Music for Chameleons (31 page)

TC:
Y’all ain’t got de choice, dat’s why.

TC:
I much prefer solitary satisfaction to some of the duds you’ve forced me to endure.

TC:
’Twas up to you, we’d never have sex with anybody except each other.

TC:
Yes, and think of all the misery
that
would have saved us.

TC:
But then, we would never have been in love with people other than each other.

TC:
Ha ha ha ha ha. Ho ho ho ho ho. “Is it an earthquake, or only a shock? Is it the real turtle soup, or merely the mock? Is it the Lido I see, or Asbury Park?” Or is it at long last shit?

TC:
You never could sing. Not even in the bathtub.

TC:
You really are bitchy tonight. Maybe we could pass some time by working on your Bitch List.

TC:
I wouldn’t call it a
Bitch
List. It’s more sort of what you might say is a Strong Dislike List.

TC:
Well, who are we strongly disliking tonight? Alive. It’s not interesting if they’re not alive.

TC:
Billy Graham

Princess Margaret

Billy Graham

Princess Anne

The Reverend Ike

Ralph Nader

Supreme Court Justice Byron “Whizzer” White

Princess Z

Werner Erhard

The Princess Royal

Billy Graham

Madame Gandhi

Masters and Johnson

Princess Z

Billy Graham

CBSABCNBCNET

Sammy Davis, Jr.

Jerry Brown, Esq.

Billy Graham

Princess Z

J. Edgar Hoover

Werner Erhard

TC:
One minute! J. Edgar Hoover is dead.

TC:
No, he’s not. They cloned old Johnny, and he’s everywhere. They cloned Clyde Tolson, too, just so they could go on goin’ steady. Cardinal Spellman, cloned version, occasionally joins them for a partouze.

TC:
Why harp on Billy Graham?

TC:
Billy Graham, Werner Erhard, Masters and Johnson, Princess Z—they’re all full of horse manure. But the Reverend Billy is just so full of it.

TC:
The fullest of anybody thus far?

TC:
No, Princess Z is more fully packed.

TC:
How So?

TC:
Well, after all, she
is
a horse. It’s only natural that a horse can hold more horse manure than a human, however great his capacity. Don’t you remember Princess Z, that filly that ran in the fifth at Belmont? We bet
on
her and lost a bundle, practically our last dollar. And you said: “It’s just like Uncle Bud used to say—‘Never put your money on a horse named Princess.’ ”

TC:
Uncle Bud was smart. Not like our old cousin Sook, but smart. Anyway, who do we Strongly Like? Tonight, at least.

TC:
Nobody. They’re all dead. Some recently, some for centuries. Lots of them are in
Père-Lachaise
. Rimbaud isn’t there; but it’s amazing who is. Gertrude and Alice. Proust. Sarah Bernhardt. Oscar Wilde. I wonder where Agatha Christie is buried—

TC:
Sorry to interrupt, but surely there is someone alive we Strongly Like?

TC:
Very difficult. A real toughie. Okay. Mrs. Richard Nixon. The Empress of Iran. Mr. William “Billy” Carter. Three victims, three saints. If Billy Graham was Billy Carter, then Billy Graham would be Billy Graham.

TC:
That reminds me of a woman I sat next to at dinner the other night. She said: “Los Angeles is the perfect place to live—if you’re Mexican.”

TC:
Heard any other good jokes lately?

TC:
That wasn’t a joke. That was an accurate social observation. The Mexicans in Los Angeles have their own culture, and a genuine one; the rest have zero. A city of suntanned Uriah Heeps.

However, I
was
told something that made me chuckle. Something D. D. Ryan said to Greta Garbo.

TC:
Oh, yes. They live in the same building.

TC:
And have for more than twenty years. Too bad they’re not good friends, they’d like each other. They both have humor and conviction, but only
en passant
pleasantries have been exchanged, nothing more. A few weeks ago D. D. stepped into the elevator and found herself alone with Garbo. D. D. was costumed in her usual striking manner, and Garbo, as though she’d never truly noticed her before, said: “Why, Mrs. Ryan, you’re
beautiful
.” And D. D., amused but really touched, said: “Look who’s talkin’.”

TC:
That’s all?

TC:
C’est tout
.

TC:
It seems sort of pointless to me.

TC:
Look, forget it. It’s not important. Let’s turn on the lights and get out the pens and paper. Start that magazine article. No use lying here gabbing with an oaf like you. May as well try to make a nickel.

TC:
You mean that Self-Interview article where you’re supposed to interview yourself? Ask your own questions and answer them?

TC:
Uh-huh. But why don’t you just lie there quiet while I do this? I need a rest from your evil frivolity.

TC:
Okay, scumbag.

TC:
Well, here goes.

Q:
What frightens you?

A:
Real toads in imaginary gardens.

Q:
No, but in real life—

A:
I’m talking about real life.

Q:
Let me put it another way. What, of your own experiences, have been the most frightening?

A:
Betrayals. Abandonments.

But you want something more specific? Well, my very earliest childhood memory was on the scary side. I was probably three years old, perhaps a little younger, and I was on a visit to the St. Louis Zoo, accompanied by a large black woman my mother had hired to take me there. Suddenly there was pandemonium. Children, women, grown-up men were shouting and hurrying in every direction. Two lions had escaped from their cages! Two bloodthirsty beasts were on the prowl in the park. My nurse panicked. She simply turned and ran, leaving me alone on the path. That’s all I remember about it.

When I was nine years old I was bitten by a cottonmouth water moccasin. Together with some cousins, I’d gone exploring in a lonesome forest about six miles from the rural Alabama town where we lived. There was a narrow, shallow crystal river that ran through this forest. There was a huge fallen log that lay across it from bank to bank like a bridge. My cousins, balancing themselves, ran across the log, but I decided to wade the little river. Just as I was
about to reach the farther bank, I saw an enormous cottonmouth moccasin swimming, slithering on the water’s shadowy surface. My own mouth went dry as cotton; I was paralyzed, numb, as though my whole body had been needled with Novocaine. The snake kept sliding, winding toward me. When it was within inches of me, I spun around, and slipped on a bed of slippery creek pebbles. The cottonmouth bit me on the knee.

Turmoil. My cousins took turns carrying me piggyback until we reached a farmhouse. While the farmer hitched up his mule-drawn wagon, his only vehicle, his wife caught a number of chickens, ripped them apart alive, and applied the hot bleeding birds to my knee. “It draws out the poison,” she said, and indeed the flesh of the chickens turned green. All the way into town, my cousins kept killing chickens and applying them to the wound. Once we were home, my family telephoned a hospital in Montgomery, a hundred miles away, and five hours later a doctor arrived with a snake serum. I was one sick boy, and the only good thing about it was I missed two months of school.

Once, on my way to Japan, I stayed overnight in Hawaii with Doris Duke in the extraordinary, somewhat Persian palace she had built on a cliff at Diamond Head. It was scarcely daylight when I woke up and decided to go exploring. The room in which I slept had French doors leading into a garden overlooking the ocean. I’d been strolling in the garden perhaps half a minute when a terrifying herd of Dobermans appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; they surrounded and kept me captive within the
snarling circle they made. No one had warned me that each night after Miss Duke and her guests had retired, this crowd of homicidal canines was let loose to deter, and possibly punish, unwelcome intruders.

The dogs did not attempt to touch me; they just stood there, coldly staring at me and quivering in controlled rage. I was afraid to breathe; I felt if I moved my foot one scintilla, the beasts would spring forward to rip me apart. My hands were trembling; my legs, too. My hair was as wet as if I’d just stepped out of the ocean. There is nothing more exhausting than standing perfectly still, yet I managed to do it for over an hour. Rescue arrived in the form of a gardener, who, when he saw what was happening, merely whistled and clapped his hands, and all the demon dogs rushed to greet him with friendly wagging tails.

Those are instances of specific terror. Still, our real fears are the sounds of footsteps walking in the corridors of our minds, and the anxieties, the phantom floatings, they create.

Q:
What are some of the things you can do?

A:
I can ice-skate. I can ski. I can read upside down. I can ride a skateboard. I can hit a tossed can with a .38 revolver. I have driven a Maserati (at dawn, on a flat, lonely Texas road) at 170 mph. I can make a soufflé Furstenberg (quite a stunt: it’s a cheese-and-spinach concoction that involves sinking six poached eggs into the batter before cooking; the trick is to have the egg yolks remain soft and runny when the soufflé is served). I can tap-dance. I can type sixty words a minute.

Q:
And what are some of the things you can’t do?

A:
I can’t recite the alphabet, at least not correctly or all the way through (not even under hypnosis; it’s an impediment that has fascinated several psychotherapists). I am a mathematical imbecile—I can add, more or less, but I can’t subtract, and I failed first-year algebra three times, even with the help of a private tutor. I can read without glasses, but I can’t drive without them. I can’t speak Italian, even though I lived in Italy a total of nine years. I can’t make a prepared speech—it has to be spontaneous, “on the wing.”

Q:
Do you have a “motto”?

A:
Sort of. I jotted it down in a schoolboy diary:
I Aspire
. I don’t know why I chose those particular words; they’re odd, and I like the ambiguity—do I aspire to heaven or hell? Whatever the case, they have an undeniably noble ring.

Last winter I was wandering in a seacoast cemetery near Mendocino—a New England village in far Northern California, a rough place where the water is too cold to swim and where the whales go piping past. It was a lovely little cemetery, and the dates on the sea-grey-green tombstones were mostly nineteenth century; almost all of them had an inscription of some sort, something that revealed the tenant’s philosophy. One read: NO COMMENT.

So I began to think what I would have inscribed on my tombstone—except that I shall never have one, because two very gifted fortunetellers, one Haitian, the other an Indian revolutionary who lives in Moscow, have told me I will be lost at sea, though I don’t know whether by accident or by choice (
comme ça
, Hart Crane). Anyway, the first inscription I thought
of was: AGAINST MY BETTER JUDGMENT.

Then I thought of something far more characteristic. An excuse, a phrase I use about almost any commitment: I TRIED TO GET OUT OF IT, BUT I COULDN’T.

Q:
Some time ago you made your debut as a film actor (in
Murder by Death
). And?

A:
I’m not an actor; I have no desire to be one. I did it as a lark; I thought it would be amusing, and it was fun, more or less, but it was also hard work: up at six and never out of the studio before seven or eight. For the most part, the critics gave me a bouquet of garlic. But I expected that; everyone did—it was what you might call an obligatory reaction. Actually, I was adequate.

Q:
How do you handle the “recognition factor”?

A:
It doesn’t bother me a bit, and it’s very useful when you want to cash a check in some strange locale. Also, it can occasionally have amusing consequences. For instance, one night I was sitting with friends at a table in a crowded Key West bar. At a nearby table, there was a mildly drunk woman with a very drunk husband. Presently, the woman approached me and asked me to sign a paper napkin. All this seemed to anger her husband; he staggered over to the table, and after unzipping his trousers and hauling out his equipment, said: “Since you’re autographing things, why don’t you autograph this?” The tables surrounding us had grown silent, so a great many people heard my reply, which was: “I don’t know if I can autograph it, but perhaps I can
initial
it.”

Ordinarily, I don’t mind giving autographs. But there
is
one thing that gets my goat: without exception,
every grown man who has ever asked me for an autograph in a restaurant or on an airplane has always been careful to say that he wanted it for his wife or his daughter or his girl friend, but never,
never
just for himself.