The Dream Merchant (14 page)

After a year of running himself into the ground, Jim began to hear Ava's distance on the phone. He started visiting the farm every second or third week. The hints of his wife's considerable burden were deflected by newly cut flowers and the smells of baking bread, her mom's recipes—Ava tried so hard for him. The first night back he usually took her to the little drive-through hamburger joint. They sat in the convertible eating and making out. Jim was fresh from huge victories. Everything he and Marvin touched turned to gold. She enjoyed his sundry tales about ugly Marvin, food spilling from his mouth. It really was a fairy tale, because her handsome Jim and this monster were making impossible sums of money. Jim promised he would soon buy her a palace, no more rickety farm. It would be the most beautiful home in all of Canada. She giggled. After breakfast, Jim rushed outside and swooped the projects of the farm into his strong arms. Thirty-six years old and he was on top of the world. There was too much of Jim to embrace—what to do with all this man? He crowded out any room for her spooks and remorse. They talked about the child they would make, even played with names and decided on Michael.

Ava brought out champagne in the evening. He was so pleased that she'd planned a little celebration. Jim applauded Ava for each tiny step, but he had no idea where she was heading. She held his glass of champagne while he drank. They made love and afterwards he told her that her legs were beautiful and she believed him and when she looked in the mirror her legs were shapely and youthful. He kissed her feet. She wanted to drink more, tried to coax him, but Jim was feeling sleepy. He was snoring on the sofa and she was sipping champagne and watching
The Tonight Show.

Jim went back to work feeling energized. He had smelled the woods and country air. Everything was breaking Jim's way. He was making a lot of money. The farm was pumping with life. He could have it all.

Jim gave a few directions to the Polish lady, although he never paused to look at her. Ava noticed, but that was okay. Jim was Jim. She had her own game.

*   *   *

Jim encouraged Ava to come to their gala Saturday meetings in Montreal. It would be just like old times when he and Ava had hawked irons in the tent. The first night back onstage he gave her a hug and above the din he promised Ava a new car, something sporty. For a minute or more, Jim waved to the crowd with a radiant smile. They believed in him and he soaked in the adulation. He said to her, Do you know what this feels like, Ava? But she seemed to be somewhere else entirely.

They were on a stage that could have accommodated a good-sized dance company while twenty-five hundred customers settled into folding chairs waiting for the money. Ava was wearing a low-cut black dress and stylish heels. Jim held his arm around her as though showing his girl all his hard-earned glory, but also he was showing her off like a bosomy plaything. (He could feel Ava drifting. Okay, he'd pull her along.) Meanwhile, love songs floated on the night air and the tremendous storage rack was emptying like an hourglass. The whole setup manufactured a cogent urgency, and Jim never had to pressure or beg to sell his wares.

Ava stood at Jim's elbow, dreamy and alluring, while he introduced big winners from the past. Some of these men and women had taken home really large sums, twenty thousand dollars, as much as forty-five thousand dollars. Jim asked them how their lives had been changed. Customers came up to the microphone and talked about buying summer homes and elite cabin cruisers to explore the Great Lakes. Many people were counting on Jim and Marvin's coupons to build a big future—they were banking on it.

The thing is that Jim really believed he was doing good and true work. He always believed in his deals.

*   *   *

Marvin never factored in honor. He calculated dollars. He understood perfectly that his pyramid operation was a dying comet. As more and more people bought into the pyramid, the deepening levels would splay out into longer and longer numbers and it would take more time for consumers to complete levels and get payouts. In a matter of months, time lags would kill off the enthusiasm of eager shoppers. Party-time Saturday nights would come to an end, and furious investors would be left with their overpriced merchandise and worthless coupons.

Marvin understood that the key to success was buying time, dragging out the weeks of the operation. He prepared a simple but effective distraction. After a half year of monthly Saturday events, he added a lottery to these sessions, a one-hundred-thousand-dollar cash giveaway that was open to all shoppers in the store. It was basically a smoke screen, a way to pump out money to customers, slews of money that promised much more to come. Free money—who cared if it came from coupons or a lottery? No one could be sure exactly how long it would take to make their fortunes, but good faith was abounding and customers felt confident their coupons were gestating like savings bonds. After all, there were winners every Saturday session to go along with inspiring testimonials about the good life from earlier investors who had come up big. As Marvin expected, with the lottery in place everyone continued to enjoy these celebratory nights about promise and winning. Marvin figured the deal could go on for another year, maybe a little longer. Then he'd shut it down, sell off the buildings, and leave with millions.

*   *   *

One Saturday night the legendary comedian Lenny Bruce showed up at their monthly event. Bruce had been doing his dark monologues for peanuts in Montreal after-hours clubs called black pigs. After a number of highly publicized arrests and obscenity trials, owners of the big stateside clubs would no longer risk hiring him. It was a shame, because by 1964 Lenny Bruce had redefined his comedic form and was a revered cultural figure, a Jack Kerouac or Charlie Parker. But he was frozen out and falling into despair.

Bruce could barely believe what he was witnessing. Consumers were in a buying frenzy for big-ticket items they didn't need or even desire. Lenny was a scam artist himself and he smelled something special. Years earlier he had supported himself and his wife, Honey, by dressing up in the stolen vestments of a Catholic priest and going door-to-door raising money for a fictitious leper colony. He listened to habitués exchange savvy remarks about the best deals for coupons, what products yielded the most coupons for the money. Products were marked up 20 percent or more from what you'd pay in Sears, but the built-in profit potential from the Saturday events made this premium trivial to shoppers. The deal seemed to be a bonanza for everyone involved. People spent their savings and some even borrowed against homes to accumulate coupons. He noticed the beautiful sad, sexy woman onstage, part of the operation but also way outside it.

The scene he'd stumbled upon was Swiftean and hilarious, the endgame of capitalism. Bruce immediately introduced bits and snatches of Marvin's business scam into his comedy routine in one of the local clubs. The comedian riffed on love and money with obsessed pig farmers buying color televisions they didn't need. They drooled over a stacked sad-eyed lady held prisoner in a billowing tent, forced to give away free money on Saturday nights. A few of Lenny's Montreal skits were recorded and still exist today. He wanted to develop the routine into something larger that he could use on television, if he was ever invited back on television, or even in a movie. But first he needed to learn more about what was going on.

 

14.

From the early years of my friendship with Jim, when Mara was still a small child playing in a dusty kibbutz in northern Israel, I feared losing him. I could see him spinning off into new deals and associations with hardly a glance back. This feeling became much more pronounced after he took up with the Israeli girl and cast aside all trappings of his former life; I would soon become another nameless and forgotten “bub” along with a thousand old customers, salesmen, and cronies whom he once loved. Unexpectedly, the fear went away when I began writing “the book.”

Each visit to their place I learned new details of the story, colors, smells, minor characters; now and then I coaxed a secret. I already knew parts of his life, but when I pieced it together the panorama was a revelation. Imagine discovering that a friend of twenty years had once been an accomplished concert pianist or even a violent criminal or, in Jim's case, both, because his secret past encompassed vast dramatic and ethical terrain. My friend's youthful heroism saving his starving family might have inspired a nineteenth-century novel, and later on his moral drift was equally compelling, shocking really. For so many days he and I trolled together in the Gulf Stream, played gin rummy until dawn, drank beers at the Blue Moon. Jim was just Jim.

Writing pages about him had another effect that I hadn't anticipated. The more I learned, the more I became tender and protective toward the younger Jim, so much so that I found it somewhat painful to leave my character for visits to my actual friend in Florida. At first I found this split screen amusing, but then my mood hardened. Now that I had Jim on paper, I wanted him to have room to breathe, to be himself. I didn't want my character trifled with. It annoyed me to have my friend edit his younger self crudely, exaggerate his victories or take out awkward moments, to impress the girl. When Jim asked me about “the book,” I could feel myself tightening up. I didn't want to talk about it. I ducked the question.

But I still needed to learn many things about him and I couldn't finish without his help. This made me extremely nervous. A writer's material is his wealth and future or at the very least his sustaining illusion. Writers suffer gold fever over story lines. In my work I sweated to write honest sentences, but when I visited Jim I turned into a salesman. I was smiling and glad-handing, offering bribes—dinner at the Italian joint or maybe a case of beer or I found myself telling Mara she was beautiful or, worse yet, that she was extremely intelligent, while Jim beamed at us, yes, yes—I said whatever I needed to get him talking. I became an operator. I just wanted the story. I wanted to hear about Jim's years in the jungle. He could have the girl. By now I didn't really care. I needed to write my book.

Lenny Bruce became an issue between us. It suited Jim's purpose to brag that the great comedian had been a habitué of his store. It was like professing his friendship with Sammy Davis Jr., the sort of name-dropping I'd grown up with around my dad and his friends, all of whom had boasted about drinking nights with their Vegas buddies Sammy Davis and Sinatra as if these stars had nothing better to do than hang out with reps. But when I asked Jim for details about the comedian he clearly didn't want to discuss the subject around Mara.

When I couldn't get things from Jim or sensed he was aggrandizing for the girl, I began looking to other sources. I spoke to Jim's up lines and salesmen. I telephoned two of his lovers from years earlier. I called his mother in Canada. I talked to Phyllis numerous times. I traveled to San Francisco and spent three days with seventy-year-old Ava—that revealed astonishing back roads. Jim knew that I made these inquiries and often asked what I discovered and then looked a little dislocated or melancholy. He gave me phone numbers and sometimes made introductions. We both recognized that there were two stories—the story of his life and the story he was telling in front of Mara. Usually the stories converged but not always. He and I were now motivated by different callings. Then there was the reality of our friendship apart from the stories. Getting back to that was harder for me than for him, which, frankly, surprised me.

*   *   *

When I spoke to Jim from my home in New York he said to me that he was just barely surviving, spending the last of Mara's savings and begging his elderly mother, Sally, for money. Nothing was happening about the Wow Card. Maybe it was dead. He was hoping Phyllis would let him have two paintings to sell; actually, they were signed Monet prints he and Phyllis had saved from their Canada house. There was no longer any jump in his voice, no big deals about to break loose. Jim worried about sustaining this new life with a girl he barely knew. What if it registered to her that he was old and broke? What if the whole thing unraveled and she dropped him? What then? At night there were strangers ringing up from Israel speaking Hebrew. What was she talking about to these people? Who were they? Every few days she asked him, When can we get married, Jim?

Soon, real soon, baby.

Jim was promising big things all around. Sometimes he sneaked off to a phone booth and called Phyllis. He needed to hear her voice so that he could continue running away. But she was also broke and scared. He assured her he would soon have money to take care of her in style, like always. He'd buy her a little house on the water, and they'd remain best friends. She could count on it. He didn't mention that he'd stopped paying the premium on his life insurance. Phyllis had been the beneficiary. What would be the point in telling her? he asked me. Maybe he was right.

I tried to close my eyes to all of this sorrowful news. His candor and pathos were making me nervous because I had been writing about a man who won or lost on a big stage, a phoenix. I was in the thrall of Jim and Marvin as they rose to the top in their unlikely fashion. I wanted to write a novel with a grand sweep. In my life, Jim, Ava, and Marvin were eclipsing Jim, Mara, and Phyllis. I was afraid his present circumstance would turn off the faucet or perhaps shake my resolve. So when Jim came across as pathetic or crotchety I wanted to erase him like a father who had been a failure and humiliation to his kids. Sometimes I didn't think about him for long stretches of time, although I was writing his story every day, or I found myself judging my friend, but increasingly I regarded him as a function of the book. What present turn in his life would make a better ending? Would it be better for the novel if my friend succeeded or if he failed?

I kept expecting Jim would phone me with the news that Mara had gone off with someone younger and wealthy and that would inspire my ending, but no. She was in the background, happy, humdrum, speaking Hebrew with her kids, or she might pick up another receiver and say something to us in English, very saucy, or she might ask him if there was a football game tonight—they had started watching the games together and he enjoyed teaching her the rules and telling her gossip about the players.