by Mario Puzo
But with me he was different; he was older and he treated me as a kid brother. And he knew me, he could read me better than my wife. And he never got angry with me.
It took me two weeks to recover from the operation before I was well enough to go home. On the final day I said goodbye to Dr. Cohn and he wished me luck.
The nurse brought my clothes and told me I’d have to sign some papers before I could leave the hospital. She escorted me to the office. I really felt shitty that nobody had come to take me home. None of my friends. None of my family. Artie. Sure, they didn’t know I was going home alone. I was feeling like a little kid, nobody loved me. Was it right that I had to go home after a serious operation, alone, in the subway? What if I got weak? Or fainted? Jesus, I felt shitty. Then I burst out laughing. Because I was really full of shit.
The truth was that Artie had asked who was taking me home, and I said Valerie. Valerie had said she would come down to the hospital, and I told her it was OK, I would take a cab if Artie couldn’t make it. So she assumed I had told Artie. My friends had, of course, assumed that somebody in my family would take me home. The fact of the matter is that I wanted to hold a grudge in some funny kind of way. Against everybody.
Except that somebody should have known. I’d always prided myself on being self-sufficient. That I never needed anyone to care about me. That I could live completely alone and inside myself. But this was one time that I wanted some excessive sentimentality that the world dishes out in such abundance.
And so when I got back to the ward and found Artie holding my suitcase, I almost burst into tears. My spirits went way up and I gave him a hug, one of the few times I’d ever done that. Then I asked happily, “How the hell did you know I was leaving the hospital today?”
Artie gave me a sad, tired smile. “You shit, I called Valerie. She said she thought I was picking you up, that’s what you told her.”
“I never told her that.” I said.
“Oh, come on,” Artie said. He took my arm, leading the way out of the ward. “I know your style,” he said. “But it’s not fair to people who care about you. What you do is not fair to them.”
I didn’t say anything until we were out of the hospital and in his car. “I told Vallie you might come down,” I said. “I didn’t want hem to bother.”
Artie was driving through traffic now, so he couldn’t look at me. He spoke quietly, reasonably. “You can’t do what you do with Vallie. You can do it with me. But you can’t do it with Vallie.”
He knew me as no one else did. I didn’t have to explain to him how I felt like such a fucking loser. My lack of success as an artist bad done me in, the shame of my failure to take care of my wife and kids had done me in. I couldn’t ask anyone to do anything for me. I literally couldn’t bear to ask anyone to take me home from the hospital. Not even my wife.
When we got home, Vallie was waiting for me. She had a bewildered, scared look on hem face when she kissed me. The three of us had coffee in the kitchen. Vallie sat near me and touched me. “I can’t understand,” she said. “Why couldn’t you tell me?’
“Because he wanted to be a hero,” Artie said. But he said it to throw her off the track. He knew I wouldn’t want her to know how really beat I was mentally. I guess he thought it would be bad for her to know that. And besides, he had faith in me. He knew I’d bounce back. That I’d be OK. Everybody gets a little weak once in a while. What the hell. Even heroes get tired.
After coffee, Artie left. I thanked him and he gave me his sardonic smile, but I could see that he was worried about me. There was, I noticed, a look of strain on his face. Life was beginning to wear him down. When he was out of the house, Vallie made me go to bed and rest. She helped me undress and lay down in bed beside me, naked too.
I fell asleep immediately. I was at peace. The touch of her warm body, her hands that I trusted, her untreacherous mouth and eyes and hair made sleep the sweet sanctuary it could never be with the deep drugs of pharmacology. When I woke up, she was gone. I could hear her voice in the kitchen and the voices of the children home from school. Everything seemed worth it.
Women, for me, were a sanctuary, used selfishly it is true, but making everything else bearable. How could I or any man suffer all the defeats of everyday life without that sanctuary? Jesus, I’d come home hating the day I had just put in on my job, worried to death about the money I owed, sure of my final defeat in life because I would never be a successful writer. And all the pain would vanish because I’d have supper with my family, I’d tell stories to the kids and at night I would make completely confident and trusting love with my wife. And it would seem a miracle. And of course, the real miracle was that it was not just Value and me but countless other millions of men with their wives and children. And for thousands of years. When all that goes, what will hold men together? Never mind that it wasn’t all love and that sometimes it was even pure hatred. I had a history now.
And then it all goes away anyway.
In Vegas I told all this in fragments, sometimes over drinks in the lounge, sometimes at an after-midnight supper in the coffee shop. And when I was finished, Cully said, “We still don’t know why you left your wife.” Jordan looked at him with mild contempt. Jordan had already made the rest of the voyage and gone far past me.
“I didn’t leave my wife and kids,” I said. “I’m just taking a break. I write to her every day. Some morning I’ll feel like going home and just get on the plane.”
“Just like that?” Jordan asked. Not sardonically. He really wanted to know.
Diane hadn’t said anything, she rarely did. But now she patted me on the knee and said, “I believe you.”
Cully said to her, “Where do you come off believing in any guy?”
“Most men are shitty,” Diane said. “But Merlyn isn’t; not yet anyway.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’ll get there,” Diane said coolly.
I couldn’t resist. “How about Jordan?” I knew she was in love with Jordan. So did Cully. Jordan didn’t know because he didn’t want to know and he didn’t care. But now he turned a politely inquiring face toward Diane as if he were interested in her opinion. On that night he really looked like hell. The bones of his face were beginning to show through the skin in sickly white planes.
“No, not you,” she said to him. And Jordan turned his head away from him. He didn’t want to hear it.
Cully, who was so outgoing and amiable, was the last to tell his story, and then, like all of us, he held back the most important part, which I didn’t find out until years later. Meanwhile, he gave an honest picture of his true character, or so it seemed. We all knew that he had some mysterious connection with the hotel and its owner, Gronevelt. But it was also true that he was a degenerate gambler and general lowlife. Jordan was not amused by Cully, but I have to admit that I was. Everything out of the ordinary or caricatures of types interested me automatically. I made no moral judgments. I felt that I was above that. I just listened.
Cully was an education. And an inspiration. Nobody would ever do him in. He would do them in. He had an instinct for survival. A zest for life, based on immorality and a complete disregard for ethics. And yet he was enormously likable. He could be funny. He was interested in everything, and he could relate to women in a completely unsentimental, realistic way that women loved.
Despite the fact that he was always short of money, he could get to bed with any of the show girls working in the hotel with romantic sweet talk. If she held out, he might pull his fur coat routine.
It was slick. He would bring her to a fur shop farther down the Strip. The owner was a friend of his, but the girl didn’t know this. Cully would have the owner show the girl his stock of furs, in fact, have the guy lay all the pelts out on the floor so that he and the girl could pick out the finest. After they made the selection, the furrier would measure the girl and tell her the coat would be ready in two weeks. Then Cully would write out a check for a thousand dollars as a down p
ayment and tell the owner to send him the bill. He’d give the girl the receipt.
That night Cully would take the girl out to dinner and after dinner he’d let her bet a few bucks on roulette, then take her to his room where, as he said, she had to come across because she had the receipt in her pocketbook. Since Cully was so madly in love with her, how could she not? Just the fur coat might not do it. Just Cully’s being in love might not do it. But put both of them together and, as Cully explained, you had an ego-greed parlay that was a winner every time.
Of course, the girl never got the fur coat. During the two-week love affair, Cully would pick a fight and they’d break up. And Cully said, not once, never, not one time, had the girl given him back the receipt for the fur coat. In every case she rushed down to the fur store and tried to collect the deposit or even the coat. But of course, the owner blandly told all of them that Cully had already picked up his deposit and canceled the order. His payoff was some of Cully’s rejects.
Cully had another trick for the soft hookers in the chorus line. He would have a drink with them a few nights in a row, listen attentively to their troubles and be enormously sympathetic. Never making a bad move or a come-on. Then maybe on the third night he would take out a hundred-dollar bill in front of them, put it in an envelope and put the envelope into the inside pocket of his jacket. Then he would say, “Listen, I don’t usually do this, but I really like you. Let’s get comfortable in my room and I’ll give you this cab fare home.”
The girl would protest a little. She wanted that C note. But she didn’t want to be thought a hooker. Cully would turn on the charm. “Listen,” he would say, “it’s gonna be late when you leave. Why should you pay cab fare home? That’s the least I can do. And I really like you. What’s the harm?” Then he would take out the envelope and give it to her, and she would slip it into her purse. He would immediately escort her to his room and screw her for hours before he let her go home. Then came, he said, the funny part. The girl, on her way down in the elevator, would rip open the envelope for her C note and find a ten-dollar bill. Because naturally, Cully had had two envelopes inside his jacket.
Very often the girl would ride the elevator back up and start hammering on Cully’s door. He would go into the bathroom and run a tub to drown out the noise, shave leisurely and wait for her to go away. Or, if she were shyer and less experienced, she would call him from the lobby phone and explain that maybe he had made a mistake, that there was only a ten-dollar bill in the envelope.
Cully loved this. He’d say, “Yeah, right. What can cab fare be, two, three dollars? But I just wanted to make sure, so I gave you ten.”
The girl would say, “I saw you put a hundred dollars in the envelope.”
Cully would get indignant. “A hundred bucks for cab fare,” he’d say. “What the hell are you, a goddamn hooker? I never paid a hooker in my life. Listen, I thought you were a nice girl. I really liked you. Now you pull this shit. Listen, don’t call me anymore.” Or sometimes, if he thought he could get away with it, he’d say, “Oh no, sweetheart. You’re mistaken.” And he’d con her for another shot. Some girls believed it was an honest mistake, or as Cully was smart enough to point out, they had to make believe that they had made a mistake not to look foolish. Some even made another date to prove they weren’t hookers, that they hadn’t gone to bed with him for the hundred dollars.
And yet this was not to save money, Cully gambled his money away. It was the feeling of power, that he could “move” a beautiful girl. He was especially challenged if a girl had a reputation for only putting out for guys she really liked.
If the girls were really straight, Cully got a little more complicated. He would try to get into their heads, pay them extravagant compliments. Complain about his own inability to get sexually aroused unless he had a real interest in or real knowledge of the girl. He would send them little presents, give them twenty-dollar bills for carfare. But still, some smart girls wouldn’t let him get his foot in the door. Then he would switch them. He would start talking about a friend of his, a wealthy man who was the best guy in the world. Who took care of girls out of friendship, they didn’t even have to come across. This friend would join them for a drink and it would really by friend of Cully’s, usually a gambler with a big dress business in New York or an auto agency in Chicago. Cully would talk the girl into going to dinner with his friend, the friend being well briefed. The girl had nothing to lose. A free dinner with a likable, wealthy man.
They would have dinner. The man would lay a couple of hundreds on her or send an expensive gift to her the next day. The man would be charming all the way, never pressing. But there were portents of fur coats, automobiles, diamond rings of many karats perceived in the future. The girl would go to bed with the rich friend. And after the rich friend moved on, the beautiful girl who could not be “moved” would fail into Cully’s lap for carfare.
Cully had no remorse. His position was that women not married were all soft hustlers, out to hook you with one gimmick or another, including true love, and that you were within your rights to hustle them back. The only time he showed a little pity was when the girls didn’t hammer on his door or call him from the lobby. He knew then that the girls were straight, humiliated that they had been tricked. Sometimes he would look them up and if they needed money for rent or to get through the month he would tell them it had been a joke and he would slip them a hundred or two.
And for Cully it was a joke. Something to tell his fellow thieves and hustlers and gamblers. They would all laugh and congratulate him on not getting robbed. These hustlers were all keenly aware of women as an enemy, true, an enemy that had fruits necessary to men, but they were indignant about paying a stickup price, which meant money, time and affection. They needed the company of women, they needed the softness of women around them. They would pay air fare in the thousands to take girls with them from Vegas to London just to have them around. But that was OK. After all, the poor kid had to pack and travel. She was earning the money. And she had to be ready at all times for a quick screw or a before-lunch blow job without preamble or the usual courtesies. No hassles. Above all, no hassles. Here was the cock. Take care of it. Never mind do you love me. Never mind let’s eat first. Never mind I want to sightsee first. Never mind a little nap, later, not now, tonight, next week, the day after Christmas. Right now. Quick service all the way down the line. Big gamblers, they wanted first class.
Cully’s wooing seemed, to me, profoundly malicious, but women like him a hell of a lot better than other men. It seemed as if they understood him, saw through all his tricks but were pleased that he went to all that trouble. Some of the girls he tricked became good friends, always ready to screw him if he felt lonely. And Jesus, once he got sick, and there was a whole regiment of floozy Nightingales passing through his hotel room, washing him, feeding him and, as they tucked him in, blowing him to make sure he was relaxed enough to get a good night’s sleep. Rarely did Cully get angry with a girl, and then he would say with a really deadly loud contempt,
“Take a walk,” the words having a devastating effect. Maybe it was a switch from complete sympathy and respect he showed them before he became ugly, and maybe it was because to the girl there was no reason for him to turn ugly. Or that he used it quite cruelly for shock when the charm didn’t work.
Yet given ail this, still Jordan ’s death affected him. He was terribly angry at Jordan. He took the suicide as a personal affront. He bitched about not having taken the twenty grand, but I could sense that it didn’t really bother him. A few days later I came into the casino and found him dealing blackjack for the house. He had taken a job, he had given up gambling. I couldn’t believe he was serious. But he was. It was as if be had entered the priesthood as far as I was concerned.
Chapter 7
A week after Jordan ’s death I left Vegas, forever I thought, and headed back for New York.
Cully took me to the plane and we had coffee in the terminal while I waited to board. I was s
urprised to see that Cully was really affected by my leaving. “You’ll come back,” he said. “Everybody comes back to Vegas. And I’ll be here. We’ll have some great times.”
“Poor Jordan,” I said.
“Yeah,” Cully said. “I’ll never in my whole life be able to figure that out. Why did he do it? Why the hell did he do it?”
“He never looked lucky,” I said.
We shook hands when my boarding was announced. “If you get jammed up back home, give me a call,” Cully said. “We’re buddies. I’ll bail you out.” He even gave me a hug. “You’re an action guy,” he said. “You’ll always be in action. So you’ll always be in trouble. Give me a call.”
I really didn’t believe that he was sincere. Four years later he was a big success, and I was in big trouble appearing before a grand jury looking to indict me. And when I called Cully, he flew to New York to help me.
Chapter 8
Fleeing Western daylight, the huge jet slid into the spreading darkness of the Eastern time zones. I dreaded the moment when the plane would land and I’d have to face Artie and he’d drive me home to the Bronx housing project where my wife and kids were waiting. Craftily I had presents for them, miniature toy slot machines, for Valerie a pearl inset ring which had cost me two hundred dollars. The girl in the Xanadu Hotel gift shop wanted five hundred dollars, but Cully muscled a special discount.
But I didn’t want to think about the moment I would have to walk through the door of my home and meet the faces of my wife and three children. I felt too guilty. I dreaded the scene I would have to go through with Valerie. So I thought about what had happened to me in Vegas.