Changing the Past

by Thomas Berger

  “Jackie,” Tony said, “I make quick decisions. I want you to open for me tomorrow night. Comic I got now—what’s his fuckin’ name?—uh, Joey: he’s a bum. He ain’t ever been funny, and he’s a lush besides.” From the side of his mouth he spoke to the larger of his two male assistants, “Get rid of him, Sid.” “Sure, Tony,” said this man and started briskly to leave the room. “Hey, Sid,” Tony added. “Pay him for the whole gig and add an extra five big ones for his trouble. That’s for his family—he gets his fuckin’ legs broke if he plays it on the tables.” “Sure, Tony,” said Sid, departing.

  “It’s just,” said Jackie, “that I had to sign a contract where I am now,” which was the lounge of another hotel than the one at which Tony Gamble was currently engaged.

  “Dint I say I got friends everyplace?” asked Tony. “Dint I just say that?” He addressed the remaining male in his entourage. “Billy, call up Jerry and tell him I need the kid as of yesterday. Be nice. Send him a nice present, a case of something—no, wait a minute, he don’t drink any more. He can always use cooze. Call up Minxie, tell her to do me a personal favor and fly up here.”

  The man frowned behind his tinted glasses. “She’s on location in New Mexico, Tony.”

  Tony stuck a pugnacious jaw towards him. “Did I ask you for that information, asshole?”

  “No, Tony.”

  “Then call her.” The man left in haste. Jackie remembered reading in the gossip columns that Minxie Morrow, then one of the most promising of the latest crop of starlets, was a pal of Tony Gamble’s.

  “So that’s taken care of,” Tony told Jackie. “I want you to start next show, which is…?” He snapped his fingers at his female helper, the woman wearing octagonal eyeglasses. She said, “The midnight.”

  “You forget my name?” asked Tony. “Sorry, Tony,” said she. Tony addressed Jackie, “The midnight.”

  “Tonight?”

  “When do you think, you shmuck, next Groundhog Day?” Tony cried jovially. Then he frowned. “Do what you been doin’, only nastier. Draw blood, you know? People love that. Be a good contrast for when I come on with the ballads. People like to laugh, and they like to cry. That’s what we do, kid, get the feelings out of them. You might say we’re kinda doctors.” He threw back his head and chortled. “Or whores!”

  The tuna sandwiches arrived. Tony took a sharklike bite out of his and chewed briefly, then grimaced at the woman, who automatically put out her hand, and he spat the mouthful into her palm. In view of this incident, Jackie assumed he was correct in not touching his own sandwich, which he hadn’t wanted in the first place, and now he was sick with anxiety about going into a big room to open for the major attraction in Vegas, for that was the era when Tony Gamble had no peer as a popular performer. Going in without preparation, furthermore, and the place was enormous. Whereas his current act was proportioned to much more intimate dimensions, and while space is not quite so important to comedy as timing (which is of the essence, never more than a millisecond separating success from failure), it could be crucial with a style of the kind that Jackie had been developing in recent months. He had nearly eliminated the telling of set jokes in favor of insulting ad libs directed to individuals in the audience that he wandered through after a brief time on stage. This was ideally suited to the lounges. It seemed to him that you might easily get lost in a big main room, not to mention that, for optimum effect, the victim must be close enough to the other patrons so that they can see the butt of the derision. Obviously that could not be the case with many people in a large audience.

  And Jackie was by now sufficiently experienced in the ways of the world to be sure that though this was all Tony Gamble’s idea, it would not be like Tony to take any responsibility if he failed. Tony might in fact be offended, and take some ugly vengeance: he had heard such stories. Therefore when Tony dismissed him now, Jackie went to his new hotel room (arranged for him by Gladys, Tony’s gray-haired aide, and she had also had his clothes transferred from the other place), and he spent an hour and a half drinking black coffee and vomiting into the toilet bowl. When he went downstairs to perform, his eyes were red, his complexion was ashen; his voice had been roughened by the puking; his guts were wracked with gas pains; his nerves hummed with caffeine; his ankles had turned elastic and could not bear his weight. He ran with sweat and yet his spine was a column of ice. In the wings he all but pissed his pants despite having urinated thrice within the previous quarter hour, and he had double vision.

  All he heard of the introduction was the second syllable of his last name, but it was enough not only to restore his faculties but to raise them to a higher plane. For years afterward people bragged of being present at Jackie Kellog’s premier performance in the big time.

  It was true he could not roam through the audience in such a large room. What he could do was pick targets for his scorn from the stage—and if need be, these could be altogether imaginary. You could assume that in any large assemblage there would be overweight people; persons with large noses, mouths, ears; husbands with unattractive wives; wives whose husbands belched at the dinner table and farted in bed and wore underwear yellowed at the crotch; women who were frigid or pretended to be; men over fifty who desired girls under twenty; and those of either sex who were addicted to unhealthy and/or immoral pleasures (with the exception of gambling, which for obvious reasons could not be derided), and even the unnatural.

  When it came to the last-named, you could not of course have focused on individuals in any event, and thus Jackie’s act on stage had an advantage over the more intimate performances, for at such a distance he could pretend to notice a sexy dress or spectacular piece of jewelry and commend the wearer: “You have perfect taste, sir.”

  But his boldest stroke, a product of the inspiration which was his when in the heat of a performance, owing nothing to reason, was to poke fun at, of all people, Tony Gamble. Looking at his watch, “Tony’s gonna be out here in a few minutes—that means he’s only got enough time left to shtup three more starlets…. J’ever notice those guys who hang around Tony—you know, the ones whose hands hang down to their knees? He’s worked out a good deal with them: he pays ‘em as high as they can count: which means they all make ten bucks a week—except the guy who shot off a pinky while cleaning his gun, he gets nine…. But Tony’s big-hearted. He gives a lot of wine to his friends. He sent a bottle the other day to the vet who takes care of his dog. The vet returned it with a note that said, ‘Your horse has diabetes.’”

  Tony could be sent into homicidal rage by the mildest criticism from a newspaper columnist, and he had once actually kicked the rump of a maître d’ who grinned at him when he was himself scowling. But he was so delighted by Jackie that he brought the comic out on stage during his own show, hugged him, and said to the audience, “How about this guy, ladies and gendemen? You listen to Tony: this young man’s going to the top. And would old Tony lie to you?” The phrase drew extra applause, echoing as it did a line from the lyrics of his current No. 1 single, “Too Many Lies, Too Little Love.” Then he seized Jackie and kissed him on the lips, a Tony Gamble trademark when publicly saluting his male friends and, given his notorious heterosexual activity, unassailable though provocative. Jackie seized the microphone at this point, and asked, “Does this mean you’ll only have your pals break one of my arms?” Tony guffawed, flashing the teeth that were blindingly white in a face that was kept tanned to the brink of négritude. He was darker than the most prominent of the black girl singers of the day, when their fashion was to be pale—a fact that was more grist to Jackie’s mill in future performances.

  Jackie remained Tony’s protégé for some five years, during which time he was able to establish his identity with the public, or rather several of the various publics for show business, for there are many such, some overlapping with others, like that of television, and one that was distinct and limited though with a great influence peculiar to itself, namely, Broadway, which was yet to come for him, but he was b
y now long since a star in his own right in Vegas, Tahoe, and Miami Beach, with lesser performers opening for him now, and had done hygienic though no less outrageous versions of his act many times on the leading television variety programs. TV people had talked with him about possible shows of his own, and at any given moment there was at least one movie project under discussion. His career was in good shape by the time that Tony cooled towards him—a change that he had learned was inevitable.

  As IT turned out, Jackie moved away from Tony at just the right time. Another philosophy of popular music than Tony’s was gaining ground everywhere, one which furthermore had Leftist connotations, whereas Tony was, when not entire apolitical, of the old-fashioned school of sentimental patriotism, singing the national anthem at World Series openers and occasionally visiting army bases, sometimes at nearby overseas installations. And his drug was alcohol, not herbs or powders, nor was he unbarbered and dirty and epicene and publicly foulmouthed, and he made no bones about preferring leaders who were stuffed shirts to those who were terrorists (besides, having served as their pimp, he had seen the former with their hair down, and they were regular guys).

  Television at last came up with the right part for Jackie: the tyrannical mess sergeant in a situation comedy that derided the U.S. Army. The kitchen of the character played by Jackie prepared shit-on-a-shingle for every meal (called “Ess-Oh-Ess” in the dialogue, causing the laugh track to respond with hilarity), but now and again his Negro assistant, who in contrast to Jackie spoke an impeccable English, distracted him by some ruse and served thick sirloins to the troops, followed by apple pie à la mode rather than the canned fruit that was the orthodox dessert. This unit was on peacetime duty in Germany, where wicked but comic Fascists were still plentiful, and while the Jackie character would seem superficially to operate on their principles, his basic American decency would manifest itself sooner or later, and it was sometimes he who frustrated the neo-Nazis or anyway did not obstruct his black helper from so doing.

  After becoming famous, Jackie was invited to appear at the White House by a series of presidents of various persuasions, he remained pure entertainer and, if called upon to perform, would jovially insult the reigning Chief Executive, along with the rest of the First Family and cabinet, though of course not as raunchily as when in a show-biz venue: no sex stuff ever, and no booze material unless the target was virtually a teetotaller, and very little of an ethnic nature. So deprived of the resources on which he drew for his nightclub act, Jackie was however not at the least disadvantage: one president had cracked a tooth on a fragment of shell in his maple-walnut ice cream; another had stepped in dog poop while exercising a pet at Camp David. That sort of thing: minor human frailties, which we all find amusing. To laugh at these was to share in the ultimate state of democracy and classlessness. Nothing could have been more appropriate under that roof.

  When his sitcom came to an end after four seasons, Jackie made three movies, of which two were bombs and one a feeble success, enough to prove that when performing someone else’s material, your fate was in the writer’s hands. Therefore when he subsequently received a startling invitation to come to Broadway, he had the courage to accept, for the dialogue anyway would be tops: W. Shakespeare had written it.

  Cartwright Law, the noted director, had asked Jackie Kellog to play Falstaff in a new production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Law made a specialty of offbeat casting, along with innovations in many another area. He had staged a Lear with an entire cast of midgets; had done an Othello in which the Moor was a white actor in blackface and lago a black actor in a white ski mask. His Hamlet was a Lesbian, while the remainder of the roles were cast and performed in the orthodox mode—and, as a powerful critic said, it made perfect sense!

  The reviewers adored Jackie’s Falstaff, which he was by now sufficiently fat to perform with little padding. During the previews and throughout the first night, he adhered to the letter of Shakespeare’s dialogue insofar as he had memorized it from the script as edited by Cartwright Law, which deleted a good deal of the language in favor of clownish stage business by the stout Knight, including obscene self-gropings as he spoke of being ogled lasciviously by Mistress Page: “O! she did so course o’er my exteriors with such a greedy intention, that the appetite of her eye did seem to scorch me up like a burning-glass.” He did bumps and grinds whenever he addressed a female character, and belches, farts, and crotch-scratching at any time. “An idiosyncratic interpretation, perhaps,” said one critic in a Sunday supplement thinkpiece, “but well justified.”

  Years of performing in smoke-filled rooms, in a style of comedy that, despite the more than adequate sound systems of the day, seemed to require sustained shouting, plus the liquor of which his daily intake now was copious, along with the huge cigars that he had first used as props but finally began to smoke incessantly on- and offstage, had roughened Jackie’s voice until its timbre was that of a Hollywood version of a gangster, and as any attempt on his part to simulate an English accent would have been pathetic, he used his own unrefined Standard American—and was praised for that too by reviewers scornful of the now outmoded Broadway-British voices of the pretentious local thespians who usually essayed the Bard.

  Jackie was now at the summit of a phase of show business of which he had no prior experience. Indeed, he had never seen anything on a stage that was not a musical. He was getting highbrow praise while being paid for doing what came naturally. He understood that most of those people to whom the show was sold out for a solid six months were coming to see him and not Shakespeare, and gradually Falstaff became a Catskill-Vegas-Miami comic, updating his lines to include “Bullshit!” and adding “-hole” to the terminal word in “I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass.” His bawdy gestures became more extreme. Leering at a female character, he would fuck his fist with an index finger. Next he began to go to the footlights and perform a similar gesture while winking at attractive women in the first few rows of the audience, regardless of their escorts.

  He was usually drunk nowadays, coming to the theater with a buzz on and then, onstage as Falstaff, drinking the prop grape juice that he laced with vodka. Between the acts he drank more, and he sometimes had a girl, a pro, blow him in the dressing room, a form of midshow tension-reliever much used, and urged on his friends, by Tony Gamble. Once, while waiting to make his entrance and having urgently to piss, Jackie did so in the wings. He had regularly been rude and at times even abusive to the other members of the cast, who, though many were respected American Shakespeareans and all were Broadway professionals, were of course not known to Jackie Kellog’s vast share of the public, but he had remained at least civil to the crew, for no show, however successful, could survive without their cooperation. By the distribution of hundred-dollar bills, his personal manager, Harold Opel, was able to put the lid on the pissing incident, but hardly had that been done when Jackie, stumbling drunkenly backstage, tripped on a cable and swore at an electrician, who said, “Listen, I don’t have to take that,” to which Jackie responded, “You have to take anything I hand out, because you’re a piece of shit, and I’m a star.”

  The crew thereupon walked out. The theater was dark for two evenings and one matinee thereafter, and no sooner had this dispute been settled (by more bribes, the featherbed hiring of several more crew members who had no duties whatever, and a maudlin apology by Jackie to the man he had insulted: “I love people, Richie, I think I’ve proved that in everything I’ve ever done…”) than the husband of a woman to whom Jackie had made especially obscene gestures from the stage waylaid the star as Jackie left the theater that night, bruised his face and broke his nose. (The publicists represented this attack as an attempted mugging, and obviously Jackie could not sue his assailant.) Trouper that he was, he missed not a single performance, going on with a bandaged skull and extra-heavy makeup, drunker than ever owing to the pain.

  But next the actress who played Mistress Quickly, an arrogant bitch who had in the past won two Tonys, mad
e a formal complaint to Equity, accusing Jackie of taking liberties with her onstage and off, ignoring her protests. Jackie’s response was to write an abusive, semiliterate letter to the board attacking not only the offending colleague but all highbrow Broadway snobs who thought they were better than the combat troops of show business, namely, those who had served their time out where a lush could hit you with a bottle for not making him laugh, and concluding with kiss-my-ass-you-no-talent-bums.

  All persons and institutions concerned, except the fearful producers of the play, leaked this communication to the press. Jackie did so because he was proud of himself, speaking as he thought he had for the Common Man of entertainment, but in fact not even his fellow standup comics were in sympathy with him in the case at hand: he had willfully ruined what at first had been seen as a victory for their craft, a demonstration that he who could do standup, the most demanding job in show biz, could outdo the snobs at their own game. But now he had played into the hands of the disdainful and also probably destroyed forever any chance that the experiment would be tried again.

  His best friends in the business and previously generous media people publicly turned against him: e.g., Roz Wilshire, the gossip columnist and an old pal, called him “a disgusting slob” on TV, and Tony Gamble, who now let his hair grow shoulder-length, sang protest songs, and embraced Leftist causes in a desperate effort to regain popularity with American youth, said, when asked about his old protégé, “I love the cat’s talent, but it was this hangup of his about abusing the ladies. I just couldn’t dig it and told him so, and he told me to stuff it. Hey, what can you do?”

  When militant women’s groups picketed the theater, Jackie walked out of the show. Who needed that shit? He could make five times the money, back in the big hotel rooms of which he was now reigning king, for in an age when rock-and-roll and country-and-western were successfully invading every medium, and the take-my-wife one-liner comics were becoming superannuated, when Tony Gamble, once the favorite entertainer of the American Legion, performed at counterculture rallies, Jackie Kellog could be relied on to maintain the old standards.