by Ted Heller
We're still watching Vic sing and I said to Ziggy, “He's good, don't you think?”
“He'll do,” Ziggy said.
Then he asked me if Vic would mind it if he ran onstage right now and started goofin' around. I said, “You wanna wake up without your balls tomorrow?”
He said, “No, I got a tendency to need those.”
He asked me who I was and I said Arnie Latchkey. “I'm managing Vic,” I told him.
“My condolences, Arnie,” he said.
SALLY KLEIN: Before every show Harry and Flo would drink tea, especially Aunt Flo. She would always put a lot of honey in it for her voice. So we were in their room and I kept looking at the clock. Harry was talking to Flo and to me but I didn't hear a word. Because my own thoughts were blaring so loud: Tell them, Sally, tell them. You have to tell them. You have to!
Every time I tried, the words wouldn't come out. One time I even got as far as “There's something I have to tell you.” Flo said, “What is it?” and I said, “Nothing.”
I went to the bathroom and vomited with the water running so they wouldn't hear it. I stayed in there for five minutes. The phone rang . . . it was time to go to the dressing room to get ready.
Ziggy purposely had them called ten minutes too late.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: Vic had really mastered his stage persona. I was surprised. At the end of the five songs he did, he said straight out of nowhere, “Thank you, ladies, thank you, gentlemen. It has really given me such unbelievable naches to come up and sing for you tonight! You're a great crowd and you couldn't make me feel more accepted. And—for all you lovely Sadies, Selmas, and Shirleys—I'm in room four-thirteen.”
Now where did this come from?! Where did naches come from? I knew he was shtupping girls and I guess maybe he'd asked them for a few words of the local argot. I don't know. And the joke at the end? Room 413? He'd never said one word onstage before this night—he just warbled.
There truly was something magical in the air that night.
SALLY KLEIN: I walked with Harry and Flo down those long halls. They seemed endlessly long, a mile long. They were holding hands. God, they were so tiny.
I remember the elevator didn't work. We waited for two minutes and then we decided to use the stairs.
Going down the stairs we passed this man coming up. He was dressed in a tuxedo, he had his hair parted in the middle and it was very shiny. And he had a very long, thin handlebar mustache. I remember that he smelled of paprika.
“Oh my God,” Harry said.
Flo gasped and covered her mouth, like she was in shock.
I don't know who it was.
I took them downstairs and into their dressing room and closed the door. I started crying again.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Blissmans!” the emcee said and then the O'Hares and Ziggy went onstage. Now, I'd never seen the act before but it didn't take Watson and Crick to see that the O'Hares weren't related to Ziggy Blissman. The crowd, though, they were confused: most of them had seen Ziggy with Harry and Flo. And they're asking themselves and one another, “What's Father Flannigan and Mother McCree doing onstage with Ziggy?”
Ziggy never broke stride. The routine began and Ziggy just flowed with it. He had the knack, that gift all funnymen have, to glide through troubled air.
Behind me I hear a commotion, a little one. I turned around and there are these two tiny people and they got the Max Factor Pan-Cake makeup on. It's Harry and Flo.
They inch up to where I am, backstage, and peer though the curtains. They see the act, they see the O'Hares and Ziggy. And Ziggy's hugging Kathleen O'Hare and calling her Mommy and he's calling Jimmy O'Hare, who was the spittin' image of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Poppy.
Flo, who is aghast, turned around and Sally was right behind her and Flo said, “Who is that?!” And Sally said, “That . . . that's you. That's you and Harry. Ziggy replaced you.” I could tell . . . she wanted to say something like “I'm sorry” but she just couldn't get the words out.
I looked at Harry, I looked down at him . . . he was shaking violently, like an electric toothbrush. The man was humming! Sally went over to him and wrapped her arms around him and then Flo collapsed . . . she was about ten yards behind us. Thud!
Two stagehands lifted her up and propped her on a chair, and Harry tries to walk over to her but then he collapses too. They dragged both of them, Harry and Flo, very slowly, very delicately, into their small dressing room. And that's where they died.
The lights came down quick. Just when the O'Hares and Ziggy began clicking. The emcee took the mike and said that due to some problems the show would be temporarily halted.
SALLY KLEIN: The next thing I know we're in Ziggy's bungalow, me, Ziggy, and Dr. Schwartzman, the house doctor at Heine's.
“They're dead,
Ziggy,” the doctor said. Ziggy was sitting on his bed. He put his face in his hands. He started sniffling and blew his nose.
Dr. Schwartzman said, “I didn't know it was possible but my guess is they had a sort of mutual stroke. She had one. Then he had one.”
Ziggy was crying now.
There's a knock on the door and I said, “Go away, Bernie,” but Bernie Heine walked in. He used the key.
“Ziggy, I'm so sorry,” he said.
“Thanks, Bern,” Ziggy said. His face was very red and puffy.
“But we got four hundred people out there,” Bernie said, “and they want a show.”
“Can't the O'Haras do some soft-shoe for 'em? Till Lenny Pearl comes on?”
“It's the O'Hares, and they walked. And Lenny can't go on . . . he's not even here yet. Ziggy, you can't screw me over again!”
“Bernie, there's just no show left in me,” Ziggy told him. “Just have that Vic Feldbaum do a few more numbers.”
ARNIE LATCHKEY: My brother Marvin finds me in the lobby, tells me I gotta find Vic and I gotta do it PDQ. I ask why and he says, “'Cause now we're even favor-wise and this is starting a whole new go-around.” So I run up the stairs to room 413 and I bang on the door and sure enough Vic is with some doll named Selma.
“It's me, Latch,” I told him. “You gotta finish up soon, Vic, this is crucial!”
“Okay, hold on,” I heard from behind the door. Then three seconds later I heard him say, “Okay . . . done.”
We ran down the stairs, he's zipping up, and I told him he had to go back on. He said, “Are they gonna pay me double for this?” and I said, “Pal, we ain't even received one cent so far for this gig, and if you don't go on now we never will.”
So the emcee is back on, the lights come up, and he says into the mike, “Ladies and gentleman, please give a warm Loch Sheldrake welcome to a new performer making his very second appearance at Heine's tonight . . . from Boston, Massachusetts: Vic Feldbaum!”
Well, this time the welcome was something less than warm, let me tell you.
The band starts up again and the audience lets out a sporadic groan here and there. And Vic is singing “It Was You” because, you got to remember, he'd only rehearsed with this band for a few days! They had no repertoire. And in the middle of the song, people begin to cough and hiss, so Vic stops singing and says, “Okay then, maybe it wasn't you!”
SALLY KLEIN: “I can't go on solo, I just can't,” Ziggy is saying.
Bernie told him, “You got no choice. You go onstage and you piss in your pants and then go off, but you go onstage and you do it now!”
“What would your parents want you to do, Ziggy?” I asked him.
“That's really a moot point now,” he answered.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: Vic's dying up there, he's dying. The band lost interest . . . the drummer even left to take a leak. And Vic is just trading insults with the audience. The Codport is really coming out. He was telling one guy to stick the mike up his you-know-what and he told another one to pull it back out.
All of a sudden the spotlight drifts over to the audience. There's Ziggy. And then there's another spotlight on Vic. The rest of the
place is absolutely black.
“Where you been?” Vic said.
“I been in my bungalow,” Ziggy said.
“It's been lonely up here, you know that?”
“I wasn't exactly livin' it up in my bungalow either, Feldbaumelli.”
“Where's your folks?”
“Which ones?” Ziggy says.
That got a big laugh . . . 'cause everyone knew the O'Hares weren't Harry and Flo.
“The ones you were supposed to be onstage with,” Vic said.
“They died.”
“Oh, they died, did they?” Vic said.
“Yeah, Vic, almost as bad as you just was.”
And with that, it was like a great wave of laughter hit.
Waving his fist, Vic said, “You think this is dead, wait till—”
“Wait till tomorrow when you got to sing the same five lousy songs you know again.”
Vic laughed for a second and said, “Hey, you know, you're right about that.”
Teddy, let me tell you . . . it kept going. And going. The chemistry, the timing, the music, it was all there. It was filet mignon and Dom Pérignon and caviar and crème brûlée.
“You know, you keep foolin' 'round with these Jewish girls up here, Feldbaumino,” Ziggy said, “and you're going to wind up paying for it.”
“Nah, Ziggy, I heard you was the one who had to pay for it.”
And once again, it was like this massive tumult from the sky rolling over the place, an explosion of laughter. The floor was shaking, I swear to God.
“You don't look like no ‘Feldbaum’ to me, Vic,” Ziggy said.
“And what does a Feldbaum look like, I'd like to know.”
“Like me.”
“Like a basketball with three hundred carrots springing right out of it, you mean?”
Zig said, “Hey, look, Vic, the people in here could use a nap, why don't you sing a few songs?”
And Vic started to sing “Just One of Those Things” and Ziggy is jumping and skipping and hopping and he jumps in Vic's arms and the whole joint was on goddamn fire! I have never ever seen anything like this! So raw, so new, so fresh, so spontaneous, so absolutely godddam hysterical! Every molecule in the air that night was charged. Westbrook Pegler once called their act “table tennis with a comet.”
Magic. Absolute, pure, unadulterated magic. They had it. Thunder and lightning.
They did two hours. Two whole hours, I do not exaggerate. Playing off each other. The crowd was hoarse; by the end, their hands hurt so much that they couldn't clap anymore.
Lenny Pearl never got on. He finally showed up but by then the audience had been wrung dry to the bones. The only people left were the busboys mopping up. Lenny turned purple, cursed Ziggy and Vic for ten minutes straight, and left the mountains.
Oh yeah. There was one other thing. Two women were laughing so much they had to be rushed to the hospital because of stomach pains. And some man in his fifties had laughed so much that he had a massive coronary arrest and died.
When I heard that, boy, that's when I knew we'd really hit it big.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: Bernie Heine came to my hotel room at midnight, after that first show, his face still borscht pink from laughing. He said, “Arnie, that was the most sensational, scintillating thing I've ever witnessed in this hotel or in any other.”
Now, I didn't go to the Wharton School of Business. I have no business degree in anything other than swingin' deals off the seat of my pants. But I knew to play this thing so nonchalant that a nurse, had there been one on the premises, would've checked my body for vital signs and not found a single one. I said to Bernie, who'd already played his hand, “Oh really, Bernie? I suppose it was rather funny, wasn't it?” I added a yawn at the end for good measure.
He said, “Vic is booked through the week, you know. So is Ziggy Blissman.”
“And Vic is ready to fulfill that. But what that Blissman kid does, that's his business.” I don't let on for one second that I realize Bernie is famished like a third-world country for more Ziggy and Vic.
“You've got to talk to them, Arnie! You've got to get them to do this again. And again.” The man is on the verge of drooling on one of his own oriental rugs.
“Bernie, could you help me get this shoe off?” I said, and sure enough the man who'd once fired me because my tummling act was like a graceful lemming dive into a vat of boiling tar is now kneeling down before me and wriggling the shoe off my foot, his nostrils crinkling and blanching. I'm eating this thing up, I don't mind telling you.
“Perhaps I'll talk to this Blissman kid and see what I can do,” I told Bernie. “But, you know, he's all bereaved right now.”
SALLY KLEIN: Ziggy, who was shaking terribly, and I were in his bungalow, just after his parents died. “We have to make some arrangements now,” I told him solemnly. “The sooner the better.” He had on what he always had on after a show: a cold towel with ice draped over his head.
“I know, Sal, I know,” he said.
I was thinking, Did Harry and Flo ever tell him how they wanted to be buried? Did they ever talk of cremation? Would they want to be buried in Brooklyn?
“I never thought it would end like this,” I said. I gave him another minute. He was flushed all over, still sweaty and shaking, and the ice was melting over his forehead. “Well?” I asked him. “What should I do?”
“This is what you do, Sal. Find out what room an Arnie Latchkey is staying in . . .”
I thought: Who? I'd never heard Arnie's name before! I'm thinking that Arnie Latchkey is a funeral director or an undertaker or maybe he's a rabbi staying at the hotel.
“Tell him to come down here right away,” Ziggy said. “Tell him the sooner we get this done, the better for all parties involved.”
I went to the front desk and found out what room this Arnie Latchkey person was staying in. It occurred to me in the elevator that Ziggy had said “all parties involved.” I couldn't figure that one out. Two of the parties involved were dead.
I knock on the door and Arnie answers in his plaid bathrobe, which was sort of ratty. He looks at me—I'm five foot three, I've got cat's-eye eyeglasses on, I'm eighteen years old but look sixteen—and he says, “Honey, Vic ain't here and besides, you don't look like you even had your bas mitzvah yet,” and starts to close the door. I put my foot in the door so it didn't close and said, “Ziggy Blissman needs to see you in his bungalow. Now.”
“Tell him,” he said very seriously, “I know what he wants. I understand. I'll be down in five minutes.”
So I take the elevator back down to Ziggy, convinced that Arnie Latchkey is an undertaker!
I told Ziggy that Arnie would be down any minute. By now he's stopped shaking. I imagine he might have had two belts of Dewar's by then. Beneath the chair he sat on there was a big puddle—it was the ice melting, mixed in with his own natural shvitz.
“I'd like you to be here when this Latchkey guy comes,” Ziggy said.
“I'll be here for you, Ziggy,” I said.
“These things can get ugly. If he asks for too much, we'll forget about them.”
While I was wondering what he meant by this, there was a knock. I was expecting Arnie to be dressed in black or at least dark gray, but he was decked out in his usual powder blue.
“Ziggy,” he said.
Ziggy said, “You've met my cousin Sally.” Arnie and I nodded to each other. “Isn't she pretty?” Ziggy said. He was always doing that, always trying to fix me up with the wrong shlub. Well, I wanted a boyfriend and eventually a husband, yes, but not a funeral director.
“Look, let's make this short but sweet. I've had a rough day,” Ziggy said.
“I should say so!” Arnie chimed in.
“Vic's signed for the rest of the week and so am I.”
“I'm familiar with it.”
“But I lost two sets of parents tonight . . . my stage ones and my real ones.”
“I'm aware of it. My condolences, by the way, as regards both sets.”
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“Yeah, sure,” Ziggy said. “What's this Vic Feldbaum's future look like right now?”
“I'll be honest with you, Ziggy,” Arnie said, sitting down. “If it's not dark, then it's indeed quite dim.”
“That's what I was hoping.”
Arnie undid a button on his shirt and said, “And your future, might I be so impertinent enough to ask? What's the forecast there, in terms of light?”
“Murky at best, gloomy at worst.”
Ziggy poured Arnie a Dewar's . . . that's when I got my first taste of the table manners of Arnie Latchkey. The loudest drinker, chewer, and swallower in the history of the Catskills, which really is saying an awful lot.
“You know what I'm aiming at, don't you, Arn? You know what I'm talkin' about over here?” Ziggy said.
“I believe I do.”
“How do you think Vic's gonna feel about it?”
“On behalf of my sole client, my opinion is that, as he probably doesn't really give a shit, I'm sure he'll see things your way—our way —as to this one regard.”
“Are you going to ask him tonight or—” Ziggy began.
“I've already interrupted him with one girl tonight, Ziggy. Two times, I think he might go for my carotid artery. This can wait.”
“Let me know first thing tomorrow, wouldja?”
“Will do, Zig.”
Arnie got up and walked to the door, and Ziggy—he's still got the turban on even though the ice has melted—walks over to him.
“There's the little matter of percentages, you know?” Arnie said.
By this time, of course, I realized that Arnie was not a rabbi or a funeral director. So I was expecting Ziggy to throw out something like 70/30 or maybe 60/40, in his own favor. What I heard, though, staggered me, considering that this was Ziggy Blissman, who could never be moved to give even his parents a fair deal.
“Arnie, we split things fifty/fifty down the line, all the way. I hope your sole client is amiable to that.”