The Man Who Cancelled Himself (27 page)

“That was tactful of her,” Tommy said bitterly.

“One might also say diplomatic,” agreed Marty.

“So how did it?” I asked.

They both glanced across the room to make sure Lyle was out of earshot.

“He stole him from us,” Tommy said flatly.

“Care to tell me about it?”

They exchanged a look.

“We’ll give you the facts,” Marty said carefully. “Lyle will no doubt give you a different version of them. . , .”

“If he hasn’t already,” broke in Tommy.

“But ours is the real story.”

I nodded. In my business I am often treated to six or eight entirely different versions of the real story, each one of them entirely believable. As for the truth, well, the truth is that there is no real story. There’s only one individual’s self-interest bumping up against another’s. That’s why you shouldn’t ever believe anything you read in the newspaper, with the possible exception of Calvin and Hobbes.

“I met Fiona in drama school,” Marty recalled. “I was still kind of torn at that point in my life. Part of me wanted to perform. Part of me wanted to write. Tommy and me, we started writing together when we were still in high school. Comedy routines, sketches, one-act plays. We’ve been writing together for, Christ, it must be—”

“Twenty-five years,” said Tommy. “Which makes us—”

“Old fuckers,” concluded Marty, shaking his head. .

I ate my chili, wondering what it must be like to write with someone else for so long. Their brains must have become a single mutant organism by now, neither one complete without the other: Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and see the incredible Siamese twins of shtickdom.

“For a while,” Marty continued, “the two of us had been tummeling this idea for a stage play. Kind of a
Man Who Came to Dinner
vehicle, only the uninvited guest isn’t this world-famous author, he’s—”

“My Uncle Maxie,” said Tommy, picking up the ball and running with it. “My mom’s kid brother, who used to periodically descend on our household when I was a little boy. Maxie was this totally exotic, Runyonesque character. He hung out at the racetrack, he drank cheap whiskey, he fucked hookers—my kind of guy, in other words. My father hated him, because he never had a real job and because he was a major leech. Ate up all our food, ran up huge phone bills. He’d stay for weeks at a time, driving my father crazy. Only he couldn’t throw Maxie out—my mom adored him. One year they got in this huge fight over him, with the result being that Maxie had to pull his weight if he was going to stay. That meant baby-sitting for me and my little sister. And, believe me, Maxie was the baby-sitter from hell. He’d have his floozy girlfriends over. He’d entertain us with these incredibly filthy jokes he picked up in the navy. The man was totally cool. He made me who I am today.”

“Wait, I thought you said he was totally cool,” cracked Marty.

“Anyway,” Tommy went on, “Marty and I were talking about doing this play based on him, told from the little boy’s point of view, when—”

“Fiona brings her new boyfriend, Lyle, into the Suburbanites,” said Marty.

“What was your first impression of him?” I asked.

“First impression?” Marty’s eyes were on Lyle across the room. “I thought he was a total scumbag. That’s one good thing you can say about Lyle. He isn’t one of those guys who became a shit after he got successful. Lyle was always a shit. A fake hippie. Mr. Peace and Love. Mr. Spontaneous. Always talking about how we were all brothers, man. Total bull. He was strictly out for himself. From day one he was hyping himself, always going on and on about how talented he was, and how untalented everyone else was. He had this nasty way about him, this smirk. He was strictly a taker. The others were certainly taken by him, especially Fiona. Christ, she was in love with the fat fuck. Me, I thought he was a schmuck. Repulsive, too.”

“The guy never bathed,” explained Tommy. “And let’s face it—he was a big guy who sweated a lot. Zowie, did his feet—”

“The others wanted to vote him into the group,” recalled Marty. “I didn’t want to, but I went along. Because he was so damned good—almost as good as he thought he was. I couldn’t deny that. When it came to improv Lyle was better than Steve, Tory, and all of us put together. You’d say to him, okay, you’re a fresh-caught bass in the bottom of a rowboat. And, zot, the man’s flopping around there on the stage floor. All you needed was the lemon and tartar sauce.”

Lulu promptly sat up, salivating freely. I explained to her it was just a figure of speech. She stretched back out with a harrumph.

“He was huge, he was physical, and he held nothing back,” said Marty. “A dynamite performer.”

Tommy: “And a miserable fucking human being.”

Marty: “He had a total absence of consideration for the rest of us. If you’re in a group, you put the group first. That’s what it’s all about. It’s a team. You support each other. Play straight man for each other. Take turns. Not Lyle. To him, the rest of us were rivals for the audience’s attention, period. He did whatever the hell he felt like doing. He hogged the stage. He grandstanded. He’d even run out in the middle of somebody else’s bit and piss all over it. If we called him on it, he’d just smirk and say, ‘Hey, I got a laugh, didn’t I?’ That’s all that mattered to him—whether
he
got a laugh. It was totally bush. Like with his Belushi imitation. There was no real point to that stupid sketch. It was just Lyle showing off. But he was so talented that he got away with it. The audiences loved that bit.”

“As did Belushi, I understand.”

Marty rolled his eyes. “After he became friends with John he was totally impossible.”

“So impressed with himself,” added Tommy, with dry dismay.

“Everything was Beloosh this and Beloosh that. And Lorne and Gilda and Chevy and Candy Bergen and Carly fucking Simon. He was totally obnoxious about it. He gloated. He boasted. And he made it real clear he no longer considered the rest of us worthy of him. What he said was, ‘I’ve out-grown you people.’ Before he could say another word, Steve walked. So did Tory. She couldn’t stand Lyle. He was constantly hitting on her, even though he was living with Fiona. And that was the end of the Suburbanites.”

“Fiona made it sound like you were all ready to go your separate ways,” I countered.

“She’s just being diplomatic again,” Marty said. “We would have stayed together if we felt good about what we were doing. Lyle made us feel worthless. We broke up because he broke us up.”

Tommy: “And Marty and I told him if he ever tried to use Uncle Chubby without our permission, we’d sue his fat ass.”

“Yes, getting back to Uncle Chubby …”

Marty nodded amiably. “One morning we’re all sitting around the Pink Teacup shpritzing ideas for new material and we got to talking about Tommy’s Uncle Maxie and how we were going to write a play about him.”

“Right away, Lyle’s eyes light up,” Tommy remembered: “And he says, ‘Hey, this guy would make a far-out character for a sketch.’ ”

“Translation: ‘He’d make a far out character for
me,’”
said Marty.

“Right away we said no,” continued Tommy. “Very firmly, I might add. We told him we already had plans for him.”

“Translation: Back off, Jackson,” said Marty.

“And he didn’t?”

“The shithead used him on stage that very night,” Tommy replied angrily. “At intermission, someone in the audience tossed out a one-line idea—Mr. Rogers stoned. Next thing we know Lyle comes out as my Uncle Maxie, totally zonked, and he sits down in a chair and starts improvising this incredibly filthy bedtime story. The audience went berserk. It was fucking hilarious,” he admitted sourly. “Especially when Fiona jumped into his lap and started saying stuff like, ‘And then what happened, Uncle Chubby?’ And, ‘Ooh, what
are
you doing with your finger, Uncle Chubby?’ And there you have it—Uncle Chubby was born. Lyle’s attitude has always been that we all collaborated on it. Marty and me contributed Uncle Maxie. The audience contributed the Mr. Rogers angle. He, Lyle, brought him to life. And Fiona named him. That’s what he says. We say he appropriated our character without our permission. He even wanted to take Chubby with him when the Suburbanites broke up.”

“But we were damned if we were going to let him do that,” Marty said. “Maybe we couldn’t prove that Chubby was ours. We had nothing on paper. Nothing copyrighted. But he was certainly the property of the Suburbanites, not Lyle Hudnut. That much he understood, and had to respect. Mostly because of Fiona, who sided with us. She told Lyle she’d never speak to him again if he tried to take Chubby away from us.”

“So he backed off?” I asked.

“Temporarily,” allowed Marty. “When he got hired for
Saturday Night Live
he tried to get us hired, too. He made out like he was doing us this great favor, when the fact is he just wanted to get his hands on Uncle Chubby. But Lorne Michaels wasn’t that interested in taking on a team of personal writers for Lyle fucking Hudnut, so Uncle Chubby fell by the wayside.”

“Did you two ever write that play?” I asked.

Tommy shook his head glumly.

“Too bad,” I said. “Sounded like a good idea.”

“Do you really think so?” He brightened considerably. Practically came to life.

“I do. Particularly told from the kid’s point of view.”

Tommy was silent a moment. “Yeah, well, real life sort of got in the way,” he said with weary resignation.

“We didn’t hear from Lyle again until after his close personal friend Beloosh OD’ed,” Marty recalled.

Tommy: “Actually, it was Fiona who called us.”

Marty: “She said Lyle was incredibly down. Depressed, his career in the toilet …”

Tommy: “My attitude was, hey, lemme at the flusher.”

“But we agreed to meet with him,” said Marty. “We did it for her, not him. We did it strictly for Fiona.” He looked at her there at her table, eating with Chad. “For her, we’d do anything.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

Marty poked uncomfortably at the remains of his chili. “She didn’t say anything?”

“What about?”

“Fiona and me …”He cleared his throat. “We were living together when she met Lyle. She was my girl. Lyle stole her from me. I—I guess I was just too tame for her. She wanted someone reckless and dangerous. Someone who’d make her feel like she was living fast and hard. Someone who’d treat her like dirt. She wanted Lyle, and she got him. Broke my heart.” A faint, wistful smile crossed his lips. “But it never changed how I felt about her.”

So that’s what Annabelle meant when she said Muck and Meyer’s attachment to the show cut deeper than money. Marty had an even stronger reason for hating Lyle than I realized. Much stronger. I set down my fork and shoved my half-eaten lunch to one side. I wasn’t as hungry as I’d thought. “So you got together with him?”

“We sat down with him,” Marty acknowledged. “And I’ll tell you—Fiona wasn’t kidding. He was a changed man. Someone who’d been taken down a few pegs. He was subdued, morose, shaken.”

“It was pretty satisfying,” Tommy recalled happily.

“We knew going in exactly what he wanted,” Marty said. “And he wasted no time getting to it: He asked us if he could try Chubby out as a stand-up routine. We let him—again, strictly as a favor for Fiona. We even banged together some material. No money changed hands. The man was simply trying out an act at Catch a Rising Star, and we were simply helping him out. Anyway, as you know, it flat-out clicked. Lorne hired him for
The New Show,
and this time we were brought along as writers. We quit the agency, and we never went back. Neither did Lyle. Uncle Chubby just took on a life of his own after that. He’s a modern cultural phenomenon.”

“Or at least he was,” Tommy reminded him.

Marry nodded. “You’d have to say the jury is out on him right now.”

“Who owns the rights to the character?” I already had a pretty good idea what the answer was.

Marty sighed. “Lyle does. As far as the world is concerned, he created Chubby, he owns Chubby, he
is
Chubby.”

“You don’t share in any of the licensing royalties?”

“Not one penny,” Tommy answered tightly, shifting in his chair. He looked pained and unhappy. Even more so than usual. “We hired lawyers. Tried to get him to give us our fair share. It would have been the classy thing to do. But he wouldn’t. Because he didn’t have to. We never registered anything with the Guild. Never protected ourselves legally. It’s strictly our word against his. As far as he’s concerned, he’s taken good care of us. He got us started in TV. He put us to work here. Christ, we each made four hundred thou last year from this damned show. We’ve got nothing to complain about.”

“I can think of several million reasons,” I suggested.

“No, you don’t understand,” Marty argued, with surprising vehemence.

“Then help me.”

“This show,” he declared, “this is us getting what’s ours. We get our salary, we get episode fees, we get residuals. Christ, when
Uncle Chubby
goes into syndication we’ll have money coming in for years. That’s why we stick around. If we leave, Lyle gets it all. We won’t give him that satisfaction. So we stay. He treats us like shit, day in and day out. And we take it, day in and day out. Because we’re the ones who are sticking it to him.” Marty broke off and made a face. “Hey, Tommy?” he said, glancing down at his bowl.

“Yeah, Marty?”

Marty burped. “I don’t feel so good all of a sudden.”

“That makes two of us.” Tommy looked exceedingly unhappy now.

“Correction, gentlemen,” I said, staggering to my feet. “That makes three of us.”

I
WATCHED THE SIX
o’clock news sprawled limply on my back on my sofa with a damp washcloth on my head and a tall glass of Pellegrino water in my hand. I had been downing Pellegrino for the past hour, so as to replenish my precious bodily fluids. I didn’t know which brand Chad Roe was home drinking, and I didn’t give a shit.

In all, fifty-one of the fifty-four members of the
Uncle Chubby
family had become violently ill about fifteen minutes after sitting down to our festive catered lunch. We barfed our guts out, if you must know. And I’m afraid you must. The lucky three who hadn’t were Katrina Tingle who, unlike Lyle, had stuck devoutly to her macrobiotic diet, Fiona Shrike, a vegetarian, who had eaten only the cole slaw and corn bread, and Naomi Leight, who was still working the copy machine in the office when the early birds had started dashing for the johns. She had not considered this a glowing review.