Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

“No, it’s you who don’t understand. When you get to be my age, what you regret is not the times you cheated a little, but the times you didn’t.”

  “It’s not going to be like that with us.”

  “I’ll bet when you were a kid you clapped hands for Tinkerbell.”

  Early every morning, rain or shine, Hymie, who was then being treated by a Reichian analyst, would trot out to the dunes and let out primal screams sufficiently loud to drive any sharks lingering in the shallows back to sea. Then he would start on his morning jog, accumulating a gaggle of everybody else’s children en route, proposing marriage to eleven-year-old girls and suggesting to nine-year-old boys that they stop somewhere for a beer, eventually leading them to the local candy store for treats. Back at the beach house, he would make both of us salami omelettes garnished with mounds of home fries. Then, immediately after breakfast, still hoarse from his dune therapy, Hymie, who was connected to the world outside by his phone, would put in a call to his agent: “What are you going to do for me today, you cacker?” Or he would get a producer on the line, cajoling, pleading, threatening, honking phlegm into his handkerchief, lighting one cigarette off another. “I’ve got it in me to direct the best American film since Citizen Kane, but I never hear from you. How come?”

  I was often wakened in the early-morning hours by Hymie hollering into the phone at one or another of his former wives, apologizing for being late with an alimony payment, commiserating over an affair that had ended badly, or shouting at one of his sons, or his daughter in San Francisco. “What does she do?” I once asked him.

  “Shop. Get pregnant. Marry, divorce. You’ve heard of serial killers? She’s a serial bride.”

  Hymie’s children were a constant heartache and an endless financial drain. The son in Boston, a Wiccan, and proprietor of an occult bookshop, was writing the definitive book on astrology. When not contemplating the heavens, he was given to writing bad cheques on Earth, which Hymie had to make good. His other son, a wandering rock musician, was in and out of expensive detox clinics, and had a weakness for hitting the road in stolen sports cars which he inevitably smashed up. He could phone from a lock-up in Tulsa, or a hospital in Kansas City, or a lawyer’s office in Denver, to say there had been a misunderstanding. “But you mustn’t worry, Dad. I wasn’t hurt.”

  Not yet a father myself, I deigned to lecture him. “If I ever have children,” I said, “once they reach the age of twenty-one, they’re on their own. There has to be a cut-off point.”

  “The grave,” he said.

  Hymie supported a shlemiel of a brother who was a Talmudic scholar, and his parents in Florida. Once, I found him weeping at the kitchen table at two a.m., surrounded by chequebooks, and scraps of paper on which he had made hurried calculations. “Anything I can do?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Mind your own business. No, sit down. Do you realize that if I had a heart attack tomorrow, there would be twelve people out on the street, without a pot to piss in? Here. Read this.” It was a letter from his brother. He had finally caught up with one of Hymie’s movies on late-night television: prurient, obscene, meretricious, and an embarrassment to the family’s good name. If he must make such trash, couldn’t he use a pseudonym? “Do you know how much money he’s in to me for, that momzer? I even pay his daughter’s college fees.”

  I was not good company. Far from it. Waking in a sweat at three a.m., convinced I was still wasting away in that slammer in St-Jérôme, denied bail, a life sentence my most likely prospect. Or dreaming that I was being weighed again by that somnolent jury of pig farmers, snow-plough men, and garage mechanics. Or, unable to sleep, grieving for Boogie, wondering if the divers had messed up, and if, against all odds, he was still tangled in the weeds. Or if his bloated body had surfaced in my absence. But an hour later my concern would yield to rage. He was alive, that bastard. I knew it in my bones. Then why hadn’t he shown up at my trial? Because he hadn’t heard about it. He was on one of his retreats in an ashram in India. Or he was in a heroin-induced stupor in a hotel in San Francisco. Or he was in that Trappist monastery on Big Sur, trying to kick, studying his list of the names of the dead. Any day now I would get one of his cryptic postcards. Like the one that once came from Acre:

  In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

  Judges, 17: 6.

  The day after my release from prison, I had driven out to my cottage on the lake, jumped into my outboard, and covered every inch of the shoreline as well as the adjoining brooks. Detective-Sergeant O’Hearne had been waiting for me on my dock. “What are you doing here?” I’d demanded.

  “Walking in the woods. You were born with a horseshoe up your ass, Mr. P.”

  Late one night Hymie and I sat on the deck, the two of us sipping cognac. “You were such a bundle of nerves when we first met,” he said. “Sweating anger and resentment and aggression under that assumed hipster’s carapace. But who would have guessed that one day you would get away with murder?”

  “I didn’t do it, Hymie.”

  “In France you would have got off with a slap on the wrist. Crime passionnel is what they call it. I swear I never thought you’d have the guts.”

  “You don’t understand. He’s still alive. Out there somewhere. Mexico. New Zealand. Macao. Who knows?”

  “According to what I’ve read, afterwards there was never any money withdrawn from his bank account.”

  “Miriam found out that there were three break-ins into summer cottages on the lake in the days following his disappearance. That’s how he probably found some clothes.”

  “Are you broke now?”

  “My lawyer. Alimony. Neglected business affairs. Sure I’m broke now.”

  “We’re going to write a screenplay together.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not a writer, Hymie.”

  “There’s a hundred and fifty big ones in it for us, split two ways. Hey, wait a minute. I mean one third for you, two thirds for me. What do you say?”

  Once we settled into work on the script, Hymie would rip scenes out of my typewriter and read them over the phone to a former mistress in Paris, a cousin in Brooklyn, his daughter, or his agent. “Now you listen to this, it’s fabulous.” If the reaction wasn’t what he expected, he would counter, “It’s only a first draft and I did tell Barney it wouldn’t work. He’s a novice, you know.” His cleaning lady’s opinion was solicited; he consulted his analyst, handed out pages to waitresses, and made revisions based on their criticisms. He could charge into my bedroom at four a.m. and shake me awake. “I just had a brilliant idea. Come.” Slurping ice cream out of a bucket retrieved from the fridge, he would stride up and down in his boxer shorts, scratching his groin, and begin to dictate. “This is Academy Award stuff. Bulletproof.” But the next morning, rereading what he had dictated, he would say, “Barney, this is a piece of shit. Now let’s get serious today.”

  On bad days, dry days, he might suddenly sink to the sofa and say, “You know what I could do with now? A blow-job. Technically, you know, that’s not being unfaithful. What am I worrying about? I’m not even married now.” Then he would leap up, pluck his copy of The Memoirs of Fanny Hill or The Story of O from a bookshelf, and disappear into the bathroom. “We should do this at least once a day. It keeps the prostate in check. A doctor told me that.”

  Back at Jimmy’s Bar, in 1952, we hit the road in Hymie’s Peugeot12 again, and the next thing I remember is one of those crowded, tiny, smoke-filled bar-tabacs with a zinc-topped counter in an alley off the market in Nice, and the three of us knocking back cognacs with the porters and truck drivers. We drank toasts to Maurice Thorez, Mao, Harry Bridges, and then to La Pasionaria and El Campesino, in honour of the two Catalan refugees in the company. And then, laden with gifts of tomatoes that still reeked of the vine, spring onions, and figs, we moved on to Juan les Pins, where we found a nightclub open. “ ‘Tailgunner Joe,’ ” said Hymie, “my intrepid comrade-in-arms Senator Joseph McCarth
y, that cockroach, actually never flew into battle …”

  Which was when a seemingly comatose Boogie suddenly shifted gears, going into overdrive. “When the witch-hunt is over,” he said, “and everybody is embarrassed, as they were after the Palmer Raids, McCarthy may yet be appreciated with hindsight as the most effective film critic ever. Never mind Agee. The senator certainly cleaned out the stables.”

  Hymie would never have taken that from me, but, coming from Boogie, he decided to let it fly. It was amazing. Here was Hymie, an accomplished and reasonably affluent man, a successful film director, and there was Boogie, poor, unknown, a struggling writer, his publications limited to a couple of little magazines. But it was an intimidated Hymie who was determined to win Boogie’s approval. Boogie had that effect on people. I wasn’t the only one who needed his blessing.

  “My problem,” Boogie continued, “is that I have some respect for the Hollywood Ten as people, but not as writers of even the second rank. Je m’excuse. The third rank. Much as I abhor Evelyn Waugh’s politics, I would rather read one of his novels any day than sit through any of their mawkish films again.”

  “You’re such a kidder, Boogie,” said a subdued Hymie.

  “ ‘The best lack all conviction,’ ” said Boogie, “ ‘while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’ So said Mr. Yeats.”

  “I’m willing to admit,” said Hymie, “that our bunch, and I include myself in that lot, possibly invested so much integrity in our guilt-ridden politics we had little left for our work. I suppose you could argue that Franz Kafka didn’t require a swimming-pool. Or that George Orwell never attended a script conference, but …” And then, unwilling to tangle with Boogie, he unleashed his anger on me. “And I hope I will always be able to say the same for you, Barney, you condescending little prick.”

  “Hey, I’m not a writer. I’m merely hanging out. Come on, Boogie. Let’s split.”

  “Leave my friend Boogie out of this. At least he speaks his mind. But I have my doubts about you.”

  “Me too,” said Boogie.

  “Go to hell, both of you,” I said, leaping up from the table and quitting the nightclub.

  Boogie caught up with me outside. “I expect you won’t be satisfied until he punches you out.”

  “I can take him.”

  “How does Clara put up with your tantrums?”

  “Who else would put up with Clara?”

  That made him laugh. Me too. “Okay,” he said, “let’s get back in there, and you make nice, understand?”

  “He bugs me.”

  “Everybody bugs you. You’re one mean, crazy son of a bitch. Now if you can’t be a mensh, you can at least pretend. Come on. Let’s go.”

  Back at the table, Hymie rose to rock me in a bear hug. “I apologize. Humbly I do. And now we can all do with some fresh air.”

  Settling into the sand, on the beach in Cannes, we watched the sun rise over the wine-dark sea, eating our tomatoes, spring onions, and figs. Then we shed our shoes, rolled up our trouser bottoms, and waded in up to our knees. Boogie splashed me, I splashed him back, and within seconds the three of us were into a water fight, and in those days you didn’t have to worry about turds or used condoms drifting in on the tide. Finally we repaired to a café on the Croisette for oeufs sur le plat, brioches, and café au lait. Boogie bit the end off a Romeo y Julieta, lit up, and said, “Après tout, c’est un monde passable,” quoting only God knows who.13

  Hymie stretched, yawned, and said, “Got to go to work now. We begin shooting at the casino in an hour. Let’s meet for drinks at the Carlton at seven tonight and then I know of a place in Gulf-Juan where they make an excellent bouillabaisse.” He tossed us his hotel keys. “In case you guys want to wash up or snooze or read my mail. See you later.”

  Boogie and I strolled as far as the harbour to look at the yachts, and there was our French sugar daddy, sunning himself on his teak deck, out of the Mediterranean endlessly rocking, his squeeze nowhere in sight. He looked absolutely pathetic, wearing reading glasses, his sunken belly spilling over his bikini, as he perused Le Figaro. The stock-market pages, no doubt. Obligatory reading for those without an inner life. “Salut, grandpère,” I called out. “Comment va ta concubine aujourd’hui?”

  “Maricons,” he hollered, shaking his fist at me.

  “Are you going to let him get away with that?” asked Boogie. “Knock his teeth out. Beat the shit out of him. Anything to make you feel better.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  “You’re a fucking menace,” he said, leading me away.

  3

  The script Hymie and I wrote on Long Island was never produced, but less than a year later, in 1961, he phoned me from London. “Come on over. We’re going to write another picture together. I’m so excited about this project I’ve already written my Academy Award acceptance speech.”

  “Hymie, I’ve got a full plate over here. I spend every weekend in Toronto with Miriam, or she flies here and we go to a hockey game together. Why don’t you get yourself a real writer this time?”

  “I don’t want a real writer. I want you, darling. It’s from an original story I bought years ago.”

  “I can’t leave here just like that.”

  “I’ve already booked you on a first-class flight leaving Toronto tomorrow.”

  “I’m in Montreal.”

  “What’s the difference? It’s all Canada, isn’t it?”

  Outside, it was fifteen degrees below zero, and another cleaning lady had quit on me. There were mouldy things sprouting in my fridge. My apartment stank of stale tobacco and sweaty old shirts and socks. In those days I usually started my morning with a pot of black coffee fortified with cognac, and a stale bagel I had to soak in water and heat up in an oven encrusted with grease. I was then already divorced from The Second Mrs. Panofsky. I was also a social pariah. Adjudged innocent by the court but condemned as a murderer, incredibly lucky to walk, by just about everybody else. I had taken to playing childish games. If the Canadiens won ten in a row, or if Beliveau scored a hat trick on Saturday night, there would be a postcard from Boogie on Monday morning, forgiving me my red-hot outburst, those harsh words I swear I didn’t mean. I tracked down and wrote or phoned mutual friends in Paris and Chicago and Dublin and, you know, that artsy desert pueblo–cum–Hollywood shtetl in Arizona, favoured by short producers in cowboy boots, with those health-food restaurants where you can’t smoke and everybody pops garlic and vitamin pills with their daily fibre. It’s not far from where they made the atom bomb, or from where D. H. Lawrence lived with what’s-her-name. Santa something.14 But nobody had seen or heard from Boogie, and some resented my inquiries. “What are you trying to prove, you bastard?” I visited Boogie’s old haunts in New York: The San Remo, The Lion’s Head. “Moscovitch,” said the bartender in The San Remo, “he was murdered somewhere in Canada, I thought.”

  “The hell he was.”

  At the time, I was also having my problems with Miriam, who would change everything for me: then, now, and forever. She was still vacillating. Moving to Montreal to marry me would mean giving up her job with CBC Radio. Furthermore, to her mind, I was a difficult man. I phoned her. “Go ahead,” she said, “London will be good for you and I need some time alone.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I can’t think with you here.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re devouring me.”

  “I want you to promise that if I’m in London for more than a month you’ll fly over for a few days. It won’t be a hardship.”

  She promised. So why not, I thought. The work wouldn’t be rigorous. I needed the money desperately and all Hymie required was sympathetic company. Somebody to sit at the typewriter and guffaw at his one-liners, while he worked the phone, striding up and down, honking, chatting up bimbos, agents, producers, or his analyst: “I just remembered something significant.”

  Hymie’s film turned out to be one of his iffy patchwork-quilt pro
jects, the financing stitched together by pre-selling distribution to individual territories: the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy. His once curly black hair had faded grey as ash, and he was now given to cracking his knuckles and picking at the fat of his palms with his thumbnails, rendering the flesh painfully raw. He had shed his Reichian analyst for a Jungian, whom he visited every morning. “She’s incredible. A magus. You ought to see her yourself. Great tits.”

  Hymie now suffered from insomnia, chewed tranquillizers, and did the occasional line. He had been through an LSD session with the then-modish R. D. Laing. His problem was that nobody in Hollywood was in need of his services any more. His phone calls to most agents and studio executives in Beverly Hills went unanswered or were returned some days later by an underling, one of whom actually asked Hymie to spell his name. “Call me back, sonny,” said Hymie, “when your voice has changed.” But, as promised, we did whoop it up together in that suite Hymie had taken in the Dorchester, where he was encouraging the chambermaid to write poetry, and a waiter in the dining room to organize a staff union. We smoked Montecristos and sipped brandies and sodas while we worked, and called room service to send up smoked salmon and caviar and champagne for lunch. “You know something, Barney, we may never be able to check out of here, because I don’t know if my backers can handle the bill.” My long phone calls to Toronto, often twice daily, included. “Hey,” Hymie would say, breaking off in the middle of acting out a scene, “you haven’t spoken to your sweetiepoo in six hours. Maybe she’s changed?”

  Early one afternoon, maybe ten days into our collaboration, I phoned again and again, but no one answered. “She told me she’d be home tonight. I don’t understand.”

  “We’re supposed to be working here.”

  “She’s a terrible driver. And they had freezing rain there this morning. What if she’s been in an accident?”

  “She’s gone to a movie. Or dinner with friends. Now let’s get some work done here.”

  It was five a.m., London time, before somebody picked up her phone. I recognized the voice at once. “McIver, you bastard, what in the hell are you doing there?”