disregard for anyone’s safety, particularly his own. No helmet. I’ll never forget the first time he took me for a ride. I’d never felt so terrified in my entire life. Or so alive.”

  “Was he still living at the Chelsea Hotel?”

  “No, he shared a basement apartment on Perry Street with a large, ugly rat. It cost him a hundred a month. No kitchen, no heat—it was disgusting. Food wrappers and dirty clothes everywhere. I hated to go there. It smelled. For that matter, so did he. Lyle was totally lacking in what you would call basic personal hygiene in those days. He didn’t shower or brush his teeth regularly. He wore the same clothes for days and days at a time. He was, well, scattered. He hardly ever knew what day of the week it was. Or even what month it was. He was always broke. For money he did his clown thing and delivered pizzas on his bike. What he really wanted to do was act, so he was sitting in on classes at N.Y.U. and hanging around the off-off-Broadway scene, auditioning for every workshop and showcase that came along. He had no agent, no training, no clue. He was merely one of those thousands of people, young and old, who exist on the edge of the theater world, and on their dreams of glory.”

  “How did he seem to you?”

  Fiona frowned. “Seem?”

  “His mood. Was he angry?”

  She considered this a moment. “He was very hostile toward authority, but who wasn’t? It was ’72 and Vietnam was happening.”

  “And what about his parents?”

  She glanced at me briefly. “Anything in particular you’re wondering about?” she asked guardedly.

  “He says he told you about his shock therapy. You and no one else.”

  She nodded. “I wondered if that’s what you were getting at. It’s actually going in his book?”

  “It is.”

  “He told me all about it one night in bed. He said his parents did it to him, and that was why he hated them so much. Naturally, I …” She tipped her head forward once more to hide her face. “I didn’t believe a word of it. Still don’t. I just think he was trying to impress me by portraying himself as this dangerous, romantic rebel who society had failed to tame. One thing you should understand about Lyle, Hoagy, is that he’s always searching for villains in his life. For enemies. The truth is, he has none—other than himself. My own opinion’s that he simply took too much acid when he was a teenager and it made him a little crazy. In a good kind of way, of course.”

  “Which kind of way is that?”

  “He held nothing back. Not one thing. That made him …” She tossed her hair back with a violent shrug. “He was incredible in bed. The best lover I’ve ever had. Though I’d appreciate it if that didn’t make it into his book. It would come as a real source of shock and disappointment to Noble.”

  “Consider it forgotten.”

  “You’re not like other ghostwriters,” she observed, raising an eyebrow at me.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Is that because you’ve had your own dirty laundry aired out in public?”

  “He held nothing back,” I repeated, to get her back on Lyle’s track, and off mine.

  “Yes.” She looked at me a moment longer, then abruptly went back to tearing at her cuticles. “That also made him an amazing actor. I was in awe of him. Because he wasn’t afraid of anything. That’s what holds most of us back. Fear. Lyle had none. No inhibitions whatsoever. I also thought he was terribly sweet underneath. He wasn’t. Underneath, he was a cauldron of rage. But I didn’t know that then. Or maybe I did. Maybe I was fooling myself. Maybe we always do when we love someone.”

  “You can drop the maybe.”

  “After a few weeks, he gave up his place and moved in with me. And we were a couple.”

  “How did your parents react to him?”

  “He refused to meet them,” she replied. “Wouldn’t go out to Scarsdale with me. And if they were coming in to see me, he’d actually leave the apartment and not come back until they’d gone. It was years before he finally met them, and he was real surly and unpleasant toward them. My dad thought he was just horrible … They gave us a washer-dryer combo for the apartment when we got married. We’d been living there together for three years by then. Lyle thought it was the most absurd gift. A symbol of everything that was wrong with middle-class society. He wanted to throw it out in the street. He never got over my parents giving us that.”

  “What did you think of it?”

  “I asked them for it,” she replied with a snicker. “Beat going to the Laundromat.”

  “Did he have any contact with his own parents?”

  “They were totally excluded from his life. He never phoned them or wrote. He wouldn’t even invite them to the wedding.”

  “Did you ever meet them?”

  “Just once, a couple of years after we were married. We were living in the apartment on Bank Street then. Things were just starting to click for us. Lyle was on Saturday Night Live. I was getting steady theater work. We were finding our way in life. But it really kept bothering me how much Lyle hated his folks. I loved mine. I wanted him to love his. So I got it in my mind that I was going to bring about a reconciliation. I called them and invited them to town to visit us. They were thrilled. I didn’t tell Lyle they were coming. I figured if I warned him, he’d freak. Anyway, when they walked in … the blood completely drained from his face. And he started screaming at me: ‘How could you do this to me?! I thought you loved me! How could you do this?!’ He punched me in the mouth, Hoagy. Hard enough to break a tooth and bloody my lip. Then he ran out the door like a child having a temper tantrum. Naturally, the Hudnuts were horrified. They fussed over me, got me some ice for my mouth. They were terribly upset. So was I. That was the only time Lyle ever hit me. It was a long time before I forgave him. I don’t think he ever forgave me.”

  “What were Herb and Aileen like?”

  “Well, they didn’t fart in public,” she joked. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “It’s not.” Out in the hallway, Lulu seconded that with a sour grunt. She sounded remarkably like Elliot, Merilee’s former pig, when she did that. I missed Elliot. Or, more precisely,
the sandwiches.

  “They were parents.” Fiona paused, reaching for the words. “Surburban, dull, totally unhip. But perfectly nice people. Herb wore a tie and wing-tip shoes, and he kept rattling on about their train trip in, and the cab ride down—he was obviously very uncomfortable. Aileen seemed frightened by the whole experience. Dazed, almost. It was rather surreal. I mean, I’d been living with their son for five years and they’d never met me before and now here I was flat on my back, bleeding from the mouth, and they’re trying to apologize for their son decking me.”

  “Can you remember what they said?”

  “That it was a nice try, and they appreciated that I’d made the effort.”

  “Anything about Lyle?”

  Fiona frowned and began pulling at her left thumb, hard, as if she were trying to yank it out at the socket. This was a new one. “She said that Lyle had been his own little man from the time he was two years old. That’s what she called him—his own little man. She said he always knew what he wanted and that once he’d decided he couldn’t be budged. Not ever.” She released her thumb. “They didn’t stay long. And that was the only time I ever saw them.”

  “Did the subject of shock therapy come up?”

  “I just told you—that never happened.”

  I nodded, glancing through my notes. “I understand you were drama school classmates with Marty Muck.”

  She brightened. “That’s right. Marty was extremely funny and quick. And a gifted writer, even then.”

  “How did the Suburbanites come about?”

  “Well, improv was just sort of the thing to do,” she replied. “For actors, it’s basic training. How you learn to reach inside yourself, to use your body, to interact with other performers. You know, the teacher will say: Okay, Hoagy, you’ve just gotten a phone call that your son was killed in a car accident, and now you have to tell your wife. It’s totally spontaneous. You just never know what will come out of anyone, especially yourself. It can be really moving or angry or scary. Of course, our emphasis with the Suburbanites was on funny and crazy. Because we all were. We were classmates, except for Lyle, and we all hung out together—Steve Sweet, who is out in L.A. now writing for Jay Leno, Tory Modesto, who just had her own HBO comedy special, Marty, Lyle, me …”