by Carson, Tom
“Honest, Mr. Gagilnil, am I?” Bettie said, goggling and pleased.
“Try to find a shutterbug between here and Wilshire who’ll contradict me, doll.”
“Okay! Oh, gosh, I’d better get dressed first.” She took a few steps toward her clothes, then turned back with a worried frown. “If I can’t find one, should I come back here anyway?” she asked. “Or am I done?”
Mr. Gagilnil sighed, but it was a fond type of noise. “Tell you what, Bettie, just take my word for it,” he said.
“Where?”
“See?” Mr. Gagilnil said to me. “The best since Venus went on half pay, and she doesn’t even know why. If she did, she’d have that mean, squinty look the rest of them get, and then it would all go down the toilet faster than you can lay Jackie Robinson. Okay! Now: which one of you wants to get spanked, and which one wants to do the spanking?”
Bettie’s eyes clouded over. “Gee, Mr. Gagilnil,” she said falteringly, “you know I’d always rather be spanked, if that’s okay. The spank-er always has to look like they have some kind of clue why this is happening, and no matter how hard I try you just go through roll after roll and start yelling at me. Besides, I think it’s mean to act like you enjoy hitting somebody, even when it’s only for glamor photography.”
“But it doesn’t bother you when whoever spanks you pretends to enjoy it,” Mr. Gagilnil protested. “Or does enjoy it, for that matter.”
“Oh, no!” Bettie said happily. “When I’m the one getting spanked, I always feel like I deserve it, because of something bad I probably did a long time ago.”
“All right, then,” Mr. Gagilnil said. “It’s really only a courtesy question, Bettie, in case you ever change your mind.”
“How do I do that?” she asked dubiously.
Mr. Gagilnil sighed again. “Will you please put her on your lap and lift your arm like you’re paddling her with zest?” he asked me. “I’d like to be done sometime before you goyim celebrate the umpteenth birthday of that simpering little bastard we bumped off back in the Old Country, with blood on our hands but a song in our hearts—Hatikvah, I think. Who knew the halo-happy fegele had hired a PR firm? Who knew?”
Soon afterward, Bettie got evicted from her apartment on Las Palmas for non-payment of rent. She had the money, but that wasn’t what her landlord wanted, and sheer stupefactionalism at Bettie’s willful refusal—or so he thought—to grasp his point, much less anything more engorged and tactile, led him to toss her and her belongings onto the street. You see, Bettie didn’t even have any idea that men used the pictures that Gagilnil took of us for purposes of sexual self-stimulation. She thought we were underwear, rope, and gag-ball models, and when I idly grumped something about the chuckleheads at the newsstand all playing bell-pull with ol’ Scrawny as Mr. Gagilnil and I were tying her up one day, I saw her eyes get as round as saucers and trembulamaticized as Bambi’s while he made frantic throat-cutting and erasive motions at me from behind her shoulder. Anyhow, it was after she lost her old place that she moved into a vacant room a floor down from mine at the good old Poil du Chien Arms.
We had a pretty good group at the Poil, although the register could boast of only one big-time Hollywood moviemaker, a natty jokefest name of Wood who made a habit of borrowing Bettie’s and my clothes. When we asked why he needed them so often, he explained that he made costume pictures—thus proving he was what he said he was, as this was a term I recognized from my earliest browsings of Modern Screen magazine, when I was still a splindly lass with a mere 36C bustline way back in Great-Grandmaville. My next-door neighbor was a polite fellow called Homer who used to be a hotel bookkeeper somewhere in the Midwest. He had moved to California in hopes of getting work as a cartoon character, for Warner Brothers if he could swing it but on the small screen if nothing better came along. And indeed, as far as all of us who were his friends were concerned, poor Homer was already well on his way to attaining that two-dimensional status in the book Mr. Nathanael West wrote about us, which was received with injured indignation in the improvised courtrooms of the Poil. Even Bettie, who heard parts of it read aloud, waxed wroth: “Why, that man’s just scared of people!” she blurted out, blinking rapidly and jerking her lipsticky mouth in a rare effort to shape it into something other than a friendly smile. “And he makes them all awful to prove he’s right.”
Beside her, Homer nodded. “You know what hurt—he didn’t even feel sorry for me,” he said dolefully, wringing his large hands and then automatically groaning. “I thought at least he’d feel sorry for me. But he looked down on me more than anyone out here ever has.”
“Or would,” said Wood, putting a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Or would.”
Meanwhile, Bettie’s and my glamor-photography sessions at the Maxwell House continued apace. On days when we were both tied up and gagged—a situation whose true peril dawned on us only when a pair of Seventh-Day Adventists came to the unlocked door of Gagilnil Art Photos and Fine Reproductions and launched into their spiel, waving tracts before us as Bettie and I whimpered and rolled our eyes, until our employer re-emerged at last from the commode and drove the duo off with massive swattings of a rolled-up Racing Form—Mr. Gagilnil used to moan with impatience at we girls’ dilatoriness in popping in the gag balls and helping each other secure them with tape or knotted cloth. “Come on, come on,” he’d say-”I’m getting wise to that whole ‘I got a code in the node’ routine. The way the two of you sniffle and mope and carry on, you’d think this was The Magic Mountain, for shit’s precious sake.”
Yet my own magic mountains never did bring out the vestigial Mallory in him, except behind the camera. As for Bettie, Mr. Gagilnil once volunteered to me that he didn’t care to test his disbelief in any God by inviting the wrath that he was sure would smite him if he ever put a paw on her perky yet vulnerable flesh; simultaneously granting the paradox that she was most sacred to atheists. That was one confession he made during what proved to be our final conversation, which took place after he had asked me, with an eye to playing the lead, to cast a glance over the scenario-treatment that, just like everyone else in Hollywood, he turned out to have been writing in his spare time.
The Puerile Maid
A Gagilnil Art Photos and Fine Reproductions Production
You are a scantily dressed, impudent maid in the otherwise untroubled household of a French Army officer; Captain Dreyfus. Though innocent of any crime, he is sent one day to Devil’s Island. There he dies, unrehabilitated and unmourned.
At his funeral, which is nonetheless Catholic in the final insult, you are seen making goo-goo eyes at the priest. In an arbor in the Dreyfuses‘ backyard, you and he are making new wine from his hairy goyische grapes when the Captain’s son, Alfred Dreyfus Jr., discovers you in the act. Enraged at the insult to his dead father’s memory, and long in love with you himself as who could not be, he plans a terrible revenge.
Someone watches.
While dusting a telephone, you are seized from behind and blindfolded. Unknown hands drag you to a subterranean chamber. (I’ve got an old Signal Corps buddy in Tarzana whose basement we can probably use for this.) As your pouting lips quiver in sudden recognition of the crime you must now expiate, more unknown hands begin to tear at your saucy maid get-up.
Someone watches.
Your t*tties burst forth, in maddening cahoots with each other as usual. G-d himself has never seen such casabas. Realizing what must come next, you writhe in protest, but to no avail. As your frilly p*nties are pulled down, the glory of your t*shy is revealed in such gigantic closeup that the microscopic, indeed invisible blond ha*rs that inaugurate its nev*r penetrated cl*ft are seen rippling like a field of wheat in the w*nd.
Someone watches.
You are made to lie facedown on a t*ble. Yet no one fondles your m*rvelo*s b**bs. Everyone ignores your sweet c*nt. If th*s were the P*ris skyline, your Christian b*tt would be Notre D*me. If the men in the r**m were a college f **tball te*m, they would be N*tre D*me. A m*n appr
oaches. He rams it *p your tender α-hole. A w*man approaches. Strapping on a plastic d*ngus the s*ze of the E*jfel T*w*r, she rams it *p your tender α-hole. Everyone on the pl*net, d*gs included, rams it *p your t*nd*r a-hole.
Someone watches.
For the kicker, we cut to Alfred Junior as an awful suspicion dawns. Can it be—has his revenge failed, after he went to all this trouble? Striding to the table, he tears aside the blindfold. With bitterness, he sees that he was right, because—
You l*ked it.
Someone watches.
■
“Well, what do you think?” Gagilnil asked, lighting a cigarette as I handed the treatment back. “If you ask me, this could be the beginning of a whole new ball game. Not only does it have something to say—hell, scream—about the human condition, it’s got mood.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can do this, Mr. Gagilnil,” I broke it to him. “Much as I would truly adore having my very first movie part. I mean, what would my dear Rover say, back home? Either he’d be plumb mortified for my sake, or else he’d feel left out.”
“But dogs don’t even go to the movies,” he protested.
“Y’ain’t never been to Jolene, Alabam’,” I said with some pridaciousness; mentally adding “don’t-give-a-damn.”
“There can’t be any art cinemas in Jolene,” he said, with hauteur.
“No, but there are a lot of men in Jolene,” I explained, “and they usually go to watch the smokers straight from hunting. I used to play outside the door when I was a little girl, just listening to all that whooping and barking and the occasional gunshot and wondering which of those men was my poppa.”
“But this part was written for you,” Gagilnil complained. “How am I supposed to make The Puerile Maid now? It’d be like Triumph of the Will without Nazis, or Birth of a Nation without the Klan. Oh, sure, I could rewrite—but it won’t be the same. And this was my big chance to break out.” At which point, to my astonished consternation, he did break out, in sobs.
Although my mind was made up like Joan Crawford’s face in her later years, when her maquillage approached the hull of the Merrimac in resiliency, I did feel pretty bad for him. But then inspiration struck. It would involve a sacrifice, but then Gagilnil had been mighty kind to me—what with giving me my first job in this town, and all.
“You know, Mr. Gagilnil, I can’t do this. But my sister probably will,” I said. “And she makes me look like a tongue depressor with pretensions. Can I have the use of your telephone?” Barely taking in what I was saying, he waved me to it, the cigarette on his lower lip still trembling.
At the telephone, I hesitated. Suzannah lived in the Shakespearean hamlet of Alcapp, Tennessee, raising soybeans by day and hell by night. But we had not spoken in some years. In our sisterly rivalry, she and I had long been like Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland, except that no one knew of us and we were trash.
I looked back at Gagilnil on the sofa. He had buried his face in his hands. Between them, his cigarette stuck out like a little tombstone on fire. Sighing, I dialed Suzannah’s number.
She picked up on the seventeenth ring. “Aw—heart attack, my abundant ass,” I heard her hollering. “If you can’t stand the heat, get to hell outta my Dixie cups. Now grab your pants and go, and don’t forget to take your sample case with you.”
When she heard who this was, she snickered cattily. “You got that Awscar yet?” she asked. “I must have fell asleep for that part of the broadcast, I guess. Or maybe my flushin’ toilet just drowned out your acceptance speech, Sis.”
“Now don’t you cry for me, bitch,” I said. “I’m here in California with a sad Jew on my hands. Listen-” and I told her of the situation. As I recounted the plot of The Puerile Maid, Suzannah kept making empathetical, nostalgicky “Mmm-hmmm” noises, as one or another element of its scenario reminded her of little memories of her own life. “Well, no wonder you can’t handle it,” she said when I was done. “Y’always were such a mousy lil’ prude, even when we were puttin’ on our shows for the boys down to the swimming hole and you never would somersault while you was doin’ the cannonball. What’s the money like?”
“Green and sort of rectangular. Got pictures of dead folks on it, mostly in wigs or whiskers.”
“Well, it’s gotta beat getting turnips back for soybeans, that’s for sure. But why’re you askin’ me for? Why ain’t you talkin’ to Cousin Dewey Dell or Cousin Eula over t’ Mississippi? Or Cousin Red in Arno, Texas? Or Cousin Maggie the Cat, way down Delta way? Maybe she’s tired a’ watchin’ that nothin’-but-droop-in-these-drawers husband she’s got drink himself into stark m-sensibility…”
She went on until she had named all of us—all nine of Great-Grandma Jolene’s great-granddaughters. In the realm of male horniness, we were what the Muses were in the realm of artistic inspiration.
I hated to say it, but I had to. “Because you’re the only one of us who’d do it, that’s why,” I said.
Suzannah crowed in malignant triumph. “That’s right! That’s damn right and mighty white of you, sister mine, and don’t you ever forget it. Y’all are such ‘fraidy-cat wusses I sometimes wonder if any a’ you are real Gumstumps at all. Ony thing I won’t do is sleep with a coon, and that’s just ‘cause Momma made me promise. It was her dyin’ request.”
“Is she dying?”
“No, but she will be sometime. Probably a’ pure happiness when I wind up in the sack with the next Presi-dent of the United States, she told me.”
After I had given her the practical instructions for getting to Los Angeles and finding the Maxwell House, I hung up. Having stopped crying, Gagilnil was staring bleakly at the plastic palm tree in front of the ocean-sky backdrop. Sitting down next to him and patting his hand, I told him of Suzannah, at which he brightened up considerably. Then, having come to another decision while I was on the phone, I took a deep breath. “And I guess I’ll be moving on now, Mr. Gagilnil,” I told him. “You’ve been good to me, but it’s time for me to go in search of Darryl Zanuck once more and get on with my career.”
Apparently having had some intimation of this, he nodded. “Bettie’s going to miss you,” he said.
“Miss who?” I said, and we both smiled. “Anyway, I’ll still be seeing her at the Poil.”
I stood to go, but then hesitated. I had to ask.
“Mr. Gagilnil?”
“Yes?”
“How come, in all this time, you never once tried to lay a finger on me? Not that I’m complaining, exactly—but I am curious.”
“Why did I never touch the Happy Isles, you mean?” he said, with a wistful stare at my gazongas.
“Yes. Ivar Street is a sordid milieu, and on my arrival here, a girl like I would have struck most folks in your long unpolished shoes, one of which is presently unlaced as well—made you look!—as both an easy and a, not to flatter myself unduly, tempting, well let’s split the difference and just say ripe, target for sexual victimization. Are you, by any chance, a decent man?”
“Jesus Christ, no!” Gagilnil almost shouted, reeling as if struck. “Bite your tongue. No, no, not with your lips parted, that just drives me insane. To tell you the truth, Miss, it would have violated my aesthetic sense—in which I do take some pride, however little our work together documents it. You see, you—from your creamy skin to your miraculous gazongas, from your hair of eternal ruby fire to your incredible caboose—are a wonder of nature and a human Baskin-Robbins. I, on the other hand, on my best day, which believe me is on a calendar that would leave you blind and choking if you tried to blow the dust off it, would have to strive to manage a fairly miserable approximation of an absconding CPA on his first and no doubt last weekend in Vegas, since the cops would have his tuchus to the fire as soon as he tried to seduce a chambermaid by proudly wiggling a single five-dollar poker chip before her disbelieving and contemptuous eyes. The contrast would have been unbearable, you see.”
“I’ve slept with ugly folks before,” I said-”someti
mes even with the lights on and breakfast together afterwards, and no great harm has come of it. That can’t be the only reason.”
“It is.”
“It is not,” I said, noting with some unease that I was rapidly growing taller again. As my bazooms sprang forth like bouncy twin editions of the U.S.S. Missouri hastening to receive the surrender of the Japanese, my upside-down heart became two globes unholdable-up by any Atlas, or indeed any human agency save my own bodaciofied, endlessly ascending legs—aw, come on, Sprout! Let me down.
“All right!” Gagilnil said, as I resumed normal stature. “It’s because you make me feel so fucking Jewish, all right? In just the worst goddam way. When I look at you, I feel so hairy and disgusting and Jewish and disgusting and potbellied and Jewish and impotent and Jewish and disgusting that it just makes me want to plotz to think that I’m inside this skin, for Chrissakes. Do you have any fucking idea how all you longlegged, big-boobed Southern broads make the rest of us feel, here in this meshuggenah promised land we all allegedly share? It’s intolerable! You shouldn’t tolerate us! You should stick us in ovens today! Go on! Go on! I fucking dare you! Have the fucking courage of the fucking principles of your fucking tits! Act on what your ass is telling the world! Gas me with your farts! Burn me with your hair! Shovel me into the mass grave of your snatch! Mix my bones up with my grandfather’s, as you grind them into pumice! What the fuck do you care! You’re all getting laid!”
He took a breath.
“Don’t you understand,” he said, “that every time I stare at your jugs, I wonder if Hitler knew something I didn’t? All in all, it’s been enough
to drive any reasonably intelligent man berserk.”
I left him there—and maybe you should too, Sprout. You worry me. For one thing, far from being a middle-aged, broken-down nudie photographer, you aren’t (or weren’t, she breathes, in a sudden flash of intuition) hardly a day over sixteen, unless my formerly superb instincts have deserted me for good. And if you’ve ever so much as met anyone of the Hebraic persuasion, as Momma used to put it when minding her manners in front of them, I for one will be startled right out of my pink panties, not to give you more ideas than you know what to do with. I don’t know why in soybeans or hell you’re so down in the dumps, but you ought to try not to make the expression of it as unhealthy and woebegone-with-the-wind as the original feeling is.