The Man Who Cancelled Himself (36 page)

“That all started at Allen, actually.”

“Did it?” Herb was surprised. “We never knew that.”

Aileen said, “We knew his grades was getting bad. He stopped going to class. Even started skipping his appointments with his analyst. He’d just hole up out there in his room for days at a time, stereo blasting, kids coming and going at all hours. It was those drugs. Those damned drugs.”

“I understand he got caught selling them at school.”

Herb nodded dejectedly. “Shouldn’t have come as any surprise to us—after all we’d been through with him. But it did. Guess I just never thought I’d be fishing a member of my own family out of jail. They were willing to put him on probation. And the high school agreed to take him back so the boy could get his … his …” Herb was suddenly having trouble talking. He swallowed and stared down at his veiny hands, which were shaking even worse now.

Aileen cleared her throat uneasily. “Just what did Lyle say to you about what happened after that?”

“He said that you folks were ashamed to be the parents of a drug dealer,” I replied. “So you came down hard on him. His exact words were, ‘I was a bad boy, and bad boys get punished.’ He claims you had him institutionalized. And that you forced him, against his will, to undergo electroconvulsive therapy. Because you’d had it with his rebel ways. Because you wanted him to toe the line. And because … and because you hated him.”

“Oh, my, no!” she cried, shaking her head. “My, my, no.”

Herb got up and went over to the window, where he blew his nose into a large handkerchief. He stayed where he was a moment, staring out the window. I’m better at reading faces than I am backs of heads, but I’m fairly certain the old man was struggling not to cry in front of me. He took a deep breath and came back and sat down, his jaw clamped tightly shut. Aileen took his hand and squeezed it. Both looked shell-shocked.

“What did happen?” I asked them gently.

“Not that,” he replied huskily. “But my God, if he believes that …”

“He does.”

Herb swallowed. “Then he has every reason in the world to hate us like he does.” He turned to his wife. “Christ, that explains so much.”

She said nothing. Just stared straight ahead, stone-faced.

“Please tell me what happened,” I said.

“He didn’t stop taking those damned drugs, is what happened,” Herb told me. “Those psychedelic drugs of his. The LSD, the mescaline, those crazy darned Mexican mushrooms or jumping beans or whatever the heck they were. Playing with fire, he was. A boy in his unstable psychological state. Didn’t stop him, though. No, sir. He just kept taking more and more of ’em. H-He even went to school high as a kite on ’em.”

“One of the custodians found him,” Aileen said softly. “He was up on the roof of the gymnasium, threatening to jump. It was after school. Most everybody had gone home for the day. He’d been up there for hours. A bum trip, they called it. We almost lost him that day. He so wanted to die. Luckily, the police was able to restrain him. His doctor hospitalized him. He thought Lyle would be better in a day or two, soon as that damned drug was out of his system. Only … Lyle didn’t come out of it, Mr. Hoag. It was no bum trip. In fact, the LSD had little to do with it. Other than maybe hastening it.”

“Hastening what, Mrs. Hudnut?”

“Lyle was in the middle of a m-major clinical depression,” she replied, her voice choking. “He totally withdrew from the world. Wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t eat. All he’d do was sit in his hospital room in the dark and cry for hours at a time. Or sleep. He slept eighteen, twenty hours a day. He was like a different person. That Holy Terror look of his was gone. All he had was this dull gaze. It was like a light had gone out inside of him. He had no interest in anything or anyone. No idea of pleasure. No idea of the future. College, adulthood—none of it meant anything to him. All he wanted to do was die. They had to keep his belt and his shoelaces away from him. No sharp objects or utensils. They tried everything to help him. Heavy doses of Thorazine. Therapy. But he wouldn’t respond. He’d gone down a black hole. He was a sick, sick boy. Weeks went by, six long weeks, before the doctors ever discussed giving him the shock treatments. Frankly, we was horrified by the whole idea. Sounded to us like something from out of
The Snake Pit.
”

“We were very, very reluctant,” Herb agreed.

“But they assured us it was a safe, legitimate medical procedure,” she went on. “And that in certain cases like Lyle’s it had been proven to be a help. They were very straight with us about the memory loss, too. They warned us.”

“But their feeling about it,” recounted Herb, “was, hey, this boy is in a hopeless depression. May never come out of it. This may pull him out. So what if he has a spotty memory? Small price to pay, considering the alternative. The two of us went home and slept on it. Slept, hell. We talked all night, holding hands in bed like a couple of scared kids. In the morning, we told ’em to go ahead.”

“They gave him a series of eight treatments,” Aileen told me. “And he
did
respond, thank God. Started showing an interest in things again. He said he missed his records, his Grateful Dead records. And he wanted the current issue of Rolling Stone and—”

“And a pepperoni pizza.” Herb smiled faintly. “With extra cheese. I went and got him one. He ate the whole damned thing all by himself. Let out a belch you could hear clear out to Orient Point. Right then I knew the boy was gonna be hokey-dokey.”

“Those shock treatments saved Lyle, Mr. Hoag,” Aileen argued. “Without ’em, we’d have had to institutionalize him permanent. With ’em, he was well enough to come home in a couple of weeks.”

“What was his memory like?”

“Spotty,” Herb conceded.

“He didn’t remember a thing about the six weeks,” she explained. “He remembered the bummer, as he called it, but not the rest—it was like he’d been in a coma. We considered giving him the details, but why remind him? It was a blessing in disguise he didn’t remember. Doctors agreed with us.”

“As I understand it, much of that memory loss is supposed to come back gradually over time. Did it?”

They looked at each other.

“We wouldn’t know, young fella,” replied Herb. “He hasn’t spoken to us in over twenty years, remember?”

“Was he hostile toward you when you brought him home?”

“Not in the least,” said Herb. “He seemed grateful. Happy to be home. Happy to be back in school. We was real proud of him, too, day he got his diploma.”

“Said he wanted to take up acting here in New York,” Aileen recalled. “Performing was something he really enjoyed in school. About the only thing he talked about doing with himself. We was wary of it. Didn’t think he was up to it. Plus he was barely seventeen. And New York is, well, New York. But the boy was insistent. So, we spoke to his doctors about it, figuring they’d say no.”

“But to our great surprise, they didn’t,” said Herb. “They thought it was positive that Lyle had something he wanted to do. New York didn’t scare ’em, neither. They said, he’s gonna have to learn to sink or swim on his own no matter where he is. They advised us to let him go. So we put him on a train for Manhattan. Gave him some money.” Herb scratched his chin. “I don’t remember how much. …”

“It was twelve hundred dollars,” Aileen declared crisply.

“He phoned us from his hotel when he got settled,” Herb went on. “The Chelsea, it was. Some kind of residential hotel. And he wrote us pretty regular for a while. About the acting classes he was taking. Friends he was making. But then he stopped writing, and our letters to the Chelsea started coming back to us unopened. Seems he’d moved on, and left no forwarding address. And that was the last contact we had with him.”

“Except for that one time Fiona invited us to visit ’em,” said Aileen. “My, my, what a horrible day that was. He
struck
the poor little thing, ran out of there like a crazy man, looking at us with so much
hate.
We didn’t know why. We never, ever knew why. Until now …” She heaved a huge sigh. “You opened our eyes, Mr. Hoag. And for that I thank you.”

“Both of us do,” Herb added sincerely.

“And I thank you,” I said, “For your cooperation, and your candor.”

“Is there any chance we’ll get to see Lyle?” Herb asked, moistening his mouth anxiously. “I don’t mean today. But sometime soon, maybe?”

I sat there looking at him. He was such a sorrowful little old man. I didn’t ever want to be so sorrowful. Or so old. I didn’t ever want to have children. I took to my feet and smoothed my trousers. “I hope so,” I said. “I realize that’s not much, but—”

“You couldn’t be more wrong,” Herb assured me cheerfully. “Hope is a lot. Hope is plenty. Yessir. We haven’t had hope for a long, long time.”

Aileen started to reach for her cigarettes but stopped herself. I don’t know why. “Mr. Hoag?”

“Yes, Mrs. Hudnut?”

Her eyes were on the carpet. “What’ll you tell Lyle? Will you tell him about those six weeks? A-About what I did to him when he was a baby?” She looked up at me imploringly, a mother’s love and pain scrunching up her soft, round face. “What’ll you tell him?”

I started looking around the room for Lulu, until I remembered she wasn’t with me anymore. I went and got my hat. Then I went to the door. Then I said, “I honestly don’t know.”

Because I didn’t.

One of the hardest positions I ever put myself in as a ghost is when I manage to find out something important about my celebrity that he doesn’t know about himself. Something his loved ones never told him—for a variety of reasons. Some selfish. Some not so selfish. But all of them painful. You can’t hurt other people when you write a novel. You can piss them off, disappoint them, bore them. But you can’t hurt them. It’s different with a memoir. A lot different. With a memoir, you can hurt them bad.

I chewed on it as I strolled across Central Park toward home. True, Lyle’s parents had handed me gold. The stuff that best-sellers are made of. This definitely rated the cover of
People,
which is for tell-alls what the cover of
Rolling Stone
is for rockers—
I made it, Ma, top of the world!
Good for the book, no question. And that was all that mattered—what was best for the book, right? Or was it? What about the people involved? What about what was best for them? Lyle Hudnut already hated his parents, blamed them for everything that had gone wrong in his life. If he found out his mother tried to kill him when he was two, he would only hate her more. Want to expose her in print. After all, here was
proof
of Aileen’s evil. Here was Lyle’s chance to bury them, once and for all. I had no doubt he would see it that way. None. But was that fair to them? Was it right? And what about his six weeks down that black hole of depression?
Did
he remember it? Was I dealing with fabrication and denial, as Vic had suggested, or had Lyle’s memory actually been erased? If so, would it help him to find out now, after all these years, why he’d undergone shock therapy? Or would it only hurt him? Would he be able to deal with it? The man was already plenty unstable. Plus somebody was trying to murder him. Could he handle this on top of it? I chewed on it. I had a job to do: Help the world understand a major television star named Lyle Hudnut. But at what cost? Would it be worth it if it tore him up inside? Who the hell was I to decide this? What right did I have to say what one human being should or should not know about his own life? I was not a loved one. Or friend. I was not his shrink. I was just the guy whose name would be found at the bottom of the title page, under the words “As Told To.”

Sometimes I’m overpaid for what I do. I admit that. This time wasn’t one of those times.

It was a warm evening, the air soft and hazy. There was still a lot of activity in the park. The paths were filled with joggers and Rollerbladers, the baseball diamonds crowded with office softball teams playing with great intensity and ineptitude. I paid them little attention. It was the others I was noticing. The guys who were tossing sticks for their ebullient, arfing retrievers. The couples who were pushing their babies along in carriages. They were the ones I kept noticing. Everywhere I looked I saw them. It was a genuine laugh riot how many dogs and babies were out in Central Park that late summer evening. Just to round out the hilarity, the path I was on brought me out of the park directly across the street from Merilee’s building. Amazing how that happens. I sat there on a bench, looking up at the eight windows. Lights were on up there. Lulu was up there.
She
was up there. Everyone was up there. Except for me. I was sitting on a park bench all by myself, getting soot and chewing gum on my linen trousers. I took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. Then I went and found a pay phone.

I met Very at The Blue Mill down in the Village on Commerce Street, where neither the menu nor the decor has changed one bit in my lifetime. I was already deep into my second martini, heavy on the olives, when he came charging in, muttering about all of the goddamned reporters who’d kept him on the goddamned phone. I ordered calves’ liver with bacon and onions. He went for the trout almondine. Lulu’s favorite. Our waiter, Pete, was nice enough not to ask me where she was. Just brought me another martini, and a Rolling Rock for my nodding acquaintance.

Very gulped down half of it from the bottle before he puffed out his cheeks and demanded, “Ever try to come up with a delicate way of saying that a guy died while he was taking a piss?”

“What did you say, Lieutenant?”

“That Roe was electrocuted in the washroom—while in the process of using the urinal. Let ’em figure it out for themselves. Yo, it’s not like your basic pisser has a wide assortment of uses. You don’t wash your socks in it. You don’t brush your teeth in it …”

“Did you call it an accident or murder?”

He gestured for another beer. “Didn’t say one way or the other, dude.”

“Why not?”

“Because you got to watch how much you give the New York press corps.”

“Why?”

His dark eyes flashed at me impatiently. “Because no matter how much you give them, they always figure you haven’t given them everything.”