Exit Laughing

by Victoria Zackheim

  Sitting in that car, wanting to push away the pain of my reality, I thought of Wendy Miller and Jane. I thought about how the past few months had been difficult, as I struggled to accept the fact that I might only be an aunt—never a mother. As these thoughts began to well up, I remembered that there was a way out, if only temporarily.

  “Know any comedy routines?” I asked Adam.

  My brother’s face brightened up, and he veered off the highway and into the parking lot of a Barnes & Noble. “I’ll be right back. I’m going to go buy a CD. It’s hilarious.”

  I groaned. I adore my brother, but our humor is so different. I was sure he was in the store rummaging through a pile of some sort of silly South Park, The Simpsons, or Family Guy type of nonsense, full of potty talk and lines about diarrhea.

  Adam climbed back into the car.

  “I’m not in the mood for fart jokes,” I said.

  “Trust me. You’ll like this,” he said.

  I examined the plastic case as he slid the CD into the player. Who was this pale white guy with a scruffy beard—this Jim Gaffigan?

  Turns out, he’s a very funny guy. He has the ability to take mundane events—riding an escalator, eating a waffle—and find the humor in them. He even dipped into some black comedy, like joking about the Old Testament story of Abraham climbing a mountain to sacrifice his son.

  Adam and I drove on, munching on cheap gas-station candy, watching the New Mexico sky turn pink, and listening to Jim Gaffigan. I was laughing so hard at times I had to wipe tears from my eyes. The good kind of tears.

  CLEAVON VICTORIOUS

  — Michael Tucker —

  In the fall of 1992, my wife, Jill, and I got a call from a close friend of Cleavon Little, telling us that Cleavon had decided to take his hospice care at home. She said that friends would be stopping over through the week and that he had asked for us to be included. The sad news was not a surprise—when I had worked with him in Toronto not nine months before, the cancer had already been taking its toll.

  The night we went to his house, there were six or seven other people already there. We gathered in the kitchen, while the nurse was upstairs preparing Cleavon to hold court in his bedroom. I remember mentioning to Jill that these other friends were much more intimately connected to him than we were, but she reminded me that we had known him almost the entire span of our acting careers, starting when he and Jill did a Broadway play together in 1974. It was the rollicking comedy All over Town by Murray Schisgal. Cleavon was the star, and he was great at keeping the laughter rolling.

  Jill tells the story of a performance when one of the actors went up on his lines, and Cleavon tried to help by giving him the cue again. When that had no effect, Cleavon actually tried saying the actor’s line for him. But that didn’t help either—the poor guy was lost; his eyeballs looked like little bull’s-eyes and the flop-sweat was rolling. So, Cleavon casually strolled off stage, found the prompter’s script, brought it back out onto the stage, and handed it to him.

  “There you go, son. Just read it—nice and slow.” And he gave him that look that he was famous for—kind of judgmental and wary at the same time, as if to say, “Whoa, this boy’s so slow he’s dangerous.”

  The audience, of course, was having a grand time.

  Eight years later, I had my first acting experience with Cleavon in Two Fish in the Sky, produced by the venerable Phoenix Theatre. It was a disaster of historic proportion—historic in that the Phoenix, a New York cultural institution since 1953, was plunged ignominiously into the ashes by our production, never to rise again. Cleavon played a London-based Jamaican flim-flam artist with an accent that, despite all his hard work, was completely unintelligible. Added to that was my character, a rabbi who spoke in a pronounced London-Jewish dialect.

  The scene between the two of us was like listening to the United Nations on the day the simultaneous translators went on the fritz. We could see the people in the audience shrugging and looking at each other, as if to say “What’s going on? Do you understand any of this?” Cleavon, as I recall, remained blithely above the fray, never letting the audience’s confusion affect in any way his ebullient good time.

  He was irrepressible. From his New York debut in the political satire Macbird to his Tony Award–winning performance in the musical Purlie to his unforgettable portrayal of Sheriff Bart in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, you could always count on Cleavon Little to light up the moment.

  The nurse came down to the kitchen and announced that he was ready to receive visitors. We filed silently up the stairs. Most of the other friends had been around all week; we were the newbies. Jill and I pulled up chairs, while a few of his closer friends sat on the edge of the bed. Cleavon looked like Gandhi: his hair was gone and his body emaciated. He was hooked up to a morphine drip, but the effort it took to move his body made it obvious he was still in a lot of pain. He was at the end of his struggle.

  “Well,” he said in a small crackly voice, “look at you two little cuties.” We were, as I recall, the only white people in the room. “You come to say goodbye?”

  We nodded, and Jill went over and kissed him on the cheek.

  “If I knew there was a kiss in it, I would have done this years ago.”

  We all laughed. He started to say something else, but he didn’t have much breath. He looked at the man sitting closest to him on the bed and reached his hand out to him. I recognized him as an actor we’d seen years before in New York, but I can’t for the life of me remember his name. I wish I could, because his face and his presence will be with me forever.

  “Tell them about the show they missed last night,” Cleavon said to him.

  All the friends chuckled quietly, and Jill and I waited, not knowing what kind of show he was talking about.

  “Well,” said the friend, and he smiled and shook his head. “Last night, Cleave told us he was ready to die.”

  “Yes, he was,” said a woman who was standing next to the nurse.

  “I mean, he’d been suffering this damn cancer long enough, and he knew it was his time, and he had made his peace.”

  “Amen,” said someone softly.

  “Yeah, I made the best deal I could get, I suppose,” said Cleavon in his crackly voice.

  “He said goodbye to each one of us, and we hugged him and kissed him and told him how much we loved him. We were all sitting around on the bed by then. And he said that he was going to close his eyes and let the Lord take him, and we all nodded.”

  Cleavon closed his eyes as the story was rolling out, so as to give us the proper visual.

  “So, his eyes were closed and we each did our individual thing. Some of us, I know, were praying.”

  “And some of us were crying,” said the woman standing beside the nurse. “As quiet as we could be.”

  “It went on for a long time,” said the actor. “I mean, a real long time. Hours, it seemed. None of us wanted to say anything or do anything, ’cause we didn’t want to break the spell, y’know?”

  “I kept peeking over at the nurse,” said another friend, “but she just shook her head. ‘Not yet,’ she was saying.”

  The nurse nodded, confirming this part of the story.

  “And just when I thought I would burst from all the tension and the quiet and the waiting, I saw this one big eye pop open. Just one. You know, that hairy eyeball thing that Cleavon likes to do, all suspicious and surprised and scared, all at the same time? Like he’s saying, ‘What you doin’, boy?’ ”

  “And this big old eye flicked to the right and then it flicked to the left and it took us all in, one at a time. I was the first to go. I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe, I swear to God. Then everybody went. The nurse, Cleavon, everybody. It came in waves. We couldn’t stop it for the life of us. And in between the waves, we tried to catch our breath and hold our aching sides. And then it came again. I can’t tell you how long we laughed.”

  Two nights later, Cleavon passed, le
aving all of us with the memory of his bringing down the house one last time.

  INTO THE LIGHT

  — Barbara Lodge —

  My father died first.

  When he tripped and fell in a parking lot, I figured he needed new shoes, so we got black Reeboks with extra tread. He wore them to work daily with his gray pinstriped suits, white button-down shirts, and black knit ties. “Trendsetting,” he would say, “stylish and comfortable.” He proceeded to buy them by the dozens to give to friends and family.

  Two months later, while wearing his new black Reeboks with that extra tread, he fell again. This time, he suffered lacerations on his face, warranting dozens of stitches.

  Several doctors’ appointments later, he was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. There was no cure. Victims usually die of respiratory failure within two years. Paralyzed. Unable to eat, speak, or move.

  Soon after his diagnosis, he invited me to breakfast; I loved having breakfast with my father. We sat on the same metal chairs with the same lemon needlepoint pillows, at the same Formica table, in the same sunny yellow breakfast room where we had eaten my entire life. It was a Saturday morning, my mother was out playing bridge at the club, and he was wearing his navy wool robe, flannel pajamas, and leather slippers. On this day, this usually dapper man looked disheveled. As we ate our eggs, he said, “I’ve been thinking: my work here is done.” I had to breathe and stay steady and calm, so I took his hand. Muscle spasms bumped up under his skin; tiny electric shocks signaling nothing good. His nerves were firing at random intervals, similar to the engine of a car sputtering before it wears out.

  He’d made up his mind.

  “Where I’m going is a happy place,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not time. You’re only eighty-three!”

  He assured me he was unafraid and that his mother would be waiting for him.

  When he was forty-five, he was pronounced dead during surgery. He described the blinding white light and his deceased mother standing in front of it, her loving arms outstretched.

  I had to believe him.

  My father was the exhale to my inhale and taught me that anything, anything, was possible. So, before this disease stole his body and left his brilliant mind trapped in a paralyzed shell, he was going to move on. I had no say.

  For weeks after our breakfast date, he’d sit in his big black leather chair, eyes closed, emptying his mind. Whenever I’d blow into the room, hoping to regale him with stories of my children, he’d respond, “Shhh, silence is okay, too.” So I’d sit next to him, holding his hand, already feeling the loss of my father.

  “Tomorrow will be the big day,” he announced to me and my mother, exactly two weeks after revealing his plan.

  My mother was appalled and would have “none of this ridiculousness!” She stormed out of the room and called all three of his treating physicians (who’d become personal friends), asking them to come over, which they did that afternoon. When the cardiologist, internist, and neurologist completed their batteries of tests, including a mobile EKG, their joint conclusion was, “You’re not going anywhere anytime soon.” As he left the bedroom, one doctor said, “I’m going to see my sick patients now.” My mother walked them to the door, wearing her patented “I told you so” grin.

  My father winked at me.

  Late that evening, he told me to go to Tower Records right away and buy a Barbra Streisand CD containing the song “Memories.” I didn’t understand his urgency, but had faith he knew what he was doing. I gathered my purse and made for the door.

  “Stop! You are going nowhere of the sort!” my mother snapped. “Don’t you know the kind of people who go to Tower Records on the Sunset Strip at this hour?”

  I ignored her reproach. Apparently, I was the kind of person who did just that. My father’s body was about to give birth to his soul.

  When I returned with the CD, my mother was fuming in the other room, and my dad was still very much alive, serene and comfortable in bed, wearing his yellow flannel pajamas. Without speaking, we played and replayed the song “Memories” so many times we could hear it, whether it was playing or not.

  This was his exit music.

  He lay on his back with his eyes closed, me curled up next to him, hoping he’d both succeed and fail. When his breathing became almost imperceptible, after several dozen run-throughs of the song, I leaned over closer and whispered, “Are you dead yet, Daddy?” He opened one eye, looked around the room, and said, “No.”

  We exploded into hysterics, our laughter cutting through all things death and dying and returning us to the simplest form of one another. We held hands and laughed off and on for hours. At two in the morning, he pressed me to go home to my sleeping children. I didn’t want to but acquiesced, only after he promised not to stop his heart until I’d finished carpool.

  He started manifesting his plan the next morning, as I was dropping off my kids at school. I sensed the shift and sped to his bedside. While holding him in my arms, I felt a rush of energy sweep out of his body, and I knew we would never ever be separated. Death may have ended his life, but it didn’t end our relationship. For days, even weeks after his passing, I saw and felt miraculous life-affirming energy in all aspects of nature. My father had taken residency in the gentle breeze that rustled the pine trees, and in the pink and orange clouds that streaked across the sunset sky. He was nowhere and everywhere. He was home.

  My therapist suggested that such experiences of mystical wonderment, even ecstasy, were nothing more than dissociative denial that my father was actually gone. He said, “You haven’t grieved his death and are trying to ignore the emptiness of your loss.” I fired him before I even had a chance to go to the cemetery and tell my dad.

  I was good at this death thing and considered it my newly awakened life’s mission to shepherd dying loved ones into the light. Whether they were open to the possibility or not, I was going to help. Nancy Davenport and I became friends the day I saw her fall off the curb into the gutter. I wrapped my arms around her, lifted her back up to standing, and then introduced myself, recognizing her from my UCLA writing class. The crumpling motion her legs made when she fell reminded me of something all too familiar.

  After a few weeks in class, she mentioned she’d been to a doctor because of weakness and difficulty swallowing.

  Three weeks later she announced her diagnosis: “I have a disease called ALS.”

  Instead of feeling averse to being around another victim of the cruelest disease I’d ever known, I drew in closer, invited her to lunches or dinners, and offered to have “writing days” outside of class. I was determined to work my way into her life and begin my tenure as fearless shepherd into the light. The essays she read in class were smart, eloquent, and insightful, a sign she might be open to the idea.

  As it turned out, Nancy, a stubborn card-carrying atheist, wasn’t. Death was death was death. Death offered no white light, no angels, no waiting family members, no envelopment in universal love. No nothing. Despite or because of that complication, my resolve to help her was unwavering. She was terrified of dying, and I didn’t want to be. I mean, I didn’t want her to be. We spent as much time together as possible.

  I gave her a picture of my dad taken a few years before, as he was skipping down a cobblestone street. He’d been waving his arms like wings, and the photo captured the precise moment when neither of his feet touched the ground. His smile was wide and real and free. Unadulterated joy of the sort found in heaven.

  Nancy loved the picture and asked me to station it on the coffee table directly in her line of vision. We included him in our conversations, and I told her about his life of abundance and hard work, how he built an empire between tennis games, and how once he was diagnosed with ALS his focus shifted upward. I explained that she was going to a happy place and that family members whom she loved would be waiting for her in heaven.

  “Now you’ve gone too far. There’s no one up there.” She struggled to stand an
d pushed her walker out of the room.

  My certainty was so “entertaining,” however, she chose to keep me around as a curiosity.

  Nancy’s feeding tube days were quickly approaching, and I wanted to provide her with delicious tastes, hoping a happy stomach would lend itself to an open mind. During one of our precious surf ’n’ turf dinners at a local restaurant, I approached the concept of death from a scientific angle.

  “Listen, Nancy. I want you to understand this. Energy beats our heart.”

  She brought a bite of lobster dripping with butter to her mouth, “One of the foods I’ll miss most is buttery lobster.”

  “I know, but listen. Since energy beats our heart and since it’s a scientific fact that energy never dies—”

  “Did your father like lobster, Barbara?”

  “Stop interrupting me! No, he didn’t. Energy beats our heart and energy never dies. Are you with me?”

  My words were rapid-fire urgent. “It logically follows, then, that when our bodies die, the stuff that beats our heart, our energy, our soul, our consciousness, our spirit, lives on in a different form. This is important, Nancy. Death is not the end. Energy never dies. Do you understand?”

  I ordered myself a cosmopolitan martini, briefly questioning which one of us I was trying to convince.

  “You’re wrong,” she said, sipping her Grey Goose on the rocks. “No one listens to our prayers. All that’s ‘out there’ is empty darkness.”

  “Make it a double,” I told the waiter.