Some Can Whistle (6 page)

“I should have bought a Cadillac long ago,” I said. “I’m a Texan, after all. I like big cars. Why was I driving a Mercedes anyway? Am I a European?”

“No, but at least you were trying to be one,” he said. “Now you’ve reverted to barbarism, just as I always knew you would.”

“You’re a boring little dope addict, leave me alone,” I said. “I doubt if you can even read Greek anymore.”

The salesman who brought the Cadillac was what is now called a hunk. He was in his mid-twenties, not very good-looking but still a hunk. Godwin offered him several varieties of drugs, all of which he refused. Godwin stared at him appraisingly, but the young man was rather stolid and may not have realized he was being appraised. A bored mechanic in a pickup was waiting to take the young salesman back to the Cadillac agency. It was clear he didn’t like Godwin, who hadn’t offered
him
any drugs.

I gave the young man a check, he gave me a receipt, and the good-smelling car was mine.

“Have a good day,” the young man said as he left. Godwin had tried to make eye contact with him but the young man wasn’t into eye contact.

“You’re as spoiled as a pig,” Godwin said to me. “Besides that, you’re irresponsible. Gladys will probably kill herself in that Mercedes.”

A dust cloud came pouring up the road from the south. At the head of it was Gladys; she had called the filling station, got the Mercedes started, and was now practicing driving in her new car. She sped by the house, going about eighty; the dust cloud engulfed Godwin before following Gladys on north.

“She seems to have got the hang of it,” I said. “As for you, you’re lucky that mechanic didn’t run over you. I don’t think your charm worked on that mechanic.”

“I rarely waste my charm on aging laborers,” he said archly. “Perhaps I should accompany you on this fatherly errand. I
might overlook your rudeness and accompany you. It could well be that you’ll need my charm when you locate the young lady.”

“Why would I? She’s
my
daughter,” I said. “Anyway your appearance more than offsets your charm. One look at you and she’d probably want a restraining order of some kind to keep me away from my own grandkids.”

Actually, I was tempted to take him. I was still pretty apprehensive at the thought of meeting my daughter. Godwin was strange, but on the other hand a known quantity. Having him along to bicker with might keep me from getting too nervous on the drive down.

Then, abruptly, I rejected the notion—a gutless notion at best. She was
my
daughter—I had spent many miserable years hoping against hope that I’d someday get a chance to meet her. Now the chance had come. Providing myself with a buffer before I even laid eyes on her would be the act of an emotional coward.

I
was
an emotional coward, more or less, but in this case, if ever, I knew that I had better try to transcend my cowardly instincts. I wanted that girl to like
me
, not Godwin.

“You better stay here and look after Gladys,” I said. “What if she did have a wreck?”

“You’re just greedy,” he said. “You don’t want to share your daughter with me. You probably won’t even bring her home. Pig that you are, you’ll take her somewhere where you can have her all to yourself.”

“The thought hadn’t occurred to me,” I said. “But now that you mention it, maybe I will. I wonder if she has a passport.”

I was getting a little tired of the reclusive life in Hardtop County, if the truth were known. I had begun to dream Mediterranean dreams, and to miss the girls of those golden shores: Claudia Cardinale and Melissa Mell, Ingrid Pitt, Senta Berger, Françoise Dorléac, Romy Schneider—all my continental dreamgirls. Maybe I’d take a house in Rome, get to know my daughter in a European setting—the grandkids could grow up bilingual.

Godwin had known me long enough to quickly sniff the drift of my thoughts.

“She works in a Dairy Queen,” he reminded me. “I hardly think she’d have a passport.”

“A Mr. Burger,” I corrected. “A Mr. Burger, not a Dairy Queen.”

“There may be a difference,” Godwin said, “but I doubt if that means she’s much of an internationalist.”

I got out of the Cadillac and went to get my bags.

“God, you’re tiresome,” I said. “If I don’t leave, I’ll be too tired to drive, just from arguing with you.”

“Look, I’m an experienced dad,” he said. “I’ve got nine children to your one. You may well find yourself in need of my expertise.”

“Godwin, not this time,” I said, stiffening my spine. “This is something I want to do alone.”

“Self-parody is the first portent of age,” I said to myself as I cruised through Jacksboro, the first town on my route south. Jacksboro was distinguished among the small towns of the region for having kept intact a block of old limestone buildings; the buildings were in no way appealing, but they
were
consistent in an area where few things were, architecturally speaking. The stone buildings of Jacksboro looked as if they’d all crack to bits and fall down if you whacked them a time or two with a big sledgehammer.

I drove on to Decatur, reflecting cheerfully that there wasn’t a single man-made structure within one hundred miles of my house that wasn’t ugly. The Kimball Museum in Fort Worth, which happens to be precisely one hundred miles from my front door, is the first appealing building one can hope to encounter in any direction, if one starts from my house.

“Self-parody is the first portent of age” was not some little personal warning I was issuing to myself; it was an alternative first sentence to my novel.

“The first portent of age is self-parody,” I said, to see if changing the word order would help things along. It seemed to me from what I could remember of novel writing, an activity I had unfortunately let lapse for nearly twenty years, that the first sentence of a book was of critical, even crucial, importance. If you could think of a good one, all the other sentences might follow after it obediently. They might just come marching briskly out of your brain, like well-drilled soldiers.

It was apparent to me that my girlfriends’ boyfriends sentence wasn’t working, although I had set my heart on it. Certainly it was an accurate reflection of my life, and though I’m odd, in the end I may not be all that odd. Several of my girlfriends now had boyfriends who looked to me for fatherly counsel. I spent a good many hours each week dispensing advice to the bewildered young men who—often to their intense surprise—had been adopted as the boyfriends of my older, but still perplexing, girlfriends. It was ironic, of course, that fatherly counsel was what I had been called on to provide—after all, I had never even seen my own child, and as yet had given her
no
counsel—but, if ironic, it might also be paradigmatic.

More odd, if possible, was the fact that I rarely spoke directly to these lucky young men. I relayed my counsel through the often cloudy medium of the girlfriends. I might say to Jeanie Vertus, “Why don’t you tell Carver this? You could just mention that I mentioned it.”

Or I might say to Nema Remington, “I think A.B. ought to consider such-and-such.” Nema, never one to let the grass grow under a useful thought, would promptly call her husband and demand that he consider such-and-such.

In that way, life proceeded. The process reminded me a little of a teen-age party game, popular in the fifties, of passing Life Savers from boy to girl on the ends of toothpicks. It was a game that suggested kissing, yet a sharp object stood between you and the kiss. Sharp objects also stood between the boyfriends and me—i.e., the girlfriends. That the girlfriends were sharp was fine with me. Their sharp behavior was what had got me interested in the girlfriends in the first place; life is too short to waste
on dull women, of which there are far too many—most of them employed in the television industry, or so I had once thought.

One or two of my girlfriends’ boyfriends were actually young in age—Marella Miracola’s, for example—but the ones who seemed to need the most counseling were merely young in mind.

“He’s a child, you see,” my girlfriends were always saying to me gravely in the wake of some particularly messy bit of behavior on the part of a boyfriend.

“He’s never grown up,” was another sentiment often heard in these conversations.

“He’s like a giant four-year-old,” Jeanie said of one lover. Jeanie often put things brilliantly.

By contrast with their lovers, I was, in the view of most of my old girlfriends, thoroughly grown up. The consensus was that I was not only grown up, I was
too
grown up. None of them had ever met Pedro, but they knew about him and seemed to feel that in ways that counted with them I was not much his junior. Chronologically I was three or four decades his junior, but chronology meant little to my girlfriends. All of them were firm subscribers to the nonsensical theory that you’re only as old as you think you are.

My own position was more realistic. I think I’m as old as I am, and I am fifty-one. At forty-eight, I was a different man; at forty-five, I was more different still. But fifty-one seemed to be the age at which one was most likely to cross the threshold of self-parody—which is why I was thinking of changing my first sentence.

The courthouse in Decatur looked as if it belonged in Bavaria. It was built of red granite and was topped by a grotesque tower with a clock in it. The clock had been stopped for several years—and the same could be said for the town over which the courthouse towered. Decatur was a stopped clock of sorts, but its citizens were very proud of their courthouse and kept spotlights
trained on it all night. To me it resembled one of the lesser castles of the mad King Ludwig II. If the Danube had been flowing past it, the courthouse might have looked appropriate, but unfortunately the only thing that flowed past it was Highway 287, a bleak asphalt river that carried one north to Amarillo and the drear Oklahoma panhandle.

I sometimes whiled away my drives by directing what I liked to think was a sharp eye at the many nondescript little communities through which I passed. There was obviously no guarantee I was going to make it as a novelist—I had left my imagination in mothballs too long. Travel writing might have to be my fallback position. My mind was not entirely gone, but it had acquired a tendency to drift. It seemed to me I might make a virtue of necessity and drift along with my mind. I had a friend named Jack McGriff, an antiques scout. Jack spent his life on the highways of America finding wonderful things wherever he went. During the nine years when I had been chained to a sound stage in Culver City, I had envied no one so much as Jack. He seemed to have the perfect life, going where he pleased, and—more importantly from my immediate point of view—not going where he didn’t please.

“I spend very little time in Gary, Indiana,” he remarked to me once. In the trade he was known as “Cadillac Jack,” due to his penchant for cars just like the one I was presently driving through Decatur.

While Jack McGriff was enjoying some of the best scenery in America, I was spending fourteen hours a day amid some of the worst, i.e., Culver City, the Gary of the entertainment industry. During my years there, I must have averaged at least two confrontations an hour. I had confrontations with writers, confrontations with actors, confrontations with light men, sound men, camera men, prop men, and—worst of all—network men.

Network men are a much-maligned species, and they deserve to be much maligned. They usually have glue for brains, and can only be communicated with through the medium of the screaming match. Day after day I screamed myself hoarse trying to stir their gluey thought processes a little; often I failed
utterly, and it was on those days that I most envied Jack McGriff. Why was I wasting my life screaming at glue-brained shits in twelve-hundred-dollar suits?

The answer was that my show was Number One in the ratings: six years straight, Number One, an unprecedented thing. My inventions, Al and Sal, were a normal middle-class family living in Reseda, California, with their three normal middle-class kids, Bert, Betsy, and little Bobby. They experienced the normal strains, the normal delights, the normal tragedies of American life, and, to my surprise, eighty or ninety million Americans chose each week to experience these same strains, delights, and tragedies with Al and Sal and their children.

When I wrote the pilot for “Al and Sal” I was living in one room in a motel in Blythe, California. I was a loner and a loser who had pretty much failed at everything: at the novel, at screenwriting, at marriage, and, over and over again, at romance. I had never enjoyed one day of normal domestic life, and I knew perfectly well I probably never would. Then, inexplicably, as a last throw of the dice, I produced from my fantasies of what domestic life could be a sitcom that not only had held America in thrall for nine years, but that was even now causing people who actually
had
domestic lives in places as far flung as Pakistan, Finland, and Brazil to neglect their own perfectly normal domesticities in order to watch a series that had been born of my own despairing fantasies.

One doesn’t easily stop being El Primo, even in television, where almost everyone’s daily fantasy is that some happy morning he’ll wake up and not be working in television anymore. I had hoped it every day for nine years, but Number One is not something you just casually walk away from; even in our last year, when the show was barely still in the top forty and I was worth hundreds of millions, I didn’t find it easy to leave.

I departed in stately stages, first to a palace on the cliffs at Laguna, then across the hills to another palace in Rancho Mirage, then to a spacious hacienda in Patagonia, Arizona, where I had the distinction to be the first gringo millionaire to be robbed by the famous cross-border Robin Hood, Vega Vega,
about whose career I produced a pilot for a series that died after four episodes: my public, if I still had one, wanted a newer, fresher, more yuppified Al and Sal, not some absurdist comedy about a Mexican bandit. “Cheech without Chong” was how one callous reviewer described it.