I'll Be There

by Iris Rainer Dart

  But even after the long flight from L.A. to Kennedy Airport and the limo ride from New York, she couldn’t sleep at all. At first she thought it was because she was nervous about the opening tomorrow night. But that was impossible. She knew the act backward and inside out, to the point where every gag sounded like an ad-lib and every haughty toss of the head was a guaranteed laugh. No, the fact that the opening was hours away wasn’t what had kept her awake. It was knowing that for the first time in almost thirty-five years, she was back in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and she was feeling an unexpected tug of sentimentality about the old days she’d spent here.

  This was the place where all of it had started for her. Onstage at the Steel Pier in the Jerry Grey Kiddie Show, a show in which she had first appeared when she was five years old, and from which she had retired at age ten. And it was in those shows where suddenly she had felt her power as a performer and had known that if nothing else in the world ever worked for her, when she stood on a stage and sang a song, even in the light of a bare lightbulb, for that moment people loved her, or thought they did anyway, and for years that

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  brand of love had almost made up for the fact that she wasn’t pretty, and her mother was fat, and boys didn’t exactly fall all over her. Atlantic City was where she had first met Bertie. Bertie who was already gone for two whole years. How could it be?

  And just forty miles north of Atlantic City on Long Beach Island was the place where she had met and married the only husband she would probably ever have. John Perry. She had been nineteen and he was thirty-one, the owner of the theater where she was working. The one who had predicted the eventuality of the success she was having now. And one night, aching with a girlish crush on him, she’d gone to his house on the beach, wanting him, begging him to make love to her, and instead he told her she was fabulous and brilliant and how famous she would be some day, then patted her on the ass and sent her on her way.

  Of course later that summer, almost as a vote of confidence in her future fame, he had asked her to marry him, swept her off her feet, managed her career until she started actually to approach the fame he’d predicted, and then he left her. Not because he didn’t love her, but because he said he couldn’t handle what he knew would become her superstardom. Told her one heartbreaking night, the memory of which still hurt, that he wanted a woman, needed a woman who would bask in his glory.

  Now it was six-fifteen in the morning of her opening night at Caesars, and she knew she ought to turn over and try to catch at least a few hours of sleep or tonight on stage she’d be a dishrag, but she was too wide awake, thinking about the old days, and soon she was on her feet, padding around trying to find some sweat clothes to throw on so she could go out for a little walk on the boardwalk. Last night, by the time she and Nina had arrived it was late and they were both too tired from the trip to feel like going out to explore. They had ordered dinner to be sent up to the suite, and when Richie Charles called to say he had arrived that afternoon, they invited him to join them. Richie was in Atlantic City to be Cee Cee’s opening act, and Nina had taken an immediate liking to the funny black man, who after dinner taught the kid three new card games before Cee Cee told them to break it up, and sent Nina to bed.

  For a minute Cee Cee thought it might be a bad idea to let Nina and Richie become friends, because the comic’s outrageous, X-rated,

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  foulmouthed behavior was well known, but then she decided it was mostly the character he played onstage who was whacky and not so much the quiet, lonely, brilliant comic she had known for years as they both had worked their way up. Onstage Richie did a lot of jokes about using drugs and getting laid. He had even been reputed to drop. his pants and “moon” the audience, or unzip his fly, as the women n the audience shrieked and he did some material about “the truth about black men.” But the offstage Richie was gentle and thoughtful and as childlike as Nina herself.

  This morning as Cee Cee opened the door from her bedroom and stepped into the living room of the garish suite, she remembered that she didn’t have to tiptoe out, because last night Nina and Richie had made a plan to wake up early, rent bikes, and go for a long ride on the boardwalk at sunrise, and Nina had probably met Richie in the lobby before six so that by now the two of them were well on their

  way.

  ;l’he jangling sounds of the casino jarred the early-morning hum in Cee Cee’s brain, and she passed through quickly, amazed as she’d always been in Las Vegas that even at this hour there were rows of whit-haircd ladies holding plastic cups filled with coins, and pulling at the slot machine handles. Some of them even sat on folding lawn chairs they’d brought from home and parked in front of a favorite slot machine. Now she was out the door onto the boardwalk, where she stopped for a long nostalgic time to breathe in the salty fishy smell and watch the sun coming up over the ocean and the waves rolling in to an empty beach.

  For an instant she closed her eyes to take herself back, to pretend that no time had passed at all since the days she’d spent there as a kid, sure that she could still smell the unchanging carnival smell that must be wafting from Fralinger’s Salt Water Taffy, down a few blocks, which someone in New York had promised her was one of the institutions still standing.

  I can’t believe I’m actually getting a thrill out of being in Atlantic City, New Jersey, she thought, and turned left because some vague memory told her it was in that direction where everything would be that she wanted to see. A group of bike riders moved breezily past her and set a flock of pigeons fluttering, and she was excited to be on the boardwalk, passing chintzy little souvenir shops crowded with

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  schlocky merchandise, where she used to rush every summer just before she went back to the Bronx so that she could buy her father a tin ashtray. She remembered how painstaking the decision was over which ashtray it should be, and how she would carefully count out the change Leona had given her with the warning not to spend it on “chazerai,” nothing junky or worthless, which was why she bought ashtrays, because they were useful.

  The city’s new look was disorienting to her. The marquees of the casinos jarred her, and in the store windows she noticed the featured Tshirts, which used to say on them FUTURE MISS AMERICA,

  now said I LOST MY ASS IN ATLANTIC CITY. There had always been a kind of low, carnival atmosphere about the place which she’d recognized even as a kid, but in those days it was a high camp, ricky-ticky kind of cheapness, now it felt tawdry and overdone. She started walking faster, knowing now exactly where she was going, and when she finally saw what used to be the Steel Pier in the distance jutting out into the water, she felt as if someone had kicked her.

  Even from that distance she could see what was now a closed-up and deserted building surrounded by a wooden construction fence. The pilings were still up and a geodesic dome that must have once housed a theater or ballroom after Cee Cee’s time stuck out over the water, but there was nothing left of the life of the place Cee Cee had once believed was the epitome of the entertainment world. With the star-filled stage shows. And elegant movie theaters, and the famous diving horses and the Auto Show, with all of the tall gorgeous showroom models standing on the revolving platforms next to blindingly shiny cars that looked as if they had just landed from outer space.

  She continued to walk toward the remains of the pier, passing pizza parlors and submarine sandwich sho?s and frozen custard stands, but now she moved more slowly because the closer she came to it the more obvious it was how desolate the spot was where the dazzling showbusiness center had once stood. And probably, she decided, the closer she got the more painful it would be, so she stopped and for a while, with the squacking of sea gulls over her head, she stood and looked over the railing above some steps leading to the beach.

  It wasn’t until she was about to turn and go back to the hotel that she looked down and realized with a warm fe
eling and misty eyes that she knew those steps as if she’d just walked down them yesterday,

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  because it was beneath this very spot under the boardwalk where she’d been asleep in 1951 and a little girl’s crying had awakened her. The little girl was Bertie, and that was when the two of them had their first conversation.

  The memories of that morning bubbled up around her and she stayed holding on to the railing remembering it so vividly she could even see the bathing suit Bcrtic wore, and how she’d felt when she’d snuck away from the snoring Leona that morning to come down to the beach, where real kids went. Kids whose lives weren’t devoted to show business, who didn’t feel more worn out than a kid ever should from the late show she’d appeared in the night before. It was the way she always remembered feeling, because from the time she was five she was already living some grownup showbusiness life. And that was why she’d been so wiped out that when she finally did get to the beach, she’d fallen asleep under the boardwalk, until Bertie’s sobs woke her.

  Of course the beach had been different then. Not littered with soda cans and newspapers and cigarette butts the way it was today. Now remembering how it was, superimposing a mental picture of those days on the empty beach, filled her with a glowing nostalgia as she walked slowly down, and stopped holding the bannister halfway to the bottom. In the distance near the shoreline she could see an old woman wearing a big straw hat and carrying something that looked like a Geiger counter, sweeping it across the beach, probably searching for lost coins. A cool morning breeze moved over her and she felt a chill she wasn’t sure if she should attribute to that or to the fact that she was reliving a moment which, in retrospect, had changed her life.

  Never in the five summers she had spent here working the kiddie shows, with all of the late-night performances, had she been awake early enough to see the beach as empty as it was now. In those days, by the time she had a chance to be outside, the sand was always covered with families playing ball and playing cards and buying ice cream from the wandering ice cream men who walked up and down shouting, “Hey, ice cream! Getcher ice cream.” Cee Cee’s favorite ice cream had always been Dixie Cups, which she dug at and ate with a little flat wooden spoon. Now she looked up at the white clouds looking like bubble bath against the blue sky and hoped Nina would like it here.

  That little girl was getting better every day, Cee Cee thought to

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  herself. Loosening up the way Cee Cec had hoped and prayed she would. She was ten now and filled with imagination and ideas. At school last semester she’d been the director of her class play, which was Peter Pan. She had long ago grown tired of Barbie dolls and was passionate about her dance classes, and told Cee Cee that someday she was going to marry Baryshnikov, and kept the autographed picture of him, which Cee Ccc had been able to get her, framed over her bed.

  They were close, and for Cec Cce who hadn’t had a real relationship with a man in years, and whose only real friend was gone forever, it was probably the closest relationship she was destined to have. Sometimes that thought made her feel depressed and empty, but most of the time she figured what the hell, having Nina and having her career was so much more than almost anyone else she knew had, she was infinitely blessed.

  When she got to the bottom step and was about to duck under the boardwalk to her spot, she stopped short and her heart pounded, because there where she’d first laid eyes on Bertie, as cracks of the morning sun came through making stripes of light all around, slept a bearded scruffy man probably in his sixties. He was wearing an old, dirty plaid flannel shirt, and worn shoes, and lay on top of a sleeping bag, with a tattered backpack hooked onto his back.

  Her first instinct was to turn and run up the steps, before the man woke up and pulled a gun from his bag and tried to rob her, or maybe unzipped his pants and tried to flash her. But the poor guy looked a little too old and weary to be dangerous, and maybe that was why she wasn’t running, even moved a step closer for a second wanting to wake him and tell him this was her spot and that he was ruining what was supposed to be a sentimental moment. But she didn’t wake him. Instead she pulled her wallet out of the pocket of her sweat pants, removed five one-hundred-dollar bills from her wad of spending money, walked over to the man and slid the bills into the pocket of his shirt, and walked back to the hotel to do a sound check for her opening night.

  “Atlantic City, what a place! Every year a bevy of hopeful young beauties come here and parade in bathing suits and evening gowns displaying their looks and their talents, vying against one another to

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  be the one chosen to serve. And those are just the hookers.” Gotta work on some better Miss America stuff.

  Before Cee Cee’s show every night Nina would have room service deliver her dinner to the suite at Caesars Palace. After the waiter left, she would take her plate of food out from underneath the silver cover, and her glass of milk out of the ice-filled holder, put them on the floor next to the sunken Jacuzzi, turn on the power, and modestly slip out of her robe at the same time she slid into the steaming water. Then she would eat her dinner with the water bubbling wildly around her.

  “Now that’s got to be bad for the digestion,” Cee Cee would always say, walking through the suite pushing the buttons to close all of the floor-to-ceiling drapes as she vocalized to get ready for her show.

  During the day Nina would sit out by the pool ordering ginger ales, which she charged to Cee Cee’s tab and sipped while she sat in the sun playing gin rummy for money with a former show girl named Donna who was now a change girl at Caesars.

  In the late afternoon while Cee Cee had a massage or rehearsed or shopped, Nina would go with Richie Charles to Tivoli Pier, or to Margate City to see Lucy the Elephant, or take a ride in a rolling chair, or just sit on the beach with him and build sand castles. Some afternoons she lolled around in the airconditioned suite on the big round bed, reading or talking long distance to Kevin back in Los Angeles. Kevin loved to be filled in on which shows Nina had seen, which stars she’d met when they stopped backstage to congratulate Cee Cee, and which dirty jokes she remembered from the various comics, jokes she wrote down and then read to him over the phone so he could explain them to her.

  “A guy is sitting in a bar and a beautiful woman at the other end of the bar says to him … wait a second, I think I heard Cee Cee walk in … hold on, Kev,” she said, then put the phone down and

  ran to the bedroom door to peek into the living room and check. “Nope, she’s still at rehearsal. Where was I?”

  “A beautiful woman at the other end of the bar says …” Kevin reminded her in his halting voice.

  “Right… the beautiful woman at the bar says to the guy, ‘I will do anything you want, fulfill your wildest dreams, and all you have to do is be able to ask me for whatever it is you want in three words.TM

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  Kevin giggled, a silly giggle on the other end of the phone. “Yeah?” he said.

  “So the guy looks at the woman and says, ‘Paint my house.’” Nina paused, waiting for an explanation of why in the world that was funny.

  “Tell you in two years why that’s funny.” “Hey, you’re only twelve.” “That’s two years older than you.”

  Kevin laughed for a long time, and when he finally stopped, she asked him, “Well? Why is it funny?”

  Kevin was still giggling. “Because the woman thought the man was

  going to ask her to do something sexy.” “Yes? And?” “And he didn’t.” “So?”

  “Neen, let’s talk about this in a few years.”

  “Paint my house. Paint my house. I don’t get it. And I’m never telling you any more jokes.”

  “Are you still hanging around with Richie Charles? I saw him on his comedy show on HBO. My God, he’s raunchy.”

  “He’s my best friend here,” Nina said in a vo
ice serious enough to let Kevin know that to say anything negative about Richie would be a violation. “Of course, Cee Cee won’t let me watch his act. He opens for her and she doesn’t let me leave the dressing room until she walks out to go on. She turns down the volume on the speaker so it doesn’t pump into her dressing room, and I can’t hear it. After she does her

  version of Mae West, how much worse could he be?”

  “Worse.”

  Every night she sat in Cee Cee’s lavish dressing room, perched on a tall director’s chair near the makeup table, telling Cee Cee all the events of her Atlantic City day. And when Richie came offstage and the stage manager knocked, Nina would hold Cee Cee’s hand, feeling the sweatiness of her palms which never went away no matter how many times she did the show, and walk out to the wings with her. Then she would give Cee Cee a good-luck hug, smelling the thick pancake makeup and feeling Cee Cee trembling slightly with her preentrance jitters.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Cee Cee Bloooooooom!!!!!” And off Cee

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  Cee went, doing her little strut of a walk as the crowd went wild, and Nina, who had seen the act so many times she knew it by heart, went back to sit in the dressing room with Richie, who was teaching her everything he knew about cards, which was considerable.