A View From a Broad (15 page)

One day, during a break in orchestra rehearsal, some of the bigger boys, led by Jojo Sagon, a Filipino with a chip on both his shoulders, picked Angel up, threw him into his empty bass-fiddle case, and locked him in. They thought the whole thing terrifically funny. When our teacher, Mrs. Kiyabu, called everyone back and, noticing that Angel was missing, asked where he was, the boys opened the case, to everyone’s great amusement.

Yes, the joke was extremely successful. Even Angel smiled a little when he was finally let out of the case, although I remember thinking at the time that it wasn’t a smile of amusement exactly. For the rest of the day, Angel didn’t say a word to anyone, which just confirmed everyone’s feeling that Angel was at heart aloof and unlikable and deserved whatever he got.

Angel didn’t go home that afternoon or that night, nor was he anywhere to be found the next morning. His parents, who together could barely speak a word of English, came to the school to find out what had happened, but in a stirring display of school unity no one would tell them the truth.

Finally, about a week later, Angel was found, hanging from a eucalyptus tree about ten miles out of town. On the trunk of the tree, he had tacked up a little sign: I’M TIRED OF BEING THE PUNCH LINE.

I thought a lot about Angel in Germany, where not so long ago I wouldn’t have come up to standard. In fact, I was thinking about him when Miss Frank came bouncing into my room one morning and threw a little guidebook on my bed.

“Get up!” she said in that tone only mothers usually use. “We’re going.”

“We are? Where?” I asked, squinting my eyes in the sunlight that was suddenly flooding the room.

“To Salzburg, of course,” said Miss Frank as if we had planned it for days. “It’s beautiful. And it’s in Austria.”

So the cagy woman was reading my mind again. I watched as she busily laid out the clothes she decided I should wear. I thought about the punishment she always said was coming. Well, I still didn’t know about that. But I knew as long as I had Miss Frank, I surely had my reward.

I
had often heard it said that God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland. Well, at least God rested on the seventh day. The Dutch never do. I don’t ever remember seeing a town so on-the-go as Amsterdam. In fact, the Amsterdammers are as industrious when they i play as they are when they work. Maybe when you live on land that by natural right ought to be sea, you take everything very seriously, even pleasure. In any case, the Dutch go at their fun with intense determination. And for the weekend of the 16th of October, they had determined that their fun would be me.

The fact was that I was better known in Holland than anywhere else on the Continent, and expectations were running high. There was too much to live up to. I like to whip the crowd up myself rather than have them all whipped up before I even get there. When an audience is that excited, there’s no place left to take them. And then what’s a poor girl to do? Well, I’ll tell you what I did. I ate hash.

Mm, boy, was that a big mistake! For despite any rumors to the contrary, I am, except for an occasional salt pill, essentially drug-free. I used to do a little routine in my act that went like this: First I’d say in a real Scarsdale voice, “Harry! Where does she get all that energy from? She must take something, Harry. What do you think she takes?” Then I’d say, very dramatically, “I don’t take anything. I’m high on life.” I can hear it in the balcony now!—"Where can I get some?”

It was a dumb little bit, and it was corny. But it was also true. Only once before in my career had I gone onstage stoned, and that was in St. Louis, almost three years before.

On that unforgettable night, I snorted a bit of something the promoter, with only the best intentions, had left for me on my dressing table. It was hardly enough to do any normal person harm, and I felt I was entitled. That tour had been a killer, and I was exhausted. So I snorted it and went onstage.

Four and a half hours later, I was
still
onstage. I sang every song I knew and quite a few I didn’t. But of course, I didn’t just sing. I expounded at length on such up and entertaining topics as How Do You Think the Soul Feels at the Moment of Violent Death? And the oh-so-cheerful, oh-so-amusing What to Do About the Highway Slush Fund.

At one point during that sterling performance, I left the stage altogether, not to interact more closely with the audience, but to walk out to the candy counter in the lobby, where I bought and consumed an entire quart of buttered popcorn before being returned to my right and proper place.

In every way, the show and I were disaster areas, and I punished myself for it for months afterwards.

So I certainly should have known better in Amsterdam. But, as I said, I was a wreck, and everyone kept telling me how great the hash was and how they ate tons and tons of it and were feeling terrific and how it would relax me and I would be wonderful and funny and full of cosmic energy.

Well, what I was, was nauseous beyond belief. But the nausea took a back seat to the waves of Nameless Terror that came flooding over me with tidal-wave force. I looked out towards the stage
from my dressing room and saw a dark, cavernous abyss where soon I would be led only to be flailed and humiliated by those who had claimed to adore me not ten minutes before. My fears weren’t lessened. They were heightened. Not just heightened. Blown out of all proportion.

“. . . I would be wonderful and funny and full of cosmic energy.”

I tried desperately to talk myself down. I tried to do my vocal runs, my exercises. I tried to remember my name. But I had truly gone to Gouda. And I was terrified.

Miss Frank, of course, knew something was wrong the minute she walked in and saw me sitting inside the wardrobe case sucking my thumb. She offered me some tea, but not much sympathy. She had been with me in St. Louis and heard me swear never to work stoned again.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Sick,” I said.

“How sick?” she wanted to know.

“Very, very sick,” I said.

“Good” was all she said, and then she quickly left the room.

How heartless! I exclaimed to myself, my mind struggling to form even that self-pitying thought. I’m going to find that woman and tell her what I think of her! But I could barely put one foot in front of the other. And curtain time was only minutes away!

When my girls came in for our usual preshow chat, they too saw what pathetic shape I was in. Each of them had some advice: a cold shower, a bowl of borscht, a hit of speed. But I knew I was too far gone for any of that. I didn’t know what to do. But, as always, Miss Frank did.

I had no idea where she had gone after she left me so abruptly a few minutes earlier, but now she came back to the dressing room carrying a large book under her arm. As she got closer, I saw that the book was, in fact, my reference tome to all known medical diseases, which hadn’t been opened since I bought it. “Here, dear,” Miss Frank said, “I want you to see something.” “Really, Miss Frank,” I said, feeling dizzier by the minute, “I don’t want to look at that book now.” “Oh, yes, you do,” she answered back, shoving before my face a two-page full-color photograph of advanced mytosal phelyngitis, featuring in gruesome detail both rear and frontal views. Shrieking and heaving like the sea, I fled into the bathroom.

When I came back out, I was quite a bit lighter and sober as a nun. Miss Frank was waiting, dog dress in hand. She didn’t say a word to me as she zipped me in or even as we walked to the wings,
where I waited to make my entrance. But just as the curtain went up and the timpani roll began, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

“Goodness, you looked so sick” she said, and even in the semidarkness I could swear I saw a tear in her eye. “Well, go on, get out there. Before I jab you with this needle.”

I gave my light man the cue to go. As the house lights went to black, I could hear the crowd shouting and stamping in anticipation. I looked back over my shoulder for Miss Frank. But she was gone. She knew I didn’t need her anymore, and she had work to do. And, her absence told me, I did too.

With a smile to the girls that said, I’m okay, I picked up my mike, straightened my hem, threw out my chest and strode onto the stage.

“Oh, Amsterdam, Amsterdam,” I shouted to the crowd. “What a thrill it is to be here. . . .” And to my fondest surprise, I found I really meant it.