Great Kisser

by David Evanier

Bukowski wrote, “it’s the dead who rule the world.” And I’m thinking, Hymie had broken the larynx of a robber who shot him. Well, he was entitled to do that. But he bullied the helpless. He stole, cheated and killed. He bought women. He had a rack on his farm to torture them a little.

  So why was he so obviously superior to me?

  III

  He’d argued a copyright law case before the Supreme Court and he won. They named it after him. He’d hung out at the Peppermint Lounge with Joey Dee and the Starlighters when the twist was a craze and at Sardi’s and the Copacabana when they were the meccas of Broadway. He was a great storyteller. He headed a powerful literary foundation. He obtained money for the heirs of the great writers, keeping his huge cut. He represented the most beautiful literature ever written, held it in his filthy hands. He hung with Harry Cohn and Orson Welles and William Faulkner.

  He was a player. He knew something essential about reality that I did not. He didn’t know or understand what I did. But I didn’t—couldn’t even imagine—what he knew, that iron-trap mind of his. What did he know that I didn’t know? Everything! That was the problem.

  And he was a bridge to another time, a time of O’Neill and Williams and Sherwood Anderson, a time when these manuscripts meant something. But not to him, of course. He didn’t know what was so hot about them.

  It was the juxtaposition of the dirt and the art.

  And he radiated protection. He could pick up the phone and solve your thorniest problems. I thought of compiling an enemies list to show him and pushed the thought aside.

  He knew how the world ran. He knew the secret. On 42nd Street, the armpit of the universe, amid the porno shops, the killers, the beggars, the pimps, the hookers, he opened the manhole cover, picked up the filthy round black metal, sewage water streaming down the sides of it, beckoned to me, and he said: “Here it is. The answer you can’t find in your books or the Bowery Poetry club. Go down into it like I went into that fireroom and shoveled coal. Get burned, Michael. You’ll come out a piece of garbage, a fucking asshole. But you’ll finally be a man.”

  “Who says that I’m not?” I screamed at him.

  Hymie laughed. It wasn’t worth discussing.

  IV

  Hymie and I were not getting along. He was abusive. He looked at me and said, “Only a mother could love that face.” Later on he decided to flatter me: “You look handsome today, kid.” I agreed with him, but knew he was, in his own language, “buttering my ass.”

  He might be a Jewish “made man” and I was not made at all. I had spent my life standing in front of the houses of women I yearned for, waiting at the gate, a soulful gaze on my face.

  The fronts of the houses were as far as I penetrated.

  I had a contract “of human decency,” as I called it, drawn up for Hymie to sign in which he would agree not to call me a “little elf,” “toad,” “Hebe,” or “poof.” Wouldn’t be mean to me. Would recognize that all people are part of “the family of man.” Hymie laughed when I showed it to him. “I ain’t signin’ nothing,” he said.

  I stuck it out with him because I wanted this story. This was my courage.

  V

  Hymie sent me to see his cousin, Roberta, a hot number, “just out of the joint,” to gather more information about him for my screenplay. I got dizzy listening to her, and didn’t know how much of this shit was true. “My father ran guns for the CIA, for Cuba,” she said, “and I know that Hymie was involved with him for naval intelligence. Heavy duty, because there was in-camera testimony and afterwards they read Hymie his rights during my federal trial.

  “I had been with my Dad under a tank in Beirut six months before he was killed by my mother. My father was an operative for the CIA and had been in the Mossad for twenty years. He was one of the guys with the Irgun who blew up the King David Hotel after he was liberated from Dachau.

  “I understood Hymie because of my father. Nobody else could stand him. Hymie will test you. Throw things at you out of left field. Hymie and my father could look at each other and know what was going on. They were perfectly in sync. Two men of steel. Hunting down Mengele was a passion for them, and Eichmann. They had big-time involvement. They went jaguar hunting, they went on CIA missions in Honduras when I was like seven. Deep in the jungles. My Dad was captured at the Bay of Pigs. He was with British intelligence at the time. He was supposed to be executed by the Cubans. He had a death sentence for December 31st. But the guards were drinking in Havana. My Dad grabbed a grenade off the guy, and blew out of the prison. He made it to the beach, escaped, got back to London. When my father got shot, or Hymie got shot, they were always there for each other.

  “Under my house I had ten thousand gallons of diesel fuel. That was because if there was ever any emergency, the Coast Guard knew they could always refuel at my father’s house. I grew up with Hymie, my father and Meyer Lansky. I have Meyer’s shabbus candlesticks in my house. My father was killed by my mother. It was chaos and mass confusion. Hymie flew in the night my father was killed. There were police and agents. Hymie was like, ‘You can handle it, kid.’

  “I went to prison at 17,” Roberta said. “Hymie was visiting us. We’re sitting in the kitchen. Over the wall, SWAT teams from everywhere. Like right out of ‘Miami Vice.’ Helicopters. Army explosives people, tanks. Hymie answers the door. They say, ‘We have a warrant for the arrest—’ and Hymie says, ‘Oh shit, they got me.’ But the arrest warrant was for me. I got arrested that night on federal firearms charges for hand grenades, machine guns, tanks, rockets—all that stuff that was buried in the ground by my father.”

  VI

  On a Saturday afternoon I’m with Hymie again and he tells me about the time he told a woman that Sinatra wanted to have sex with her. “The girl was about six three, a nurse,” Hymie recalled. “Crazy about Sinatra. She was told Frank wanted to fool around, but to be with him she had to be blindfolded. And she did it. She had three blindfolds on. And about four guys banged her. She was told the rules: she could talk, but he wouldn’t talk back to her. When it was over, she thought she got the greatest fuck in the world. She was happy as a pig in shit. I had one bedroom that had wall-to-wall mattresses. Three king size mattresses. So eighteen feet of mattresses. Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end.”

  In the taxi, Hymie told the Jamaican cab driver, “Drive faster, nigger, or I’ll turn you in as a miscreant. You know what that is?” The driver squirmed in his seat. “You don’t talk to me like that. I’m a human being.”

  “Watch the road, nigger, or I’ll carve you a new asshole and shove your green card up it. All I gotta do is make one phone call.”

  Hymie’s voice was cold and threatening—the raw face of power. No civil rights revolution, none of that bullshit for him. Stripped of veneer, this was the real deal, the vicious undertow of America.

  The driver, in turmoil, went through a red light, and a police car appeared instantly. The cop pulled the cab over and said to the driver, “You wait here. Don’t move.”

  Hymie and I got out of the cab and looked for another on the crowded Times Square street. Ten minutes passed. We couldn’t find one, and the police, busy with other duties, hadn’t returned to the Jamaican driver’s cab. Hymie noted that the forgotten Jamaican was starting up the cab, and he hurried over to a police car and alerted them the driver was about to take off. The policeman headed off the cab as it began to move; flashing lights exploded all over the cab.

  Hymie and I watched as the cab was derailed. A bunch of policemen surrounded it. We heard a commotion. The cab was shaking from side to side, as the driver pounded the steering wheel with hopeless rage. I looked at Hymie’s triumphant little smile. Oh yeah, this night was turning out sweet.

  Later, in his office, when I protested how he acted with blacks, he said, “Yeah, but you don’t understand. I ain’t no bigot. There’s prejudice and there’s bigotry. There’s a big fucking difference. I ain’t a bigot, see. I’m just right about them. I know what they
’re like. That’s why I’m prejudiced. But no bigotry is to be inferred.”

  Changing the subject, Hymie said, “Did I tell you about the Vatican ring? A friend of mine left a ring at my place from the Papal ring collection of the Vatican. It had been missing for centuries. The ring was in a wooden box. It was supposed to be worn on the gloved hand of the Pope. So I went to the library and got The Book of Rings by Kunitz. And there in the book was an exact diagram of this ring. The ring was humongous. I wanted to authenticate it and sell it to Bobby Kennedy, who was alive at the time, for a hundred grand, which was a low figure. Then let him donate it to the church and get all the credit. I just wanted the hundred grand.

  “I go to Cardinal Spellman’s office. I was sent in there by some wiseguys. They sent me to see a guy working for the Cardinal whose nickname was Trigger. I told him I wanted the Cardinal to authenticate the ring. Trigger took me over to the side and said, ‘I don’t advise you to do that. See, I have no control over it once I hand it to the Cardinal. He can appropriate it and send it on to the Vatican himself. If it’s missing from the Papal ring collection, I can’t protect you on that. I advise you to write His Holiness.’”

  “So I did that. I tell His Holiness I got a client that has access to the ring, blah blah blah. So, okay. Then I hear from the apostolic delegate in Washington. This guy comes down from Washington and takes me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ‘What are we going there for?’ I say. He says, ‘There’s an expert there, blah blah blah.’ I say, ‘But I thought someone from the Vatican could do this.’ He says, ‘That could be arranged, if you would like to come to the Vatican.’ So I’m thinking to myself, ‘If I go to the Vatican, they’ll say I’ve violated a national treasury act, and snatch the ring. And who knows what they’ll do with me. But the point is, the ring will be gone.

  “I say, ‘Oh no, I won’t go to the Vatican. I’ll tell you what; I’ll make it real easy for you. I’ll meet somebody in Switzerland or Austria. But I’m not going into Italian territory.’ The box the ring was in was shaped like a church. It had a glass door on it and the ring laid inside. The apostolic delegate takes the ring out, looks at it, and says, ‘Well, for a ring 500 years old, it doesn’t show any wear or tear.’ Now I know I’m in trouble. I jerked the ring out of his hand, put it back in the box, said ‘Thank you, pal.’ Then I said, ‘Why should it show any wear when it’s worn on a gloved hand only?’ I got the hell out of there. He said he’d find out if they wanted to meet me in Switzerland. Meanwhile I got the ring.

  “Robert Kennedy gets assassinated. That’s the end of the deal with Bobby. So now a certain individual knows I got the ring. He calls me one night. He was at the Copacabana. He says, ‘You bring it down here.’ I say, ‘You want to buy it?’ He says, ‘No, no. Just bring it down here. I need it for like an hour.’ I go down to the Copa. It was four in the morning. The place is shut down except for the regulars. The guy, Carmine, is there with a dozen of his subordinates, all knock-around guys. I put the thing on the bar. Carmine puts the ring on his hand. He’s standing with the ring at the bar and the guys are lined up, one behind the other. He makes them come over; they had to kiss the ring and genuflect. Each time a guy came over, bent down and kissed the ring, Carmine’s face got red like Heinz ketchup. I thought he was gonna have a stroke or something. I whispered in his ear, ‘Carmine, you keep getting this high blood pressure, something’s liable to happen to you here.’ ‘Calm down,’ he says, ‘only three to go.’ I really liked this guy, but he got his kicks out of this and I couldn’t tell him I wanted a hundred grand. So I never sold the ring.”

  I looked up, and Hymie’s arms were outstretched toward me. In his cowboy hat, he sang “Some Enchanted Evening” to me. It was uncanny; it was as if Ezio Pinza had just entered the room. The intonation and enunciation were perfect. The parody of the schmaltzy Italian immigrant singer was outrageous and touching:

  And somehow you know

  You know even then

  That somewhere you’ll see her again and again.

  End of chorus. He stopped. He saw my helpless laughter and his pug’s eyes sparkled.

  He was very pleased with himself.

  Some enchanted evening

  You may see a stranger

  You may see a strain-juh

  Across a crowded room …

  He finished the chorus, even more emotively. Stopped. Suddenly arms in the air:

  And night after night

  As strange as it seems

  The sound of her laughter will

  sing in your dreams.

  Three minutes later, he had drained it dry. I was exhausted from laughing. We sat there in the dust, looking at each other and smiling.

  Hymie rose. “Let’s eat, kid.”

  In the restaurant, Hymie announced that in addition to the screenplay I would write about his life, he had hired Ron Fatino to write a movie version of A Moon for the Misbegotten. “Ron’s done his due diligence and come up with a brilliant idea, oh yeah.” He paused for effect, and announced, “This will make you shit in your pants. All the characters in the movie will be on rollerskates.”

  Hymie’s hooded eyes were dancing.

  VII

  The next day, I met Hymie at his hotel room. He was trying to put on his boots, and he winced with pain. The diabetes, the heart were kicking in. I didn’t think he was going to be able to do it. “Can I help you?” I said, moving toward him.

  “No,” he said quickly. “I gotta do it myself.”

  He picked up the boot, raised it, tried, and put it down again. He tried it three times, his face clenched. The fourth time, he squeezed them on.

  I wondered what would happen if he had let me help him, how the balance would tip in our relationship. It was a line he would never cross.

  VIII

  When I showed Hymie my screenplay about him four months later, he said, “You made me into a gutter rat.” He didn’t pay me, and he never spoke to me again.

  Three years later, when I had moved back to New York, I called Linda, my ex-manager. She was in mourning. “Hymie died,” she said. “He was in a lot of pain at the end. When Misbegotten premiered at the Directors Guild, he invited twenty people. No one came.

  “He was such a huge pain in the ass for such a long time. We did a lot of coke together. He married Roberta, you know. His cousin. He’d visited her in prison. He put everything in her name. She stole it. He felt she had completely lied to him. She did a lot of drugs. He was made a fool of in the end. She suckered him, outconned him. She even kept the horse Harry Cohn gave him.

  “Hymie was going to have her killed, but he lost his concentration, he was so sick.

  “Nobody noticed his dying.” Linda sighed. “He was part of history. At the end he owed everybody, he robbed everybody.

  “I hate to say it, but I miss talking to him. Isn’t that stupid? I was always looking for a moment from him, some kind of redemption. I never got it.

  “Near the end, one of his movies was made in Mexico. He went and had all these shirts made to wear there. He wanted to look Spanish. These were accordion, caballero shirts. He went down to Little Havana and had all these outfits made. So that when he went to Mexico for the filming he would look right. Except the shirts were Cuban—and he was going to Mexico City. The movie was supposed to take place in Cuba but shot in Mexico.

  “So he was dressed like a Cuban so he would look as if he was walking around in Cuba, just like in the movie. So when he got to Mexico looking like a Cuban, Tom Hanks would get it. But nobody in Mexico understood this. Nobody got it. They just thought Hymie looked crazy.

  “I remember the contract you drew up for him, Michael. The ‘Family of Man’ contract. There was no way he would sign that. He liked you, Michael. He just liked mugging people.

  “He never gave me anything, except two things near the end. One was a bottle. I went into the ladies’ room. He always had good coke. But this was baby powder. When I told him, Hymie pouted. ‘I get good stuff,’ he said.<
br />
  “Then, at his Peninsula Hotel suite in Beverly Hills, Hymie opened the drawer and gave me two blank eight-by-eleven envelopes that said ‘Hotel Peninsula’ on them. He said, ‘You’ll be glad you have these someday.’ And I am. He felt he was bestowing something important on me. I said, ‘Thank you, Hymie.’

  “I still have those envelopes.”

  When he died, Hymie slipped under the radar—there were no major obits—through the cracks of the streets and gutters.

  The gutters, the Supreme Court, Rosie’s untimely crack-up, Jimmy Blue Eyes’ tale of his childhood, the magnificent Ronnie Kray, sixteen years in naval intelligence, the endless shit of Mario’s father, Cardinal Spellman’s Trigger—it was a good, rancid ride.

  Hymie, tripped up at the end by sultry Roberta.

  Hymie also wanted his enchanted evenings.

  After a long day of abuse, telling me I didn’t know what it was like out there, that I was soft because of his beneficent care, his protecting me from all contact with the world, after I sat for hours waiting for my father to give me my monthly check, he finally handed it to me. My father held out the money and told me what he was doing to me, that he was ruining me.

  Finally, at the end, my father handed me the check. As I walked away with my father’s $250, he said, “I know you’re a busy man. You’re busy as a cockroach with your writing.”

  Did I actually say, “Thank you” for that check?

  I don’t remember.

  I’m sure that I did.

  Rabbits in the Fields of Strangers

  Kaddish

  … upon Israel and upon all who live

  as the sparrows of the streets

  under the cornices of the houses of others,

  and as rabbits

  in the fields of strangers

  on the grace of the seasons

  and what the gleaners leave in the corners;

  you children of the wind—

  birds

  that feed on the tree of knowledge

  … to them and to you