A Way of Life, Like Any Other

by Darcy O'Brien

  Upstairs, Mr. Caliban’s bedroom was done in a Genghis Khan motif, all red, black, and silver with weapons on the walls and a full set of Mongolian armor standing in a corner. Mr. Caliban used the armor to hang his suits on, when he came home from work and changed into his relaxing clothes. Mrs. Caliban’s bedroom knocked your eyes out. It was entirely chartreuse, the walls, the rug, the bedspread, everything. The bed was a four-poster job and the chartreuse hangings had been made to order by some nuns in France. In each of three corners of the room stood a stuffed bear, Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear. Papa Bear was as tall as the ceiling, Mama Bear about eight feet, and Baby Bear about the size of an average American male human being. These, I learned, were symbolic of Caliban family members, and Mr. and Mrs. Caliban called each other “Bear” or sometimes “Big Bear” and “Little Bear” out of affection. “Why, we’ll just have to get another Baby Bear now you’re here, won’t we, sweetie?” Mrs. Caliban said to me. Sometimes she slept with one of the Bear family.

  Dinner was served promptly every evening at seven and was a valued ritual, though it lasted only eight to ten minutes because the Calibans ate so fast. The dinner hour coincided with a recorded broadcast of the day’s big race from Santa Anita or Hollywood Park. While Mrs. Caliban attended the races every day and would know the results before the broadcast, she relived the event in excited reverie, and all of us were caught up in the passion. As the horses left the parade ring, we would finish off the matzoh ball soup. The balls were the size of your fist and for the first several evenings I am afraid I made a mess of things, but no one noticed or cared. The roast got gobbled up by the time the horses were ready in the starting gate. With “There they go!” we began dessert, and Mrs. Caliban revealed where her money was, shouting “Come on Ballyhamish!” or “Take the rail Johnny Longden you bastard!” If her horse was in the race to the last, the final furlong in that dining room resembled the first meal for the Donner Party after six months of shoe leather and cannibalism. Spoons rose from plate to mouth and back and forth again faster and faster down the home stretch, Mrs. Caliban rising from her chair, standing on it, screaming “You can do it! You can do it! Use the whip! Go baby go go go!” and then, win or lose, rushing from the room to collapse on a contour chair, giving herself up to the Magic Fingers and calling for an Alka-Selzer. We would join her there and go over what went wrong or right. She did fairly well, keeping careful account and rarely exceeding her allowance in a given year.

  Mrs. Caliban was a remarkable woman. She was over fifty yet from a distance looked younger than my mother: it was only when you got within three or four feet of her that you could see where she had had her skin tucked up, and her hair was the color of an October persimmon. Like Elizabeth Taylor she had converted to Judaism to marry the dynamo man of her dreams. She had never faltered in her devotion to Sam Caliban: he and the horses were her life. She and Jerry, while not as close as my mother and I had been, had a deep understanding. They rarely spoke to one another but she opened a new charge account for him every Christmas, and while he did resent her in an obscure way I suppose common to most sons, in his heart he wished her well. Once during my tenure she got angry at him for dumping trash into the swimming pool. Jerry argued that the pool man was coming the next day and would take care of it, but she threatened to close Jerry’s account at Saks. When she left for Santa Anita, Jerry took an eighth-century battleaxe from his father’s room and went to work on Mrs. Caliban’s favorite contour chair. “I’ll show her trash,” he said. In minutes he had hacked the chair to bits. He deposited the remains in various neighbors’ garbage bins up and down the alley and said he couldn’t wait to see what would happen. That night, when the big race was over, Mrs. Caliban hurried from the dining room. She had lost a bundle and needed that chair badly. She came back to the dining room flushed and sweaty.

  “Sam! How many contour chairs have we got?”

  “I don’t know, Little Bear. Six?”

  “Don’t Bear me at a time like this. There are five chairs in there and mine is gone. Somebody’s taken my chair!”

  “Wait till I finish my coffee,” Mr. Caliban said.

  “Stick your coffee!” Mrs. Caliban said. “Somebody’s stolen my chair and I need it!”

  “Take mine,” Jerry said. “It works.”

  “I don’t want yours, I want mine! It has the best Magic Fingers and I’ve got it adjusted just right. There’ll never be another one like it!”

  We all got up to search for the chair.

  “I don’t see it could be stolen,” Mr. Caliban said. “The alarm system works perfect. Anybody gets in here a bell goes off at headquarters.” He counted the paintings.

  The maid was summoned for questioning. She kept mum though she must have known what had happened. She had been a trusted member of the family for years, so no suspicion fell to her, and she knew Jerry would reward her. When we gave up the search, Mrs. Caliban broke down. Mr. Caliban helped her to bed and comforted her with Nembutal. Jerry ordered a replacement the next day, but Mrs. Caliban said it could never be the same.

  Jerry and I had perfect freedom to come and go as we pleased, but I liked the house so much that I stuck around most of the time. I would sit by the pool and contemplate the water or play the slot machines in the pool house. There was a big supply of quarters, so it didn’t cost me anything, and if I won I could keep the pot. Ping pong and billiards, a juke box, a bar, a bowling lane, the pool house had everything. It opened onto the pool with sliding glass doors, and on the rear wall, forty feet across, studio artists had executed a magnificent mural, all in silver and aqua. In the center foreground Sam Caliban was depicted sitting in his director’s chair, watching a parade of characters from his pictures. From one end of the wall to the other marched masterful images, Martians, monsters of all kinds, ape women riding giant lizards, toads wearing space suits, the abominable hermaphrodite, Pilar the Pygmy Love Goddess, and a series from Mr. Caliban’s exploitation pictures, teenage drug freaks, beatnik hubcap snatchers, a runaway nun. You could spend an afternoon just taking it all in. I thought how such a display could comfort my father in his decline.

  “How is it you never lost money on a picture?” I asked Mr. Caliban. We were on our way to Las Vegas for Thanksgiving. Jerry was driving the El Dorado, with his mother beside him and Mr. Caliban and me in the back seat.

  “First off,” Mr. Caliban said, “I got an instinct for the property. I know what’s gonna entertain your average person who goes to see a movie. Why? Because I’m an average guy myself. Maybe a little smarter, maybe I work a little harder, but I think like the man in the street, and I never forgot where I came from. From nowhere. The business is changing.

  Not too many guys like me left. A lot of these young guys, they got too much education or too much something, I don’t know, they all wanna be Tolstoy, you know what I mean? Back when I started, all the big men were like me. Pants pressers, right? So they knew what everybody liked and they all made money. People laugh about Sol Wurtzel. They laugh like about what he said when they came to him with a script Dante’s Inferno. Sol said, ‘O.K. Make it. But one thing. Don’t open in the summer.’ Sure it’s funny. But don’t you know something? Sol Wurtzel was a genius. There wasn’t no air conditioning in those days. A lot of these new guys think you can cram a lot of crap down people’s throats and call it art and expect people to pay two dollars for the privilege. Me, I make ‘em happy. So what’s wrong with that? I pay my taxes.”

  I remembered what my mother had said about Mr. Caliban and Will Rogers. I would have to disagree with her the next time I saw her.

  Mr. Caliban had the common touch with his family, too, and with him I felt that I could be happy and stay happy. I had not known that I had been unhappy, but there had been nothing like the sense of well-being I experienced when we drew up in front of the Sands and Jack Entratter came out to greet us personally and showed us to our rooms, palatial suites the hotel had financed with a seven million dollar loan from the Teams
ters Union Pension Fund. Fresh flowers and free bottles of booze, fruit baskets, bowls of nuts. Frank Sinatra was expecting us at the dinner show.

  Mrs. Caliban went off to the pool and Jerry and I followed Mr. Caliban into the casino. We had a drink with Julie Ziff, the casino manager and a vice president of the Sands, who was upset because his daughter had married a radical who was buying up thousands of dollars worth of merchandise on Mr. Ziff’s credit cards and selling it and giving the money to underground revolutionary groups. Mr. Ziff was a very fat man with spaniel eyes that had spots under them from cortisone treatments. He was known as the most honest man in Las Vegas. His word was gold, everyone trusted him, and he felt betrayed.

  “I don’t know, Sam,” Mr. Ziff said. “At least the kid could ask me for money direct. I see where he’s bought fifteen sofas. Who does he think he’s kidding? I think he can use fifteen sofas in a walk-up? Does he take me for some kind of a jerk or what?”

  “The kid’s a kook,” Mr. Caliban said. “But he is married to your daughter. I don’t see you can do nothing.”

  “I’m no reactionary,” Mr. Ziff said. “I vote Democratic. I give to the United Negro College thing. But I think my son-in-law’s a godamned communist.” He downed a diet cola.

  “He’ll grow up, Julie,” Mr. Caliban said. “We all got troubles. How’s Frank?”

  “Great. Number one. Nothing but high rollers in here all week. But he’s worried about Sammy. Sammy’s into the mob for so much he’ll be a hundred before he pays off. Excuse me, will you Sam? I gotta see Gino. Gino’s picking up a package for us tomorrow.”

  Mr. Caliban explained to us that picking up a package meant picking up money owed the hotel by some gambler. A lot of the high rollers gambled on credit, and the hotel would send a courier to pick up the cash payment. Maybe the guy had to juggle his accounts so nobody would notice how much he was taking out. People didn’t like to write checks for gambling debts because it looked bad, and the hotels preferred cash for big debts because it was easier to keep their own records that way and keep the Government off their backs. There was no legal way to enforce collection of a gambling debt, not even in Nevada, so sometimes the hotel had to lean on people pretty heavy. Sometimes they had to threaten murder. The hotel wouldn’t get involved directly, of course, but they could hire people. I wondered wasn’t it all dangerously illegal. Legal, Mr. Caliban said, was how you defined it. The Feds had bugged Mr. Ziff’s private apartment at the hotel. That wasn’t legal. That was a violation of Mr. Ziff’s constitutional rights. Every time Mr. Ziff got on an airplane his luggage got lost so the Feds could search it. That wasn’t legal either. It was like any business, you didn’t get anywhere if you spent too much time worrying about the proprieties. You had to be first and you had to keep moving in the entertainment business, and gambling was entertainment just like anything else. Nobody brought the gamblers in like Sinatra, but if you didn’t collect the debts you couldn’t pay Sinatra. It was very exciting.

  Mr. Caliban had come to Las Vegas to gamble but he wouldn’t start until after dinner. Jerry explained to me that his father had a system and once he put the system into operation, he couldn’t stop until he won big because stopping would foul up the system. I asked Jerry whether his father always won, and Jerry said sometimes. We had a ringside table at the dinner show and when Frank Sinatra entered to wild applause he came over to the edge of the stage and greeted Mr. Caliban and shook hands with him.

  “Sam, it’s good to see you.”

  “Great, Frank, great.”

  I felt pretty important and I figured a lot of people in the audience were probably wondering who I was. Sinatra broke into “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and he looked a lot at us and smiled at us. Mrs. Caliban said there was no question at all that Frank was the greatest. She wondered whether she had worn the right dress. We were sitting so close I could have touched the chorus girls. Sinatra put everyone into a state of elation. When the check came, the head waiter said it was compliments of Mr. Ziff, and Mr. Caliban gave the head waiter $50 and the waiter $20.

  Mrs. Caliban played the slot machines for a while and then went to bed. She didn’t like to watch her husband gamble but she let him, because that way he let her go racing.

  Marriage was a give and take proposition. Mr. Caliban played craps. After an hour he was wet and had taken off his coat and tie and rolled up his sleeves. The hotel supplied him with free drinks, but he stuck to beer and didn’t drink much. At midnight he drank three quick cups of coffee waiting his turn. By one he was $2,500 ahead.

  9

  LAS VEGAS

  MR. CALIBAN stayed at the craps table all that night and into Thanksgiving Day. How much he was ahead was now a secret between him and the hotel, and we couldn’t actually tell whether he was losing, because he gambled on credit and Jerry said his father’s credit line at the Sands was $50,000. Mr. Caliban’s system, if he was behind, involved betting one third of what he was losing, so that he could make up his losses within three throws of the dice if he got a good run or quit before he doubled his losses if he thought his luck had run out. People who tried to make up a loss 100 per cent on one throw were stupid. He had his meals brought to the action and they were all compliments of Mr. Ziff, who slept during the day but had left word.

  Mrs. Caliban, Jerry, and I had Thanksgiving dinner without Mr. Caliban because he was still busy playing craps and couldn’t quit now. His energy amazed me. I could see how a man like that could manage to never lose money on a picture. We went to the dinner show at the Flamingo, where Joe E. Lewis was performing, and Jerry told me how the Flamingo had been Bugsy Siegel’s dream and how Bugsy had been rubbed out in Beverly Hills. I also learned how Joe E. Lewis had got his throat cut, lost his voice, and become an alcoholic, and how Frank Sinatra was going to play Lewis in The Joker is Wild and would put his heart and soul into the role of the singer who becomes a successful nightclub comedian after getting his throat cut, losing his voice, and becoming an alcoholic. Lewis’s jokes were about broads, drinking, and the pathos of life. He said that when you had to hold onto the floor to keep it from revolving, you were really drunk. I had turkey and cranberry sauce because I was feeling traditional, but Terry and his mother ate big steaks. The check was compliments of the management.

  We had a fine Thanksgiving, though Mrs. Caliban got sick from the food or the champagne and we had to help her to her room. Terry and I went down to watch Mr. Caliban, but he asked us to go away because we interfered with his concentration. He gave us a $100 bill to amuse ourselves with, and we went to a couple of nude shows, one very elegant where the girls wore feathers and bared their breasts only from time to time, the other, in a dive away from the Strip, more direct. Two attractive girls stuck frankfurters into each other and then cut them up for bar snacks.

  Before we went to sleep, Terry said he had got the impression his father was losing heavily, but he warned me not to say anything about it or ask any questions. This had happened before, although he couldn’t recall his father staying quite so long at the tables. Mr. Caliban had been at it for thirty-one hours.

  We were having a brunch of lox and bagels in the Garden Room when Mr. Caliban came in and said he was ready to go home. He was still alert, but he was gray, and he slept all the way to Beverly Hills and didn’t wake up till Sunday, after I got back from mass. My father drove me to and from the church and we always had breakfast together afterwards, but he never came into the Calibans’. He never asked to come in and I never asked him to. He was still driving his 1948 DeSoto coupe with Navajo blankets covering the worn-out seats. It was strange being with him in the midst of this glamorous life I was leading. I asked him why he didn’t get a new car, and he said he couldn’t afford one. It was better to stick with a faithful old horse anyway than take a chance on an animal that might shy and throw you where you didn’t want to be.

  We were in the confessional together, my father on one side and I on the other with the priest in between us. Dad confessed first.
I could hear the sound of his voice but I couldn’t make out what he was saying, and I wondered what on earth he had to confess. Perhaps he masturbated, that was the only sin I could imagine for him and I doubted even that. It was possible that he wished harm or suffering to come to my mother, but if so he needn’t have bothered. I could hear the priest giving him a light penance of a couple of Hail Marys, so he must not have done much. I was the greater sinner, yet he felt more sorrow and guilt than I, it was written on his face. I decided to make a clean breast of things. I told the priest what I had seen in Las Vegas and how it had excited me, and I said that there was a girl in my English class who was making it difficult for me to think about grammar. It was not her fault, but she sat next to me and smelled wonderful and had wonderful legs. The priest asked me how old I was, and when I said I would be sixteen soon he said that I was lucky to be so young, because I had plenty of time to amend my life, yet I couldn’t count on an indefinite time because God could call me at any moment. I could be knocked down by a car as I left the church that morning. Or I could get cancer. God’s mercy was infinite. He loved all His creatures, from the lowliest caterpillar to the President of the United States. He loved Protestants and he loved Jewish. If I was truly sorry for what I had done and promised to try to lead a good life, I would sit at the right hand of God. I was so lucky to be a Catholic, because I could start a new life that very morning. Wasn’t it a beautiful morning? The sun was hot and was drying the dew from the grass. The sun was taking moisture into the air, and one day God would take me into heaven, if I was worthy. It was up to me. If I transferred to Loyola high school, I wouldn’t have to worry about the girl in my English class. I should think about that. Above all I should avoid the occasions of sin. Adam had made us weak, but God’s grace could make us strong. My penance was three rosaries and now I was to make a good Act of Contrition.