The Dream Merchant

by Fred Waitzkin

  Jim and I tipped glasses—maybe he could still get away from her; that’s what I was toasting. She never let him out of her sight. He needed her permission to go out for the paper. Really, it disgusted me. I didn’t want to drive him back to their dump in Homestead. But Jim pushed away from the table: it was time to go home so Mara wouldn’t get nervous. Please, she turned him into an old house pet. I wanted to keep him here, at the Blue Moon, where the big picture still seemed possible, so I launched into our version of confessing the truth. The game was a legacy from my youth, when friendship and sharing intimacies were more urgently important to me than anything else. Jim and I had played more than a few times in the early years of our friendship but not once since he’d taken up with Mara. If either of us prompted the other with a serious question, the other had to answer honestly—it was a test of our fidelity and a kind of dare—putting aside any and all jockeying for advantage, all hype and salesmanship, and in my case, considerable inhibitions to respond fully with the truth.

  The question jumped from my mouth like a living thing. Jim, did you ever kill someone?

  He looked at me with a little smile and I leaned in close. Come on, it’s just the two of us.… Although it wasn’t just the two of us. The restaurant was packed, elbow to elbow.

  I know you had a bad time in Brazil. There were different rules in the jungle.

  He nodded, yes.

  Yes, what? Did you ever put a gun to a man’s head? Or maybe you used a knife? I had a sense for the couple next to us leaning our way, listening while they ate. But I was feeling high from drinking beer and saying these reckless words. I was way out in front. He could have laughed in my face.

  Did you? And then maybe you walked back into your normal salesman’s life again … like nothing important had happened.… You have to answer my question.

  He nodded yes to this, slowly, and one side of his face tightened like leather. It made me nervous and a little giddy.

  You killed a man? A woman?

  I was whispering way too loud, making a mess, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him, because now Jim had raised both hands and put them gently around his throat as though he were adjusting a scarf and then he began tightening it around his throat. He held this pose for a few seconds in the busy restaurant.

  18.

  With jarring frequency Marvin Gesler would hear about the grand opening of another pyramid operation in western Canada. Almost always they were virtual clones, a big store with a circus tent outside.

  Marvin’s bold dream-selling enterprise that even the great Lenny Bruce had lauded for originality was becoming common fare. The final insult came with news that copycat operations were flourishing in Detroit and Columbus. Marvin had pushed to open in the States, but Jim had been concerned about being undercapitalized. Now there was competition on all sides and savvy customers were traveling for better deals.

  In the last disheartening months, before they put up the real estate for sale, Marvin was frantic, sending Jim racing to a distant store or calling him back hundreds of miles because he needed to have dinner and a talk. Jim was never at home, and if he even mentioned driving to the farm to visit Ava, Marvin flew off the handle. He couldn’t accept that Jim had a retreat that gave him pleasure.

  Marvin was beset by an urgency that seemed pointless and chaotic. His business musings were replaced by gluttony and lusty thoughts. He asked Jim to introduce him to girls. This seemed laughable and grotesque, but once Marvin seized upon an idea he wouldn’t let it go—he asked Jim compulsively. Whenever Marvin was around any good-looking woman, he wanted to touch her. He didn’t accept normal social limitations. He didn’t understand how he looked. He knew what he felt. Whatever Marvin coveted was essential and irresistible, and particularly now when he was afflicted. He attempted awkward lurching seductions. Jim watched at a late-afternoon office party while Marvin cornered one of the secretaries, a twenty-year-old redhead with freckles and a zesty laugh. He lumbered ahead like an old wrestler. He felt her breasts and began kissing her neck. He was the president of the company and his power conferred lurid appeal along with dread.

  Jim wondered where all of this would lead. As the business unraveled, alternative lifestyles came into his mind. He enjoyed a stolen day or two with Ava. He felt the itch to move on to something new.

  But at the same time, Jim recognized his limitations. He could close a deal with the best or he could torque up the energy in a lazy room. Jim could even inspire men’s lives, but Marvin was a creative force. Jim never lost sight of this, and their relationship had a daunting and persisting autonomy. Marvin was profane, but Jim worried that on his own he would be banal. Marvin could bestow the wealth of Solomon. Think about it. How much would you be willing to give a man who could give you many millions in return? This bribe was at the center of their lengthy partnership.

  * * *

  It was sealed with a nod that Jim would find Marvin women. Marvin wanted this from Jim as if it were a key clause in a new contract. Jim had to digest this new responsibility and decided, finally, that helping Marvin with girls would be hardly different from feeding him or listening to his rants. It might even be amusing and it would get Marvin off his back. With their tacit agreement Marvin felt greatly relieved and was able to close one door a little and open another.

  The partners spent a week driving cross-country brainstorming. Jim’s great spirit for the road inspired Marvin, who was soon holding forth on money schemes and sports minutiae. The world just looked brighter with Jim at the wheel driving toward unnamed pleasures. Marvin’s ideas were swelling all through him again as if someone big had pulled the switch. He kept coming back to franchising, which was still in its adolescence in Canada. Put a man deep in debt, he said to Jim, and he is more likely to make you money. Marvin walked into roadside restaurants with a new bounce and jauntiness that was a little silly for a man of his heft, but he didn’t care. He had emerged from defeat with unexpected optimism.

  The opportunity to go into an entirely new venture spurred Marvin into a flow as if all his myriad schemes were linked to a common line of reason; the particular commodity or service hardly mattered. He said as much. Muffins, credit cards, weight loss clinics—they’d all suffice. In this respect, why was business any different from music or art? Whether a master artist rendered a barn or a smiling woman, the painting would still have his energy, his stamp. They would all work; virtually any business idea could work. This made sense to Jim, although he found it curious that his partner was making references to music and painting.

  Marvin was content to talk endlessly. He was stirred by his ever-shifting notions and abstruse refinements. One fine October afternoon, they were on a country road about a hundred miles north of Toronto, passing herds of long-haired black and white cows, meadows bordered by little forests of rust colors that filled Jim with a restless feeling. Six years earlier, heading west along this road for a thousand miles, Jim had sold Bibles and then months later he’d come back and sold the same farmers waterless cookware. He knew all the turns and knolls and the tired smiles and wary hesitations of a thousand housewives. In his new Cadillac Jim had delivered the tonic for bleak lives. He had silver spoons and stories to stir desolate souls; sometimes passion was key, but just as often he aroused them with the sorrow of our passing lives. To succeed, Jim needed to crawl into hearts, which wasn’t hard, because he was moved by his customers. Jim really wanted to connect and he believed that he was delivering the goods, whatever the product. He loved each of them, if only until he walked out the door. Marvin didn’t understand the puzzle of Jim’s selling because he mainly cared about ideas, making profits, and hoarding money.

  They were on the top of a hill, just south of the town of Bracebridge. Ahead was a vista of lush farming territory that stretched west and north for thousands of miles. And then on the downside of the hill Marvin began pointing at something and his voice was sharp as a fisherman spotting the big school. That’s it, Jim, that’s it over there.

>   What are you looking at? Jim answered. It was just more farm country. Jim drove down the road a quarter mile until it angled closer to a small dairy farm. Then he stopped the car.

  Marvin was gazing across the grain field. He stepped outside the white convertible and stood against a barbwire fence pointing toward a covey of structures, including a lovely red gambrel barn, a classic.

  Is it the barn?

  No, no, look at the one with a domed roof. Marvin was pointing at some kind of old storage shed fashioned from crumpled rusty metal like a giant inflated accordion lying on its flat ends.

  What is that?

  Never saw one before in Canada, Marvin answered. There are some in the States, shipped there from Europe after the war. Marvin was admiring this shed or shanty that was squat and unsightly and so out of place in this timeless Edward Hopper farm vista that it suggested Marvin himself standing in a room of handsome, understated people.

  Jim, that’s a gold mine, he said. That’s so much money over there you couldn’t spend it in six lifetimes. Most anyone would have taken this for empty blather except Marvin was entranced, so Jim stared at the ungainly building and he strained to imagine the magic that Marvin was seeing. But all Jim saw was a big piece of junk.

  * * *

  On the drive back to Toronto, Marvin gave Jim a short history of these unusual structures. At the onset of the Second World War the U.S. Navy anticipated mammoth problems creating shelter for troops and the wounded and storing untold amounts of ammunition, food, and supplies. They needed a design for an inexpensive, lightweight, portable building that could be constructed rapidly by untrained people. The navy took the problem to the Fuller Construction Company in Quonset Point, Rhode Island, and within sixty days two very smart engineers had designed a structure in which ribbed galvanized steel sheathing was placed over a frame of steel arches. The whole thing came together with self-tapping screws. It was so simple to put together that virtually anyone could do it. The buildings, called Quonset huts, could be erected on a concrete base or even a plywood floor. By the end of the war more than 170,000 of them had been produced. But the design itself proved to be far more durable than anyone had imagined. The components worked in unison, making them virtually indestructible. The domed roofs did not collapse beneath the weight of a blizzard of snow or the pounding winds of hurricanes.

  Marvin recognized that, despite their homely appearance, staunch inexpensive buildings had a tremendous market in rural Canada, particularly for farmers. Gesler Sheds—he named the new company on the spot—would be perfect for storing grain, machinery, and livestock, but really they could be used for just about anything. They could be insulated and partitioned into rooms. You could use them for houses, churches, or hockey rings. They went up like giant Tinkertoys. A man and his wife could put one together in an eight-hour day.

  Marvin envisioned millions of his squat sheds changing the face of Canada.

  19.

  Ava offered the great comedian respite and a degree of pleasure he could not have imagined, but Lenny Bruce couldn’t shake off his demons. By the time she met him, pain and degradation had taken over his life. When Lenny was feeling confident about Ava he wanted to show her the whole misery. It was a test. Several times he pressed her to come to his hotel room in Montreal, although she was uneasy about these visits. The sparse room seemed to resonate with bad encounters.

  One night he hadn’t bothered to hide his works—he wanted her to see—and she tried to avert her eyes. He wanted her to try smack. He’d made the suggestion before, but that’s where Ava drew the line. He badgered her. He took her hand and tried to pull her balking like a mule into the bathroom. Okay, okay, then watch me, at least. Lenny’s voice turned unctuous and pleading: Honey liked to watch. It turned her on. Lenny imitated pumping the syringe in and out as though it were sex. Ava didn’t know whether to run or stay. She followed him like a ghost.

  Sitting on the toilet in his underpants, he looked sickly thin, and his skin was green and pasty in the dim fluorescent light. He was frantically jabbing his callused veins for a hit. She turned away trying not to gag. Just give it a chance, he whined, looking back over his shoulder. Lenny was so out of whack—how could he think she would like this? Afterwards, there was blood spattered on the tile floor. His lips were turning blue and the needle was still hanging from his vein. Ava pulled it out. She threw some towels down on the blood while he stumbled into the bedroom.

  She wanted to drive back to the farm, but Ava waited until he came around. He didn’t want her to go. It was too late to drive thirty miles. And Lenny was pining for her as though she were his mother and his lost wife, and all of his regret. He was so raw and pathetic, no holding back. Manic bursts of ideas came out, tears welling up, maybe for his junkie wife wandering the streets. Ava hadn’t seen him like this. Whole dialogues and different voices came out of Lenny, shards of old routines, and she laughed and cried, but she couldn’t touch him. Then he drifted off, nodding to dreamy jazz. He started humming, but she didn’t recognize the tune. Do you get it, baby? he whispered hoarsely. Do you get it? Do you get it? She wasn’t sure. Do you love me? He opened his eyes a little and tried to find her. Do you really love me? She nodded sadly. He’d put the whole mess on the table. His eyes were set way back in dark tunnels. One of them wasn’t focusing and the whole right side of Lenny’s face was slack. He seemed to be asking, Can you handle this?

  Okay, not forever. Not forever, he said. Nothing is forever. Promise when I come back from Los Angeles you’ll be my girl. Promise that.

  She looked back at him and said simply, I promise, but she was thinking.

  I know. I know, he said, becoming agitated about what he’d done. He wanted to reach across to her. He couldn’t find her in the dark. Lenny was slurring his words. It was Stan Getz, he said.

  What?

  We’ll get married. We’ll make a baby. What you say?

  She shook her head.

  We’ll make a baby. Lenny couldn’t back off, though all this was too much for her.

  A baby. Ava was holding her hands against her ears. Lenny, don’t talk about such things. I’m a married lady.

  Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me, he said all red in the face. The veins in his neck were bulging. Don’t decide what you won’t do with me, okay? Okay? We’ll see. We’ll see what happens with us.

  Two days later, Lenny Bruce was back in Los Angeles, thinking of Ava. She was always in his mind and he couldn’t work or even make his phone calls. For the first time in three years, he was scheduled to appear on The Tonight Show, but it didn’t seem important. He had a trial coming up, but when his lawyer called to talk strategy Lenny couldn’t follow the arguments. He was scribbling about Ava in his notebooks. He felt such remorse at pushing her to watch. It was pitiful. Lenny knew he was wretched and couldn’t help himself. She had become his whole world, his only chance. He thought of her framed against a doorway of the farmhouse, her face touched by a shadow of sadness, her features flushed and gathered around a darkness so charming and sublime that it was burning him up. The expression of Ava’s lostness and hurting possessed Lenny and he couldn’t help himself; he was back on a plane to Montreal, flying to her. He had to see her, talk to her. He had to tell her all his ideas, convince her to stay with him. He wouldn’t take no.

  20.

  Gesler Sheds was the most extravagant and enduring expression of Marvin’s profuse genius. By the spring of 1966 Marvin had sold the retail stores and put most of the money into constructing the first of four mammoth sheet-metal factories, altogether nearly two million square feet of manufacturing space. The partners would in fact change the face of Canada’s farming landscape, and beyond that they would rapidly transform the manner and upside potential of agricultural storage throughout a dozen arid countries in Africa and the Middle East.

  At this most prolific time in Jim’s life, he didn’t know anything about Ava and Lenny Bruce. Jim first learned about their affair nearly four decades later, when
he and Ava met for a whimsical and affectionate evening in San Diego. (Some of this history came directly from Ava, during our visit, but many details I discovered myself at the Princeton University Library, where Lenny Bruce’s notes and journals are archived. There were nearly a hundred fervent handwritten pages about Jim’s wife and the meaning of love as seen through the comedian’s dark and improbable lens.) Jim readily acknowledged to me that if he’d known about them in 1966 it wouldn’t have mattered very much. He was working fifteen-hour days assembling and training a national sales team and looking after Marvin. He didn’t have the time to placate his wife with her considerable sorrows. Jim was racing for glory and the dreams of his father. But I could imagine my friend pausing a beat to pawn his wife off to the great comedian, absolving guilt with his extravagant salesman’s largess. Jim was always working the angles.

  It was also in the spring of 1966 that Ava had made her decision to move out to California and become Lenny Bruce’s second wife. She was biding her time for the right moment to tell her husband. She still cared for Jim, but he was no longer in the front row of her concerns and dreams.

  Ava hadn’t yet told Lenny she was two months’ pregnant with his baby. It felt exciting to be sitting on so much power. She imagined his ecstasy and the way his life would change overnight. He hadn’t visited Canada for a month, but they talked nearly every day. She didn’t want to tell him on the phone. She found it pleasant holding back the news.