by Dave Reidy
“Say something!” I yelled.
“I don’t think that’s going to work, sir,” Tony said, at last.
Pause.
“Well, for one thing, I don’t have a sniper rifle.”
Pause.
“Even if I borrowed yours, sir, I wouldn’t know how to shoot it.”
Pause.
“Really, I—I couldn’t ask you to do that, sir. You’ve taught me so much already.”
I shook my head slowly and felt myself smile as the audience laughed. Tony had gotten into a good story. I hoped he could get out of it.
“I hate to say it, sir, but I don’t think there’s anything I can do except convince my brother to let my nephew play next year.”
Pause.
“I know he’ll go back in the draft, sir, but you’ll have a good shot of getting him again.”
Pause.
“Exactly, sir,” Tony said, brightening. “So how’s the rest of the team look?”
Pause.
“Is that bad?”
Pause.
“I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t get the reference. Everything I know about Vietnam I learned from Platoon and Apocalypse Now and—and I haven’t seen them in a while, sir.”
The balance of power had shifted. The Tony character was controlling the conversation now. It was his to end and time to end it.
“It was nice to hear from you, sir. Oh, and sir? I meant what I said before—that you’d taught me a lot.”
The tone of the entire conversation had been ironic, but, somehow, Tony had managed to strike a sincere note.
“No, sir,” Tony said. “Sitting down. Ever since you asked me the first time.”
And with that line, Tony transformed his rocky scatological detour into a paved Victory Lane. The ass wiping had been integrated into the arc of a story that spanned decades, and that, to my mind, was all it took to redeem both the material and the man who delivered it.
Having sewn up the plot points, Tony hung up with the Colonel and said goodnight over the audience’s cheers. People were still applauding and whooping—not like Indians or Asians, but like themselves—when the emcee took the microphone.
“Tony Cascarino, ladies and gentlemen!”
The applause swelled again. I dropped to my knees, pounded my appreciation into the hardwood with my fists, and let out a long, single-note whoop. When I’d run out of breath, I rolled over and sat on the floor.
I looked at my hands. The outsides were deep red and the palms were marked where I had dug in my fingernails. While the emcee introduced the next comedian, I ran cold water over my hands. Then I shut the water off, rested my forearms on the edge of the kitchen counter and leaned against it with one foot stacked on the other and my head bowed. Expressing my appreciation—with more violence, this time, than virtuosity—had exhausted me.
I went to bed while the headliner was still on, but I didn’t sleep. I replayed Tony’s act in my head, deciphering why it had worked and why, in parts, it hadn’t. And as I lay there, I realized for the first time that I had nothing against jokes. Really, who could hate a good joke? But even the best joke couldn’t do what Newhart—and now Tony—could do with character and story. Playing one of Newhart’s characters, or standing alongside one of Tony’s, gave me what I wanted most in the world: a way out of my apartment.
IN MEMORIAM
Abe walked to Agata & Valentina to get his coffee. The six blocks down First Avenue between his apartment and the café felt more like four—on the way there, anyway. On the way back, he stopped at a newsstand to catch his breath and pick up a Times. The autumn air was crisp and burned his lungs, but as he greeted his building’s doorman, Abe felt very much like himself.
Riding up in the elevator, Abe regretted having scheduled a doctor’s appointment for this afternoon. He’d had a dizzy spell yesterday morning, but he had done his five minutes at the Friars’ roast of Trump in the evening and felt fine. If I still feel fine in an hour, Abe thought, I’ll call and cancel the appointment. No point in wasting the doctor’s time on a case of the jitters.
Abe had been nervous with good reason. He was 83 years old and hadn’t performed in nine months. Would he stumble over Trump’s chair on the way to the microphone? Would his timing get to the Hilton on time? But Abe needn’t have worried. He got the one big laugh he had counted on, right at the top, and a few smaller laughs, as well. During the big one, Abe looked out at the laughing faces, absorbed the trebly din through his hearing aids, and felt distinctly alive.
Abe had been planning today’s activity for weeks, well before he had made the doctor’s appointment in a panic. The strongest memory he had of his wife’s death, apart from the gut-wrenching palpability of her absence, was the amount of clerical work that had been left behind for her survivors. Abe was determined to do as much as he could in advance, so his survivors could take care of themselves. He did not have to finish the preparations today, but he would force himself to start them.
But first, Abe sat at his dining room table, drank his coffee, and read the Times to see what they had to say about the roast. He read the lede, mainly niceties for Trump and the Friars Club, then scanned the article for his name. There it was, bringing up the rear in a paragraph listing dais “oddities,” including Survivor winners and a former light-heavyweight fighter. None of Abe’s jokes made the article, but the first line of his introduction did: “If Abe Vigoda were alive today ....” It was a good line, and Abe had laughed when he heard it. Even now, he managed a wry smile.
Abe put down the paper and picked up a manila folder from the table. The word DEATH was written in black, permanent marker on the filing tab. As he fingered the die-cut nubs on the rounded, bottom corner of the cover, Abe realized he had to urinate. He pushed back from the table, took seven careful steps to the bathroom off the kitchen, and sputtered the contents of his bladder into the toilet, shaking out the last drops before tucking in and zipping up. It was the third time he had urinated that day. Abe felt no shame about his frequent trips to the bathroom—they were part of getting older—but he was careful not to dribble any urine down his slacks. Outside their proper receptacle, the little yellow drops could erode a man’s dignity.
Back at the table, Abe opened the folder and realized that he hadn’t separated documents relevant to his actual death from those pertaining to his supposed death. He would have to sort them before doing anything else.
On top was the deed to his burial plot. Maude had wanted to pick the spot while they were still spry enough to walk around the cemetery and find a good one, so they had driven out to Flushing on a Sunday morning in the fall of 1988. They agreed on a tandem plot beneath an old elm tree, so that Donna and the grandkids would always have a landmark amidst the thousands of headstones. Abe remembered Maude insisting that their burial reflect their usual sleeping arrangement: she on the right as they looked from the head of the bed to the foot, he on the left. The notion had given Abe the creeps, but he had acquiesced, figuring he’d be too dead to care when the time came.
By the time Maude died, the elm had died, too. Unable to live with a rotting stump as a landmark, Abe paid for the transplanting of a young sugar maple. As of his last visit to the gravesite, two years ago this February, the maple had grown tall and thick in the trunk. Sap, viscous in the cold air, slid slowly down cracks in the rough bark. Abe dabbed the sticky liquid with his forefinger and tasted it. He hoped the maple would still be spilling sap long after his own funeral, but if beetles could kill that statuesque elm, Abe figured they could kill anything.
Underneath the burial plot deed was an article People magazine had published in 1982, five years after Abe’s run as Inspector Phil Fish on Barney Miller had come to an end. The article referred to Abe as “the late Abe Vigoda.” Dozens of people—some frantic, some kidding—had called the day the issue hit newsstands. Whether the callers intended to assuage their fears or bust Abe’s chops, the conversations went pretty much the same way.
“Abe?”<
br />
“Speaking.”
“You’re not dead?”
“Not yet.”
“Oh thank God. People said you’re dead.”
“I heard.”
“But you’re not.”
“Nope.”
“Great!” they’d say. “That’s great. So how’s life?”
Abe piled clippings from the Florida Times-Union, the Las Vegas Sun and Entertainment Weekly on top of the People article. Sent to him by friends and fans over the past twenty years, the articles stated for the record that Abe Vigoda was still alive. He was more famous for not having died than for having lived.
Every six months or so, someone would approach him at the post office or the grocery store and say, “Excuse me. You look just like Abe Vigoda.”
“I am Abe Vigoda,” Abe would reply.
The person would smile and nod slowly, as if the two of them were in on a joke, then walk away.
Next, Abe pulled an eight-by-ten headshot from the folder. Pictured in front of a pale-green background, Abe wore a rumpled, gray suit with a brown and tan tie cinched around his unbuttoned collar. His hair was thin and gray on top, thick and bristly around the ears. His arms were folded beneath his chest, and he was smiling. Abe had signed thousands of copies of this photo over the years. Given his role in the Godfather films, he imagined that most of them had been hung near the entrances of restaurants he’d never been to with “Loved the saltimbocca!” or “Thanks for a great meal, Jimmy!” forged in black ink above his signature. Flipping the photo over, Abe found he had written “For ‘In Memoriam’ Tribute” on the back.
Abe had studied the “In Memoriam” segment of the Academy Awards ceremony for years. Character actors traditionally scored well on the applause-o-meter, as the audience grasped at its final chance to give an admired craftsman his due. The key factor, Abe had discovered, was the photos’ order. During the 2003 tribute, a still of the dearly departed Rosemary Clooney had been applauded appreciatively, but the appreciation had seemed minimal alongside that given the next slide, a headshot of Dudley Moore. The only position Abe considered a sure-winner was last. The producers left up the final stiff’s photo a few seconds longer than the rest, and the audience unleashed the torrent of admiration it had been holding in reserve. Abe knew he was a long shot to close the segment. If Mickey Rooney, for example, were to kick it the same year he did, Abe’s photo would have to battle it out with the others in the middle of the pack. He looked at the smiling visage of his younger self. I’ll go to war with this one, he thought.
Abe put the photo on top of the burial plot deed and picked up a glossy, tri-fold brochure. The cover read, “Riverside Memorial Chapel—Leaders in Funeral Pre-Planning, and a Source of Support to the Jewish People since 1897.”Abe had been handed the brochure five months earlier at the funeral of his friend and fellow Friar Alan King, who had died of lung cancer. With the family’s blessing, Alan’s old pals, both Borscht Belt pioneers and younger comics he had mentored, eulogized the fallen Friar Abbot by remembering his life and times in setups and punch lines.
Jerry Stiller was the first to address the assembled mourners. “Alan wrote some of his best material about his mother,” he said. “That makes two of us.”
Abe laughed freely with the crowd, stealing glances at King’s wife and kids to make sure that they, too, were laughing.
“I first saw Alan perform in a small club downtown,” Stiller continued. “He recounted his mother’s exasperation at his refusal to go to school, and said, in a faithful rendition of her accent, ‘Why don’t you go out and learn a trade? Then at least I’ll know what kind of work you’re out of.’”
Stiller gave King’s joke plenty of room, waiting for the laughter to die out before continuing. To some, it might have seemed a sign of respect, and it was. But Abe smelled a setup.
“Anyone who heard Alan tell a joke like that one,” Stiller said, “knew exactly what kind of work he was out of.”
After each eulogist had done his five minutes, he would conclude with a handful of eloquent words, expressing “in all seriousness” his sadness and his love for Alan and his family. With short sets of comedy followed by bursts of sincere appreciation for the silent guest of honor, the service was more roast than funeral.
Before the burial, Abe ducked into the directors’ office to say hello to Lewie Kirschbaum. Lewie had directed Maude’s funeral, and Abe made a point to find Lewie and inquire after his family whenever he came to Riverside.
“Shame about Alan,” Lewie said.
“It is,” Abe said. “Those damn signature cigars.”
“He would have been just as funny with a celery stick.”
“Funnier.”
“Maybe. How’ve you been, Abe?”
“I’ve been good. How’s Ada?”
“She’s great. Kids are great, too,” Lewie said, anticipating Abe’s next question. He picked up a Riverside brochure and held it out to Abe. “When your time comes, Abe—you know, a second time—I’d be honored to direct your funeral. I’ll have the rabbi read the Abraham story from the Torah, draw comparisons between his life and yours, comic descendants as numerous as the stars, the whole thing. What do you say?”
“Are you selling me, Lewie?”
“If not now, Abe, when? No good when you’re dead. Besides, you’ll need a hell of a real death to measure up to your false one.”
The two men laughed. Abe took the brochure, left the chapel, and drove out to Flushing to bury his friend.
Skimming the sales piece now, Abe thought about King’s funeral, about Maude’s, and about his own. He pulled a yellow Post-it from a pad on the table and stuck it on the brochure’s front cover. On the Post-it, he printed in black ink, “Donna, this is the place. Ask Jerry Stiller, Freddie Roman and Jeffrey Ross to speak.” Abe wondered if he should add a name to the list. Roman and Stiller were nearly as old as he was. Maybe Caan would do it, he thought.
In late 1970, Abe had flown to L.A. to meet with Francis Ford Coppola, who was considering Abe for the role of Tessio in The Godfather. James Caan, who had already been cast as Santino, sat in at Coppola’s invitation. The meeting was not an audition, but Abe thought his only shot at getting the part was to make it one. He had never done film work, and he was up against some experienced film actors for the part. Abe knew that if he performed at the meeting and it went bad, it would look like the stunt of a stage actor in over his head, or worse, like grandstanding. But what the hell, he thought. Maybe they like grandstanding out here.
Abe’s longtime agent, Ira, had worked back channels for a copy of the script and had come up empty. So he and Abe looked at a few monologues, stuff that would show that Abe could play the taciturn, murderous caporegime from Puzo’s novel. In the end, Abe decided, if given the chance, to sink or swim with the Carnival Barker, an audition piece he had written himself. It was an odd choice for a gangster part, but the Barker had gotten Abe the role of John of Gaunt in Richard II, so he figured it could work for anything.
Abe entered a stuffy, wood-paneled room on the Paramount lot, shook hands with Coppola and Caan, and sat down across from them. Caan was drinking, paying half-attention. I must be the fifth Tessio he’s met today, Abe thought.
“One of my casting directors saw your performance in The Man in the Glass Booth at the Royale,” Coppola said.
“All six lines?”
“Apparently you did a lot with a little. Enough to catch her eye, anyway. How did you like working with Harold Pinter?”
“He’s a good director,” Abe said. “Allows his actors to make choices, but keeps them faithful to the script.”
“I would imagine he does,” Coppola said, nodding slowly. “Did you audition for him?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
With Coppola’s permission, Abe moved his chair and made the thirty-six square feet of linoleum his performance space. Caan took a gulp from his drink and sat back, supporting his neck with his right hand. He
looked vaguely amused. Abe closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and centered himself. When he opened his eyes, Abe was more than the Carnival Barker. He was the carnival.
“Step right up! See the bearded lady, the monkey child, the mythical unicorn in the flesh! Or, for something more pleasing to the eye, visit the Can-Can Tent for the Parade of Luscious Legs! You sir!” Abe pointed to Caan, who was watching his every move. “Got a lady?”
“Got a few.”
“Impress any one of them with tests of strength and skill! Bang the mallet on the target and ring the Strongman’s Bell! Topple the bottles with your fastball! Toss a ring around a Floating Frog, and enjoy, as your lady turns you into a prince with a kiss!”
Caan laughed and watched Abe’s performance with intense, glassy eyes.
“Wildest wonders of the Western world, and the Orient, too! Visit the Geisha Exhibition just inside these gates, and edify yourself with photographs of the finest women in the Far East! You sir!” Abe pointed to Coppola. “Got kids?”
“I do,” Coppola said.
“Got ‘em with you?”
“I do not.”
“Then head back home to get ‘em, because we won’t be here long! This is the final opportunity to give your kids a day they’ll always remember, riding the ponies ‘round the Rodeo, feeding the goats and chickens in the Petting Zoo, and clowning with the clowns in the Three-Ring Circus! That’s right, sir, here today, gone tomorrow, so step right up, step right up!”
Though Abe wasn’t finished, he was stopped cold by Caan, who stood up and applauded, saying, “That’s great! That is just great.” Coppola applauded, too, and Abe took a shallow bow. Caan turned to Coppola and said, “He’s got it, right?”
“That was good work,” Coppola said.
“He’s got the part, right?” Caan said.
“I’ll want to see him do something from the script.”
“Do Tessio and Santino have any scenes together?”
Coppola scratched his black, bushy beard. “They’ve got a lot of scenes together, but not much dialogue.”