Funnymen (20 page)

We're still watching Vic sing and I said to Ziggy, “He's good, don't you think?”

“He'll do,” Ziggy said.

Then he asked me if Vic would mind it if he ran onstage right now and started goofin' around. I said, “You wanna wake up without your balls tomorrow?”

He said, “No, I got a tendency to need those.”

He asked me who I was and I said Arnie Latchkey. “I'm managing Vic,” I told him.

“My condolences, Arnie,” he said.

SALLY KLEIN:
Before every show Harry and Flo would drink tea, especially Aunt Flo. She would always put a lot of honey in it for her voice. So we were in their room and I kept looking at the clock. Harry was talking to
Flo and to me but I didn't hear a word. Because my own thoughts were blaring so loud: Tell them, Sally,
tell them.
You have to tell them. You
have
to!

Every time I tried, the words wouldn't come out. One time I even got as far as “There's something I have to tell you.” Flo said, “What is it?” and I said, “Nothing.”

I went to the bathroom and vomited with the water running so they wouldn't hear it. I stayed in there for five minutes. The phone rang . . . it was time to go to the dressing room to get ready.

Ziggy purposely had them called ten minutes too late.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Vic had really mastered his stage persona. I was surprised. At the end of the five songs he did, he said straight out of nowhere, “Thank you, ladies, thank you, gentlemen. It has really given me such unbelievable
naches
to come up and sing for you tonight! You're a great crowd and you couldn't make me feel more accepted. And—for all you lovely Sadies, Selmas, and Shirleys—I'm in room four-thirteen.”

Now where did
this
come from?! Where did
naches
come from? I knew he was
shtupping
girls and I guess maybe he'd asked them for a few words of the local argot. I don't know. And the joke at the end? Room 413? He'd never said one word onstage before this night—he just warbled.

There truly was something magical in the air that night.

SALLY KLEIN:
I walked with Harry and Flo down those long halls. They seemed endlessly long, a mile long. They were holding hands. God, they were so tiny.

I remember the elevator didn't work. We waited for two minutes and then we decided to use the stairs.

Going down the stairs we passed this man coming up. He was dressed in a tuxedo, he had his hair parted in the middle and it was very shiny. And he had a very long, thin handlebar mustache. I remember that he smelled of paprika.

“Oh my God,” Harry said.

Flo gasped and covered her mouth, like she was in shock.

I don't know who it was.

I took them downstairs and into their dressing room and closed the door. I started crying again.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Blissmans!” the emcee said and then the O'Hares and Ziggy went onstage. Now, I'd never seen the act before but it didn't take Watson and Crick to see that the O'Hares weren't related to Ziggy Blissman. The crowd, though, they were confused: most of them had seen Ziggy with Harry and Flo. And they're asking themselves
and one another, “What's Father Flannigan and Mother McCree doing onstage with Ziggy?”

Ziggy never broke stride. The routine began and Ziggy just flowed with it. He had the knack, that gift all funnymen have, to glide through troubled air.

Behind me I hear a commotion, a little one. I turned around and there are these two tiny people and they got the Max Factor Pan-Cake makeup on. It's Harry and Flo.

They inch up to where I am, backstage, and peer though the curtains. They see the act, they see the O'Hares and Ziggy. And Ziggy's hugging Kathleen O'Hare and calling her Mommy and he's calling Jimmy O'Hare, who was the spittin' image of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Poppy.

Flo, who is aghast, turned around and Sally was right behind her and Flo said,
“Who is that?!”
And Sally said, “That . . . that's you. That's you and Harry. Ziggy replaced you.” I could tell . . . she wanted to say something like “I'm sorry” but she just couldn't get the words out.

I looked at Harry, I looked down at him . . . he was shaking violently, like an electric toothbrush. The man was
humming!
Sally went over to him and wrapped her arms around him and then Flo collapsed . . . she was about ten yards behind us.
Thud!

Two stagehands lifted her up and propped her on a chair, and Harry tries to walk over to her but then he collapses too. They dragged both of them, Harry and Flo, very slowly, very delicately, into their small dressing room. And that's where they died.

The lights came down quick. Just when the O'Hares and Ziggy began clicking. The emcee took the mike and said that due to some problems the show would be temporarily halted.

SALLY KLEIN:
The next thing I know we're in Ziggy's bungalow, me, Ziggy, and Dr. Schwartzman, the house doctor at Heine's.

“They're dead,

Ziggy,” the doctor said. Ziggy was sitting on his bed. He put his face in his hands. He started sniffling and blew his nose.

Dr. Schwartzman said, “I didn't know it was possible but my guess is they had a sort of mutual stroke. She had one. Then he had one.”

Ziggy was crying now.

There's a knock on the door and I said, “Go away, Bernie,” but Bernie Heine walked in. He used the key.

“Ziggy, I'm so sorry,” he said.

“Thanks, Bern,” Ziggy said. His face was very red and puffy.

“But we got four hundred people out there,” Bernie said, “and they want a show.”

“Can't the O'Haras do some soft-shoe for 'em? Till Lenny Pearl comes on?”

“It's the O'Hares, and they walked. And Lenny can't go on . . . he's not even here yet. Ziggy, you can't screw me over again!”

“Bernie, there's just no show left in me,” Ziggy told him. “Just have that Vic Feldbaum do a few more numbers.”

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
My brother Marvin finds me in the lobby, tells me I gotta find Vic and I gotta do it PDQ. I ask why and he says, “'Cause now we're even favor-wise and this is starting a whole new go-around.” So I run up the stairs to room 413 and I bang on the door and sure enough Vic is with some doll named Selma.

“It's me, Latch,” I told him. “You gotta finish up soon, Vic, this is crucial!”

“Okay, hold on,” I heard from behind the door. Then three seconds later I heard him say, “Okay . . . done.”

We ran down the stairs, he's zipping up, and I told him he had to go back on. He said, “Are they gonna pay me double for this?” and I said, “Pal, we ain't even received one cent so far for this gig, and if you don't go on now we never will.”

So the emcee is back on, the lights come up, and he says into the mike, “Ladies and gentleman, please give a warm Loch Sheldrake welcome to a new performer making his very second appearance at Heine's tonight . . . from Boston, Massachusetts: Vic Feldbaum!”

Well, this time the welcome was something less than warm, let me tell you.

The band starts up again and the audience lets out a sporadic groan here and there. And Vic is singing “It Was You” because, you got to remember, he'd only rehearsed with this band for a few days! They had no repertoire. And in the middle of the song, people begin to cough and hiss, so Vic stops singing and says, “Okay then, maybe it
wasn't
you!”

SALLY KLEIN:
“I can't go on solo, I just can't,” Ziggy is saying.

Bernie told him, “You got no choice. You go onstage and you piss in your pants and then go off, but you go onstage and you do it now!”

“What would your parents want you to do, Ziggy?” I asked him.

“That's really a moot point now,” he answered.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Vic's dying up there, he's dying. The band lost interest . . . the drummer even left to take a leak. And Vic is just trading insults with the audience. The Codport is really coming out. He was telling one
guy to stick the mike up his you-know-what and he told another one to pull it back out.

All of a sudden the spotlight drifts over to the audience. There's Ziggy. And then there's another spotlight on Vic. The rest of the place is absolutely black.

“Where you been?” Vic said.

“I been in my bungalow,” Ziggy said.

“It's been lonely up here, you know that?”

“I wasn't exactly livin' it up in my bungalow either, Feldbaumelli.”

“Where's your folks?”

“Which ones?” Ziggy says.

That got a big laugh . . . 'cause everyone knew the O'Hares weren't Harry and Flo.

“The ones you were supposed to be onstage with,” Vic said.

“They died.”

“Oh, they died, did they?” Vic said.

“Yeah, Vic, almost as bad as you just was.”

And with that, it was like a great wave of laughter hit.

Waving his fist, Vic said, “You think this is dead, wait till—”

“Wait till tomorrow when you got to sing the same five lousy songs you know again.”

Vic laughed for a second and said, “Hey, you know, you're right about that.”

Teddy, let me tell you . . . it kept going. And going. The chemistry, the timing, the
music,
it was all there. It was filet mignon and Dom Pérignon and caviar and crème brûlée.

“You know, you keep foolin' 'round with these Jewish girls up here, Feldbaumino,” Ziggy said, “and you're going to wind up paying for it.”

“Nah, Ziggy, I heard
you
was the one who had to pay for it.”

And once again, it was like this massive tumult from the sky rolling over the place, an explosion of laughter. The floor was shaking, I swear to God.

“You don't look like no ‘Feldbaum' to me, Vic,” Ziggy said.

“And what does a Feldbaum look like, I'd like to know.”

“Like me.”

“Like a basketball with three hundred carrots springing right out of it, you mean?”

Zig said, “Hey, look, Vic, the people in here could use a nap, why don't you sing a few songs?”

And Vic started to sing “Just One of Those Things” and Ziggy is jumping and skipping and hopping and he jumps in Vic's arms and the whole joint was on goddamn fire! I have never ever seen anything like this! So
raw, so new, so fresh, so spontaneous, so absolutely godddam hysterical! Every molecule in the air that night was charged. Westbrook Pegler once called their act “table tennis with a comet.”

Magic. Absolute, pure, unadulterated magic. They had it. Thunder and lightning.

They did two hours. Two whole hours, I do not exaggerate. Playing off each other. The crowd was hoarse; by the end, their hands hurt so much that they couldn't clap anymore.

Lenny Pearl never got on. He finally showed up but by then the audience had been wrung dry to the bones. The only people left were the busboys mopping up. Lenny turned purple, cursed Ziggy and Vic for ten minutes straight, and left the mountains.

Oh yeah. There was one other thing. Two women were laughing so much they had to be rushed to the hospital because of stomach pains. And some man in his fifties had laughed so much that he had a massive coronary arrest and died.