Funnymen (18 page)

So I wrote this really drippy sweet letter to her, like “Vic is really, really missing you and he really wishes he could be with you. You mean so much to Vic, you're the thing that keeps him going, the first thing he thinks of in the morning and the last thing he thinks of at night. He's just no good without you.” And it went on. It was really very emotional . . . I was gettin' all choked up writing it! I slid the page over to him and he didn't even read it! He just said, “Thanks . . . send it tomorrow morning first thing.”

PIP GRUNDY:
The buses we traveled in . . . I never did enjoy them. Too cramped, too smoky, all those nasty smells coming from twenty men. You can imagine. The trains were fun though. We were based in Camden but went as far north as Maine, as far south as Florida, and as far west as Kansas. In the trains you could spread out and unwind.

Floyd and Thalia shared a sleeper, all very hush-hush because it was 1940. But perhaps not
so
hush-hush, for at three in the morning I'd wake up to what I thought was a long freight train going in the opposite direction, but it was just Floyd and Thalia attaining their climaxes.

But the dining cars, we used to take them over . . . that's where the card games were, the dice games too. We'd be tending to our instruments or just fiddling around. Some of the boys were serious about music and knew all about Lester Young, Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Django, and Roy Eldridge. It's a pity that Floyd insisted on that middling “society” sound.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Vic arranged it, he set the whole damn thing up . . . I had nothing to do with it except I went along with it.

Who was in that card game? . . . let's see . . . it was Harry Bacon, Cueball,
Sid Gibson, and Floyd. Cueball lost all his dough and then Roy Lindell hopped in and he got cleaned out quick. When Roy dropped out, Vic came in to the dining car and took his seat. I remember distinctly he rubbed his nose with his forefinger when he sat down. He asked for a drink and Sid passed him a flask. It was Floyd's deal and he was shuffling, and Vic asked the porter for a hot towel.

Floyd dealt and I was pretending to read the paper but I had my eyes on Floyd's hand. I could see the whole thing. They were playing five-card draw mostly. I could see Floyd's hand and Harry's and Sid's . . . best seat in the house. Vic and I had worked out the system: I scratch my nose this way it means this; I scratch my ear that way it means that. It was perfect.

Vic won the first hand and Harry gets the deck. We're all making small talk, farting and smoking and what have you. Vic gets the hot towel, wipes his hands and his forehead. He won this hand too, thanks in great part to me scratching and twitching and rubbing. Now the deck went to Vic. I remember Floyd had nothing, just ace high, and Harry had even worse. I licked my lips and Vic bet low so as to keep them in the game. They drew and Vic suckered them in and he beat them, three hands in a row.

Floyd is now shuffling. He changes the game to seven-card stud. No, what he did was, he put his head in his hand and thought about it for a while and
then
changed the game. He'd dealt them two cards and he said, “Hey, Vic, where you been?”

“Just getting some shut-eye, Floyd.”

“This card smells like cooze,” Floyd said.

“I don't know about that,” Vic said.

“Harry, smell this card,” Floyd said and he passed the card—which was a queen of diamonds—over to Harry. He said, “I don't know . . . it smells like a card to me.”

“Yeah, like you know the smell of cooze!” Floyd said and he dealt the card. He's still dealing and he gets another whiff and says, “You sure you were just getting some shut-eye, Vic?”

“Sure am,” Vic said. But I started to get uneasy . . . because Vic was looking uneasy.

Vic wipes his hands with another hot towel and Floyd continues dealing and then he comes to a card—it was the ace of spades that Vic had won with the game before—and he draws in a huge, huge breath. Vic looks over to me. He looked very scared . . . the color drained out of his face like it was sucked out.

I heard this noise, this strange noise. It came from Floyd's gut, his huge stomach . . . it was this inner yowl, like a lonely dog baying miles away. Floyd cleared the card table with his hands, he just swept the cards and the ashtrays and the money off the table. His face is all red and he's quaking.

Well, Arnold Latchkey felt the fear of the Almighty shoot right through him . . . because well I knew that big Floyd Lomax kept a pearl-handled Colt with him, in his trumpet case. And there was his trumpet case, right next to him. I stood up and said to him, “Okay, look, I can explain . . . yeah, we was cheatin' but it was all Vic's idea . . .” but he wasn't even listening to me. He yelled at the top of his lungs, “THALIA! THALIA! THALIA!” It was deafening, no exaggeration. “THALIA! THALIA! THALIA!” Imagine being inside the belly of a timpani for Beethoven's Ninth. That's what this was like.

He reaches for his trumpet case and Vic is standing up and backing away and saying, “Floyd . . . I can explain . . . it wasn't me . . . I swear . . .” Floyd is struggling to open the case but is quaking so much he can't get a purchase on it, and Vic says, “She came to me, Floyd, my hand to God! She started just rubbing herself against me real nice and—”

“THALIA!!!” he yelled.

Floyd snapped open the case and I thought, Okay, he knows now I cheat at cards, what do I do here? Do I stay? Do I go? If I go, where do I go? What do I do for the rest of my life? All these questions in a hundredth of a second but no answers.

“Arnie, let's go!” Vic yelled to me and that seemed like the only answer there was. I made my way around Floyd—no small feat, that—and me and Vic ran out of the dining car. Behind me I hear a gunshot and then the train whistle and I heard these big pounding footsteps of Floyd coming at us, like Sasquatch himself. We made it through one sleeping car and there was another gunshot. The next thing I know, Vic and me—his hair was blowing all over in the wind—are standing between two train cars and we see and hear Floyd stomping toward us.

“I can't believe you, you dumb guinea,” I said to him. “You gotta wise up in life, you know that?”

“Maybe so,” he said. He told me he'd been trying to wipe the scent off with the hot towels.

“So by the way,” I asked, “how was she?”

He told me she was only so-so and then said, “I guess we jump, Arn.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

The ground hurt when we hit it and we rolled for a few yards. I felt dirt kick up around my foot—Floyd was shooting at us. I stood up and looked at the train and it looked like the whole goddamn train was big Floyd's bald egg-shaped head streaking away . . . I heard the train whistle and the words “THALIA! THALIA! THALIA!”

I helped Vic up and he picked a twig out of his hair, wiped the dirt off himself, and straightened out a stray pleat in his pants.

We walked for a while. We didn't say a word. At first it was pitch-black out but then the clouds cleared away from the moon and things were starting
to look very familiar from my old
tummling
days. The air smelled sweet and the wind was rustling the leaves. It was summer.

After about an hour Vic asks me, “Hey, Latch . . . you got any idea where the hell we are?”

“We're in the Catskills, Vic. Loch Sheldrake.”

“What the hell are we gonna do now?”

I told him, “I got an older brother named Marvin owes me a favor. Big time.”

• • •

DANNY McGLUE:
It was the lowest, coldest thing I think I've ever heard of.

I knocked on his door . . . by this time Ziggy had his own bungalow at Heine's. It wasn't much; there was a radio and a Victrola, a bed and copies of
Variety
and
Billboard
and
Metronome
all over the floor.

I walked in and there are two people sitting there, a man and a woman in their fifties, as Irish-looking as a four-leaf clover. Ziggy had a sheepish, guilty look on, as if I'd caught him at something. He was standing and they were sitting.

Ziggy directed me to a corner and told me, “They're auditioning to become my folks.”

All I could say was “
Wha—?”
I mean, I was dumbstruck!

“Danny,” he said, “I'm really very miserable with the present arrangement.”

He stared talking about how his contracts were with “Sigmund Blissman and Parents” but that they never did say Harry Blissman or Flo Blissman. He's telling me all this and I'm taking in the man and the woman sitting there—I felt sorry for them. They needed work. I had 'em figured for vaudeville hoofers right away. I have no idea how Ziggy found them.

“So you're replacing your parents with these two?” I asked him.

“If they're good enough.”

“Harry and Flo have no idea about this, do they?”

To everyone he suddenly said, “Alas, I am being rude!” He introduced me. Their names were Jimmy and Kathleen O'Hare. They'd been in the Gus Edwards and Considine and Sullivan circuits; they'd worked with the Marx Brothers way back when, but were small potatoes. And they weren't even husband and wife—they were brother and sister! A pauper's Fred and Adele.

“You gotta hear this broad sing,” Ziggy says to me. “What pipes.”

I whispered to him, “You know, your own mother has pipes from God.”

“This one don't bust eyeglasses, Danny.” And then he pulled me back into the corner and said, “I really think this is going to work out for the best.”

What could I do? I felt terrible. Harry and Flo had always been wonderful to me. They'd sung songs by Kern, Foster, Arlen, the Gershwins, and Berlin, and then along comes Danny McGlue and I'm giving them nonsense like “Ol' Man's Liver” and they never once raised a fuss.

I went along with it and I'll probably burn in hell.

SALLY KLEIN:
They came back from Laramie in June. They looked wonderful—vigorous and tan and refreshed. Harry especially—he looked five years younger.

Ziggy hadn't played a date since he froze up onstage. Bernie Heine and the owners of Marx's and Berenson's and Kutsher's—they weren't exactly thrilled with him. He told me to tell them—which I did—that his parents were coming back any day now.

Harry and Flo knocked at my room at Berenson's resort and we all hugged and kissed and I let them in. They told me what a wonderful time they'd had and after ten minutes we got down to business.

“So is there anything lined up?” Harry asked.

“You're booked here this Thursday through Sunday. And you've got the White Lake Lodge the following weekend.”

Harry asked, “So did Ziggy's solo act go over like gangbusters?”

“Oh no!” I told them. “He hasn't worked in a while. He knew you were coming back and he had Joe Gersh book these dates.”

I told them about how he'd failed miserably, how he was practically comatose afterward. It really got to Flo. You know, they hadn't treated him well when he was a boy and by now he'd exacted his revenge. I think that now, in their hearts, it was time to call the war off. The hatchets were buried.

I had no idea whatsoever what was going to happen.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Freud would have had a field day with this.
This is classic stuff!
Biblical stuff! Ziggy was once the loneliest kid in Brooklyn, practically abandoned. He rises up and wreaks his revenge on his parents. What's the word that comics use when they have an audience in hysterics? They
slay
them. And now here you've got Ziggy slaying his parents. I mean, this is like Greek mythology. Just classic stuff.

SALLY KLEIN:
Every show that Harry, Flo, and Ziggy did, the O'Hares were there . . . with the very best seats in the house, courtesy of Ziggy. You've seen
Strangers on a Train
, when Robert Walker is at the tennis match and all the heads are going back and forth, following the ball? Except Robert Walker, he's fixed on Farley Granger? Well, that's just what was happening here. These two were
glued.