“What are you looking for?” he said. “I got everything. Balcony, orchestra, what do you want?”
“We’ll take the best two you have,” I said, “as long as they are down fudge.”
“What?” he said, looking at me sharply.
I had meant to say “down front” of course, but obviously it had come out wrong. So I tried again.
“Down fudge.”
“What are you, a wise guy?” he said.
Lettie took over at that point, saying I meant close to the stage, but not until she had given me a peculiar look of her own.
“I got a great pair,” the fellow said, “but they’ll cost you four hundred dollars.”
Lettie shook her head no, but I nodded—not trusting myself to talk—and indicated that we could take them.
What the fellow didn’t know is that I would have paid him a thousand dollars for them.
“Are you all right?” Lettie asked, as we entered the theatre.
“Share,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
I had to agree with her on that—and to wonder, of course, what had happened to me. Then I realized that it had to be connected to the drama that had unfolded at the apartment on Gramercy Park. My actions in disposing of Peabody must have triggered some deep-seated justice-seeking mechanism in my brain. Ergo (that word I’d been trying to shoehorn in) the effect on my speech pattern.
I was disturbed, of course (who wouldn’t be?), since speaking is tremendously important to a fellow such as myself—I hadn’t realized just how important it was—and it would probably take all kinds of therapy to get me back on track. Yet in some curious way—and no matter what law enforcement was able to achieve—I was happy not to have gotten away clean.
Obviously, however, I would have preferred a more gentle slap on the wrist.
The seats were in the tenth row center, and they were every bit as good as the scalper said they were. I had to give him that. After glancing at the program, I could judge from the number of scenes that we were in for a long evening. I wasn’t sure I could tolerate all that entertainment in one sitting, as upset as I was. But once the show started, I got caught up in it and forgot about how long it was going to be.
Just watching the scenery alone made me feel we had gotten our money’s worth. I recognized most of the music, but it was all new to my daughter, and to tell the truth, I spent most of the time watching Lettie watch the show and seeing the light come back into her eyes.
The high point of the first act came when a big burly black fellow came out and sang, “Old Man River” in a voice as deep and rich as the Mississippi itself. The audience went wild when he finished singing it. The show continued, of course, but from time to time, they would bring the same fellow back to sing a few bars of the same song. The audience was glad to see him, but each time he came out on stage, their applause was a little less enthusiastic. It soon became clear that the only reason they were bringing him out was so that you wouldn’t notice they were changing the scenery. I thought that was a mistake and considered asking Lettie about it, but I didn’t want it to come out wrong. And more important, I didn’t want to interfere with her enjoyment of the show. So I didn’t say anything to her, although I was confident that as an up-and-coming producer, she would agree with me.
It had been quite a trip. The great apartment in Gramercy Park, the dinosaurs and restaurants, Lettie’s movie deal, the whole Peabody business—you name it—and then getting to see a Broadway musical comedy in seats that were so close to the stage we might as well have been right up there with the actors. I did not see how we could possibly squeeze in any more excitement—but try telling that to Lettie who was just getting warmed up.
“Let’s do something else,” she said, when the show was finally over and the audience had stopped applauding.
“If you can think of something.”
“I can,” said Lettie. “What about a horse-and-buggy ride through Central Park. I’ve dreamed of taking one ever since I was a little girl.”
“I hadn’t realized that,” I said, unaware that she had crossed over into maturity—which, as far as I was concerned, she hadn’t. (They could make her the head of a Hollywood studio and I would feel the same way.)
The other shows had emptied out by the time we got to the street, causing us to get caught up in a huge, slow-moving crowd of theatregoers. They seemed in no hurry to get home, which was fine with me, considering the day I had put in. But Lettie suddenly ducked her head down, grabbed my hand and started to fly through the crowd, pulling me along behind her like some kind of kite she was trying to get off the ground. I held on and had to laugh at the spectacle—an eleven-year-old stringbean hauling a fully grown man behind her (and don’t forget my suitcase). Where did she get that kind of strength, I wondered? Could it have been the twelve ballet lessons I had invested in? If so, they had certainly begun to pay off.
She whipped and zigzagged us up to the edge of Central Park South and we didn’t stop to catch our breath until we had signed on for one of the fabled buggy rides. The horse we got was a little on the old side but had remained proud and regal all the same. And our buggy was fit for a king. Lettie insisted that we put blankets over our legs, even though I was doing fine without them.
“No, no,” she said. “It’s part of it.”
Then we settled in to enjoy the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves, the mysterious park and the stately buildings that surrounded it. From what we could see, each of the apartments was warmly lit and had a romantic feel to it. We wondered about the people who lived in them. They couldn’t all be Faye Dunaway. So who were they? Or at least I wondered about these things. Even though she had been dreaming about it for years, Lettie quickly lost interest in the whole operation.
“Would you give me one of your famous head massages?” she asked.
“In a buggy?” I said, acting more startled than I was. “And since when did they become famous?”
“Are you kidding!” she said. “They’re fabulous.”
She had not quite answered my question, but when she snuggled up against my shoulder, I gave her one of the famous head massages anyway. I would come in with one now and then—at home—when my wizard’s imaginary sleep dust didn’t work.
She fell asleep immediately, making me the only one there to enjoy the ride that she had been so desperate to take.
But there were certain advantages to the situation. For one thing, my speech was still a little shaky and I was concerned about my ability to handle certain words, chief among them my favorite in the whole English language. So I thought I might as well use the opportunity to try it out. Keeping my voice low so as not to disturb either Lettie or the driver, I whispered it in the darkness—daughter—and was delighted when it came out clear as a bell.
A Biography of Bruce Jay Friedman
Bruce Jay Friedman is a bestselling author, playwright, memoirist, and Academy Award–nominated screenwriter. In a career spanning over five decades, he has achieved both critical and commercial success for his work, which is characterized by dark humor, absurdity, and incisive observations of contemporary life.
Friedman was born in the New York City borough of the Bronx on April 26, 1930. Growing up, he aspired to become a doctor, but his application to the premed program at Columbia University—the only one he sent out—was rejected. He instead attended the University of Missouri where he studied journalism. Friedman enlisted in the United States Air Force after graduating from college, serving as a first lieutenant from 1951 to 1953. Friedman’s commanding officer, George B. Leonard, who later became a leading figure in the California counterculture movement of the 1960s, encouraged him to study literature, which sparked Friedman’s desire to become a writer. His time in the military inspired his first short story, “The Man They Threw Out of Jets,” which was published in the Antioch Review. His second story, “Wonderful Golden Rules Days,” was published in the New Yorker.
During the late 1
950s and early 1960s, Friedman edited men’s adventure magazines including Male, Man’s World, and True Action. He wrote his first novel, Stern (1962), during this time, working late at night and during his daily commutes from Long Island to Manhattan. The tale of a Jewish man who moves his family to suburbia only to feel alienated from his gentile neighbors and increasingly paranoid about their anti-Semitism, Stern is a hilarious and penetrating social satire with themes that recur and evolve in much of Friedman’s work.
While employed as a magazine editor, Friedman met another moonlighting author, Mario Puzo, whom Friedman had hired as an assistant editor. Puzo was working on his novel The Godfather and the two became lifelong friends. The success of Friedman’s second novel, the bestselling A Mother’s Kisses (1964), in which an overbearing matriarch—described by the New York Times as “the most unforgettable mother since Medea”—goes to incredible lengths to help her only son get into college, allowed the author to leave his magazine job and pursue writing full time.
Friedman next turned his attention to the theater, writing two highly successful off-Broadway shows: Scuba Duba (1967), starring Jerry Orbach and Judd Hirsch, and Steambath (1970), in which the afterlife is portrayed as a steam bath filled with the recently deceased and God is a Puerto Rican towel attendant. Around this time, Friedman made his first visit to Hollywood at the invitation of a producer who wanted him to work on a film about comedian Lenny Bruce. Not wanting to “be the one to fuck up the Lenny Bruce story,” Friedman declined the offer, but he would go on to write several acclaimed screenplays, including Stir Crazy (1980), starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, and Splash (1984), for which he received an Oscar nomination. In 1972, Neil Simon adapted Friedman’s short story “A Change of Plan” into the film The Heartbreak Kid, which was directed by Elaine May and starred Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd. The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life (1978), Friedman’s witty portrait of bachelorhood in America, inspired the cult comedy The Lonely Guy (1984) starring Steve Martin.
A popular and gregarious figure on both coasts, Friedman packed his autobiography, Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir (2011), with details of his adventures with celebrities of the cinematic and literary worlds: Norman Mailer bit him during a fight, Warren Beatty enlisted his help in arranging an affair, and Kurt Vonnegut once asked him, “Can you teach me how to hang out?” Friedman had a regular table at the iconic New York City restaurant Elaine’s, where he hung out with friends including Puzo, Joseph Heller, and James Salter.
Friedman’s other work includes the novels The Dick (1970), About Harry Towns (1974), Tokyo Woes (1985), and A Father’s Kisses (1996), as well as the short story collections Far From the City of Class (1963), Black Angels (1966), and Three Balconies (2008). As editor of the influential anthology Black Humor (1965), which featured stories by Thomas Pynchon, Edward Albee, Terry Southern, and Joseph Heller, he is credited with introducing the eponymous genre and its self-reflexive anxieties and gallows humor to American readers. Friedman lives in New York City with his wife, educator Patricia J. O’Donohue.
Friedman in 1940 at the Laurels Country Club in the Catskills with his favorite comedian, Jackie Miles. An early influence on Friedman, Miles was one of many Jewish comedians including Milton Berle, Mel Brooks, and Joan Rivers, who performed at resorts in upstate New York’s Borscht Belt from the 1940s to the 1960s.
Friedman with his mother, Mollie, in 1943. Raised by Mollie and his father, Irving, Friedman graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx.
Friedman in uniform as a lieutenant in the air force, where he served from 1951 to 1953. During this time, his commanding officer, George B. Leonard, recommended three books that influenced Friedman’s decision to become a writer: Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe, From Here to Eternity by James Jones, and The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. Friedman’s military experience informed his first published short story, “The Man They Threw Out of Jets.”
Friedman at his typewriter in 1954. The author worked as a men’s adventure magazine editor while writing fiction late at night or on his long commute from Glen Cove, Long Island, to Manhattan.
Published in 1962, Friedman’s first novel, Stern, set the tone for much of his future work with its nebbish narrator, who is driven mad by his suburban neighbors’ anti-Semitism. The New York Times Book Review called the book, “an iridescent tour de force.”
The book that launched Friedman into literary fame and allowed him to quit his day job upon its publication in 1964, A Mother’s Kisses was a New York Times bestseller praised for its comedic portrayal of a young man’s domineering mother as well as its emotional depth.
Friedman (at right) with Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, in 1966. The two met when Friedman hired Puzo as his assistant editor for both Male and Men magazines. Puzo churned out dozens of stories for the publications while working on his seminal novel on the side. Friedman and Puzo remained close friends until Puzo’s death in 1999.
After leaving his job as a magazine editor, Friedman began writing plays. He’s pictured here (left) on the set of his off-Broadway show Steambath in 1970. In Steambath, purgatory is a steam bath and God is a Puerto Rican towel attendant. The play was also adapted for a TV movie on PBS (right) in 1973.
Friedman at home in his office in Great Neck in 1971. When not writing at home on Long Island, he spent time in Hollywood during the seventies and eighties working on screenplays—and even had cameos in three Woody Allen films.
(From left) Friedman with his friends Joseph Heller, Mel Brooks, and Mario Puzo in Southampton in the 1980s. He has maintained close friendships with other writers over the course of his career and, as described in his memoir Lucky Bruce, had a standing lunch date with his inner circle, the members of which chose to exclude James Salter because he was “too good a writer.”
Friedman in a recent photo taken by his daughter, Molly.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1996 by Bruce Jay Friedman
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1957-6
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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