The Man Who Died Laughing

by David Handler

  Hoag: And you honestly didn’t say to yourself, hey, I’ve found my identity—I’m a comic.

  Day: No. I had no idea there was a future in it for me. And then, don’t forget, Mel died on me in 1940. That was a real traumatic thing for me. I’ve never known such a sense of loss. He was everything to me—father, big brother, best friend, partner. When he died … I-I really didn’t know what to do with myself. One thing I knew for sure was I couldn’t even think about performing. All it did was remind me of Mel.

  Hoag: So what did you do?

  Day: I finished high school and took a civil service exam. Got a job in Washington as a clerk for one of FDR’s dollar-a-year men. I lived in a rooming house. Met a nice girl from Indiana along the Potomac one day. Judy Monroe. A stenographer. She had red hair and the whitest skin I’d ever seen. My first real girlfriend. We went to the movies. Ate Chinese food. I almost married Judy. Then Pearl Harbor was bombed. I went into the army. They shipped me down to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for my basic training. Hot, muggy, the food was so greasy and awful I lost twenty-five pounds the first month. Also, it was not a terrific place for a kid from Brooklyn named Rabinowitz. I was the only Jew down there. A lot of the crackers thought it was our fault that the United States was in the war. So I got in a lot of fights. It was just like Gates Avenue all over again. Only I was all alone now. No Mel. No Seetags. The only guy in my barracks who was nice to me was this tall, skinny kid from Nebraska who had the bunk below mine.

  Hoag: What was his name?

  Day: Gabriel Knight. And da rest is showbiz history.

  (end tape)

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NO ONE LEFT ME any more presents that first week. Someone did sort of move around the tapes and notes piled on my desk one afternoon, but I figured that was just Maria doing her dusting. At least I did when the sun was out. When night came and the coyotes started to howl, I became convinced somebody was trying to spook me and was doing a damned good job. I took to looking under the bed at night. There was never anyone hiding down there. Except for Lulu.

  I kept thinking it couldn’t be Sonny. He was being so cooperative and open. Our work was going great. I was thinking it couldn’t be Sonny until he announced after our morning workout that he’d decided he wanted to leave Gabe Knight out of the book completely.

  We were eating our grapefruit by the pool. He wore his white terry robe with “Sonny” stitched in red over the left breast. I wore mine, too. A gift. Mine said “Hoagy” on it.

  “You’re kidding,” I said, nearly choking on a grapefruit section.

  “I’m very serious, pally.”

  He was. His manner had changed from warm and expansive to guarded.

  “We can talk about plenty else,” he went on. “My philosophy of comedy, my theories of directing, my recovery from—”

  “Wait. You can’t do this.”

  “It’s my book, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, but the reason people are going to buy it is to read about the two of you. They want to know why you broke up. Certainly that’s why the publisher bought it. Face facts. Gabe is now a very big—”

  “So I’ll give ’em their dough back. I changed my mind. Project’s off. You’ll be compensated for your time. Vic’ll book you a flight back to New York for this afternoon.”

  As if on cue, Vic appeared. He seemed somewhat short of breath, and was chewing on a thumbnail. “I … I called them, Sonny,” he announced timidly. “I called the police.”

  Sonny bared his teeth. “You what?”

  “They said there really isn’t m-much they can do,” Vic plowed on, rubbing his forehead with the palm of his hand. “What with you destroying the evidence and all. But at least it’s on the record now. It’s better this way. I’m sure of it.”

  I cleared my throat. They ignored me.

  “Vic, I told you I didn’t want you calling ’em!” hollered Sonny, reddening.

  “I know you did,” admitted Vic. “But you pay me to protect you.”

  “I pay you to do what I tell you to do!”

  “So,” I broke in, “what exactly are we talking about here, gentlemen?”

  Sonny and Vic exchanged a look, Vic shifting uncomfortably from one enormous foot to the other.

  Sonny turned to me, brow furrowed. “May as well know, Hoagy. Not like it’s any big deal. I got a death threat in this morning’s mail.”

  I swallowed. “What did it say?”

  “He won’t tell me,” Vic said. “And he flushed it down the toilet.”

  “Crapper is right where it belonged,” snapped Sonny. “Vic, I want you to know that I love you, but I don’t feel very good about you right now. I’m real, real upset with you for bringing the cops into this. They’re bound to leak it to the press. I’ll have ’em crawling all over me again. Just what I don’t want. Next time you get a bright idea, do me a big favor and remember something—you’re a dumb ox. Always have been. Always will be. Dig?!”

  Vic blinked several times, nodded, swiped at his nose with the back of his hand. He was, I realized, struggling not to cry. “Sonny, I …”

  “Get out of my sight!”

  “Yes, Sonny.” The big guy skulked back inside the house, head bowed.

  Sonny watched him go, shook his head. “Dumb ox.”

  “He was just doing his job, Sonny.”

  “Hey, you don’t even have a job, Hoag,” he snarled. “If I want you to talk, I’ll ask you to talk. Otherwise, shut your fucking mouth.”

  With that he turned his attention to that morning’s Variety. I sat there for a second, stunned. Then I threw down my napkin and started around the pool to the guesthouse to pack. Then I stopped. Suddenly, Sonny’s book seemed real important to me.

  “So why’d you drag me out here?!” I yelled across the pool.

  He looked up, frowning. “Whattaya mean?”

  “I mean, why’d you waste my time? I’ve put a lot into this. I think what we’ve done so far has been damned good. I’m ready to start writing. My mukluks are unpacked. I’m set to go. Why the fuck did you drag me out here, huh?!”

  He tugged at an ear. Then he laughed.

  “What’s so funny?!” I demanded.

  “You are, Mister New York intellectual kosher dill. If I didn’t know you, I’d swear you’re taking this personal.”

  “Maybe I just don’t like to see you back down.”

  “Sonny Day never backs down.”

  “Really? You said you wanted to tell this story. No, needed to tell it. You said it was part of your healing process.”

  “There’s something you gotta understand about me, pally.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t ever listen to anything I say.”

  I returned to the table and sat down across from him. “Why are you balking, Sonny?”

  “I-I can’t help it. This thing … this thing with Gabe is too painful.”

  “More painful than talking about your father?”

  “Much more.”

  “How so?” I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “How can I?” he asked. “You don’t trust me.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No, you don’t. You won’t let me get close to you.”

  “This is work, Sonny. This isn’t personal.”

  “Work is personal with me.”

  Wanda came padding out from the kitchen in her caftan and sweat socks. Her eyes were puffy, her hair mussed. “What’s all the yelling about?”

  “Creative differences,” Sonny replied.

  “This is your idea of creative differences?” I asked.

  “Just like old times,” he acknowledged. To Wanda he said, “You’re up early.”

  “Who’s up?”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “I have a class.” She yawned and poured herself some coffee.

  He turned back to me. “Tell ya what, pally. I got that emcee job in Vegas tomorrow. Why don’t you come with me?
We’ll have the whole drive out. We’ll talk, have dinner. Maybe it’ll help. If I still feel the same way when we get back, then we’ll call it off.”

  “What about Lulu?”

  “It’s only for one night. Wanda can take care of her.”

  “Sure, Wanda can take care of her,” Wanda said.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll go to Vegas.”

  “We’ll go to Vegas,” Sonny agreed. “Just the two of us.”

  Just the two of us, of course, included Vic.

  We left well before dawn in the limo, Sonny and I riding in the back along with the smell of his toilet water. Sonny slept. Asleep, with a blanket pulled up to his chin, he almost looked like that pudgy kid from Bed-Sty again, the one who slept out on the fire escape with his big brother on hot nights. Now he slept in an air-conditioned limo.

  I watched him. There’s an old saying—to really get to know a man you have to walk around in his shoes. A ghost, I was learning, has to wear his skin, too. I had no doubts now that Sonny Day was a colossal piece of work—unpredictable, confounding, maddening. Was I getting him yet? I still couldn’t tell if he was being open with me or merely showing me the Sonny he wanted me to see. I couldn’t tell if I was seeing him as he was or as I wanted him to be. Maybe I was trying to invent him, turn him into a sympathetic, vulnerable fictional creation. Maybe I never would get him. But I had to try.

  At one point he shifted and the blanket fell away. He reached for it in his sleep, his manicured fingers wiggling feebly, a whimper coming from his throat. I hesitated, then covered him back up. He grunted and snuggled into it.

  We cleared Pomona and Ontario in the darkness. The sky got purple as we climbed the San Bernardino Mountains and was bright blue by the time we descended to the desert floor. Sonny woke up around Victorville and announced he was hungry. We stopped at a Denny’s in Barstow for breakfast. Aside from a couple of truckers at the counter, we were the only customers. The hash browns were excellent.

  Sonny bought the papers on the way out. They were filled with stories about the Oscar nominations, and that got him going.

  “See this, Hoagy? The comedies got aced out again. That really fries me. Did Stan Laurel ever get nominated for Best Actor? Groucho Marx? W C. Fields? Me? No way. They think we’re just fooling around. Lemme tell you, comedy has to do the same thing drama does. It’s gotta tell a story, have believable people, make a point—and then on top of that it’s gotta be funny, too. That makes it even harder. But the snobs, the critics, they don’t see it. For them, you gotta hold up a sign. Be solemn. Dull. They act like it’s a crime to entertain people. You gotta entertain ’em. It’s like Sammy told me one time: If you can’t tap your foot to it, then it ain’t music.”

  “It’s that way in my business, too,” I said. “You’re only taken seriously in literary circles if your stuff is torturous and hard to read. If you go to the extra trouble of making it clear and entertaining, then the critics call you a lightweight.”

  “They like you. You ain’t dull.”

  “That’s true, I wasn’t. But I also never wrote a second book. They’d have gotten me then.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that. It really bugs the hell out of me.”

  “What does?”

  “The way you talk about yourself in the past tense, like you’re eighty years old, or dead. You’re young, you got talent. You’ll write lots more books. Good books. You just gotta work on your attitude. Not I was. I am. Say it: I am”

  I said it, I said it.

  “That’s more like it.” He glanced at the newspaper story again, then bared his teeth, disgusted. “Screw ’em. We’re the ones who have the talent. We know what we’re doing.”

  He reached down and opened up the little refrigerator in front of us and pulled out two small bottles of Perrier. He opened them and handed me one.

  “I just have one question,” I said. “If we’re both so smart and we know what we’re doing, then how come we’re on our asses?”

  His eyes widened in surprise. Then he laughed. He actually laughed at something I said.

  “You’re okay, Hoagy. You’re a no-bullshit guy. Glad we decided to do this. Hey, Vic, how ya doing up there, baby?”

  “Fine, Sonny,” he replied softly.

  “Stop pouting already, will ya? So I blew. I take the blame. I apologize. You’re not a dumb ox. You’re my pally, and you meant well. I’m sorry, okay?”

  Vic seemed to brighten. “Okay, Sonny.”

  “Now how about some sounds? Get us in the groove.”

  “You got it.”

  Vic put on some cassettes, uptempo Sinatra and Torme from the fifties, and we bopped along, sipping our Perriers, the heat shimmering outside on the Devils Playground. It wasn’t the worst way to travel.

  “Merilee used to get letters from cranks,” I said. “Guys who wanted to buy her toenail cuttings. Wear her panties. Never death threats though.”

  Sonny shrugged. “After thirty years you get used to it. Part of the deal, at least it is for me.”

  “What did this one say?”

  He gazed out the window. “It said that I’d never live to see our book in print.”

  “Oh?”

  Sonny polished off his Perrier and belched. He stabbed a finger in my chest. “I know just what you’re thinking—that’s why I maybe want to pull out. Well, you’re wrong. The two things got nuttin’ to do with each other. I’m not that kind of person.”

  “What kind of person is that?”

  “The kind who you can scare. If I worried about the cranks out there, I’d go outta my head. Besides, I got my Vic. Right, Vic?”

  “That’s right, Sonny.”

  We hit the first signs for the Vegas casinos when we crossed the Nevada state line.

  “What exactly are you supposed to do for this pageant?” I asked him.

  “Show up. Everything’s already written for me. I just introduce the girls, eyeball their tits, wink at the audience. We walk it through this afternoon. Go on at five-thirty. You like showgirls?”

  “What’s not to like?”

  “Red-blood American boy, huh?” He grinned, man to man.

  I grinned back. “Type O.”

  He furrowed his brow. “What can I tell ya? I wish I didn’t have to be doing it. It’s cheese all the way. But I got no choice. If you’ve had personal problems like I have, you start at the bottom again. Prove you can deliver. In this business, you’re a prisoner of people’s preconceptions of you.”

  “Not dissimilar to life in general,” I said.

  “You can say that again.”

  “Not dissimilar to life in general,” I repeated.

  He gaped at me in disbelief.

  “You forget something important about me,” I told him. “I grew up on you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked me over and scowled. “Coulda done worse.”

  “You can say that again.”

  After so many hundreds of miles of pure barren desert, Las Vegas rose up before us in the hot sun like a gaudy, indecent mirage, the hotels and billboards so huge, so unlikely, I was sure they’d disappear if I blinked twice. I tried it—they didn’t.

  “Put in a lot of years here,” said Sonny wistfully. “A lotta shtick under the bridge.”

  The third annual “Miss Las Vegas Showgirl Beauty Pageant” was being broadcast live from the MGM Grand Hotel, or so the billboard out front said. The parking lot, which must have spanned ten acres, was mostly empty except for some broadcast trucks. Inside, the vast casino was colder than a deli case and about as quiet. Most of the tables were covered. It wasn’t noon yet.

  Sonny got the royal treatment. The staff bowed and scraped and whisked us up to our rooms. He and Vic had a two-bedroom high-rollers’ suite with a living room, kitchen, and complimentary fruit basket. Nice view of the purple mountains, too. I was billeted across the hall in a single room with no fruit basket. I had a view of the MGM Grand parking lot and way off in
the distance, a view of the Caesars Palace parking lot.

  They had, to quote Sonny, a real peach of a health club downstairs. We each pumped a round of irons, then did ten kilometers on the cycles, had a sauna and a cold plunge. Vic suggested we have our lunch sent up to their suite. Sonny insisted on eating in the coffee shop. So, bristling with health, we stormed the coffee shop and attacked man-sized platters of tuna salad.

  We sat in a booth, Vic and me on either side of Sonny. A lot of guests came over to ask for his autograph and shake his hand. They were tourists, salesmen, ordinary folks—his people. He joked with them, kidded them, acted downright pleased by their attention.

  Vic, on the other hand, never relaxed, never stopped scanning the room for somebody who looked like trouble. Vic was on the job now.

  “You gonna spend some time in the casino?” Sonny asked me between autographs.

  “Only as long as it takes to lose all my money.”

  “How much you bring?” he asked, looking concerned.

  “A thousand.”

  He was relieved. “That’s chicken feed.”

  “How about you?”

  “Me? I can’t go near a casino anymore. I gamble like I drink—can’t stop. Used to drop fifty, a hundred grand in a night. You won’t find me near a table now. Or the track.”

  At five minutes before two, Vic tapped his watch.

  “Thanks, Vic,” said Sonny, signaling for the check. “Don’t wanna be late for rehearsal, Hoagy. That’s exactly the kind of thing I can’t afford now.”

  The waitress was slow in coming over. As the seconds ticked away, Sonny tapped the table with his fork. Then yanked at Vic’s wrist to check the time. Then popped a couple of Sen-Sens in his mouth. Then yanked at Vic’s wrist again.

  “Honey?!” he called out again, clearly agitated now. “Waitress?!”

  “One minute!” she called back.

  “Why don’t I just let you out, Sonny?” Vic offered soothingly. “I can sign for it.”

  Sonny smashed the table with his fist, bouncing our silverware, our glasses, our keno holder. “No!” he roared. “She’s gonna bring it right over and she’s gonna …!” He caught himself, suddenly aware that people at neighboring tables were staring at him. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Good idea, Vic,” he said quietly. “Thanks.”