by Sol Stein
“I don’t produce lemons, Mr. Manucci.”
“Maybe not so far, Mr. Riller. Maybe this one’ll be your first. Suppose the critics don’t like what’s-its-name?”
“The Best Revenge is its name,” I said. “If you’ve presold enough theater parties, it doesn’t matter much.”
“How much?”
“If the production gets good word-of-mouth from the theater parties, it’ll run.”
“What happens if you don’t get theater parties, like on this one? Mr. Riller, I made one phone call before you came, somebody in your business who owes me, and from what he said it sounds as if your investors think your new play is controversial. Do you agree with that?”
Manucci sure was thorough. I said, “I’ve had my share of inoffensive hits. I decided it’s time to have an offensive one. A lot of people thought John Osborne and Harold Pinter offensive at first.”
“Did they pay off?”
“Some did. Some didn’t.”
“Mr. Riller, you sound as if producing plays isn’t exactly a business.”
Ezra interjected. “Depends what you mean by business,” he said.
“A business,” Manucci said, “is when you get to take out enough more than you put in to be worth the trouble. It seems to take a lot of trouble to put a play on.”
“Compared to what?” I said.
“Compared to what I do.”
“Mr. Manucci,” Ezra said, “all of Mr. Riller’s plays are part of a mix. Some are pure commercial for visiting firemen. Some are for serious theatergoers. If either lands big, they get everybody. A few of Mr. Riller’s productions will continue to generate income long after we’re gone.”
“Can you borrow against that future income?”
“Not really,” Ezra said.
“Mr. Hochman,” Manucci said, sipping coffee again as if it might lubricate his harsh consonants, “an asset is something you can borrow against now. Posterity is not an asset.”
Ezra started to speak. Manucci cut him off.
“If Mary my wife becomes Mary my widow and needs what’s in my safe deposit box, she don’t want to find future income. She wants to find cash money. No posterity, no prestige. Fellows in the fantasy business sometimes lose track of what’s real.” He sighed and turned to me. “I hear the Times man has more clout than the rest put together. Ever try buying him?”
What do you do with the type of mind that imagines that what you can do on the docks you can do with the Times?
“I don’t think that would work.”
“It works in every business I know. A hundred buys a traffic ticket from a cop. If Lockheed wants an okay from the Jap government, it costs a lot of millions. Everything else is in between. You think a critic who makes sixty thousand a year won’t take thirty for one review?”
“It’s not done.”
Manucci stood up. “How the fuck do you know it’s not done? Maybe you don’t do it. Maybe it’s done with presents, not cash. Maybe it’s done by giving a paid annuity to somebody’s mother. Maybe it’s done by not doing something.”
I didn’t understand.
“Not breaking legs. Mr. Riller, if I put money with you I got to know you’re a realist.”
The intercom buzzed. Manucci went over to his desk, held the phone to his ear. What am I doing here? I looked at Ezra.
He gestured, palms down. Take it easy.
Louie in heaven, I thought, it wasn’t like this when you went to see Aldo, was it?
Manucci was saying into the intercom, “No. No is no.” He disconnected whoever was on the line, then said, “Did you tape that, honey? Terrific. Now hold the calls for a while.” He was still seated at the desk across the room when he said in a voice that seemed to boom, “How come a guy with your track record is having such trouble raising money for your new play?”
Ezra interjected, “When Mr. Riller organized this partnership—”
Manucci, on his way back to the sofa, cut Ezra off. “Mr. Hochman,” he said, “if I advise your client to do anything illegal, you speak up. Otherwise you keep quiet because this is a meeting between him and me and you are an observer, understand?” He turned to me. “Please,” he said, “continue.”
I tried to speak casually. Nothing was to be gained by telling Manucci how desperate I was. Why else would I come to his father or to him?
“Most of the people who invest in the theater,” I said, “figure the downside gamble is a tax write-off against ordinary income, costing them thirty to fifty cents on the dollar net. That’s if you lose everything, which is rare. This year most of my steadies have taken a bath in the market, short term and long term. They can’t use losses.”
I couldn’t tell whether he believed me. He sighed. “What’s in it for you?”
“In a loss situation? The production usually contributes some part of the budget to my office overhead.”
Manucci laughed. “You spend a year of your time for some office overhead? I hear guys who produce movies can make three hundred big ones as their fee on a flop.”
“If a play’s a success, as general partner I get fifty percent of the profits once the investors have their money back.” Why did my voice sound as if a mechanical monkey were talking?
“I’m like the movie producers,” Manucci said. “I like to see mine, win or lose.”
“I understand.”
“What I understand,” Manucci said carefully, lowering his voice so that I had to lean forward to hear him, “is that sometimes an investor is entitled to a piece of your piece, is that right?”
“That’s a matter of contention,” Ezra said. “I’ve never permitted Mr. Riller to do that.”
“Please, Mr. Hochman, don’t use words like contention. There’s always a first time for everything.”
Ezra coughed.
“If you offered better terms than usual to some of your old-time investors,” Manucci said, “maybe they’d have come up with the money.”
“I couldn’t have Mr. Riller do that. Word would get around to the others.”
Manucci tapped his forehead. “Mr. Hochman, you think you’re doing your client a favor by butting in? I tell you, any lawyer did me favors like that I’d put in a tube and mail back to law school.” Manucci leaned forward in his chair, addressing me now. “Weren’t some of your investors leery of your new one because it isn’t a musical or a Neil Simon–type play that rakes it in?”
“My new one,” I said, “is like the plays that have survived over the years, O’Neill, Tennessee Williams at his best.”
“They weren’t in poetry, were they?”
“Whoever described it to you as poetry in a derogatory fashion was misleading you, Mr. Manucci. Tennessee Williams used elevated language.”
“He didn’t do too well in the end, did he?”
“I produced one of his best plays. Would you deride Shakespeare for using elevated language?”
“There ain’t no elevated anymore,” Manucci said, “just the subway.” He looked to see if we would laugh at his joke. When we didn’t, he did.
“I wish you’d take a look at my new play. Will you read it?”
Manucci, leaning back into the sofa, said, “That’s very flattering, Mr. Riller, but I don’t know that I’m a judge. I know automobiles. I know horses. I know money. I know women. Now some of the women I see, they like to go to Broadway plays, it’s very exciting to them, live theater, and I like them to be excited you understand, so it’s mutually beneficial. I get to see shows that are good and some that are not so good, but what would I know personally? I told my accountant to ask around. He knows a couple of the people who’ve been in with you pretty steady. They talked as if they were friends of yours, not just investors. They admire the hell out of you as a producer, but they told my accountant they don’t think this one has a hope in hell in today’s market, that’s why they’re staying out. You lied to me about the reason.”
In my circles, people don’t call each other liars except behind the oth
er person’s back.
Ben, I never lied to his father. Pay attention. Don’t lie. Use your brain.
“What my accountant tells me,” Manucci went on, “is that in your business you’re the general partner and the investors are limited partners, and when all the money’s in, the partnership is allowed to start spending it and not before. He tells me this play of yours been in rehearsal for six weeks, you’re headed out of town for bookings, and the partnership is a long way from closing. Is that true?”
I nodded.
“Who’s been shelling out for the actors?”
“I have.”
“Personally?”
“That’s the only kind of money I’ve got.”
“What about the set, isn’t that expensive?”
“In this case, yes,” I said.
“And it’s built?”
“It had to be.”
“Who paid for it?”
“I haven’t yet.”
“You’re going to get the set builder mad if you don’t pay.”
I nodded, trying to smile.
“In fact,” Manucci said, “I had a little talk with your set builder before you came. He says he’s going to close you down out of town unless he gets paid.”
“He’ll get paid.”
“Out of what? You’ve raised only twenty percent of the money you need and no more’s coming in.”
“Twenty-two percent,” I said, hopeless. He’d researched everything.
I stood up so his eyes would have to follow me as I paced.
I said, “Mr. Manucci, you know I’m here to discuss an investment from you that would enable the show to go forward on schedule, but I have to be sure…the money is clean. I don’t mean to pry—”
“You’re prying,” he cut me off. His face was chiseled stone. Then the muscles in his cheeks relaxed. I’d have hired him as a character actor in a flash.
“I don’t know what you know about me, Mr. Riller. I’m going to tell you. When you sit down.”
I retreated to my place on the sofa opposite him.
“When you pick a play, Mr. Riller, it’s got to meet your standards, right?”
I nodded.
“Would you have produced Let My People Come, one of those things?”
“No.”
“It’s got to be something you want to be associated with, right? Right,” he said. “I don’t do narcotics because I don’t want to be associated with something that hurts a lot of people I don’t want to hurt. You understand?”
I nodded.
“There’s nothing I do that would foul up kids,” he said. “Besides, the hard stuff is dangerous for guys who run it because the cops’ve got a rod up their ass about narcotics. You know why?”
I didn’t.
“Because they’re jealous. You’d be too if you were a cop. You make thirty something a year after a long haul, and some low-level dealer’s making that much a week? A cop does his twenty years, what kind of a civilian job does he get? Directing traffic to a teller’s window in some bank? A drug dealer, if he doesn’t get caught, he’s got a lifetime career. The cops hate dealers for the same reason a lot of people hate Jews, pure jealousy. I don’t want to get in the middle of that kind of psychology. Have a cigar?”
From the desk he brought over a box of Macanudo coronas.
“Only after dinner,” I said, waving the box away. Ezra, offered the box as an afterthought, took one.
“Take another one for later,” Manucci said, clipping off the end of Ezra’s cigar.
“Can we get back to the business at hand?” I said.
Manucci’s face froze. He’d offered the cigars. He liked telling me about his business. I’d made a crack about the source of his money, and that opened him up, and now I’d shut him up.
“Mr. Riller,” he said, “the business at hand was your needing four hundred plus. I was explaining to you that every bill that crosses my desk is as clean as your wife’s face. I don’t think you want to listen, you just want to talk. You think you’re up on a stage or something? You think you’re in charge of this conversation? I’ll tell you something, Riller, you aren’t in charge of anything anymore.”
My pride forced me to my feet.
“You going somewhere?”
How repair this? I looked at Ezra.
Manucci said, “If you’re going, take your babysitter with you.”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Ezra said.
I walked the rest of the way to the door as if I were underwater in a diver’s heavy helmet.
Ezra came after me. “Ben,” he said, “wait a minute.” And in a whisper, “What’ll you tell Sam Glenn?”
I needed to loosen my tie, undo the top button of my shirt so I could breathe.
Manucci’s voice caught me. “Hey Riller,” he said, “this is a business discussion, isn’t it?”
4
Nick Manucci
Sure everybody said my old man was terrific, did they ever ask my mother or me for a reference?
With Mama he never went off the wall because she was going to be the mother of his bambinos, right? His fun was other women. With her he was like she was some religious figure who lived in the house. He gave orders to her just like he did to the priest.
Nice man. You think that body spiked on the iron fence flew there? You crossed Aldo Manucci and you crossed the River Styx at the same time.
In high school, come my senior year I had to talk college to him. You needed college for anything, right?
That terrific man didn’t ask for a discussion with me about my life, he had it all figured out. “I want you go first class, Harvard, Yale, something like that. You become bigshot for big company, General Electric, General Motors, something like that.”
Finished?
“Papa, with respect,” I said. “I don’t want to be part of General nobody. I want to be on my own like you.”
“Maybe you don’t have brains to be on your own. Maybe you not smart enough to go Harvard Yale.”
“If you wanted me to be like you,” I said, “why didn’t you marry a woman as smart as you?”
“I married your mother!” he shouted.
“My brain is half yours. Maybe it’s her half that isn’t good enough!”
The old lion smacked my face so hard the mark stayed for three days.
*
I hung in my room like it was a cave, the shade down, the ceiling light off. I pissed in my baseball trophy so I wouldn’t have to go down the hall to the toilet except when they were asleep.
I kept the door locked. I wouldn’t let him come into the room even when he said through the door that if I apologized he’d make peace.
On the third day I let my mother in.
She stood there, holding her arms out to me. Not a word.
She held me tight against her breasts, patted my head, humming some Italian song from long ago.
It was like dope.
Then she said, “Nicko, he tell me what you say. I forgave you, Nicko. Now you forgive him.”
*
That old moneylender sure knew how to put a proposition to your head. Pick any college. Major in anything. He’d lend me the money. But if I went to a college he approved of and majored in business, the money wouldn’t be a loan, it’d be a gift.
I didn’t want to come out of school owing him anything.
The only business school in the area I could get into was NYU, where I learned all the rules my old man violated. They taught us never confuse employees with people. My father confused them all the time. Also, some borrower give him a story, he’d give the borrower two, three more days. Soft! If one of his collectors goofed, he’d give him a warning before firing him, a waste of time. NYU taught us time was your asset, the more successful you were the bigger that asset. My old man wasted time listening to people’s stories that didn’t have anything to do with how much they could pay back. He was like a country grocery store, that’s why he never made it out of Little Italy.
M
y father’s way was horse-and-buggyville, getting hooked by customers’ stories, meeting their families, that shit. My business was to sell money. The guys who borrow big from banks use the phone. The guys who borrow from me, they’re not thinking about buying a car if they find the right model. They have a hard-on for money that won’t let them think of anything else and it won’t go away unless they get it. The little guy’s got a MasterCard, he’s borrowing every time he uses his plastic, he doesn’t have to ask. The man who comes into my office couldn’t make it if he had a hundred Visas in his pocket. He knows how much he needs. He can’t walk to another showroom. It’s a dangerous business. If a starving man walks into a supermarket, he’ll steal. In this supermarket the goods aren’t lying around on shelves. People starving for money can get crazy. Guys who put out oil rig fires, they get paid a lot, don’t they? Guys like me put out a businessman’s fire. When one of them welshes and you go to get your money and he puts his hands around your throat, he forgets it’s business, he thinks he has a right to kill you. Which is why I frame deals so the guy knows I’ve got his short hairs, so he won’t be tempted to welsh, or to get rough. My customers don’t have a list of approved suppliers. It’s either me or the mob, and who wouldn’t rather deal with me?
*
When that Ivy League putz Riller and his nothing lawyer headed for the door, they were doing what a lot of them do, pretending to be heading somewhere when they had nowhere to go except back to me. I could see his lawyer stirring the sawdust in his brain.
Riller turned around as if I had him on a string. “Mr. Manucci,” he said to me, “you’re right, this is a business discussion. The real negotiator in the family is my wife.”
“Oh? What does she do?”
I looked at Mr. No-Guts. I figured his wife for one of those Greta Garbo types that tries to make you feel you’re part of the wallpaper. I’d have guessed she’s an actress who gets her jobs through Mr. Big, then puts her ass out for him to kiss.
“She’s a literary agent,” Riller said. “She negotiates hard bargains every day.”
I’d give her something hard to bargain for.
He said, “I’d like you to meet my wife sometime.”
“It would be my pleasure,” I said.