Me and Orson Welles (2 page)

“I'm getting there.”

“He's
getting
there.”

“Slowly.”

“Listen,” said Stefan. “Broads aren't interested in slowly. Their
parents
are interested in slowly.”

Skelly was jabbing his finger in my face. He wore a white beer jacket signed with names and obscenities.

“They want you to be aggressive,” he said. “They
want
you to fight for 'em.”

I looked at the ground and shook my head. “I don't know if that's who I am.”

Stefan nailed me. “And who you
are—
is that who you
want
to be?”

“I don't know.”

At this point they usually slapped their heads in disbelief.

Even
I
sometimes slapped my head in disbelief, but this was my enduring problem with girls. I was always the “friend” and never the “boyfriend.” I shared all their romantic troubles during lunch; they showed me their diaries; I got the jubilant: “The big idiot finally
asked
me!” I got: “Richard, you're the only guy I can really
talk
to. I mean, I can talk to you like a girl.” But I never got the dream, the Unhooked Capacious Brassiere. I never got the “you-can-take-off-my-stockings-before-my-parents-get-home.” Which is exactly what Skelly got, and Stefan got. In abundance. Overflowing.

But I thought I had a chance with Caroline Tice. At least a slight chance. She was guileless and smart. Green Lutheran eyes. I liked her shortness; I liked her Lutheran eyes; I liked her ring size. She wore her hair as short as a guy's, and I liked that, too.

And I was polite. Oh, God, I was polite. I bought her flowers. I wrote her parents elaborate thank you notes whenever they'd had me over for dinner—sixty-hour suppers where they smiled with courteous Lutheran horror at the Fast-Talking Jew Boy their green-eyed jewel had dragged home.

“The show is at eight,” Caroline was saying, “but I have to be there by at
least
six-thirty. And, Richard, please, no more rowdiness from your drunken friends.”

“It wasn't us.”

“It wasn't
we.
”

Caroline had the lead in
Growing Pains,
which was being performed that night for the second and final time. I'd gone the previous evening. It was a terrible play, a “comedy of youth” filled with characters named “Dutch” and “Slim” and “Spats” shrieking about roller skates and lost baseball gloves.

Anyway, the only really enjoyable moment of the play was when Kristina Stakuna (Amazon Queen of the Swollen Softballs) came onstage and the entire Black Crow Crew started stomping and giving her wolf whistles.

“That artful uplift!” called out Stefan.

Then Skelly got all seven of us singing to the tune of “That Old Feeling”:

At the intermission Dr. Mewling invited us to leave.

We goofed around on the front steps of the school, smoking my terrible Wings cigarettes and indulging in wildly obscene fantasies about Kristina Stakuna and the college goon she was dating. “I heard when she visited him at Rutgers,” said Stefan, “that he screwed her for
nine
hours straight. When he was done he had to go to the hospital. I'm not shittin' ya.”

I'd met up with Caroline after the show. “That was really raw,” she'd said. “You embarrassed Kristina. You embarrassed me. You guys are
really
raw.” But even as she said the words, it struck me that she had actually enjoyed it—that she, too, had been briefly illuminated by the celebrity of the mighty Black Crow Crew.

“Am I going to see you this afternoon?” she asked, now on the phone. “Or are you going to drag me into New York again to look at old boarded-up theatres and say, ‘Did you know Eva Le Gallienne starred in
Peter Pan
here in 1925?' ”

“1926.”

“Look, I'll see you tonight. And do me a favor: tell the Black Crow Crew they're officially
not
invited. Tell them they can come to the party afterwards at Kristina's house; I'm
sure
they'll enjoy that.”

“I'm sure
you'd
enjoy that.”

“I am
not
interested in Phil Stefan, Richard.”

“Then you're the only girl in the school who isn't.”

When I replaced the phone, Jolson was still wailing:
Dirty hands! Dirty face!

“Ma!” I yelled to no one in particular. “I'm heading out.”

“Gai gezint,”
said my grandfather.

I stood by the front door wearing my father's old black double-breasted coat (too big for me, but I liked that it felt as if it were a costume from
Uncle Vanya)
and my battered black fedora—a five-dollar bill folded into my sock.

“The leaves!” called my mother.

“Tomorrow! Ma, I've got nothing on my schedule tomorrow but raking! I'm going to do seventeen, maybe eighteen hours straight.”

The front door was already shutting behind me.

“It's no use,” I heard her say.

I
walked toward the library feeling that the weights I had been lifting in the mornings were finally beginning to show some results. I'd begun working out last spring under the direction of Stefan, who assured me that I could transform myself into him.

How influenced I was by every encounter that came my way. I still said out loud each morning: “Every day in every way I am getting better and better”—and who the hell believed that anymore? My parents had bought me Dale Carnegie's
How to Win Friends and Influence People
and that stuff was rattling inside me, too.
Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.

I took a folded postcard from my wallet, and the librarian handed me a never-been-read copy of Rosamond Gilder's
John Gielgud's Hamlet
.

The immaculate newness of its shiny wrapper in my hands felt delicious. On the cover was Gielgud's hawklike profile, framed in a high black collar. There were more photographs inside, set designs, plus the entire edited scripts of Gielgud's famous 1934 and 1936 productions.

I started reading the book as I walked toward the train station. I could hear that evocative and autumnal Saturday-morning sound: the bass drums booming from the marching band as they practiced. Some small current of guilt passed through me; I was a drummer in that band, and I should have been standing inside the fieldhouse on Rahway Avenue with the rest of them. “What the hell,” I said. “Sometimes you gotta pounce.”

Somebody had left a
Westfield Leader
on the train, and I skimmed it as we rattled east.

What was my family doing here?

My father owned United Tire Sales on Broad Street in Newark, and instead of going bust in the crash, his used-tire business had wildly flourished. Nobody could afford new tires anymore, and he had thousands of used ones stacked to the ceiling. All at once he was pulling in so much money he didn't know what to do with it. At one point we were hiding it in the oven. And in a daring gesture of social mobility (engineered by my mother, who, in her own way, was pretty courageous), we moved to our fairytale-looking Victorian house on Lawrence Avenue in Westfield, where the green-eyed Lutherans grew.

I changed trains at Newark for the Hudson Tubes, and I was trying hard to hold on to my sense of energy and optimism. I checked my reflection in the window— O.K., smooth the part in the hair, bring down the shoulders a little bit, loosen the intensity around the eyes, add just the subtlest suggestion of an ironic smile. Gabel in
It Happened One Night.
Energy and maybe even a little arrogance. (“Yes, I love her, but don't hold it against me; I'm a little screwy myself.”)

I held the
Hamlet
cover up to the window next to my reflection and tried to mimic Gielgud's august and severe pose. I heard my John Barrymore record in my head:
Presenting John Barrymore, crown prince of the royal family of the American theatre, as Hamlet, melancholy lover of Shakespeare's immortal drama!

I arched my eyebrows with great dramatic intensity, pulled at my collar like the drunken wreck of a once-great stage performer, and, loudly, since nobody else was in the car, went into my Barrymore impersonation. It was an English accent that no Englishman would have found remotely recognizable. I knew the whole record by heart: “Ladies and gentlemen, I feel quite
sure
that you are all so well acquainted with this famous soliloquy from
Hamlet
that any attempt at
elucidation
on my part, other than the soliloquy itself, might be justly considered a bit of impertinence. As you remember, it goes as follows.
(Long pause)
‘To be . . . or not to be . . .
That
is the question. Whether 'tis
nobler—' ”

The ticket-taker was staring down at me.

“Just practicing,” I said. “Vocal exercises.”

New York was alive with rich people in Packards honking their horns at the buses, beautiful women in fur coats, panhandlers begging for a nickel, and street-vendors selling steaming ears of corn.

I bought a bag of peanuts (“A Bag a Day for More Pep”) and turned up my collar against the wind. This indeed, I thought, was the figure I was born to cut—hands deep in the pockets of my enormous Russian coat, hat at a suitably Bohemian tilt, striding uptown with nothing to do but feel wonderful.

I needed a song. It was the game I played in New York, choosing my audition song for that moment when Jed Harris, leaning forward from his second-floor window, phone jammed against his ear, would cry out: “Wait a minute, Murray. You're not going to believe this, but I think our Kid just walked by!”

So far this hadn't happened.

I sang to myself “Have You Got Any Castles?” which was my favorite song at the moment. It was number five on the Hit Parade. And I was a
serious
chronicler of the Hit Parade; I listened with my notebook open, entering the top ten songs next to my neatly prenumbered list. My notebooks went back to 1935.

I walked up to the Gaiety on Broadway to look through the new sheet music. “Once in a While” was playing in the store. There was all sorts of stuff I hadn't heard yet, including some new Richard Rodgers from
I'd Rather Be Right.

At the upright piano in the corner, trying out a new song, sat a sort of poetic-looking girl about my age. She wore wire-rim glasses and had one of those dark-haired, milk-white faces that I'm a sucker for. Every year I fell for a face like that—and they were always named Gretchen or Marian. And they'd sit in Honors English and drop references to all these books I'd never quite gotten around to reading, quoting beautiful lines of poetry right out of the air. “Doesn't Keats have a line about that?” they'd say to the teacher so quietly it was almost a private conversation. The teacher nodded and beamed, and the rest of us were thinking: “Who the hell is Keats?”

Well, she sat at the piano playing “Nice Work if You Can Get It”—so slowly it sounded like a dirge. She wore a floral vest over a large comfortable-looking lavender shirt, blue jeans, and unpolished saddle shoes. Her hair was pulled back in a George Washington.

“Swell tune,” I said. I leaned against the piano, smiling with the casualness of a natural-born fraud. “And you play it with real feeling.”
(Make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely.)

“God, it's so
sad,
isn't it?” she said. “This just makes me want to
cry.”

“You could probably pick up the tempo a little bit.”

“No, I mean Gershwin being
dead
and all. The fact that we'll never have another Gershwin song.”

I nodded.

“No more Gershwin music—just this sort of dead air.” She stopped playing. “Wouldn't that make a great title for a story—‘Dead Air'?”

“Sure. I guess. I mean, well, you know, a sort of
depressing
story.”

She whipped out a notepad from her back pocket and wrote down the title. The skin of her cheeks and ears was so pale you could see the veins beneath it. “Did you hear what happened to Porter?” she asked. “Had a riding accident and broke his legs? I wonder if he'll still be able to write.” She stood up and massaged the small of her neck with her fingertips. “They don't like me sitting here not buying anything.”

“You know so much about music, are you a songwriter?”

“I'm a real writer,” she said. “Of course, Gershwin is a real writer.
Was
a real writer.” Then she was putting on her coat, and the salesman was closing in on us rapaciously.