by Robert Riche
The group has been waiting for me, because Dr. Feigenweiser, concerned lest his invention not receive the kind of auspicious press introduction tomorrow that it deserves, has arranged for a few embellishments to ensure its success. First of all, he has prepared a few remarks of his own that he would like to distribute to the assembled editors. He produces a typewritten treatise four pages long, single-spaced, describing in what the Americans at Pro-Tec refer to as Germlish (a bad English translation of an original German text), a history of the development of the Hand-Arbiter artificial hand.
“No one believed at first that I would be able ever to develop an artifical digital appendage that would raise the state of the art to new heights never before imagined,” it starts out. Looking it over, my feeling is that it is worthless from a publicity point of view. But I am thoroughly accustomed to corporate ego stroking; and after all, the guy is a creative genius, in a way; so it doesn’t really bother me that his treatise should be included in the press packet that we will distribute to our editor guests tomorrow at the press introduction.
“I vill read it und anzwer any quvestions,” Dr. Feigenweiser states.
“What’s that? Excuse me, doctor. You want to read this?”
“Ja. It’s wary emportant zet zey untershtand vhat ve are trywing to do by vay of backgwound.”
“It’s really good stuff, Doctor, but it will take about twenty minutes to read this.”
“Tventy-fife.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“Ve did it in Homburg, und zey loved it.”
Fraulein Shatsie nods her head vigorously in confirmation.
I look over at Frank to see where the strength is going to come from. Frank is listening with what I can only assume is a dignified expression, his head slightly cocked to one side, like the attentive pooch on old Victor record albums. No help from his corner.
Morrie Glick is actually beaming, showing his enthusiasm for the idea, spittle glistening on his teeth. I don’t know why I even bother to look at Morrie. I know him well enough to be certain, in advance, that he will never disagree with a Kraut, no matter what he thinks. Years ago Morrie confided to me after a couple of martinis together somewhere on the road that his greatest worry in life was that “the Nazi pricks,” his term for our employers, would get it into their heads somehow that he is Jewish, thus, in his view, ruining his chances for advancement within the company. In point of fact, Morrie is not Jewish, and has not been Jewish for twenty years, ever since he joined the Baptist church at the time when he changed his career from tummeler in the borscht belt to go into marketing. Nevertheless, whenever he is in the presence of the Krauts he falls all over himself to be ingratiating. He has given me strict instructions that in the internal Pro-Tec house organ that I am responsible for editing, his name should always appear as Morris, and not Morrie, the latter being a nickname which he feels is undignified. My own feeling is that he would do himself more good with the Krauts by standing up straight to them, and I have told him so, and he has even agreed with me, but the minute a German walks into the room he starts salivating. Diana, who has no firm opinions of her own on anything, except that her progress within the company is secure as long as Morrie has her under his wing, or whatever, takes her lead from him now, and still keeping the Hershey kiss look on her lips, manages to compress her cheeks into an approving simper.
Tony Passanante, I can tell, agrees with me, but since Tony thinks that all publicity and communications are a lot of shit anyway, he simply looks stony-faced at a fingernail on his left hand which he slowly brings up to his front incisors for a clipping, squinting his eyes tightly shut the minute I look in his direction.
“Tell him the best part, Dr. Feigenweiser,” says Morrie, sitting up with paws crooked.
“Ja. I vuz chust going to,” Feigenweiser snaps, looking annoyed at Morrie. Morrie’s smile transmogrifies into a wince. “Chentlemens! Mein Herren!” Feigenweiser calls out, raising the splayed rubber fingers of his hand-job over his head and waving it about. “Kommen sie herein!”
And the door to the room opens, and in file ten total strangers, all non-English speaking Germans, all in identical navy blazers and neckties, who move about the room, clicking their heels and extending to all present a rubber hand of greeting.
“Ve flew zem in last night,” Dr. Feigenweiser says, beaming with pride, “mit zer idea of placing zem among ze pwess vhen ve ingwoduce Hand-Arbeiter. At zer end, zey vill all shake hands mit zer pwess people, und zey vill first-hand zee for zemselves zer miracle of modern zi-enz.”
“Isn’t that great!” Morrie Glick puts in.
All eyes are on me. I am looking around the room at the one-handed models flown over from Germany, or more likely from Tobruk, Africa. They look like a terrorist squad masquerading as a soccer team sent out by the French Foreign Legion.
“Do you think it might be overdoing things a bit?” I ask. But there is no heart in it. The Krauts have put up a million bucks to set up this show, and they will have their way. I flash Dr. Feigenweiser what I hope is a winning smile, taking my lead from Morrie’s expression.
“Anytin’ else?” Frank is on his feet, his eyes from behind the horn-rimmed glasses quickly scanning our faces. Everybody, on cue as though drilled in a Greek chorus, shakes his head dolorously. Frank stretches his arms over his head, utters a loud and somewhat agonized groan of release, and walks out the door.
Everyone looks questioningly at one another, as if not certain yet whether or not the meeting is Over. But it is; at least, if Frank’s departure is in keeping with the way he customarily ends all of his meetings. Tony Passanante breaks the spell of post-meeting stasis, with a grin at me, and a loud-voice greeting.
“Brock, you hot shit. How the hell are ya?” This is intended not so much really as a greeting as a way to antagonize Diana who has let it be known on numerous occasions that she objects strenuously to male profanity, particularly from Tony.
I sidle over to Passanante, and in a somewhat lower tone, growl at him, “Thanks for backing me up on the Kraut soccer team, you prick.”
Tony bursts into a roar of laughter. “You noticed?”
Dr. Feigenweiser is huddled with Shatsie and the ten Germans on the other side of the room, speaking in muted German. The twelve of them, all looking over at us, suddenly break into laughter, at the same time, to a man (including Shatsie) blushing. We all smile back good-naturedly. Morrie actually waves.
“What are they saying, Morrie?” Tony asks, gibing.
“Nazi pricks,” Morrie says, waving again and broadening his grin.
The Nazi pricks file out of the room, Shatsie following after them, like a prison matron. Dr. Feigenweiser approaches, wearing his Halloween leer. “Hello zere,” he says cheerily. “Zey vere zaying zey are looking vorvart to ze pwess meeting tomowwow.”
“Do you like speaking in front of large groups of press people, Dr. Feigenweiser?” I ask him. It occurs to me as a last resort that maybe I can plant a few seeds of stage fright to make him change his mind.
“I zink id vill eggsplain zings to zem bedder.”
It will drive them screaming from the air-conditioned splendor and comfort of our circus tent back into the blast furnace of the Las Vegas desert.
“Yes, probably,” I say.
Feigenweiser nods politely and militarily at Morrie and Tony, then reaches for Diana’s hand, which reflexively and instantaneously she draws back behind her, possibly thinking he has in mind stealing her ring, before she recovers and yields it up for a Continental kiss, at the moment of which, her eyes, in a contraction of royalist ecstasy, roll inward toward the point of her lips.
“C’mere, Brock,” Tony Passanante says, He draws me apart from Morrie and Diana. “You wanna get in the raffle?”
“What raffle?”
“For a blow job. Ten bucks. I got ten guys already. I need another five.”
Actually, no, I don’t really want to win a blow job in a raffle. Back home I don
’t even enter Junior Chamber of Commerce raffles to win a Cadillac.
“Did you ask Morrie?” This is simply a stall while I try to come up with a diplomatic way of declining. It is important that I remain on the right side of Tony, who, in his way, is a power at Pro-Tec.
“Are you kiddin’? He’s got Miss Piggy. Come on, kick in.”
Tony has little patience with demurring, which is probably why his sales force succeeded in bringing in over $100 million in orders for prosthetic devices last year.
“A lousy ten bucks, Brock. You a white man, or what?”
Since I have never won anything in my life, I figure, What the hell. Ten bucks for goodwill.
“You got change for a twenty?”
“Hell, no,” he says. “Take two.”
“One, Tony. Gimme ten bucks back.” A man’s dignity demands that he draw a line somewhere.
Tony reaches in his pocket and pulls out an enormous roll of ten dollar bills. He isn’t kidding; he’s been hustling.
Morrie sidles up to us. “What’re you guys up to?”
“Tell you later,” says Tony, looking at me, and winking. I can only cast a bleak smile at Morrie.
“Diana’s got a block of tickets to Wayne Newton,” Morrie says. We’re taking Feigenweiser and the Krauts. You guys want to go?”
“Wayne Newton?” says Tony. “Sure. I’ll go.”
I only know of Wayne Newton by reputation, but I tend to rate him on about the same level as the prize in Tony’s raffle, though perhaps this is unfair. Diana sashays over, brimming with largesse.
“Make up your mind, fellows, because Wayne Newton tickets are in big demand.”
I am tempted to inquire by whom, but instead, I say, “Sounds great, Diana. Thanks.” Aside from arranging for rooms at conventions, Diana derives her power from her close relationship with Morrie into whose ear I can just imagine her whispering in the darkest moments of the night, things like, “Do you really think Brock knows what he’s doing with his ads?” Since Morrie can do as much for or against my advertising programs as Tony, I make it a point always of treating Diana with the utmost respect. She likes to have doors opened for her, for example, which I always beat everybody else out of the way to do, unless Morrie happens to be there first, in which case I yield to his droit de seigneur.
“You’re welcome,” she says, and reaches in her handbag and pulls out a ticket each for Tony and me. “Don’t lose them,” she says. “They can’t be replaced.”
Obediently, I put mine in my wallet right in front of her where she can see I’m taking good care of it.
She pirouettes, and gives a little flutter of her fingers over her shoulder. “’Bye,” she says. “See youse at the show.” Despite a daily continuing heroic effort on Diana’s part to cover the remaining traces of an accent acquired from her early childhood upbringing in Hoboken, she does occasionally slip up.
And we file out of the room together, the others to take a taxi back to Caesar’s Palace, I to the Yellow Pages and thence to a local Print-Qwik Shop to get the good doctor’s background treatise photocopied for the press conference tomorrow, and then back to Caesar’s Palace in time for a bite to eat in my room and to make ready for Wayne Newton.
CHAPTER IV
At nine o’clock in the evening I meet Morrie, Diana, and the others in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace at the base of an ornate and thickly carpeted stairway leading up to the grand ballroom where Wayne Newton “and company” are appearing in an “all-star revue.”
The lobby is jam-packed with hotel guest gawkers jostling against slot machine players and gamblers and cocktail waitresses in off-the-shoulder miniskirt togas, the latter weaving in amongst us with trays of free drinks. In the background, seemingly penned against the wall by a velvet rope, is a restless raggedy line of people extending all the way up the staircase and back down into the lobby and out of sight around a corner, as far back, it would seem, as Omaha.
Diana is wearing an off-the-shoulder toga gown herself, except hers reaches to the floor, and I must say, until I catch a glimpse of the feral expression on her face, for a moment I can see why Morrie is crazy about her.
Morrie, in keeping with the festiveness of the occasion, has exchanged his gray flannels for white flannels and is wearing an open collar pink silk shirt with a gold chain around his neck. Morrie is not tall, but stands a bit higher in high gloss black plastic elevator shoes. The pink shirt, which is beautiful, does clash, however, with the orange tint of his hair which he grows long near his left ear and layers in strands over his bald spot. Tony Passanante wears an Izod Kelly green polo shirt, and carries a double knit jacket over one arm, in case it is required that it be worn to hear Wayne Newton.
Dr. Feigenweiser and I are the only ones dressed inappropriately for the occasion, he in the same tired business suit he was wearing during the afternoon, and I, like the ten Kraut terrorists who are huddled nearby with Shatsie, in the same soccer team flannel and blazer regalia.
Shatsie has changed from the pants suit in black gabardine she was wearing this afternoon to an identically tailored pants suit, in sado-masochist black silk. She has put a touch of red to her lips, and applied deep purple makeup into the sockets of her eyes so that she looks at the very least as interesting as any of the hookers seated on stools at the bar only a short distance away. She is smoking one of her cigars.
Although Diana is furnishing the tickets, Morrie has taken over the leadership of our group, and with perhaps a bit of extra unnecessary flamboyance, with one eye rarely straying from a somewhat bewildered looking Dr. Feigenweiser, he leads us up the staircase alongside the roped-in hordes of tourists waiting in line.
“That fuckin’ Glick,” Tony growls in my ear. “He prob’ly paid some asshole a couple hunnerd bucks to get us at the head of the line.”
“And thank God, too,” I say. Actually, I envy Morrie his ability to take charge in situations like this. He is a much better advance public relations man than I am, at least as far as handling social arrangements is concerned. I am pretty good with my press contacts, but when it comes to spending company money to pay off headwaiters, order gourmet dinners, and select expensive wines (usually entailing some embarrassing moments while he grills the wine steward), no one can touch Morrie.
We are, in fact, escorted to the head of the line, the roped-in multitudes eyeing us with hatred. We are ushered in two groups into a vast auditorium tiered in scallops of loge seats rising up from the festooned stage curtain at what seems like about a forty-degree incline. The Krauts are in a shell directly below us with Shatsie, who presumably will translate the words of Wayne Newton’s songs to them. “Jeder zeit es regnet, es regnet pfennigs von himmel.” Morrie has seen to it that Dr. Feigenweiser is with us in our pod.
Immediately Morrie is conferring with the waiter, a man who does not inspire confidence as a wine steward, but impresses rather as one of long experience in hard circumstances and somewhat in need of a shave. In his white jacket he looks like one of the hawkers who sell beer and hot dogs at Yankee stadium.
“Watch this,” Tony rasps into my ear. “Don Perinyong, you wait.”
Tony is wrong. The waiter reappears, accompanied by a second who could be his brother, each of them bearing standing ice buckets, glasses, and two bottles of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge.
“Same price as the other,” Tony says to me.
It is the conflict between man-on-the-road salesman versus what Tony perceives as the home office freeloader that so rankles and drives Tony to ruffle Morrie, if he can. To Morrie, he says, “What’s the difference between Mumm’s and Taylor’s sparkling white, Glick?”
Morrie simply smiles at Tony condescendingly, and continues to focus his attention on Dr. Feigenweiser. “Do you like champagne, Doctor?”
Morrie is in his element now, and he watches every movement of the hot dog vendors to catch any dereliction of duty. Diana cannot keep her eyes off Morrie. It is his knowledge of the world and his dignified air of authority that
have won her admiration and romantic favors.
Our waiter pours, strictly heeding Morrie’s admonishment not to fill the glasses too high, then collects the company’s gold American Express card which Morrie never leaves home without.
The bubbly is good, and we find ourselves looking at one another and grinning companionably as we take our first sips, just at the moment when the lights suddenly go down, the stage curtains are drawn up majestically, and a full orchestra rises from a pit in the middle of the stage, blasting forth with music so loud you can’t make out the melody, and the darkness of the auditorium is splintered by a hundred vari-colored laser flashes streaking across the void from locations behind and to the sides of us. The effect is magnificent, irresistible, causing the skin to prickle, and each of us to stir about in our chairs as we experience a moment of magic and wonderment.
The audience, as a whole, leans perceptibly forward in anticipation of the star’s entrance, as an offstage announcer, his voice rising above the blare of the music, a feat one would not have thought possible, booms out an introduction of:
“Mis-ter
Way-y-y-y-y-ne
New-tu-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-nnnnnnn.”
And out he comes, Mis-ter Way-y-y-y-y-ne New-tu-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-nnnnn, in high-heeled snakeskin cowboy boots, purple velvet pants and a patterned shirt that looks like flocked wallpaper, loops of bracelets and bangles dangling and jangling from wrists and neck. His hair is greased back and looks like the black shiny stuff Morrie presumably puts on his shoes, and the little upswept black moustache can only be something pasted on at the last minute as some kind of joke aimed at henpecked husbands.
I immediately fear the worst, but having learned from experience that first impressions are not always right (though usually they are), settle back in my chair, applauding with the others, and wait for the show to proceed.