Changing the Past

by Thomas Berger

  His private style vis-à-vis the opposite sex had not changed since high school. He certainly was not queer. He had no sexual taste for his fellow man, but he had no other use for women. He was bored by anything a woman said unless it was dirty. To suffer a woman’s company when engaged in recreational pursuits, such as the racetrack, the fights, crap tables, and drinking to insensibility, tended to ruin these sources of the only pleasure Jackie knew in his offstage time, and sex was never fun for him but rather a necessity of nature like moving his bowels. He fucked showgirls but as always preferred whores, who did what they were paid for and left promptly thereafter.

  At one point in his early forties, however, after a physical examination at which the doctor had warned him about an ever-rising blood pressure, Jackie suddenly became aware that he was in effect all alone in the world. Since leaving home he had never communicated in any way with the members of his family, who had not appreciated him when he lived amidst them and nowadays would surely want to borrow money, and in fact his brother did try twice to reach him by phone, and his mother wrote once, on the occasion of his father’s death, with her hand out, she who had always conspicuously favored his brother, now bankrupted by a small-business flop. “Never but never take any calls from any cock-suckers pretending to be my relatives!” Jackie told his people. “They’re all phonies. I was an orphan from birth on.”

  Becoming aware of his mortality with the news of the high blood pressure, Jackie decided he would be less vulnerable under the aspect of eternity if he produced offspring, and he therefore chose as a potential mother one of the robust Vegas showgirls, at five-eleven taller than he by almost half a foot, and underneath her thick makeup a prime piece of Swedish flesh. Their marriage was a show-biz event, held in the main room of the casino-hotel, and attended by a U.S. senator and other political notables, most of the big-name performers then appearing elsewhere in town (not Tony Gamble, who shared the bill at an outdoor rock concert that weekend with a roster of bisexual, junky degenerates, two of whom were to overdose and die before the gig was over), and even a representation of the mobsters who owned most of the Strip but were rarely seen on such an occasion: Joey “the Jockey” Marino, Fat Sal Testarossa, and Mel Lapidus, called “the Hebe” but not to his face.

  Sandy was two months pregnant at the time of the ceremony. Half a year later a dead child was produced by cesarean section. The mother thereafter went into a melancholy from which she never emerged till she and Jackie were divorced a few months later, soon after which she married a Texas high-roller, went to live with him in Houston, and bore a series of healthy blond offspring.

  Jackie’s second wife was an almost plain-looking girl from the cashier’s department of the hotel at which he often appeared in Miami Beach. By now he was sick of elaborate hairdos, heavy makeup, and showgirl flesh. Cecilia wore neat white blouses and black string ties. Though she had lived in southern Florida all her life, she rarely exposed any part of herself to the sunshine, and her skin remained almost blue-white. She went to confession every Saturday and on Sunday morning to the eight o’clock mass. She drank nothing that contained alcohol. At the age of twenty-seven she lived with her widowed mother. She was genuinely offended by Jackie’s sexual overtures and soon stated that unless he desisted from them—though she liked him a lot otherwise—she would not date him again.

  Perhaps it was the insanity of this—a little plain-Jane nobody like her, rejecting a star of his magnitude—that caused him to fall in love for the first time in his life. He doted on her. They held hands at sentimental movies, in one of which Minxie Morrow, Tony Gamble’s friend, played an ingenuous high-schooler, one of the vivacious gang at the malt shop; when with Cecilia, Jackie could not really believe that he had once drunkenly gone down on a stoned Minxie in front of a private audience at one of Tony’s parties. Afterwards, Ceil would make burned fudge in her mother’s modest kitchen, unfortunately her only culinary talent. But her mom was by Jackie’s standards a great cook, with her emphasis on abundant meat and potatoes and heavy desserts, menus by which she had kept her late husband, a salesman of soda-fountain equipment, for twenty years until his untimely demise from lung cancer (he had smoked three and a half packs of cigarettes a day since the age of nineteen).

  Jackie married Cecilia at some provincial redneck courthouse where nobody recognized him, and installed her and her mother in a triplex apartment on the oceanfront, intending from now on to perform only in Florida. But once Ceil had quit her job, her finagling with the hotel’s books came to light. As the months had gone by, the head cashier had given her more and more responsibility, freeing himself for the golf course and thereby enabling her to embezzle $78,000, all of which she had subsequently lost to the horses. Now, the peculiarly outrageous thing about this was that among the vices from which Jackie had been liberated by his association with Cecilia was the track: he hadn’t placed a bet in months, just as he had not had a drink.

  Despite her criminality, the press, who now hated Jackie, championed Ceil throughout the subsequent mess. He repaid the hotel for what she stole in return for their agreement not to file charges. He was taken to the cleaner’s in the divorce settlement, for though he had hired the most expensive lawyer in the state, a nationally renowned civil-rights attorney from New York offered to take Cecilia’s case for nothing, with the obvious purpose of adding persecuted women to the roster of victims, real or supposed, on which he had made his reputation. This resulted in the maximum in adverse publicity, and Jackie was transformed from the maker of jokes into the butt of many. Hardly a night went by that he was not the subject of a derisive reference on the TV talk show on which he had in better days so often been a favorite guest. He was named as a characteristic male villain by professional feminists, and next a band of militant women set up a picket line outside the hotel at which he performed.

  What with his many reverses, Jackie began to drink heavily again. One day when, returning from the racetrack, where he had lost a bundle, he found his limo surrounded by screeching harpies. He lost control and threatened to punch “you cunts inna tit.” Unfortunately for him, a local TV news team happened to be there on a slow-news day elsewhere. With the obscenities bleeped though perfectly understandable, all three national networks showed the tape that evening.

  Despite his subsequent public apology, Jackie lost most of his bookings when the contractual clauses designed to meet such emergencies were invoked. He thereupon sued the offending hotels—against the advice of the people he employed to manage his career, all of whom insisted that he could not possibly profit from such litigation. Win or lose in court, he could never afterward perform in any top room. But when he eventually dropped the suits, the result was the same.

  Jackie arrived at middle age with a career on the skids, no wife, no children, no money, and not even a home of his own. Soon the only gigs he could get were in provincial dinner theaters, playing roles in comedies of the past before audiences the youngest members of which were his own age. No one wanted the standup act. The kind of women who offered themselves now were well-upholstered old broads whose prime was in the mists of the past, whose husbands went to bed with them only to sleep. He rejected these people as rudely as he could. Once again he was always drunk as he performed, in which state he could usually get by when playing such parts as Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner, which permitted extravagant movements and shouting, and even the forgetting of lines and loud demands to the prompter, but he had at least to remain conscious, even when in some Nowheresville where anything else would be accepted. But the fact was he passed out cold one night in Little Rock, coming to, however, before the curtain was closed and completing the play without further incident.

  Then a month later, in Oklahoma City, he tripped on his first entrance, fell to the stage, and had to be carried into the wings.

  His heart attack made mostly local news, aside from one brief reference in a New York gossip column, by a woman who hated his guts to the degree that si
mply this report, without comment, could be considered gloating.

  He survived, but his blood pressure remained impossibly high, his weight outlandish, his cholesterol count out of sight, not to mention that his liver was morbid, and he was assured that unless he immediately cold-turkeyed the cigarette habit, he could say good-bye to his lungs. Before they discovered that he could not pay their fees, the doctors were gravely concerned.

  Ironically enough, this was just the impetus he needed for a comeback. Seeking a more compassionate image, a nighttime talk-show host invited Jackie to use his program as a ten-minute forum for the story of his victimization by certain members of the medical profession. This was at a time when people in general were turning against physicians, who were regularly depicted in films, cartoons, and jokes as mercenary incompetents who drove costly German cars and spent their prime time on the golf course, popping briefly into operating rooms to cut off the wrong organ from some poor bastard whom they bankrupted with their fees.

  The network subsequently received thousands of letters in support of Jackie Kellog, and his star began to rise once again. He was in demand for guest shots on television, and he was signed for a movie satire on practitioners of internal medicine, provisionally entitled Guts. Gradually he paid off his creditors, but not the doctors, whom he countersued for malpractice, but he did take their previous advice and cleaned up his physical act, stopped smoking, drinking, and gorging on the greasy, salty, sweet foods he preferred, and began to consume fiber, even worked out every morning on the portable rowing machine that accompanied him on his tours. He had always stayed too old-fashioned to do much of drugs, which he identified with rock music, clown’s clothing, shrill do-gooder politics, and a limp-wristed style that was the antithesis of the classic two-fisted show-biz culture, from the comics like himself, who started in gangsters’ clubs, all the way up to the tough guys on the screen in his favorite movie era of George Raft and Edward G.

  EN ROUTE to a local morning TV show at the moment, Jackie was sixty pounds below his maximum weight and still losing. His blood pressure had been lowered to an acceptable level. He no longer panted when climbing a slight grade. Not only could he now see his toes, he could even touch them. He had all but forgotten what a hangover felt like, or how it tasted to wake up in the morning after smoking forty cigarettes in the sixteen hours of the previous day. He was on his fourth wardrobe since beginning to lose weight, and for an appearance of this kind, he brought along a pair of the tent-sized trousers he had worn at his largest.

  “I still can’t believe it,” screeched Sara Neil, the female half of the morning show’s pair of hosts, when Jackie held the garment up for inspection by the camera. “How much did you weigh then?”

  “I stopped counting after three-forty.”

  Sara was in her middle twenties and of the lean and sinewy build of those to whom the sensuous appetites are never a problem, are likely even a bore.

  She asked, “But you didn’t lose all this weight on an ordinary diet, did you, Jackie? There’s something more to the story.”

  “A lot more,” Jackie said, seeing in his peripheral vision that an enormous close-up of his face filled the screen of the monitor that was sunk in a depression in the desk at which he sat with Sara—that was the distinctive style of this show: when being interviewed, you temporarily occupied the seat of one of the co-hosts. He had of course been made up for such close-ups, his nose-hairs trimmed, etc., and for many years now he had been using chemical means to keep his real hair dark. On his crown he wore the best toupé money could buy: he was told by all that it was undetectable. But his skin was lined and leathery with the loss of fat. To some degree he was now like a deflating balloon.

  “There’s a whole nother spiritual dimension,” he went on. “This might sound corny, comin’ from a guy like me, but…” His voice trailed away, and he shrugged.

  “No,” Sara said quickly. Young as she was, she was a real professional. If she hadn’t been, she would never have got where she was. Girls couldn’t fuck their way to the top of the business as things stood today. “No, not at all, Jackie. I think there’s a lot of people who are going to want to hear this just because it comes from somebody like yourself.”

  Jackie nodded. “Ya know, people think, well, those guys in the public eye—and gals too—with their inflated egos, they got great ideas of themselves, they don’t have any of the problems of we working stiffs. Not true!”

  In her straight-man role, Sara groaned assent, though surely she was being hypocritical. What problems could she have ever had? The little snot got this job at the ripe old age of twenty-one, after less than a year’s experience with some nothing channel in the New Mexican boondocks.

  “People think,” Jackie continued, “that you must have all the confidence in the world to get up here and make a fool of yourself, but that is far from true—with some of us, anyway.”

  Sara looked bored. “Are you saying your weight problem came from a poor self-image, Jackie? You?”

  He hung his head briefly before bringing it up with a sheepish grin. “That’s just what I am saying. It wasn’t easy to understand. It took a lot of work. And that was only the first phase.”

  “Which means?”

  Jackie lowered his eyelids momentarily. Then he stared boldly at Sara. He had nothing to be ashamed of. “I finally realized that God loves me.”

  Sara, likely an atheist, might have been embarrassed by this confession, had she not been armed with a book that bore his name on the jacket. She raised this volume so that the camera could see it. “And you’ve told all about it right here.”

  “It’s all my ideas,” Jackie said. “I’m a talker, not a writer. I’m a high-school dropout, I’m sorry to say. I talked to Dick Trout and he wrote it all down. He’s a terrific author, with a string of best-sellers on his belt.”

  Sara pursed her lips and opened the book as if arbitrarily, but in fact the book had been inconspicuously taped so it would be exposed by such means. “What makes this unique,” said she, “at least among the ones I’ve seen, and a lot of these sorts of things are coming out nowadays—are we looking for a faith, identifiable values, some evidence of love, of caring? Your book is the only one I know that gives recipes along with the spiritual, uh—”

  “That’s right,” Jackie broke in. “And there’s nothing sacrilegious about it. God made us and He made the food we eat, too. We’d all be a lot healthier if we kept that in mind when we sit down to dinner, and not violate our systems.” He lifted his hands. “I’m not being holier-than-thou, the way I used to abuse myself.”

  “This certainly looks tasty,” Sara said, pretending to be interested in the page she had opened. “‘Shrimp Body and Soul.’”

  “For the whole person,” said Jackie. The recipes had been supplied by a nutritionist hired by the publisher. Jackie had never boiled water, making coffee in the early days with water from the hot tap.

  “We’ll be back to cook up a storm with Jackie Kellog,” Sara said to the camera with the red licht. A commercial came on. Sara ignored Jackie to speak intensely with one of the production assistants, then got up and took a sip of coffee brought her by a flunky, then had her makeup dabbed at by a young woman whose own style was aggressively punk.

  Someone conducted Jackie to an area set up as a kitchen, fitted an apron to his body, and told him where to stand. Jackie had briefly studied the shrimp recipe before going on the air, but in case he forgot, all of it was written in large letters on prompt cards held up behind the cameras by a functionary.

  Sara joined him two seconds before they came back on. “Pick up the pace a little, huh?” she asked in the last possible instant, and then smiled into the camera. “We’re back with Jackie Kellog, who’s been busy these last few years. He’s been undergoing a change of pace. The insult comic we once knew, and yes, loved, because there was never any real malice in his humor, however hard-hitting, and I think everybody realized that…the old Jackie has become a man of deep r
eligious convictions. He tells about them in his new book.” She had brought it along with her and displayed it once more. “He’s also become an authority on healthy eating, as I think you can see from his present figure—if you remember the old Jackie.” She smiled at him. “Show us how to make Shrimp Body and Soul, Jackie.”

  All the ingredients had been trimmed, cleaned, and pre-measured, the skillet put in place, the stove turned on. All he had to do was dump the olive oil in, and the shrimps, minced garlic and shallots, and chopped lemon rind, all of these waiting in little glass bowls. The dish was presumably done in seconds, in any event Sara pretended it was, for the show was ending and she had to announce tomorrow’s guests and say good-bye to the home audience.

  Jackie had had his makeup removed and was on his way to the dressing room when Sara Neil caught up with him. He had not expected this courtesy, but it turned out not to be such.

  “Look,” she said, “can I talk to you? This religious stuff is a bunch of shit, right? Say so, and I won’t bother you.”

  “No, it’s real. It might sound phony, but it’s real. I ran away from home when I was just a young kid. Everything I know I had to learn from life, most of it in gin mills full of lowlifes, I guess. But, hell, we’re all human. They can’t take that away.”

  “I mean what’s beyond that. We’re talking about God, right?”

  He was embarrassed. “I guess so.” But it didn’t seem serious, in this studio corridor, people rushing by. Nor did she, with her bright hair and pale complexion.

  She cocked an ironic eye. “This is crap, isn’t it? Some comeback shtick?”

  He was stung. “What do you take me for? Who are you? I was a headliner when you were loading your diapers. Fuck you.”