by Mario Puzo
“The only special person is the novelist,” Osano would say. “Not like your fucking short story writers and screenwriters and poets and playwrights and those fucking flyweight literary journalists. All fancy dress. All thin. Not a heavy bone in them. You have to have heavy bones in your work when you write a novel.” He mused about that and then wrote it on a piece of paper, and I knew there would be an essay about heavy bones in next Sunday’s review.
Then other times he would rant about the lousy writing in the review. Circulation was going down, and he blamed the dullness of the critical profession.
“Sure, those fuckers are smart, sure, they have interesting things to say. But they can’t write a decent sentence. They’re like guys who stutter. They break your feet as you try to hang on toe very word coming out between those clenched teeth.”
Every week Osano had his own essay on the second page. His writing was brilliant, witty and slanted to make as many enemies as possible. One week he published an essay in favor of the death penalty. He pointed out that in any national referendum the death penalty would be approved by an overwhelming vote. That it was only the elitist class like the readers of there view that had managed to bring the death penalty to a standstill in the United States. He claimed this was a conspiracy of the upper echelons of government. He claimed that it was government policy to give the criminal and poverty-stricken elements a license to steal, assault, burglarize, rape and murder the middle class. That this was an outlet provided for the lower classes so that they would not turn revolutionary. That the higher echelons of government had estimated the cost to be less this way. That the elitists lived in safe neighborhoods, sent their children to private schools, hired private security forces and so were safe from the revenge of the misled proletariat. He mocked the liberals who claimed that human life was sacred and that a government policy of putting citizens to death had a brutalizing effect on humanity in general. We were only animals, he said, and should be treated no better than the rogue elephants executed in India when they killed a human being. In fact, he asserted, the executed elephant had more dignity and would go to a higher heaven than the heroin-crazed murderers who were allowed to live in a comfortable prison for five or six years before they were let out to murder more middle-class citizens. When he dealt with whether the death penalty was a deterrent, he pointed out that the English were the most law-abiding people on earth, policemen didn’t even carry guns. And he attributed this solely to the fact that the English had executed eight-year-old children for stealing lace handkerchiefs as late as the nineteenth century. Then he admitted that though this had wiped out crime and protected property, it had finally turned those more energetic of the working classes into political animals rather than criminal ones and so had brought socialism to England. One Osano line particularly enraged his readers. “We don’t know if capital punishment is a deterrent, but we know that men we execute will not murder again.”
He finished the essay by congratulating the rulers of America for having the ingenuity to give their lower classes a license to steal and kill so that they would not become political revolutionists.
It was an outrageous essay, but he wrote it so well that the whole thing appeared logical. Letters of protest rolled in by the hundreds from the most famous and important social thinkers of our liberal intellectual readership. A special letter composed by a radical organization and signed by the most important writers in America was sent to the publisher asking that Osano be removed as editor of the review. Osano printed it in the next issue.
He was still too famous to be fired. Everybody was waiting for his “great” novel to be finished. The one that would assure him of the Nobel Prize. Sometimes when I went into his office, he would be writing on long yellow sheets, which he would put into a desk drawer when I entered and I knew this was the famous work in progress. I never asked him about it and he never volunteered anything.
A few months later he got into trouble again. He wrote a page two essay in the review in which he quoted studies to show that stereotypes were perhaps true. That Italians were born criminals, that Jews were better at making money than anybody else and better violin players and medical students, that worst of all, more than any other people they put their parents into old folks’ homes. Then he quoted studies to show that the Irish were drunks owing perhaps to some unknown chemical deficiency or diet or the fact that they were repressed homosexuals. And so on. That really brought the screams. But it didn’t stop Osano.
In my opinion he was going crazy. One week he took the front page for his own personal review of a book on helicopters. That crazy bee in his bonnet was still buzzing. Helicopters would replace the automobile, and when that happened, all the millions of miles of concrete highways would be torn up and replaced by farmland. The helicopter would help return families to their nuclear structure because then it would be easy for people to visit far-flung relatives. He was convinced the automobile would become obsolete. Maybe because he hated cars. For his weekends in the Hamptons he always took a seaplane or a helicopter specially chartered.
He claimed that only a few more technical inventions would make the helicopter as easy to handle as the automobile. He pointed out that the automatic shift had made millions of women drivers who couldn’t handle shifting gears. And this little aside brought down the wrath of Women’s Liberation groups. What made it worse, in that very same week a serious study of Hemingway had been published by one of the most respected literary scholars in America. This scholar had a powerful network of influential friends, and he had spent ten years on the study. It got front-page reviews in every publication but ours. Osano gave it page five and three columns instead of the full page. Later that week the publisher sent for him, and he spent three hours in the big office suite on the top floor, explaining his actions. He came down, grinning from ear to ear, and said to me cheerfully, “Merlyn, my boy, I’ll put some life in this fucking rag yet. But I think you should start looking for another job. I don’t have to worry, I'm nearly finished with my novel and then I’ll be home free.”
By that time I had been working for him for nearly a year and I couldn’t understand how he got any work done at all. He was screwing everything he could get his hands on, plus he went to all the New York parties. During that time he had knocked out a quickie short novel for a hundred grand advance. He wrote it in the office on the review’s time, and it took him two months. The critics were crazy about it, but it didn’t sell very much though it was nominated for the National Book Award. I read the book, and the prose was brilliantly obscure, the characterizations ridiculous, the plotting lunatic. To me it was a foolish book despite some complicated ideas. He had a first-rate mind, no question of that. But to me the book was a total failure as a novel. He never asked if I had read it. He obviously didn’t want my opinion. He knew it was full of shit, I guess. Because one day he said, “Now that I’ve got a bankroll I can finish the big book.” A sort of apology.
I got to like Osano, but I was always just a little afraid of him. He could draw me out as nobody else could. He made me talk about literature and gambling and even women. And then, when he had measured me, he would lay me out. He had a keen eye for pretentiousness in everyone else but himself. When I told him about Jordan’s killing himself in Vegas and everything that had happened afterward and how I felt it had changed my life, he thought that over for a long time and then he gave me his insights combined with a lecture.
“You hold on to that story, you always go back to it, do you know why?” he asked me. He was wading through the piles of books in his office, waving his arms around. “Because you know that’s the one area you’re not in danger. You’ll never knock yourself off. You’ll never be that shattered. You know I like you, you wouldn’t be my right-hand man if I didn’t. And I trust you more than anybody I know. Listen, let me confess something to you. I had to redraw my will last week because of that fucking Wendy.” Wendy had been his third wife and still drove him crazy with her demands thou
gh she had remarried since their divorce. When he just mentioned her, his eyes went a little crazy. But then he calmed down. He gave me one of his sweet smiles that made him look like a little kid, though he was well into his fifties by now.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “But I’ve named you as my literary executor.”
I was stunned and pleased, and with all that I shrank away from the whole thing. I didn’t want him to trust me that much or like me that much. I didn’t feel that way about him. I had come to enjoy his company, indeed, to be fascinated by how his mind worked. And though I tried to deny it, I was impressed by his literary fame. I thought of him as rich and famous and powerful, and the fact that he had to trust me so much showed me how vulnerable he was, and that dismayed me. It shattered some of my illusions about him.
But then he went on about me. “You know, underneath everything, you have a contempt for Jordan you don’t dare admit to yourself. I’ve listened to that story of yours I don’t know how many times. Sure, you liked him, sure, you felt sorry for him; maybe you even understood him. Maybe. But you can’t accept the fact that a guy that had so much going for him knocked himself off. Because you know you had a ten times worse life than he had and you would never do such a thing. You’re even happy. You’re living a shitty life, you never had anything, you knocked your balls off working, you’ve got a limited bourgeois marriage and you’re an artist with half your life gone and no real success. And you’re basically happy. Christ, you still enjoy fucking your wife and you’ve been married-what?-ten, fifteen years. You’re either the most insensitive prick I ever met or the most together. One thing I know, you’re the toughest. You live in your own world, you do exactly what you want to do. You control your life. You never get into trouble, and when you do, you don’t panic; you get out of it. Well, I admire you, but I don’t envy you. I’ve never seen you do or say a really mean thing, but I don’t think you really give a shit about anybody. You’re just steering your life.”
And then he waited for me to react. He was grinning, the sneaky green eyes challenging. I knew he was having fun just laying it on, but I also knew he meant it a little and I was hurt.
There were a lot of things I wanted to say. I wanted to tell him how it was growing up an orphan. That I had missed what was basic, the core of almost every human being’s experience.
That I had no family, no social antennae, nothing to bind myself to the rest of the world. I had only my brother, Artie. When people talked about life, I couldn’t really grasp what they meant until after I had married Vallie. That was why I had volunteered to fight in the war. I had understood that war was another universal experience, and I hadn’t wanted to be left out of it. And I had been right. The war had been my family, no matter how dumb that sounds. I was glad now I hadn’t missed it. And what Osano missed or didn’t bother saying because he assumed I knew it was that it wasn’t that easy to exercise control over your own life. And what he couldn’t know was that the coin of happiness was a currency I could never understand. I had spent most of my early life being unhappy purely because of external circumstance. I had become relatively happy again because of external circumstance. Marrying Valerie, having kids, having a skill or art or the ability to produce written matter that earned me a living made me happy. It was a controlled happiness built on what I had gained from a dead loss. And so, very valuable to me. I knew I lived a limited life, what seemed to be a life that was bare, bourgeois. That I had very few friends, no sociability, little interest in success. I just wanted to make it through life, or so I thought.
And Osano, watching me, was still smiling. “But you’re the toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen. You never let anybody get near you. You never let anybody know what you really think.”
At this I had to protest. “Listen, you ask me my opinion about anything and I’ll give it to you. Don’t even ask. Your last book was a piece of shit, and you run this review like a lunatic.”
Osano laughed. “I don’t mean that kind of stuff. I never said you weren’t honest. But let it go. You’ll know what I’m talking about someday. Especially if you start chasing broads and wind up with somebody like Wendy.”
Wendy came around to the review offices once in a while. She was a striking brunette with crazy eyes and a body loaded with sexual energy. She was very bright, and Osano would give her books to review. She was the only one of his ex-wives who was not afraid of him, and she had made his life miserable ever since they were divorced. When he fell behind in his alimony payments, she went to court to get her child support and alimony raised. She had taken a twenty-year-old writer into her apartment and supported him. The writer was heavy on drugs, and Osano worried about what he might do to the kids.
Osano told stories about their marriage that were to me incredible. That once, going to a party, they had gotten into the elevator and Wendy refused to tell him the floor the party was on simply because they had quarreled. He became so infuriated that he had started to choke her to make her tell him, playing a game, as he called it, of “choke the chicken.” A game that was his fondest memory of the marriage. Her face turning black, she shook her head, still refusing to answer his question about where the party was being held. He had to release her. He knew she was crazier than he was.
Sometimes when they had minor arguments, she would call the police to have him thrown out of the apartment and the police would come and be stunned by her unreasonableness. They would see Osano’s clothes scissored to pieces on the floor. She admitted doing it, but that didn’t give Osano a right to hit her. What she left out was that she had sat on the pile of scissored suits and shirts and ties and masturbated over them with a vibrator.
And Osano had stories to tell about the vibrator. She had gone to a psychiatrist because she could not achieve orgasms. After six months she had admitted to Osano that the psychiatrist was fucking her as part of the therapy. Osano wasn’t jealous; by this time he really loathed her, “loathe” he said, “not hate. There’s a difference.”
But Osano would get furious every time he got the bill from the psychiatrist and he would rage to her, “I pay a guy a hundred dollars a week to fuck my wife and they call that modern medicine?” He told the story when his wife gave a cocktail party, and she was so mad that she stopped going to the psychiatrist and bought a vibrator. Every evening before dinner she locked herself into the bedroom to shut out the kids and masturbated with the machine. She always achieved orgasm. But she laid down the strict rule that she was never to be disturbed during that hour, by the children or her husband. The whole family, even the children, referred to it as “The Happy Hour.”
What made Osano finally leave her, as he told the story, was when she started carrying on about how F. Scott Fitzgerald had stolen all his best stuff from his wife, Zelda. That she would have become a great novelist if her husband had not done this. Osano grabbed her by the hair of her head and shoved her nose into The Great Gatsby.
“Read this, you dumb cunt,” he said. “Read ten sentences, then read his wife’s book. Then come and tell me that shit.”
She read both and came back to Osano and told him the same thing. He punched her in the face and blackened both her eyes and then left for good.
Just recently Wendy had won another infuriating victory over Osano. He knew she was giving the child-support payments to her young lover. But one day his daughter came to him and asked for money for clothes. She explained that her gynecologist had told her not to wear jeans anymore because of a vaginal infection, and when she had asked her mother for money for dresses, her mother said, “Ask your father.” This was after they had been divorced for five years.
To avoid an argument, Osano gave his daughter’s support money to her directly. Wendy didn’t object. But after a year she took Osano to court for the year’s money. The daughter testified for her father. Osano had been sure he would win when the judge knew all the circumstances. But the judge told him sternly not only to pay the money directly to the mother but als
o to pay the support money for the past year in a lump sum. So in effect he paid twice.
Wendy was so delighted with her victory that she tried to be friendly with him afterward. In front of their children he brushed off her affectionate advances and said coldly, “You are the worst cunt I’ve ever seen.” The next time Wendy came around to the review he refused her entrance to his office and cut off all the work he had given her. And what amazed him was that she couldn’t understand why he loathed her. She raged about him to her friends and spread the word that he had never satisfied her in bed, that he couldn’t get it up. That he was a repressed homosexual who really liked little boys. She tried to keep him from having the kids for the summer, but Osano won that battle. Then he published a maliciously witty short story about her in a national magazine. Maybe he couldn’t handle her in life, but in fiction he painted a truly terrible portrait, and since everybody in the literary world of New York knew her, she was recognized immediately. She was crushed, as much as it was possible for her to be, and she left Osano alone after that. But she rankled in him like some poison. He couldn’t bear to think about her without his face flushing and his eyes going a little crazy.
One day he came into the office and told me that the movies had bought one of his old novels to make into a picture and he had to go out there for a conference on the script, all expenses paid. He offered to take me along. I said OK but that I would like to drop off in Las Vegas to visit an old friend for a day or two while we were out there. He said that would be OK. He was between wives and he hated to travel alone or be alone and he felt he was going into enemy territory. He wanted a friend along with him. Anyway, that was what he said. And since I’d never been to California and I’d get paid while I was away, it looked like a good deal. I didn’t know that I would more than earn my way.