The Autograph Hound (21 page)

Mr. Benstedt sits me down and tells me to take off my right sock. He puts alcohol in a pan. I soak my foot. It tingles. I won't go and see the guys at The Homestead after I make my move, they'll come and see me. I don't know which restaurant I'll get, but it'll be blue chip. Some place that's been around a long time and that's staying right where it is.

“See this.” Mr. Benstedt holds up an inky blue jar. “One color. That's what they give me. And they call this the Land of Plenty. It's a mockery.”

He puts his ear close to the radio. “Listen to that voice. Garland could sing. She's been a real influence. I've done dozens of rainbows. And the other side of the rainbow, too—the bluebirds, mountains, lemon drops, everything.”

“She made a comeback, so can you.”

“The public don't deserve me. Nobody wants the old symbols. The snake was wisdom and truth, the tiger was strength and courage. And who believes in love and constancy these days, so the rose is out. I'd rather stay in retirement and highlight the memorials on my own body. A thousand years from now I'll be preserved like an Egyptian tomb. Archaeologists'll have a field day.”

“You mean your body tells a story?”

“Details you'd never get in photographs, kid. I made up great designs, but I saved history for myself. The Bonus March. The Bombing of Hiroshima. Joe McCarthy and Roy Conn. It's all on my stomach. The main events from 1924 to 1965. I made a few mistakes, but after a while you get to know the difference between a publicity stunt and a real catastrophe.”

“Could you call my tattoo … engraving … history?”

“It's only history when you kick the bucket. Your name isn't there, just the hospital's. It's words, not pictures. I'm not even allowed to jazz it up.”

Mr. Benstedt pulls up a stool and lifts my foot out of the alcohol bath. It feels cool and light.

“Can you take pain?” says Mr. Benstedt. The machine's buzzing in his hand.

“I'd rather not.”

“Hold onto the bottom of your chair. Think of something nice.”

The first bite hurts terrible. The needle moves so quick. I can't keep up with my pain. My leg pulls back automatically. Mr. Benstedt holds my ankle tight. For an old man, he's got a strong grip. “Think hard!” he says. “Think big!”

You need peace and quiet to think of the stars. I'm dripping with sweat. “Stop, Mr. Benstedt! Stop, for chrissake!”

His machine clicks off. I open my eyes. Mr. Benstedt's not smiling. “I'm not even up to the ‘e' in property.”

“Turn up the music. Maybe that'll help.”

Mr. Benstedt goes to the radio and makes it louder. Still Judy. When he takes his seat again, there's blood on his blue arm.

“Mr. Benstedt, you're bleeding.”

“I did it for her.” He nods his head toward the radio. “Before you came in.”

“For Judy?”

“She's my only modern since 1965.”

“It's her slippers from
The Wizard of Oz
.”

“I had to do them in blue. That's all I've got.”

“They're ruby like she wore.”

“That's 'cause of the blood. The engraving's fresh. Blue and red make ruby.”

“The blood's in the shape of her slippers. It doesn't drip. It's right in place. Shining.”

“That's craft.”

“It's magic.”

Mr. Benstedt turns on the machine. “She was the greatest singer in America. She gave me a lot of pleasure.”

“Was?”

“Dead. They just flew her in special from London. If I didn't have this nine-to-fiver, I'd be up at Frank E. Campbell's paying my respects.”

Mr. Benstedt says nobody's ever walked out while he's working. I tell him to turn off the machine. He says my foot might get infected in my sock. Too bad. I'm going to see Judy. I'll be back.

It's the way Mom would've liked it. Crowds three blocks long. Flower trucks backed up and honking, filled with every kind of fresh flower in every possible design. Mom was here—81st Street and Madison Avenue—when Valentino passed on. He got headlines like Judy, but he wasn't as big. He was only a sex symbol, you couldn't hum his work. Judy means more than the physical stuff. She's the voice of America. Mom came all the way from Ocean Beach for the Valentino Vigil. She stayed up half the night. She said there were 100,000 fans waiting to say good-bye to Rudy. They held pictures and souvenirs like this crowd. Mom was only allowed a few seconds with him. She said that was enough, the black hair, the smooth complexion, the gorgeous head lying on silk sheets in Frank E. Campbell's. She kept the front page of the
Daily News
in a frame on her dresser. It's brown and shredding, but you can still see Rudy's head and chest, and the guards standing at attention to protect him. Mom said it was one of the greatest moments in her life. “After that,” she said every Sunday when we walked home from Mass, “Death will always be beautiful.”

Mom would like the way the fans are behaving themselves. She got mad at the women who tried to crawl into Rudy's coffin. She broke the spruce cane I bought her telling me about the two girls who committed suicide the day Rudy died. She thought they were after publicity. “They didn't even stand on line.” Mom got into one of her red furies. “They didn't own him. He wasn't their property. What did they do for him!” Mom showed me the letters she wrote on Valentino's behalf—in the early days when all her fingers could move at once. She wrote to every magazine and newspaper that called him a “pink powder puff.” It took months, but Mom did it. “Benny, I swear to you, Rudy was no pink powder puff. He was all man. I saw the movies. I saw him. Believe your mother!” I believed her, but she never stopped telling me.

We loved Judy. She was the first star to make Mom forget Rudy. Sure, Judy had her ups and downs—marriages, suicide attempts, drinking. But that's all part of being a star. Judy came through it. Her fans stuck by her. Mom and I never missed her on TV. When she played New York, I'd always hang around the Westbury, where she stayed. Rudy was a big seducer, people fell for his looks. Judy went right to the heart.

Flashbulbs are popping near the front of the line. It's Good News Probst and his Instamatic. He's photographing the kids squatting down on the pavement playing Garland on their portables. He's with the rest of the Horn & Hardart crowd—Sypher, Macready, Moonstone, and Gloria. He waves me over. “Trigger was dead and stuffed two months before Roy Rogers told us. There was no time to mourn.”

I duck under the barricade.

“The nearest and dearest are always the last to know,” says Gloria, touching my arm as if we hadn't been fighting and were friends again. “She was making such a good comeback in London at The Talk of the Town.”

“What comeback?” says Sypher. “They were throwing food at her.”

“How do you know, Louis?” says Gloria.

“I heard it from one of our international entertainers.”

“I bet it was roses,” says Gloria.

“It was food.”

“Hey, man, cut this food jive. I feel sick.” Moonstone closes his eyes after he speaks. He's hugging himself like a baby.

“What's with him?”

“When he heard about Garland,” says Sypher, “he went to Walgreen's and bought bottles of Darvon, aspirin, and Seconal. He took two of each.”

“Three,” says Moonstone.

I whisper to Gloria. “I got five hundred dollars.”

She throws her arms around me and kisses me.

“Cut it out, Gloria.”

“He got it! He got it!”

“Got what?” says Macready.

“Benny got the money to move to another restaurant. He's going to have the biggest collection in the world.”

“
That's
good news,” says Probst.

“Where you moving?” says Sypher.

“I'm not sure. Maybe Lutèce, or the Basque Coast.”

“Frog food.”

“Louis, they're very good restaurants,” says Gloria.

“Do they have entertainment?”

“No.”

“Then what's the big deal?”

“Benny's getting a three-star restaurant. Put that in your pipe, Mr. Waldorf Towers, and puff it.”

“Is that nice talk for a guy who helped you out at the Majestic?”

“I forgot,” says Gloria.

“Wanna get married, sweetheart?” Sypher says. “You're like my first wife. Everything I asked, she forgot.”

“Can't you see she's embarrassed, Louis?”

“Slam it, moneybags. Where'd you get the coin?”

“Sold an heirloom.”

“An heirloom? I didn't know you went back that far.”

“Judy had such a nice family,” Gloria says. “They were helping her with her comeback, giving her strength and backbone. After long hours on the nightclub floor, she'd sit with them by the open fire. Have tea. Joke. Judy'd pick up some old sheet music and sing a favorite. They were so nice together—a team. They were so scrubbed, so talented. Liza the singer, Joey the drummer, and little Lorna.”

“Don't cry, Gloria.”

“You wouldn't feel bad, lady, if you kept away from newspapers,” Probst says. “I don't read them. I feel great.”

“How do you keep up?”

“Read the almanac. You get all the facts, but a year late. It's too bad about Judy, but look at it this way—in 1968, over four million Americans established two point one million new families, over ninety-two percent of all Americans live in families. You don't read about that in those scare headlines. It gives you a boost to think of all those happy people—praying together, bowling together, probably listening to Judy's songs together.”

“You're full of shit, Good News,” says Moonstone.

“Facts keep you on the sunny side of the street. You can't worry too much about one suicide when you know Judy's only one of six thousand, one hundred thirty-eight this year,” says Probst. “I've been through serious crises before—the Battle of the Bulge, the Berlin Airlift, the Dodgers leaving Ebbets Field. The almanac's got it all. In small print, things aren't so horrible.”

“Pills, man. Dig it.”

“That's just temporary, Moonstone.”

“Whaddya mean?” says Moonstone. “Sometimes it lasts for days.”

“Moonstone knows what he's talkin' about,” says Macready. “When JFK got killed, he musta swallowed half a bottle of Seconals. He was out like a light.”

“I had the hungers. Slept for three days.”

“That was a coma,” laughs Macready. “The police took you to the hospital and gave your stomach a pumping. You had yourself one big coma, jim.”

“What's the difference? My eyes were shut, weren't they?”

“You took half a bottle of Seconal? They say that's what Judy took,” says Gloria.

“Five—I took five Seconals and washed them back with a dozen aspirin and Coke. The blinkers slammed like iron gates, or somethin'. I was flying.”

“How come you didn't take the same for Judy?” says Gloria.

“She was great, but not that great.”

“You're too young, Moonstone,” says Gloria. “Your hearing's bad from all those rock bands. You don't remember Judy riding in Andy Hardy's jalopy up Main Street. Or the excitement when we thought Glenn Ford was going to marry her and take her away from all her trouble. You never saw the yellow brick road that the crew painted out of respect in front of her air-conditioned dressing room. I wish I could go to sleep and wake up in a month when this is over.”

“A month?” says Moonstone, swaying. “You know about Sodium Amytal?”

“No.”

“Two with a glass of Gallo. It's a wipeout.”

“I'm afraid to take those things. I might dream of Judy. I always do, standing with the Wizard, getting into the balloon to come back to black and white.”

“No dreaming with Sodium Amytal. Days and days of dead time.”

“Then I could pretend this never happened. I was never here. I could listen to Judy. I could watch her films. It'd be like she hadn't gone away.”

“She hasn't,” says Probst. “With cable television, cassettes, tapes, there's going to be more Judy Garland than ever before.”

“I never thought of that,” says Gloria.

“That tramp routine with her teeth blacked?” says Moonstone. “Corny, man.”

“She made ten thousand dollars a night when she played the Palace,” I say. “She sang in E-flat. Her records on Decca sold millions.”

A girl listening to Judy's records on the pavement pushes up beside me. She's wearing a lumberman's shirt and blue jeans, with a black armband that says “33,000” and the word JUDY pinned over it. Her glasses are the wire ones. “I want to say something. If you're not going to speak up for Judy's soul, I will. Have you ever heard Edith Piaf? Helen Morgan? Marlene Dietrich?”

“Sure.”

“Well, Judy was greater! All her life she wanted to be free, to fly over the rainbow. Understand? Drugs helped, but she had a bad karma. Death was the great leap. She was free of her husbands, the networks, the star system. She was
free
because she chose
freely
. In that act, that last moment, Judy showed us how great she was, and how brave. She was liberated! No more pig capitalism, no more sexist guilt …”

A Rolls Royce pulls up to the front of Frank E. Campbell's. The sun shines off it. Television reporters, their hats tipped over their eyes from the glare, rush toward the car with their cameras.

The girl keeps talking. I don't have time to answer.

“She was free. No more exploitation. No more media freaking. Now she can do her thing …”

“Who is it, Benny? Can you see?”

“I think that's Judy's Silver Cloud. It was custom designed for her.”

“No kidding?”

“See the running board. I rode three blocks when
I Could Go on Singing
premiered.”