Changing the Past (10 page)

Elaine was doing her finish, pumping her crotch into the edge of the curtain while the drummer in the three-man band (piano and sax) made accompanying rim-shots on his snare and, after an exceptional hump, adding a crash of the high-hat.

Without a conscious thought Jack strode onto the stage in his busboy's red mess jacket. The lights were brighter than he anticipated, but that only added to an atmosphere which was both that of make-believe and heightened reality. He felt the master of himself and all he surveyed.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said to Elaine in a new, piercingly clear voice that he produced by instinct. “Let's give the little lady a hand, oh yeah, oh yeah.” He grasped his groin. “Hey, Elaine, I got a big hand for yuh!” The audience guffawed. “Now, I don't want any of you comin' up here, smel-lin' that curtain. That won't leave
me
with anything to do after the show!” He sniffed audibly. ‘“Hi, you-a girls,' said the blind Italian as he passed the fish store.” Next, Jack shouted, “Why is a police station like a men's room?…It's where the dicks hang out!” Without being signaled, the drummer began to hit a rim-shot after each punchline, just as he did for the strippers' bumps-and-grinds.

He got off a dozen jokes in rapid-fire, hitting them with the next before they had recovered from the previous gag, understanding instinctively that handling an audience has much to do with rhythm and pace, and of course confidence, which he had had from the first, perhaps because he despised these men who had nothing better to do than swill drinks and leer at women they couldn't have except for a fee, and many of them were servicemen, some with colored ribbons over the breast pocket, for the war had not been over long. Whereas he was just a punk kid, manipulating all the people in the room.

Mr. Charles called him in when he left the stage. “Kid, I got ta hand it to yuh: you got balls. And you ain't bad, you ain't bad.”

Still swollen with a sense of triumph, Jack said, “I think I did great!”

The saturnine manager pointed a finger at him. “Don't get too fresh too soon. I said not bad: I didn't fuckin' say great. I liked the Eyetalian gag; it was comical yet respectful.” He pointed again. “So you do the rest of the shows tonight. Tomorrow, I'll think about it. I don't know about Buster. He might be ready for the pasture.” Mr. Charles had never been seen to smile. Now he added dolefully, “Listen, anybody come up and ast how old you are, you say twenty-one. If we keep you on as a comic, we'll fix you up with I.D. You ran away from home, right? You ain't registered for the draft, are ya?”

Jack was settling down now, ready to deal with reality, and therefore he answered with simulated submissiveness. “No, sir.”

“Okay, kid, keep it up.” Mr. Charles lowered his head and began to examine a ledger that lay open before him.

“Sir,” said Jack, “I'm only getting a busboy's money.”

Mr. Charles looked up lugubriously. “So? You're a busboy.”

Jack was making fifteen a week in wages and came in for a minuscule share of the tips of the three waiters whose tables he cleared, but he was dependent on the figures they gave him and assumed these were on the minimizing side, for his income from that source was only about three bucks per week. He did get most of his meals gratis in the club kitchen, which meant he lived on hamburgers, for the cuisine was exclusively short-order and the chef was hardly going to give him the so-called sirloin steak sandwich that led the menu and was priced at a whopping dollar and a half. (There was a cover charge of $2.50 at the Club Coronado, a minimum of two bucks. Mixed drinks cost a dollar per, and beer was fifty cents for a short glass. Customers paid through the nose, but there were few complaints: they came to see the naked girls, in a time when smutty movies could only be seen at Legion smokers.)

“Maybe if this works out,” he asked Mr. Charles, “you would—”

“I don't like being hustled for money,” the manager said, staring with lusterless eyes. “It shows a lack of respect.”

Jack continued to grow as an audience favorite throughout the subsequent months, though in a place the commercial purpose of which was to create drunks, troublemakers would appear from time to time, usually harmless hecklers whom he found it easy to demolish (“Hey, when I come where
you
work, do I bother
you?
Do I kick the toilet-brush outa your hand?' but infrenuently someone would pose a genuine menace. Once a man hurled a glass at the stage, and another time a husky crewcut fellow in a sailor's uniform stood up and shouted in a drunken Southern voice that he would whip Jack's ass for not making him laugh even once. Though fearing no man's verbal assault, Jack was physically a total coward, and he would have been seriously upset on such occasions had not the bouncers introduced by Mr. Charles not soon materialized and escorted the offenders off the premises, after having in both cases done something discreet and effective to bring about a violent bending at the waist and the immediate disappearance of all aggressive display.

Jack had the sense never again to bring up the subject of money with Mr. Charles, whom even Marie was scared to cross, whereas she had taken liberties with Vince, faggot that he was, and had been wont to skim from the tips she was supposed to split with the club. She admitted she would never try as much with Mr. Charles. “They burned a girl's nipple up in Jersey for doin' that,” said she, in an almost inaudible undertone, for she insisted that all areas of the club were wired. “They're mean, Jackie, real mean. You oughta get out of this business and do something clean like join the army.”

But the fact remained that Jack was in his element. He saw Mr. Charles & Co. as his protectors and, doing what he enjoyed, in those early days he did not see money as the supreme good. Anyway, after he had proved himself for a couple of months, Mr. Charles called him in and said, “Move outa that fleabag room of yours, Jackie. It don't make the right impression for one of the featured performers at the Coronado Club. Get over the Mountford Hotel, they'll fix you up. You can afford it: you're making fifty a week.”

This seemed a fortune to Jackie, who was now called by his stage name and not Kid. The latest posters mounted on either side of the main doors to the club showed an elaborately retouched life-sized photograph of a showgirl in tassled bra and sequined G-string and identified as “fresh from the Follies Berger in Gay Paree, the glamorous MARIE BONJOUR, heading a bevy of exotic, erotic beauties for your delectation.” Diagonaled across a lower corner of the poster on the right ran a yellow band on which was printed: “Fresh from the Great White Way, the sidesplitting comic JACKIE KELLOG!”

But after six-eight months it had become clear to Jackie that he could never become a headliner at such a club, which was essentially a whorehouse with added attractions. However, he lacked the nerve to speak of his ambitions to Mr. Charles, who might well find him ungrateful. But once again the heavenly powers came to his aid without being asked. Mr. Charles called him in.

“Here's how it goes, Jackie. Me and my associates are wrapping it up here. But I got a soft spot in my heart for you, maybe because it was me gave you your start and you're like a son to me. We got some interests in Havana, a lot nicer than this shithole which I don't mind telling you we just kept open for sentimental reasons, you know? You can come along over to Cuba, or I'll give ya a good send-off for someplace else, your choice.”

Someplace else turned out to be Atlantic City, and Jackie took that choice, for Havana was farther from the Big Time to which he aspired. The Atlantic City club proved to be much like the Coronado, with the difference that it maintained no resident performers but every few weeks changed all the personnel of one show for an entirely new group. Owing to Mr. Charles's recommendation, Jackie was given an opportunity to go on for ten minutes of standup for a few nights, but the reception was lukewarm at best, and soon the arrogance he had so quickly attained by hearing laughter degenerated to what in a weaker character might well have become true self-pity, which is never funny, as opposed to the simulated kind that is so successful for comics who pretend to be victims of their associates, especially the women to whom they are hypothetically married.

But Jackie Kellog was too tough a nut to be cracked by disregard, he who after all had risen above his lack of superficially attractive attributes to win the respect of his high-school classmates and even the unwelcome devotion of a Betty Jane Hopper (whom he realized, looking back, not only Gordon Riggins but most of the other boys believed both sexually and socially desirable). Far from being discouraged, he acquired strength by hating the people whom he could not make laugh, but he had far too much self-command to display resentment, always the trait of a loser.

It was at this time that Jackie first formulated what was to become his trademark style: abuse of individual members of the audience, which made the others hilarious and caused the victim him- or herself to laugh even more vigorously or seem that most shameful of Americans, the creature who could not take a joke,
viz
., the Poor Sport. It began one night when Jackie could not evoke an audible snicker with his first five, the strongest, jokes. If
they
didn't make it, he faced stark disaster, for the material went downhill from there. He found himself praying for a heckler, for an audience is invariably sympathetic to a performer who is being harassed. Had he thought of it, he might have found someone to hire for the role, but it was too late now, and in fact this was the last of his scheduled shows, after which the efficacy of Mr. Charles's recommendation ran out.

Jackie stared malevolently at the tables nearest the stage, and of the persons sitting at them chose a man with a huge belly and several chins. “Hey, buddy,” he cried, “didn't you come in with a whole party? Where'd they go? You
eat
‘em?…Where's the wife tonight?” He put his hand to his ear, pretending to listen for an answer. The fat man remained silent though he was grinning widely. “Dog-training class? What kind of dog does she have?…Oh, you don't have a pet? But the wife can now bring your slippers and newspaper?”

People had begun to laugh now. “I know your wife, sir,” Jackie continued, rolling his eyes. “I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I think she made a pass at me the other day: at least she mounted my leg and started to hump it.” He was on a roll now, the audience in his pocket, and this audience, unlike that of the Coronado, included both sexes. Some of the women were even married to their escorts, while others were the spouses of men not present; the point was that wives, like Italian-Americans, fat people, et al., were
obliged
to enjoy jokes about their own kind, their natural self-interest permitting no choice in the matter. The only wrong was to be ignored. In the case at hand, if anybody failed to make the maximum response she would probably be a single woman, the girlfriend of a married man.

Jackie finally let the first victim sink back into eternal oblivion and seized another, a relatively young woman with prominent incisors, and proceeded to deliver a series of gibes in which squirrels, chipmunks, and other rodents figured. She colored though of course was constrained to laugh at least as heartily as anyone else, but her escort, a man with a sinewy jaw, had begun to glower loyally. The answer was to turn the attack on
him
. “Look at this guy,” Jackie said, pointing, “When his girl says, ‘Tell me sweet nothings,' he belches in a higher key. He just sent back his salad; they put garlic in it, and he refuses to eat anything flavored with his favorite underarm deodorant.” The man had already been conquered. He was laughing behind a cupped hand, which probably meant he had ugly front teeth, but Jackie had already done the dental material, so he passed up this opportunity and chose a new target, a middle-aged woman who wore too much costume jewelry and looked Jewish. His hypothesis was easily confirmed. “Hey, lady,” he shouted, “so you wanted your son to become a physician? Congratulations, he's thirty-two and still plays doctor with little girls.” The woman produced shrieks of mirth, her outsized earrings swinging wildly, and slapped her husband's outstretched forearm.

A man named Gus Sebastian managed the Harlequin Club. He called Jackie in after the show and commended him on the change of act, predicting that he was onto something which might take him a long way if used correctly. However, now that he had discharged the obligation to Mr. Charles, Sebastian himself had no more openings in his schedule for the next half year unless someone got sick, in which case if Jackie were then available, he would get hold of him through his agent.

From a fellow comic who was not as competitive as some, Jackie got the name of an agent named Marty Trenier and went to New York for the first time in his life, and after meeting some resistance from Marty, who contrary to expectation was dressed in black suit and white shirt, phoned the number in Havana given him by Mr. Charles, who was pleased to hear from his protégé. “Gimme the bum's name again?…Don't worry about it. He'll ask
you
next time. So when you comin' down to see us, Jackie? We got a real nice set-up here: you know, tables, blackjack and the rest. All legal. Good-looking young girls, too. No cows, ya know. Okay, Jackie, glad to help out. Any time.”

An hour later, Marty Trenier called at the hotel and apologized. At his office, Marty said, “You got friends, Jackie. How come you need me?” He raised a pair of white hands. “Not that I'm prying!”

“I'm not long in the business,” Jackie said. “I just came up from Florida.”

“I can book you in the mountains. Don't expect a top place: I take what I can get. Got to make a living like the next man.” Marty was a whiner. He sent Jackie to a small Catskill resort called Rudner's where the pay was small but included full room and board. Jackie performed at two shows per night, with Fridays off, and used his new insult style on the exclusively Jewish audiences, with even greater success, Jews being even more anxious than Gentile Americans to prove themselves able to laugh when abused, and all the more so in the years immediately following the war, an event of which Jackie had scarcely been aware except as it was depicted in the blood-and-guts movies in which the Yanks whipped Japs, and Jews, except for the obligatory G.I. from Brooklyn, who often had fair hair and freckles, were seldom mentioned.