The Dream Merchant (19 page)

 

20.

Gesler Sheds was the most extravagant and enduring expression of Marvin's profuse genius. By the spring of 1966 Marvin had sold the retail stores and put most of the money into constructing the first of four mammoth sheet-metal factories, altogether nearly two million square feet of manufacturing space. The partners would in fact change the face of Canada's farming landscape, and beyond that they would rapidly transform the manner and upside potential of agricultural storage throughout a dozen arid countries in Africa and the Middle East.

At this most prolific time in Jim's life, he didn't know anything about Ava and Lenny Bruce. Jim first learned about their affair nearly four decades later, when he and Ava met for a whimsical and affectionate evening in San Diego. (Some of this history came directly from Ava, during our visit, but many details I discovered myself at the Princeton University Library, where Lenny Bruce's notes and journals are archived. There were nearly a hundred fervent handwritten pages about Jim's wife and the meaning of love as seen through the comedian's dark and improbable lens.) Jim readily acknowledged to me that if he'd known about them in 1966 it wouldn't have mattered very much. He was working fifteen-hour days assembling and training a national sales team and looking after Marvin. He didn't have the time to placate his wife with her considerable sorrows. Jim was racing for glory and the dreams of his father. But I could imagine my friend pausing a beat to pawn his wife off to the great comedian, absolving guilt with his extravagant salesman's largess. Jim was always working the angles.

It was also in the spring of 1966 that Ava had made her decision to move out to California and become Lenny Bruce's second wife. She was biding her time for the right moment to tell her husband. She still cared for Jim, but he was no longer in the front row of her concerns and dreams.

Ava hadn't yet told Lenny she was two months' pregnant with his baby. It felt exciting to be sitting on so much power. She imagined his ecstasy and the way his life would change overnight. He hadn't visited Canada for a month, but they talked nearly every day. She didn't want to tell him on the phone. She found it pleasant holding back the news.

Ironically, Lenny Bruce was never so highly revered as a performer as during this period when he was holed up in his California house, not working a day, because the clubs wouldn't hire him. Following his second LA trial more than eighty prominent figures, including theologians, scientists, entertainers, novelists, playwrights, and critics, a virtual Who's Who of American intelligentsia, had signed a public protest against his legal persecutions. They described Lenny as a “performer in the field of social satire in the tradition of Swift, Rabelais, and Twain.” Many cultural luminaries wrote letters to Lenny ruing his suffering and extolling his art. For the most part he didn't answer this correspondence.

Lenny was dead broke from not having any income and paying lawyers for his frequent court appearances. Since curtailing his visits to Ava, he had stopped taking care of himself. He was surviving on junk food, diet soda, smack, methedrine, uppers to study, and downers to sleep for an hour or two. Lenny was paranoid about the police breaking into his Hollywood home and taking his drugs from the medicine cabinet, so he paced his rooms with syringes, vials, and pills jiggling in his pockets. He was putting on weight and his ankles and feet were achy and swollen with edema.

Nonetheless, Lenny harbored the hope of winning back his reputation in the courts and salvaging his career with something new and bold. For a few hours in the morning he studied law books, listened to tapes of his past trials, or sometimes jotted ideas for routines or notes about Ava. Their white-hot love affair had been more obsessive and delicious than any man could imagine, but winning Ava's commitment had changed the experience almost overnight. Lenny wrote in his notebook that it was a relief not to feel such wrenching desire. This huge love had been a distraction and now he felt drawn back to his old habits, and if they shortened his days on earth they also brought back his artistic hunger. An old friend of Lenny's, television pioneer Steve Allen, was guest hosting for Johnny Carson on
The Tonight Show
and had invited Lenny to make an appearance. Lenny was looking forward to this first gig in months.

He began writing pages about romantic love with the notion of developing ideas into a book or perhaps a screenplay. Ava would be the gorgeous centerpiece while Jim and Marvin's flashy business hoax would be the metaphor for critiquing an unethical economic and legal system that pillaged men's lives. “Ugliness and beauty, who can tell?” Lenny wrote cryptically in one of his journals.

While Ava was dreaming about a new house and a baby in Hollywood, Lenny was turning her over in his mind, examining his attraction and doubts as closely as he examined her nude body when they were together on the farm. He still got horny when he thought of her arms, her neck and breasts, but it bothered Lenny that he cared so much about the way she looked. If she weren't a stunning beauty in the manner of his ex-wife, maybe he wouldn't like her at all. It was hard to gauge the wisdom of an exceptionally beautiful woman like Ava. Probably he loved her because she made him feel young and alive. His little black books had pages of such musings. Perhaps it wasn't Ava he loved but an image he'd created? Maybe she was hardly more than the projection of his desire. Lenny became obsessed with this idea that Ava lived in his head and that loving her was mostly loving himself. She was just handy.

Lenny was thinking about these ideas incessantly. What is love? he asked Ava on the phone after sharing some thoughts about the new project. Lenny's mind was filled with the taped sounds of her life, her darkest urges and needs. He thought of her more now as his model and muse than a lover and he wanted to share each bratty caustic irony, except her deep silence stopped him short. The question of her value apart from physical beauty had tortured Ava ever since she realized that first-place trophies in beauty pageants were the way to her father's heart. But more immediately, she was on the verge of leaving her husband to come to Lenny. She wasn't feeling like a muse. She was nauseous in the morning, pregnant with his son, not that Lenny knew this. Ava was confused and upset.

Lenny tried to mask his mistake with fast talk and gaudy promises. But he got off the line feeling disgusted and out of control. Then, for a moment, he saw it clearly: they were both scrambling to grab onto something, two big losers. He loved her, or he needed her, what did it matter? She'd wanted to come to him and he'd tortured her with insipid conjectures. He wanted to touch her, call her back, explain everything, but he was too sick and weak. He was trapped in a bottle. He tried to pardon himself with junkie excuses: he couldn't help himself; he'd call her back later. He went in the bathroom and took out the stuff. He watched himself grinning into the mirror.

*   *   *

Ava was late turning on
The Tonight Show
and host Steve Allen was nearly finished with his introduction.… he's more than a comedian; Lenny Bruce comments on the world with the genius of a philosopher. Here he is, the great Lenny Bruce.…

When Ava saw him on the grainy little black-and-white television her heart began flapping in her chest. She had no idea he would be on. Lenny was seated on a stool, twenty pounds heavier than the last time he visited Canada. By the way, I'm not proud that I'm divorced, he began hesitantly, as though trying to fathom the routine. Lenny's eyes were swollen and spooky and one of them hardly opened. Ava knew the look. It's a failure, you know, and it's a hang-up, being divorced. Especially if you're on the road. He spoke slowly, mumbling his words, occasionally spitting one out like a bad seed. But once the material caught hold, Lenny smiled to himself and delivered the routine in a restless, searching manner all the more affecting for his obvious discomfort.

Society has made up a lot of dirty words that actually hurt me as an individual. Now, I'm on the road, and it's three o'clock in the morning, and I meet a girl, and I like her. Supposing I just have a record I wanted to hear, or I have a good painting, an original Degas, and I want to relate to her, just talk to her. There's no lust, no carnal image there. But because where I live is a dirty word—at three in the morning—I can't say to her, Would you come to my hotel? 'Cause “hotel” is a dirty word at 3:00
A.M.
Not the next day at two o'clock in the afternoon when the Kiwanis meet there, though—then “hotel” is clean. But at three in the morning …

So you start to think. You know you can't say “hotel” to a chick, so you try to think of what won't offend. What is a clean word to society? “Trailer.” Trailers are hunting and fishing and outdoors. You tell a chick, Hey, you wanna come to my trailer? there's nothing dirty in that. Okay, uh, where is it? “Trailer” is clean and so she'd be happy to come there.

I met a chick I really dig; I'm crazy about her. I met her in a circus tent where she tries to entice guys to buy coupons with her looks; because she's really stacked, everyone wants to touch her. Me too. Is that dirty or clean? Maybe it's dirty, but it seems clean to me. She's in this tent selling coupons. Buy a coupon and you get a dream. An expense-paid trip to the Caribbean. Or money for the rest of your life. They sell big dreams in the circus tent. People are spending hundreds for coupons that are probably worthless, unless a dream is worth something. Apparently it is, because I told this lady I loved her, right there in the tent, and she laughed at me. He must be a dirty old man, says he loves me in a tent. He wants it. He must be dirty.

My girl is so beautiful, reminds me of my ex-wife. Maybe that's bad, to fall for someone because she reminds you of someone else. I'm not sure if it's good or bad.

Anyhow, she lets me visit her on the farm, whenever her old man is away, which is probably wrong. But it feels right. I call her place the Sad Palace. It's sad because this chick, she's so beautiful and stacked, she thinks she's ugly. The Sad Palace turns things upside down. My girl can't stand her arms, her legs and breasts, as if someone told her they are dirty. They are beautiful. Legs and breasts aren't dirty. I always tell that to judges when they haul me into court for obscenity. How can legs and breasts be dirty, c'mon! That's what the farm does to her, confuses ugly and beautiful. In the Sad Palace, beautiful is ugly and ugly is beautiful. She looks out the window at the trees and thinks the view is ugly. This place makes you wonder, What is dirty? What is clean? Maybe what you think is dirty, Steve, is different from what I think. I keep saying that to the judges. Maybe what's dirty for you is clean for me.

*   *   *

Ten days later, Lenny called Ava on the phone and was just barely coherent. He said that his ex-wife, Honey, came over to the house and they shot up together, very strong shit; he collapsed on the floor. Ava missed some of the words, but Honey was all through it. Honey was worried he might die. She couldn't get him standing. He was too heavy. Honey and a friend brought him around by holding ice cubes against his balls and then they forced him to drink coffee and walk around the pool. Honey fed him uppers so he wouldn't fall asleep. She said she wouldn't do smack with him anymore because she couldn't lift him up, he was too heavy.

Lenny insisted he was okay. He didn't sound okay. He was back seeing his wife. Ava told him then, blurted it out that she was pregnant with his child. Lenny, do you hear me? I'm having a baby, your baby. You wanted this baby. You hear me? His answer was incomprehensible. Then she heard a shuffling sound and he was off the line. She tried to dial back, but no one picked up. She didn't know anyone in Lenny's California life to dial. She was shut out. There is nothing about this last conversation in Lenny's notebooks. There is no telling whether he understood what she was saying about the baby.

Three days later, Ava was in the kitchen having a sandwich when she heard on the radio that Lenny Bruce had died of an overdose in his Hollywood home.

 

21.

Nine months had passed since Mara had introduced herself to Jim at a recruiting meeting in Israel. They were seated on a torn sofa that smelled like old dogs. She was now his wife. They had taken their vows in a civil ceremony with two witnesses selected at random from a small group of people milling around.

Mara was absently turning through yesterday's newspaper and glancing out the window at her kids playing in the backyard near the rusty swings. He called her name, but she didn't answer. He waved at her playfully, hoping for a smile. Jim sat back and stared out the window at the kids.

He couldn't sell this one small woman who had become his wife. He couldn't convince her that things would turn his way again. He couldn't make Mara believe he would lose twenty pounds or that he would have the check next week from Peter—his youngest brother occasionally sent Jim a check for thirty or fifty dollars—and they would be able to go out to an Italian dinner in the mall. She had a resistance, a thickness he could not penetrate; perhaps it was petulance or the arrogance of youth. He couldn't make his words stick. He couldn't close it.

Jim's focus had narrowed to her smallest impulses and responses. All his selling had become devoted to currying her favor. When Mara was happy and especially if he made a remark that captured her interest or made her smile, he felt as if something very large had broken his way. Immediately he wanted to build upon it, make it forever. If she made a caustic remark or turned off to him completely—she had been doing this more lately—he felt like a spurned adolescent. He rarely thought about his daughter or his ninety-five-year-old mom, who was still living in Canada in the house he had bought for her in 1975. He tried to squeeze Phyllis from his mind, although she had saved him from many jams and shared his aspirations for more than two decades of marriage. They had lived in spectacular homes and shared thousands of delicious meals. Now Jim didn't know where she was sleeping or eating or whether she was eating at all. He wasn't even curious—this was proof, he reasoned, that Phyllis was no longer alive to him and hadn't been for some time. This was his justification, his righteousness. Mara was living in his skin. She was lurking behind every miscellaneous thought.