Mere Anarchy (6 page)

Meanwhile your son’s film was made under the supervision or, better I should say, collaboration of our crackerjack staff, which, take it from Varnishke, any of the big studios should only have, they wouldn’t grind out such chozzerai always for ten-year-old submentals. A man like Sy Popkin who personally spitballed concepts with the little nudnik happens to be one of Hollywood’s great unrecognized talents. The man could have won fifty Academy Awards if he hadn’t one lousy time been spotted in Mexico double-dating with Trotsky, a coincidence that forever marked him unhirable with those schmendriks who right away run scared. Also our dramatics counselor, Hydra Waxman, who gave up a promising screen career to donate, gratis yet, her time to teaching teenage golems. The woman—may she rest in peace but later, after she
dies—personally
directed the amateur cast in your son’s movie, coaxing from a tsimmes of talentless trombeniks every tiny morsel of histrionic ability while meanwhile your little momser sat on the sidelines watching her work and breathing from his adenoids.

Finally, Mr. Wall Street macher, there’s our own Abe Silverfish, a man who has editing awards from prestige film festivals in Tanganyika and Bali. The man stood—and if I’m lying my wife should perish in an acid bath—stood over and badgered your schlimazel Algae, who if you take my advice you’d toss the kid a little Ritalin once in a while maybe he would now and then stop with the fidgeting. Silverfish personally stood over the Avid and showed him where he should make every splice. Incidentally, the kid used all our equipment, fiddling like the klutz he is with a brand-new Panavision camera, which now when I press the button makes a sound like when you turn slowly the wood handle on those tin party noisemakers Elsie calls groggers. Meanwhile for this I wouldn’t bill you since we’re about to be partners in a new venture.

Respectfully,

Monroe B. Varnishke

Dear Mr. Varnishke:

To suggest in any way that the staff you have assembled is anything higher on the evolutionary scale than a band of
dingoes
is hyperbole of the wildest sort. Partners in a new venture?! Have you suffered a silent stroke? First let me be clear that the idea for Algae’s screenplay was conceived by my son alone and based on true life experience that the family lived through when our local mortician mistakenly thought he’d won the Nobel Prize. That a traitor like Popkin who probably passed atomic secrets to Trotsky over tacos might have in any way contributed as much as a comma to my wunderkind’s scenario ranks in credibility alongside accounts of the Loch Ness monster. As for that dipso Miss Hydra Waxman, the Internet tells me that she has never appeared in any film of a millimeter above eight, and then under the name of Candy Barr. Incidentally, are you aware your instructor Silverfish was fired from editing a Hollywood movie because Henry Fonda was repeatedly cut in upside down? Algae also said the camera you provided him with, far from being new, ran in fits and starts as a result of being heaved at a nineteen-year-old lifeguard when she refused your advances. Is Mrs. Varnishke OK with you hitting on the female help? By the way, I apologize for disparaging your wife’s circulatory system with my sometimes too accurate wit. Given the myriad blue tributaries that mark her topography, I couldn’t keep myself from commenting on her similarity to a road map.

Finally, let this be the termination of any contact between us. All further correspondence should be mailed directly to the firm of Upchuck and Upchuck, Attorneys-at-Law.

Au revoir, meatball.

Winston Snell

Mine Dear Mr. Snell:

I only thank God He gave me a sense of humor so I can take a little joshing without immediately running right away to one of those gun magazines where hit men are so easy to hire. Let me do you a favor and clear up for you some facts. I never once in forty years looked at another woman except for Elsie, which candidly was not so easy as I’m the first to admit she’s not a dish like those zaftig courvers who pose in God knows what positions for magazines you probably wait drooling on the docks for as the boats arrive from Copenhagen.

Secondly, I’m just curious—where did you get the idea that that little vontz your son was a wunderkind? It could only be that you’re a typical cigar-sucking money maven who surrounds himself with namby-pambies who yes you and fill you full of bubbe meisehs you like to hear and the minute you leave the room, believe me, they roll their eyes. When Elsie and I had the candy store and I had a cretin who jerked my sodas who I kept on out of the goodness of my heart for his mother, she had a hip replacement, the doctors made a mistake, she wound up with a Chinaman’s liver—anyhow, this poor troll, the soda maker, with his double-digit IQ, towered like Isaac Newton over your Algae mentally.

That, by the way, was the summer Elsie’s nephew Benno won the spelling bee. “Mnemonic” the kid spelled, he’s all of eight. This is what I call bright, not your blond Midwich cuckoo who’s had every advantage in every private school with the expensive tutors and still he can’t remember who he is without checking the name tape in his T-shirt.

Meanwhile, instead of threatening with the lawsuits, tell instead your shysters if they check carefully, they’ll see that while you have a single print of the film that made both Weinstein brothers run like a couple of land speculators to throw sixteen million rugs your way, we have the only existing original negative up here in a bungalow. I just pray nothing happens to it, not that Mrs. Varnishke hasn’t already gotten a chicken-fat stain on the opening shot.

Moe Varnishke

Varnishke:

I read your last letter with a mixture of pity and fear, the Aristotelian recipe for tragedy. Pity because you obviously are unaware that by holding the negative to my son’s film you are guilty of a little social lapse called grand larceny, and fear because I had a prophetic dream last night wherein, after your prison sentence, you vividly caught a screwdriver in the tripes from a burly fellow inmate at Angola.

Although a fresh negative can be minted, albeit one of inferior quality, from the print I have, I would strongly suggest you instantly ship the original to yours truly before further defiling of its delicate coating occurs from either chicken fat or any other of the assorted noisome condiments you and that gargoyle that stares back at you over the breakfast table uses to render edible her cuisine. My patience is rapidly expiring.

Winston Snell

Listen, Snell:

It’s you not me that’s heading to the slammer and if not for trying to sell a movie you don’t own by yourself then for at least kiting checks because your genius son talks in his sleep and Elsie’s hobby is taping. Meanwhile I try to protect the negative but believe me it’s not easy. First my nephew Shlomo, he’s six next week, such a lovely kid, can sing all the words to “Ragmop” in either Yiddish or English. But let’s face it, it’s a wild age and he took a sharp rock and put a long scratch right in the middle of reel two. He loves to take the negative out of the can and scrape the emulsion off with a penknife. Why? Do I know? I just know he scrapes and he kvells. Not to mention my sister Rose got Lubriderm on reel seven. The poor woman. Her husband died recently, a massive heart attack, but I warned him—don’t look directly at her when she steps out of the shower. Anyhow, it’s a shame you’re so stubborn because by now we both could be realizing a nice piece of change from this flick, but listen, you’re a man with principles. By the way, exactly what is kiting checks, and why is it a felony? Gotta go, the dog has the negative.

Varnishke

Varnishke:

You vile little paramecium. I offer you a 10 percent participation in the distribution rights to Algae’s film. What you really deserve, in your own vernacular, is not one red cent but a good spritz from a can of Raid.

I suggest you grab this deal before I regain my balance and take it off the table as it could be your passport from the grubby summer world of pubescent auteurs to the delights of Miami or Bermuda. Perhaps if some portion of your profits goes to a good plastic surgeon for a complete physical makeover, Mrs. Varnishke might even be allowed on a public beach.

Winston Snell

Mine dear boy:

Elsie regained consciousness from a coma she was in, the result of an accident she had setting some mousetraps, she leaned in too far to smell the cheese to make sure it was fresh. Bingo! Anyhow, she woke up just long enough to whisper into my ear the words “Make it twenty percent.” Then, out again like one of those dolls when you tilt it back the eyes close. Meanwhile, the minute you put on the dotted line your Sam Hancock—and before a notary she also mentioned—you’ll not only get the negative but Elsie makes a wonderful stuffed cabbage which we’ll include gratis a few portions but return the jars please. You should live and be well.

Your new partner,

Moe Varnishke

N
ANNY
D
EAREST

“WHAT EVIL LURKS
in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.” And with that came a fiendish cackle projecting shivers up my spine every Sunday when as a mesmerized youth I sat curled around our Stromberg Carlsen in the crepuscular winter light of my progenitors’ gloomy digs. The truth is, I never had the slightest idea what dark mischief gadded about even in my own pair of ventricles, until weeks back when I received a phone call from the better half at my office at Burke and Hare on Wall Street. The woman’s usual steady timbre jiggled like quantum particles, and I could tell she had gone back on smokes.

“Harvey, we must talk,” she announced, her words fairly drenched in portent.

“Are the children all right?” I snapped, expecting at any moment to be read the text of a ransom note.

“Yes, yes, but our nanny—our nanny—that smiling and unfailingly polite Judas, Miss Velveeta Belknap.”

“What about her? Don’t tell me the twit’s gone and broken another Toby mug.”

“She’s writing a book about us,” the voice on the other end intoned as though emanating from a catacomb.

“About us?”

“About her experiences being our Park Avenue nanny for the past year.”

“How do you know?” I rasped, suddenly crippled by remorse that I had pooh-poohed legal counsel advising a confidentiality agreement.

“I went to her room while she was out to return two Tic Tacs I had borrowed before the holidays, when I inadvertently came across a manuscript. Naturally I couldn’t resist a peek. Darling, it’s vicious and embarrassing beyond anything you can imagine. Especially the parts about you.”

A twitching in my cheek began its arrhythmic calisthenics, and drops of perspiration began emerging on my brow with audible snaps.

“As soon as she gets home I’m going to fire her,” the Immortal Beloved said. “The snake refers to me as porcine.”

“No! Don’t fire her. That won’t stop the book and will only cause her to dip her quill in more astringent vitriol.”

“What then, lover boy? You know how these revelations will play amongst our tony chums? We won’t be able to set foot at any of the posh watering holes we habituate without we’re snickered at and lampooned by wit’s cruel rapier. Velveeta refers to you as ‘that gnarled little pipsqueak who buys his hapless offspring into top preschools while failing to do yeoman service in the boudoir.’”

“Don’t do anything till I get home,” I pleaded. “This requires a little skull session.”

“You better ratiocinate on the double, sugar. She’s up to page three hundred.” With that, the light of my life smashed the phone down into its cradle with photon velocity, causing my ears to ring with the ominous tolling of that damn bell in Donne’s poem. Feigning Whipple’s disease, I bailed out of my work early, pausing at the corner hops emporium to placate my jangled ganglia and review the crisis.

Our history with nannies had been a roller-coaster ride at best. The first one was a Swedish woman who resembled Stanley Ketchel. Her demeanor was succinct, and she achieved discipline amongst the brood, who began showing up for meals well mannered but with inexplicable contusions. When our hidden TV camera caught her in the act of bouncing my son horizontally across her shoulders in what wrestlers call the Argentine backbreaker, I queried the woman on her methods.

Obviously unused to interference, she lifted me out of my loafers and pinioned me to the wallpaper a good three feet off the floor. “Keep your schnozz out of my rice bowl,” she advised, “unless you’re happy to wind up in a reef knot.”

Outraged, I sent her packing that night, requiring the assistance of only a single SWAT team.

Her successor, a nineteen-year-old French au pair named Veronique, who was all wiggles and cooing, with blond hair, the pout of a porn star, long tapered legs, and a rack that almost required scaffolding, was a far less truculent type.

Her commitment to our issue, unfortunately, lacked a certain depth, preferring as she did to loll about on the chaise in a slip and vaporize chocolate truffles while thumbing the pages of
W
. I adjusted to the creature’s personal style more flexibly than my wife did and even attempted to help her relax with an occasional back rub, but when the ball and chain noticed I had taken to wearing Max Factor and bringing the little frog breakfast in bed she tucked a pink slip into the folds of Veronique’s
poitrine
and deposited her Louis Vuitton on the curb.