by John Haskell
In retrospect, killing the bookie was easy. And if it would have been a crime, which it was, it would’ve been the perfect crime except, first of all, I was shot. And now what? I took the cab to a bar about two blocks up the street. I could have walked to the bar even with a hole in body, but I felt like splurging, like celebrating. I had my freedom now, a big word but that’s what it felt like, doing what I had to do to get the weight off my chest, and off my mind, and scotch and water. That’s what I ordered. I didn’t care what brand, or what liquor even. I sat at the bar, drank it down and ordered another, feeling both freedom and happiness, or trying to. I tried to put on a happy face as they say, hoping my outward expression might affect the inner tranquillity or lack of tranquillity, and I’ve never been good at faking a smile, at consciously willing my lips to spread across my teeth, as if my lips belonged to someone else and then, when I slid off the bar stool I spilled my stupid drink. Some scotch spilled on my cuff and my hand and I shook my hand to shake off the wetness and also to shake off the feeling that felt like the opposite of freedom. The jukebox was playing a song, a song I didn’t know but I heard the words, almost in love with you. And your mood is your mood, meaning it’s malleable, you can make it be what you want, and the song wasn’t a dance song but I wanted to feel like dancing. But everyone else just sat on their stools, perched is the word, elbows lodged like fence posts into the wood of the bar and come on, people, I said, but the joint, as they say, was dead. So I took the rest of my scotch to a table. I sat on the worn padding of a large chair, hoping my newfound freedom would sink in, would start to exist and then sink in and that’s when someone said to me, What are you so happy about?
Me?
You’re smiling.
Why not? And when I said this, the woman, in her twenties, with bangs and a handmade blouse, sitting alone in a booth to my right, smiled. A half smile. Half of it confident, and the other half, the not-smiling half, intrigued me. She reminded me of someone, and I told her, as if we were friends, I feel like a million bucks. That’s what I wanted to feel like, or should have felt like, and the fact that I didn’t made it worse. I didn’t tell her I’d just murdered a person. I tried to be casual. I covered the blood on my shirt with my jacket, pretending I was fine, or better than fine. I’m golden, I said, not quite knowing what that meant, but she seemed to know, or at least she responded by raising her glass, like a toast, and sure. I could feel myself getting into character. Not sure who the character was but whoever it was he started chatting with her, asking questions about her life and revealing details about his life, which was my life, and the details were insignificant but still, something was passing between us, and I asked this person in the handmade shirt if I might offer her a nightcap, and she laughed at that, or maybe a shoulder to cry on, whatever she might need. Her collarbones were showing. And it was cold in the bar but they do that, keep the temperature low so that people won’t sleep, so they’ll keep moving or keep drinking, and she wasn’t a runaway, her clothes were too nice. And when I actually looked into her face I could see in her face the same kind of eagerness my daughter used to have, the same willingness Nijinksy had, to risk his common sense, and my daughter wouldn’t have been as old as this girl, and didn’t look like this girl, and the reason I didn’t want to think about my daughter is complicated. Like everything is complicated. That’s why I killed the old man, to settle my complications, and although killing someone is also a complication, I thought I’d settled my debt. Now I was free. And I assumed I would feel free because once you’re free of complications happiness should follow, that’s what I thought, and now that I’d paid off a giant debt I should have felt gigantically happy. One would think. And one keeps waiting for the happiness to arrive, waiting and waiting and now here I am, remembering this apparition. She was flesh and blood, and she was friendly. And I was expecting things to be going my way, that’s the expression you use when you find a penny on the ground, or a quarter, and whatever it is, if things don’t go my way I can either change those things or change myself, and the mistake I made was wanting to change nothing. And I noticed that I was shivering. I wasn’t cold but I was shivering. And when I leaned back in my chair she could see my shirt and the blood on my shirt and I’m fine, I said, not because I thought I was but because what’s the point. What was I going to do? I imagined her laying a damp cloth on my forehead, cool and calming, and I’ll see a doctor, I said, later, and for the first time in days I let my eyes close. And was the adrenaline leaving my body? I don’t think so. But I was tired. When she talked to me her voice was like the cool, wet cloth, soothing, except there was no wet cloth. They talk about not closing your eyes when you’re wounded, when you feel like giving up and going into what feels like sleep but it’s death. That’s when you’re supposed to stay awake. Stay awake or die. And when I looked up there she was, and her eyes were not like my daughter’s eyes. Her eyes had seen things and mine had too, we had that in common. And her lips. The adrenaline was mixing me up I guess because I thought I’d been going somewhere and now here I was, and if this was where I’d been going and where she’d been going, the question was, if there was a question, and the answer to the question, I didn’t know any of it. And I didn’t mind. I could almost call it peace, but distracting me from the peace was the pain. And in the confusion of all those things happening together she told me I needed to see a doctor. And the hard part was sitting up. The muscles in my back, the obliques and the obturator, they were injured, and the pain was real but I didn’t say, would you give me a hand? I managed to sit upright on my own. And it felt better being upright, not great, but that’s what I had to adjust to. Whatever feeling was there. And it’s strange how love, the feeling we call love, is so slippery. It slips from one object to another, and we think the particular object is causing the love but now I suddenly wanted to embrace this person in front of me, a person I didn’t know, but I did know her. She was my daughter and my wife, and she wasn’t Rachel either but I saw Rachel and, where have you been? And it’s true I’d never looked for her, never tried to find out what club or what class she was dancing in, and everything passes. As if the person in front of me is a mirror, or was, and the bleeding seemed to be slowing down, and if she was a mirror reflecting everything I knew, and as a consequence everything I was, was that a part she was playing? The jukebox song wasn’t finished but I had my own part to play, and whether it was foisted on me, or whether I wanted it foisted on me, now it was out of my control. Bye-bye, I said, and when I stepped out onto the sidewalk, at that hour, in that part of town, there weren’t many cabs so I walked. The moon was up there, gibbous I believe, moving westward, and I followed the moon, the pain in my side still there when I moved but now it was less intrusive. My mind could turn to other things, like the night air, cool and loud, and it was almost enjoyable, the act of walking, legs striding, arms swinging, blood flowing, but because I didn’t want my blood to flow out, when I saw an empty taxi I hailed it.
Inside the Crazy Horse the audience sounded angry. They were booing, stomping their feet, pretending to be angry because the show hadn’t started. I walked to the bar where Cosmo, standing by the cash register, phone to his ear, was saying, the show can’t go on without you. The stage was empty except for the spotlights, red and green, and the show hadn’t started because Teddy had gone on strike. He was refusing to play his part, but the audience loves you, Cosmo was telling him, and the girls love you, and I sat at the bar, listening. When I nodded to Cosmo he nodded to me, too preoccupied to notice the blood on my shirt and I didn’t tell him. I ordered a beer from Sonny, and the problem was, the dancers had learned to perform their parts a certain way, with Teddy, and they needed his portrayal of Mr. Sophistication, or thought they did, to give them the freedom to be whoever they wanted to be on stage. Without a Mr. Sophistication they refused to perform, and Cosmo, like a pantomime, was pulling at his hair. He was worried, obviously, but when he walked up on the stage I was oddly relaxed, drinking beer, my belly bu
rning but only slightly, more warmth than heat, and I imagined a cartoon animal, the liquid beer flowing out of the bullet hole like water out of a fountain. If I sat straight, balancing my body without using my obliques, I could enjoy the show, which at this point was Cosmo pacing the stage, holding a microphone, improvising. He started telling jokes, and when the jokes ran out he did a little soft shoe, buying rounds of drinks, introducing the waitstaff, basically taking up time, killing it as they say, and that’s when I saw, at a table near the stage, a hand waving to me. It belonged to Freddie. It was perched like a bird on his arm, an insistent bird, calling me over, so I took a last sip of beer, and when I got to his table he wanted me to sit. And talk. About what happened. You’re a real hero, he said. That was some stunt. Molto delizioso. He thought I was Italian, or that I spoke Italian, and when I turned to look at the stage, because Cosmo wasn’t there anymore, there was nothing to see, and our friends, Freddie said, meaning his friends, were dying to hear my story. How I did it. We didn’t think you would actually … and I told him to tell his friends I was tired. I wasn’t feeling so good. I’m not in the mood, I said, for going anywhere. Cosmo wasn’t standing at his usual spot by the bar, and a few minutes later I was walking outside with Freddie.
In the story, Petrushka has already killed the Moor, but in doing so he’s been injured. And the Charlatan wants to finish the job. I was sitting on a red milk crate and Freddie was leaning against his blue Chevrolet. We were back at the parking garage, but this time we’d come to the top, and under the night sky the conversation we had basically boiled down to the pros and cons of killing me. Apparently they thought I wouldn’t return from Chinatown, not alive, what with the car and the bookie’s bodyguards, although it turned out he wasn’t a bookie, he was a Chinatown gang boss, a competitor, and what I was was a loose end, an embarrassing one but Freddie had scruples. The fact I’d held up my end of the bargain meant something. But there was also the fact that the Chinese gang would want retribution, they’d want an eye for an eye and I was supposed to be that eye, but he wasn’t convinced it was right to get killed for doing your job. And I didn’t want to seem to be selling him, because if he thought I was trying to cajole him or persuade him, although that’s what I’d be doing, he might resist. So I went at it indirectly. I told him that logically, yes, his job was to murder me, that’s what was expected of him and that’s what people do, they go to work, do their jobs, but without ever thinking, like sheep, or what were those animals that were supposed to jump off cliffs? They were like lemurs, or ferrets, some kind of rodent, and their job was to act out a part and his job was the same. That’s what I told him. His job wasn’t to jump off a cliff but whatever it was, yes he could do it, and I said could, not should or will because I wanted to give him what they call wiggle room. To decide for himself. He was leaning against his car, his forearm resting on the rear windshield, and the last time we’d come to this parking lot it hadn’t been good but this time we were on the top level, open to the air, the sky above me, the lights of Hollywood off to my left and the ocean, far away, to my right, and I knew the feeling of trying to seem relaxed, which is the opposite of being relaxed, and I felt the difference because I felt the gun in my pocket. I’d forgotten to wipe off my prints and throw it away and now, although I had no experience being who I was being, that’s who I was. And I was nervous, but I wasn’t scared. Maybe killing a person makes you not scared, I don’t know, but Freddie noticed my shirt. The blood was a patch of dark red blackness below my right rib and he said, looks like you got hit. Not bad, I said, and I could feel the pistol’s textured grip in my pocket. I’ll get it looked at, I said, and the way he looked at me, as if he had a hearing problem, or was retarded, or maybe he was thinking about his job. Freddie, although he was supposed to kill me, was trying to figure out a way that not killing me made sense. And to help him, I told him that, although he could kill me, and most people probably would, some people have a code. Lemmings were the animals I was thinking of, although they don’t actually jump off cliffs, and although I used the word code, I didn’t clarify what code I was talking about, hinting at only the outline of a code, letting him fill in the details of what that code ought to be, or what his code ought to be, and it’s not that I convinced him of the code’s morality or even the code’s existence. Well, maybe I did convince him of that. The red light of the LIVE NUDE GIRLS sign was flashing down on the street, and I told him, I can disappear. No one will have to see me again. And by presenting a logical way out of a situation he’d rather not be in, he was able to get out of it. Don’t think I’m letting you live, he said, because that won’t happen. And then he opened the door of his blue Chevrolet, brushed off his slacks, got in, backed up, and when he drove away, although I seemed to be out of the so-called woods I wasn’t.
The tragedy of Petrushka is the tragedy of us all. That’s what Haskell says, but the story of Petrushka is not completely tragic. Yes, at the end of the ballet he’s dead, but by dying he’s freed himself from the person who controlled him, or the idea that did, and punished him, and although he’s never been loved, he knows what love is. Like a Pierrot, and like any fool, he believes in the possibility of … and I was going to say transformation but it’s really just possibility, which is why he seems to always return, always the same sad clown, and he never really dies because, as Haskell is trying to say, he’s me.
Upstairs in the dressing room, I sat in front of a mirror, not looking at myself but there I was, or here I was, putting my face on. That’s what my mother called it when she put her rouge and eyeliner and lipstick on. And I was using a thick, black, oil-based pencil, drawing first the outline of a mustache, the handlebar curl that spirals around my cheek and then I penciled it in, dark and slightly maniacal, but I wasn’t feeling maniacal. I was calm. I was getting ready for another role, and whether it made me happy, or made happiness possible, or whether it allowed some forgetfulness to seep between the cracks that separated me from the role I had played, or roles, didn’t matter. What mattered was the playing. Entering a role is like entering the ocean, like stepping in and fighting the waves to get beyond the waves, and although I couldn’t play Mr. Sophistication the way Teddy played him, once I’d put the mustache on, and the red lips, and my face was painted white, like a ghost or like death, Mr. Sophistication was me. Or I was him. And they talk about owning the role, meaning possessing, or being possessed, and the person I saw in the mirror was not what I thought I would be, or what I’d wanted to be, but sometimes, to become who you are you have to change who you are. And I wasn’t acting like him, I was him, Mr. Sophistication, or he was me, and the hole in the side of his back was aching. I took off the shirt I was wearing, damp with blood, dropped it in the oil-drum trash can, and the hole was still bleeding. But not badly. But I seemed to be getting sleepy, which is why I kept breathing. The painful part was getting my arms and my head through Teddy’s T-shirt, the one with the bow tie printed on the front. I found it hanging on a hook, and it didn’t smell bad and I didn’t bother changing my pants. I put on Teddy’s tuxedo coat, walked to the top of the steep stairs, and before I took the first step I remembered the top hat. It was on the shelf above Teddy’s mirror, and the top hat was part of the person I was being, or going to be, and I set it on my head. I looked in the mirror, adjusting the hat, lying to myself that I looked fine and felt fine and it didn’t matter because for an instant, a fairly long instant, the face I saw in the mirror wasn’t my face, and what would she be like if she had lived? I would never know. And then, holding the wobbly handrail I walked down the stairs. Sherri and Darlene were down in the so-called wings, sitting on folding chairs, and I sat with them, on the last rung of the steps. They were glad I was there, I think, telling me not to worry about my lines. Just go out there, Sherri said, you’ll be great. The red-haired dancer was on the opposite side of the stage, invisible to me, and Sherri and Darlene were wearing their black fishnet stockings, their lips red, and they didn’t notice my T-shirt turning red, a
nd I didn’t mention it because I wanted the show to go on. I took shallow inhales because it seemed less painful, but pain was part of the job. Life means work which means playing the part, and it didn’t matter if I’d never been to Vienna. You make up the place and you make up the self that resides in that place, and the art is to make it up well, to feel comfortable. And comfort is relative. I had a hole in the middle of my body, and I was feeling that hole and at the same time I was listening to Sherri and Darlene talk about what they were going to eat after the show, and I was listening to the music as it started to fade, and when the two of them stood up I also stood up, and that’s when Sherri gave me a kiss. In the middle of my handlebar mustache. She wished me merde, and I could still smile. I wasn’t that sleepy. I remembered the phrase you’re supposed to respond with, break a leg, and I could see her thick makeup, and the sleepiness felt like a cloud, and I was under the cloud, but it wasn’t raining yet. I was still breathing. And Sherri showed me where to stand, on a spot behind the middle of the curtain. She moved to her spot, next to Darlene at the side of the curtain, and like the tides of the ocean, emotion is constantly moving, flowing in or out and it’s normal to be sad, and then sadness changes, like the afternoon light changes, gradually, but you feel it, even if you’re not aware of it, and Sherri was limbering up, bending and twisting, and I felt stiff, but that was fine. On the other side of the curtain the crowd was clapping and booing and I heard Cosmo pull the microphone off its stand. I could feel his footsteps vibrating on the stage, not far from me but separated from me by the curtain. He was waiting for the audience, his audience, to quiet down, and they did, slowly, and he thanked them for their patience. He called them friends, Romans, then he paused. Just kidding, he said, and then he said, but seriously, folks. And when he said it, that was the cue for the music to start, the Viennese waltz, and the show that had to go on was starting, the momentum moving, and direct from the capitals of the world, he said, and the girls were peeking through a crack in the curtain, whispering to each other, and when I peeked through the curtain I saw Cosmo, his silhouette pointing to the cardboard Ringstrasse and the Ferris wheel and the house of Sigmund Freud. And then the whispering stopped. This was what they call the last minute, the moment before who I was going to be would finally appear, the moment he said, Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my pleasure to give you—and here he paused, and the crowd went quiet, the ice cubes stopped tinkling, and whatever sleepiness I might have felt I fought it, and then I heard him say my name—Mr. Sophistication. That was the moment I was supposed to part the curtain, walk to the microphone, and that’s when I looked to my left, to the spot where the red-haired dancer was supposed to be standing, and that’s when I thought about Rachel. I’d never said good-bye to her. And it wouldn’t have done any good to imagine her, standing there, because I never would say good-bye, and the ache in my lower back was everywhere. Cosmo was telling the audience, he must be delayed at the airport. And when I turned, away from whatever thoughts I was having I saw my hands, in front of me, holding the curtain. And again Cosmo said, Ladies and gentlemen … Mr. Sophistication. And the hands, which were my hands, parted the curtain. The light was blinding but I stepped into it, seeing nothing but light at first, and hearing nothing, blind and deaf, but the stool was there, the microphone resting on the stool, and when I got to that, with one hand touching the stool, I looked out, letting the spotlights hit me, and the eyes of the audience, and when I sat on the edge of the stool the pain and the sleepiness, they didn’t leave but now I heard clapping, applause would be too strong a word, but some of the people were clapping their hands, and I saw the legs of the people close to the stage, crossed over other legs, feet moving, and looking out into the darkness I was inviting whoever was out there to join me, to join me on a sentimental journey. To old Vienna. The mysterious city of cobblestones and clock towers, and once the show got started, one by one, Sherri and Darlene and whoever it, they offered to show me the Kunst Museum, and people laughed at that, and as the story proceeded they gradually removed their lederhosen and their leather jackets, and the next thing I knew, although it wasn’t actually the next thing because it was all part of the same thing, the act of living my life. I was talking and gesturing, and although my brain was trying to sleep I kept my eyes, like windows, open, watching the people on stage with me, watching them dance because that’s what they loved, and it’s what they did. And I was listening to the music because when the music changed it would be my cue, and when I heard it change I lifted the microphone, my lips almost touching the black metal and I cleared my throat. The music was ready and the lights were ready and I began, Falling in love again, Never wanted to, half singing, half speaking, letting the words come out of my mouth, hearing the words as if they were made by my voice. What was I to do. The eyes closing, the memories fading.