The Straight Man - Roger L Simon (2 page)

"Who is she?"

"Emily Ptak."

"Emily Ptak . . . not Mike Ptak's wife?"

"You know her?"

"No, but I certainly know who he is—or was.
Otis King's straight man."

I didn't have to elaborate. It was clear that I knew
what everybody else in L.A. did. And half the rest of the country as
well. One week before, Mike Ptak, a former late-night TV comedy star,
had taken a fifteen-story dive off the penthouse of the Albergo
Picasso hotel on the Sunset Strip. He had landed in the valet parking
area of the Fun Zone—America's best-known comedy club—the same
club where, it seemed like onlyyesterday, Ptak had gotten his start
playing hip Dean Martin to Otis King's funky, jive-talking Jerry
Lewis. Or was it white Aykroyd to black Belushi?

I stared at Nathanson, my desire for a safe haven
slowly succumbing to the intense, sometimes almost voyeuristic
curiosity that had drawn me to my chosen field in the first place.
There was not likely to have been a more interesting case in Los
Angeles at the moment. And who was to know  how it would really
affect my therapy? Besides, I had to admit, there was something oddly
appealing about having my shrink in my debt.

"Sure," I said. "I'll do it."

"Good," said Nathanson. "I'll have
Emily call you. See you next time."

2

"
So you think someone killed your husband."

"
I don't think. I ..." Emily Ptak half
gasped and gestured futilely through my living room window, the
checkerboard pastels of West Hollywood spread out behind it. Emily
had insisted we meet at my office/apartment because she wanted
anonymity and someplace she could bring her four-year-old daughter,
Genevieve. So I stashed Genevieve in my bedroom with the cable TV and
found a cup of herb tea for Emily, but she still wasn't really able
to articulate. Standing up, she drank a couple of swallows of tea,
then placed it on the coffee table and started pacing back and forth
between my microfilm reader and the sofa while clenching and
unclenching her hands.

"Why don't you sit down a minute?"

"No!"

But she sat, almost primly, on the edge of the sofa.
I glanced up from her pink hightops and slightly ill-fitting gray
kimono skirt to her dirty blond hair cut short in a punk style that
did little to mask her coarse, almost bovine features. Although Emily
Ptak had been married to a hip comic, wore trendy Japanese clothes,
and was only about twenty-seven, she already had a matronly quality.
There was something oddly endearing about that—as if, beneath it
all, she desperately wished to dissociate herself from a
sophisticated life she didn't want or ask for. But there was also
something tight and conservative about it.

"Gene speaks very highly of you."

"gene?" For a split second I didn't realize
whom she was talking about. "You mean Dr. Nathanson?"

"Yes, I've, uh, been seeing him for over two
years now."

Emily blushed and fidgeted with a pair of Carrera
sunglasses she nervously removed from her purse.

"What do you do besides that?"

"
You mean for work? I'm an M.S.W., but right now
I'm just volunteering a couple of days a week with Cosmic Aid, Eddy
Sandollar's foundation in Ojai. He's doing really original work with
famine relief. I'd like to do more but ..." She nodded toward
the bedroom.

"I understand. And how can I help you?" I
asked, sounding more like a parish priest than a detective. Or maybe
like Nathanson. Through the window directly behind her a large
billboard dominated the Strip, urging SAFE SEX. It showed about a
half-dozen muscular, shirtless gay guys grouped around a tiny,
smiling Jewish bubba. L.A. LOVES YOU LIKE A MOTHER, it read, giving
the number of the AIDS hot line. Beyond that another billboard showed
a starving African child and said HELP HIM SURVIVE, giving the number
of something called the California Hunger Project. This was West
Hollywood in the eighties—the Plague Years.

Emily continued to fidget with her Carrera glasses,
holding them far away from her body as she folded and unfolded them.

"
Mike didn't do it," she said. "He
wasn't the suicide type."

"What's the suicide type?"

"
He was never depressed, for one thing."

"Rea1ly?"

"Really. I know it sounds weird, but he just
never let anything get to him. He wasn't particularly good at what he
did and that didn't even bother him. He was happy being a straight
man." She glanced over at her daughter who was visible through a
crack in the bedroom door, staring at the TV with a sad, mechanical
expression. "Not like me. I'm a typical endogenous depressive.
I'm almost as bad as Gene."

"He's depressed?"

"Shrinks are the most depressed people in the
world. Who do you think has the highest suicide rate?"

"Yeah, I know," I said. That was all I
needed—a depressed shrink. With my luck, it was a communicable
disease. "So," I continued, "do you have anything
specific about Mike—or is this all based on character analysis?"

She stood and looked away, lost in thought a moment.
Then she took out a cigarette and lit it, staring painfully at her
matchbook as if it were a symbol of decadence of some kind. It was
from the Plaza Athenée in Paris. "Do you know a lot of people
in show business?" she asked.

"Sure. You live in Los Angeles half your life,
you have to know a lot of them."

"What do you think of them?"

"As a generalization, I think they have a great
life. That's why they bitch about it so much. Who else gets to do
what they want—more or less—and is paid a fortune for it?"

"
Guilt provoking," she said. "Some of
them give the pleasure principle such free reign, they don't
recognize their death wish until it's too late."

Endogenous depression. Pleasure principle. This woman
had done a lot of shrinking. At least she knew the buzz words. "What
does this have to do with the subject at hand?"

"What do you know?"

"What I read in the L.A. Times. They indicated
Mike's career was floundering. Three weeks before, his five-year
partnership with Otis King had been dissolved. A week after that,
King signed a three-picture pact with Global Pictures for six million
dollars plus a percentage of profits. That could drive a man to
suicide. At least it was good enough for the police .... Is this
accurate?"

"As far as it goes."

"What else should I know?"

"
Otis King is an ambulatory schiz with extreme
obsessive-compulsive tendencies."

"
What's that supposed to mean?"

"
He's a human time bomb. Into everything—coke,
heroin, speedballs, freebase, Methedrine, Percodan, men, women,
children, transvestites, and dogs."

"Sounds uninhibited."

"He makes Richard Pryor seem like Mother
Theresa."

The doorbell rang.

"Just a second," I said, and went and
looked through the peephole. My thirteen-year-old son, Simon, was
standing there grinning at me in a dirty Clash T-shirt and a pair of
ratty cutoffs.

I opened the door a crack and looked at him. "Hey,
sport. Good to see you. But come back a little later. It's business
hours."

"I know, Dad. But it's an emergency. I gotta
have sixteen dollars. Fast."

"Sixteen dollars?" I glanced back at Emily,
who had discreetly turned the other way. "What in hell for?"

"Spray paint."

"What're you gonna do? Hit up on somebody's
garage door so I have to bail you out of the sheriff's station like I
did two weeks ago?"

"Nah, we got permission." He nodded behind
him where three of his teen-age buddies were leaning against the
corridor wall, trying to look like surly gang members but not quite
making it. It was his regular crew, the KGB—the Kings of Graffiti
Bombing. For a middle-class white kid, Simon was heavily
ghetto-identified and spent his time break dancing, practicing black
and Chicano slang, or spray painting graffiti. Mostly the latter. The
weird thing was, he was very good at it.

"Look, your mother gets child support for this.
Besides, you know the law—if I give you the money, they still can't
sell it to you. You need an adult to buy spray paint in California."

"Yeah, that's why I thought maybe you could come
with us."

That was it. I took him aside. "Listen, schmuck,
can't you see I'm busy? I'm working."

"Dad, I know .. . but you gotta understand. We
got special permission to throw a bomb on a wall by the Pan Pacific."

"Who gave you permission?"

"The Parks Commission dude. And if we don't do
it now, we—"

"Did your friends try their parents?"

"They can't find 'em. Dad, graffiti's art. You
said so yourself. Besides, this is a contest. The dudes who do the
best pieces get beamed up to New York for the nationals!"

"
All right. All right. What a con job! Just wait
in the lobby till I'm finished."

"
Thanks, Dad. You're fresh." Simon gave me
a big hug and rushed off to join his friends. I turned back to Emily.

"
Sorry. I got a kid with an identity crisis. He
thinks he's a member of the Third World."

But Emily was now sitting back down on the sofa,
staring off into space. I walked over to her.

"
So what is it?" I said. "You think
Otis King is responsible for his own partner's demise?"

"l don't know."

"It doesn't make much sense, considering what's
happened to Otis, his good fortune."

"That may be. But whatever happened, I know it's
not suicide. And if I don't do something about it ..." She
stopped, biting so hard I could see a drop of blood forming at the
top of her lip. " . . . I don't know how I'll answer to
Genevieve when she grows up." She looked over toward my bedroom.
The little girl had stopped watching television and was standing in
the doorway staring straight at us in a macabre, unblinking way that
reminded me for an instant of The Exorcist. "How much do you
charge, Moses?" But before I could answer she said, "Never
mind. I trust you. Just bill me."

All my clients should be that way, I thought.

"How do I get to Otis King?" I asked.

"Not easy. He's trying to kick his drug habit
and he's under twenty-four-hour-a-day therapy with Dr. Carl Bannister
in the Malibu Colony. Until he's cured, Bannister's keeping him in
total isolation. Nobody can get in."

God. Another shrink.

3

"The hidden purpose of psychotherapy is to
brainwash people into accepting society as it exists, accommodate
them to what is wrong so they can be comfortable with themselves and
not want to change things. Isn't that right, Moses?"

"I have the feeling I'd be uncomfortable in any
society."

"That's because you're so self-involved. If
you'd try to contribute to the welfare of others, you wouldn't spend
so much time walking along with a face as long as your arm. Think
about the freedom fighters in South Africa, El Salvador . . . the new
resistance against fascism in Chile . . . the strugglers against
Soviet social imperialism in Afghanistan .... By the way—how's your
sex life?"

"About half as alive as the Democratic party."

I was with my aunt Sonya, driving east from Venice
along Pico Boulevard. It wasn't my normal procedure to bring a
septuagenarian on casework, but I had broken my last two dates with
her, and I knew if I did it a third time, I'd never hear the end of
it.

"And let me add," she said, "that by
the welfare of others I do not mean just one particular senior
citizen. I mean—"

"I know. I know. 'The greatest good for the
greatest number.' Thank you, Jeremy Bentham."

"Thank God you still remember something in this
narcissistic culture hell-bent on navel contemplation and acquisition
of personal possessions."

"All right. All right." We were pulling up
to the valet parking of the Fun Zone. "Is it all right if I give
this exploited worker my BMW or should I park it myself?"

"
How else do you expect him to make a living?"

On the east end of the Sunset Strip, the Fun Zone
("the Omphalos of American Comedy") was your basic L.A.
Eighties Trendoid Post-Deco club with a dusty rose and gray tile
facade and a brushed stainless steel front door that looked like it
was borrowed from the engine room of the Queen Mary. You drove up to
it by a side driveway that cut between the club and a recently built
piece of work called the Albergo Picasso, a self-described
"European-style spa  hotel" done on the exterior in a
series of multicolored squares said to derive from the master's
Cubist Period and on the interior in "harmonious tones" out
of his Blue and Rose periods. It was the kind of place my New York
friends would once have used for a facile put-down of L.A. but now
would rush to stay in, because with its minimalist cuisine, German
cars, and diminishing smog, Los Angeles had become, by attrition, the
spiritual capital of today's "material world." And that, as
the lady sang, was where we lived.