The Brothers K (50 page)

When, at Everett’s suggestion, they abandoned the typewriter in order to stick their heads underwater and shout down into the far more responsive lake, Phil, or whoever he was by then, took his shot at the Underwood, and for a long while typed at a furious pace. But when, after an amount of time I fear we can call only “an amount of time,” Everett strolled over to check out Phil’s prodigious output, he found perhaps twenty pages’ worth of the numbers 2 through 8 typed out in a single-spaced column, thus:

Everett was not impressed. He picked up a stick, slipped it around the oblivious typist’s back, and shoved down the left shift key, causing the poor fellow’s perfect column of 2345678s to be marred by a sudden @#$%¢&*. “Damn!” Everett said, pointing at it. “Too bad, Phil! You’re disqualified!”

When Phil began to weep, Everett threw an arm round his shoulder and led him down to help Didi and Dale find out who the hell be the lake. He then rushed back to the log, cracked his knuckles over the keyboard, and let his altered consciousness stream onto the page as planned. The result, as far as even Everett could later tell, was several pages of self-indulgent gobbledygook. But while he was clacking away he happened to overhear Dale, Phil and Didi “playing tricks” on the apparently gullible lake by pretending they were really Einstein, Yogi Bear and Queen Elizabeth. Pathetic as this was, it struck the altered-Everett funny, and he managed (barely) to type out a little of their dialogue. Then a thundershower hit, the drugs began to wear off, and they drove back to Seattle, only to realize, first, that everything they’d written was drivel, and second, that they’d left Phil’s Underwood up at the lake.

This left Everett with what he felt was a clear choice: one option was to admit to his disgruntled friends that the mescaline experiment was a ridiculous and dangerous outing that had cost a perfectly good Underwood its life; the other was to convince them that the day had in fact been a smashing literary success, that their Einstein/Yogi Bear/Queen Elizabeth skit was brilliant, and that if they only developed it a little it could lead to great things. Obviously the latter option was as harebrained as Congress. But faith is amazing stuff. Even faith in nonsense. And Everett, at the time, really did have faith in what he called “the Keseyian Antitradition of Literary Inspiration via Psychedelics.” The result of that faith—though written primarily under the influence of caffeine—was his first and last play.

·  ·  ·  ·

H
ats
was an ambitious work in that people of all nationalities, ages and walks of life appeared in it. It was also a provincial work, in that it was riddled with local and national political references, TV puns, sight gags and private jokes thunk up by Everett and his cronies while heavily under the influence of 1968ism. By the time he’d whipped it into final form, though, Everett had incorporated a few clever theatrical devices (for instance, a play within the play) and come up with a cast so incongruous that they would probably have gotten some laughs without even speaking. And after harassing local playhouse producers and directors for weeks as only he could harass, Everett got
Hats
staged at the Boathouse Theater on Lake Washington. So one fine summer’s Saturday, Irwin and I (after he’d joined Mama for church) drove up in his nifty little Nash Rambler and caught the opening-night performance.

The obvious eccentricity of
Hats
turned out to be its chief dramatic purpose as well: everybody in it, no matter their age, race or activity, was at all times wearing some sort of hat or cap, and attached to each one, by dangling springs, were two enormous revolvers. One revolver was painted red, with a yellow hammer and scythe on its handle. The other was star-spangled red, white and blue. Both—even when bobbing dangerously about on the end of their springs—were constantly cocked, and aimed straight at the hat-wearer’s brains.

The only set was a kind of forest made of trees, bushes, telephone poles and TV antennas. In honor of the play’s supposed inspiration, Yogi Bear wandered out into this forest first, wearing his usual green necktie and putzy hat—plus the revolvers. “Hey hey hey! Am I starvin’ today!” he said. Then he started looking around for pickanick baskets.

Hoss Cartwright from
Bonanza
came out next. And in addition to the revolvers attached to his ten-gallon he had a big horse pistol which he was aiming at Yogi, obviously intending to pot him. As he was about to squeeze the trigger though, Tarzan (wearing a blue baseball cap with a hot-pink T on it, plus the two guns) came swinging out on a telephone wire making his famous jungle cry—which scared Hoss into swinging the big horse pistol around on him instead, Tarzan scowled at him. Hoss scowled back. “You Injun?” he finally asked.

“Ungawa!” answered Tarzan.

“Well gosh!” Hoss chuckled. “Sorry, fella! You had me a-goin’ there for a second!”

“Ungawa!” laughed Tarzan.

“Say,” Hoss asked. “You haven’t seen Pa anywheres, have ya?”

Tarzan shook his head, then asked Hoss in grunts and gestures whether he’d seen Jane or Cheetah.

“Well,” Hoss answered. “Now you mention it, I
did
see one fine-lookin’ woman, dressed a lot like you are, headin’ off into the shrubs with that rascal Little Joe. I reckoned she was Injun. She any kin to you?”

“Ungawa!” screamed Tarzan, and off he ran with his head-pistols sproinging.

Eddie Haskel of
Leave It to Beaver
was the play’s narrator. He strolled among the various characters like a sneering Beatrice through an Inferno, exchanging gibes or just rolling his eyes at some, giving bad advice or deliberate misdirections to others. For instance, noticing the entwined legs and cowboy boots of what was obviously a pair of writhing lovers sticking out of the bushes, he said, “Hey, Tarzan! Check it out!” And Tarzan ran over, yelled “Ungawa!” and dove right in on top. But while the curses and clothes and leaves came flying up out of the shrubs, Eddie turned with a smirk to the audience and said, “Heh-heh-heh! The Apeman just jumped Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.”

Before going any further I should mention Irwin’s reaction to it all. He had let out his first roar of laughter with Yogi’s first “Hey hey hey,” roared again each time a new character so much as appeared onstage, and in no time had everyone around him roaring too. In fact, having never seen the play without him, I have no idea whether the sidesplitting and curtain calls and surprisingly merciful reviews in the
Times
and
Post-Intelligencer
the next morning were due to the drama itself or to the deadly infectiousness of Irwin’s laugh.

I can’t remember exactly what came next—and it hardly matters. Mr. Ranger showed up to keep an eye on Yogi; Sergeant Friday and Captain Kangaroo were there; Queen Elizabeth was for some reason helping Wilma Flintstone look for Fred; then Albert Einstein appeared, formed a terrible crush on Wilma, and started following her around, espousing increasingly complicated theories to try to impress her. The subplots had multiplied to the verge of chaos, the serious theatergoers had long since walked out in disgust, and Irwin had pretty well howled himself to exhaustion when the stage suddenly darkened, a spotlight fell on Eddie Haskel, and he turned to the audience and came out with a kind of soliloquy: “What we’re all basically doin’ in these woods is searchin’, right? We’re all lookin’ for somethin’. For the Apeman here, it’s Jane and Little Joe. For the Yog it’s a pickanick basket. For Hoss it’s Pa. For Roy and Dale (heh-heh-heh!), it’s their own private bush. But meanwhile, check out these hats we’re all wearin’.”

For the first time, the characters all took notice of their preposterous headgear. “Can you believe it?” Eddie asked, boinging his revolvers around a little. “Can you believe us all dorkin’ around up here in these little doom-units? What a buncha fuckin’ jerks.”

“Say there, young fella!” Roy Rogers interrupted. “That’s no way to talk. I
like
my hat!”

“Me too,” said Hoss.

“I think they’re
sexy,”
cooed Dale Evans.

“Gosh!” said Hoss.

But then a man in the audience started hollering and fussing around—and we saw that he too had a two-gunned hat stuck on his head. A woman up in the balcony stood up and screamed: same problem. Then it was a little boy down front—a kid no more than five, cute as a guinea pig and a born ham actor. “Get it offa me!
Please!”
he pleaded. “It’s not funny anymore!” And somehow he managed to burst into such pathetic, convincing tears that Irwin’s eyes filled with tears too. Then a couple stood up in the middle of the audience—a man and woman I’d wondered about, since they’d been necking a little, and it was not the sort of drama to inspire that. Anyhow, they started trying to wrestle the. hats off each other’s heads out of love for each other. But
their
hats were invisible. They were damned good invisible-hat-wrestlers too. (Everett later said they were mimes.) They made the problem so dire and real that before long fifty or sixty people, none of them planted actors now, were wrestling with sinister nothings welded to the air above their skulls. And when the theater-wide struggle was at its height the spotlight hit Eddie Haskel again, and he smirked his famous smirk and said, “Now you get the picture. Now I can say it and maybe not offend you. We’re
all
a hopeless buncha jerks. These Kremlin/Pentagon party hats are stuck to our heads to stay.”

“Hey hey hey! What a shitty toupé!” quoth Yogi Bear.

“No cussing, Yogi,” carped Mr. Ranger.

“Please! Get it off!” the kid in the front row whimpered.

“I like mine!” Roy Rogers insisted.

“Happy Trails,” said Eddie Haskel.

T
hat was the gist of Act I, and perhaps the emotional climax of the play. But it was not the end of the entertainment. The second act dealt with the incompatibility of antiwar activism and romance, and was, if anything, even sillier than the first. Einstein was a central character. He kept tediously expounding upon things like radiation, megatonnage and so on,
trying to talk people into Banning the Hat. But every time he came close to inciting a few characters to protest, the French cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew would come bounding in and start poeticizing about springtime and love and beautiful women—and Queen Elizabeth would form a royal crush on Captain Kangaroo, or Liberace would tear off after the beefcake Tarzan, or Roy Rogers and Dale Evans would continue their search for a private bush, and the antinuke movement would fall to pieces. Even Einstein, under Pepé’s cupidean influence, would eye Wilma Flintstone suggestively, and his theories, against his will, would grow longer and longer He finally “climaxed” by telling her that an American dollar bill was six inches long, that a mile was five thousand two hundred and eighty feet, that ten thousand five hundred and sixty dollar bills laid end to end would cover a mile, that it was ninety-three million miles to the sun, that nine hundred eighty-two billion eighty million dollars laid end to end would therefore create a bridge of dollars from our planet to the sun, that any child realized that the construction of such a bridge would not be wise since the sun’s heat would ignite the money and burn the entire bridge, but that, since the year 1950, the United States Pentagon had burned the equivalent of not one but
two
such earth-to-sun dollar-bridges; and to what end? Why, to purchase the deadly hats everybody was wearing! Before the audience could begin to contemplate these dire calculations, though, Queen Elizabeth commenced bragging to Captain Kangaroo about how a pound note was considerably longer than a dollar, inspiring Liberace to nudge Wilma Flintstone and lisp, “So is Fred!,” which caused Wilma to retort, “How would
you
know?,” to which Liberace replied, “That’s exactly what I hope to show Tarzan!,” upon which the dismayed Apeman hollered “Ungawa!” and vanished into the woods. And when Eddie Haskel hollered, “Hey, Lib!” and pointed out a wriggling thicket, the pianist tiptoed over, dove right in—

and landed on top of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.

H
ats
ran all summer at the Boathouse, was produced in two other instate college towns, and Everett not only became a campus celebrity but was known for a few months in wider circles as “the young guerrilla-theater playwright,” “the head who hatched the hilarious
Hats”
and so on. In trying to capitalize on such labels, though, his original theory of composition failed him: no matter what chemicals he used to inspire or lash himself, all subsequent attempts at plays were stillborn.

Everett liked to claim at the time that it was the antiwar movement which forced him to sacrifice his budding career as a playwright. But
there were less specious reasons for his flash-in-the-pan.
Hats
, after all, had not been the work of a would-be dramatist who sat down with a sense of literary calling: it had been the one-night outburst of a cornered Kesey fanatic hell-bent on proving to his buddies that the hapless Phil’s typewriter had died for a noble cause. This, even for Everett, was unusually silly subject matter, but the motivating force was typical: at his silliest as at his best, Everett’s oratorical and literary styles have always been contrapositive; he needs an action against which to react, a thesis against which to pose an antithesis, an offense by which to be offended. He has always been a kind of verbal and literary boxer—a compulsive counter-puncher, really. And the confrontations and causes of 1968 had just turned his world into a counterpuncher’s paradise. He did begin to write and fight against the war, militarism, racism and so on, but he sacrificed very little that he valued, least of all a career as a playwright, in order to do so. Activism suited his contrary nature to perfection. The only inconsistency, the only serious discrepancy I saw between Everett’s personality and his new political passion was that he had supposedly begun fighting for the very stuff he had always found hardest to deal with: