I took the train back to Chicago, to try my luck at another talent show. From there, I got a job assisting a morphine-addicted magician who seemed bent on setting me on fire. Then suddenly I was in Duluth again, dancing alone in my boardinghouse to keep my legs up. Someone knocked at the door, and for a moment, still dancing, I imagined who it might be: Miriam, come to ask my forgiveness. Boris the seal, honking that fish tasted sweeter from my fingers than anyone else’s. Florenz Ziegfeld and George White, fighting over whether I’d be the headliner in the Follies or the Scandals.
It was the landlady, a red-nosed woman in a striped housecoat. “You’re keeping everyone awake,” she said. Then she thrust an envelope into my hand, a telegram from the hungry agent that said, Can you dance? Learn Pantages Minneapolis tomorrow.
Could I dance? I could fly. I packed my case and caught a train that night. “Lucky guy,” I told myself as we pulled out of Duluth, and then wondered when I’d started talking aloud. That is, I said, aloud, “When did you start talking to yourself?” The guy next to me sighed, then changed seats.
All the way to Minneapolis, I shined my shoes. When I got there, I had to dirty them up again, because the skinny guy in charge of the tab show wanted a Dutch comic who could dance — the one they’d booked had a bum appendix. He’d been taken to the hospital in his costume but left behind his wig. Afterward, I was fired again. The beginning of the end, I thought. Time to listen: vaudeville was dying. I should leave before it killed me too. I stood in the wings and watched the girls onstage, lovely in their skimpy costumes, the light off the umbrellas they turned hitting my face like rainwater. Maybe that’s why the agitated comic behind me — his straight man vomiting in somebody’s purse — noticed me. Probably I was just close up. He was a stout man whose suspenders seemed in danger of pulling his pants to his chin, and he was doing a small dance of impatience in the wings.
“You’ll do,” he said to me.
Remember: the Pantages, Minneapolis, September 1931?
This is where you came in.
5. Good-bye, Freddy, Good-bye
The morning after we met, like a couple who gets drunk in a strange town and wakes up with rings on their fingers and a few faint happy memories of the evening before, Rocky and I went out to breakfast to take a gander at what we’d gotten ourselves into. What had roused me from bed was rolling over and getting stabbed by a pin that affixed a note to my shirtfront: Meet me at the Busy Bee 10 A.M. Your partner.
My partner!
Said partner, I had thought, was a dark-haired clown in makeup and baggy pants. A patsy. An overexcited fat man. I looked around the Busy Bee, and all I saw was a blond guy in a good suit, puffy from drink but handsome, who waved at me. Then he waved a little harder.
When people ask me what he was like, I always want to say the one thing they won’t believe: he was good-looking. They have eyes, these people, and they’ve seen the party in question plenty. Dark hair sticking up, sloppy fat, useless with his hands and feet, squeaky, breathless. With rare exceptions, if you wanted to make it in the movies you had to choose between funny and handsome: Fred Astaire and Stan Laurel could be brothers, but which one’s the heartthrob? Even a voice makes a difference in how good-looking you are, and Rock’s real voice was knowing and slow. He could have made a living off of it, if things had gone differently. The stuff he colored his hair with washed out. (Rubbed off, too, I learned later. I was the one who told him to either dye it or give up: I was tired of finding bootblack on my good clothes.) He was handsome the way Babe Ruth was handsome, a combination of confidence and being glad to see you. A backslapping man. A handshaker. A kisser of babies and pretty girls. Just like Babe Ruth, he’d peek past a curtain at the one old lady who hadn’t smiled for anyone and point: She’ll be laughing hysterically by the time I’m done.
So there he was, my sandy-haired partner with the big hands.
“Hey!” he said. I couldn’t believe that anyone who’d drunk as much as we had the night before could look so pink and bright: healthy, really. He stood up and gave me a quick hug, surprising both me and the waitress, who had arrived with his breakfast. “How do you feel?”
“Like a wrung-out sponge,” I told him.
“You need to eat.”
“I need not to.”
“That’s okay too.” He sat down in front of his just-delivered plate, which was filled with a jumble of food. “Do you mind,” he said, picking up his fork. He took a couple of quick bites before I replied. Each time he lifted the fork with his left hand, he brought his right hand up delicately, palm down, beneath it. After the third bite I realized he did this to protect his shirtfront.
Then he set the fork down. I thought he was formulating some elaborate question — he had an expression of concerned concentration on his face — but all he said was “So?”
“So?” I answered.
His deep-set eyes — on film they looked comical, like buttons on an overstuffed mattress — were round and complicated, halfway between brown and green. He tapped his fork on the edge of his plate. “So. Still a good idea, the two of us striking out?”
“We have a contract,” I said seriously.
“I know that.” He smiled and patted his shirt pocket. “I was just wondering whether I’d have to take you to court.”
We did have a contract, drawn up at some point overnight. The terms: Rocky would get sixty percent, I would get forty, but on the tenth anniversary of our partnership the terms would reverse, and then reverse again ten years after that. Rocky put that clause in: he claimed it’d give us incentive to stick together. For all I know, the percentages were nothing but misdirection—Pay no attention to this, which says you’ll get less, but to this, which says you’ll get more. Later I found out that for Rocky, the future was like Mozambique: he believed in it, he just had no interest. What were the chances he’d get there?
Now he took the sorry thing out of his pocket. Even the paper had a hangover: it was crumpled and mottled with whiskey, nearly illegible.
“You think it’s valid like that?” I asked.
“It looks like the Magna Carta. If anything, it’s more valid.” He read it over nostalgically. “Someday,” he said, “this will be an important historical document.”
“Aha,” said a nearby voice, but not loud enough that I thought it was directed at us. Then louder, “A-ha!” Fred Fabian. I felt like a correspondent in a divorce case. Who knows how he found us. Maybe Rocky had pinned a note to him too. He had the look of a man who had slept too much or too little.
Listen, before you feel sorry for Freddy Fabian, I insist he wouldn’t have had a career anyhow. Though in real life his face was unobjectionable, it would have photographed terribly, all dark circles and sunken cheekbones. Also his teeth were awfuclass="underline" they looked like they’d been carved out of a block of cheese. What’s more, he had no ambition. He was always trying to talk Rocky into traveling less, and solely around Chicago, where his family lived. An itchy man, Fabian; he constantly pulled his clothing away from his skin, first at his wrists, then at his shirtfront, then, hands in pockets, from his hips — a sideways flick of the wrist — and his crotch — forward. Maybe he could have found work in the movies as a heavy, I don’t know. He certainly looked like a two-bit mobster as he stood by our table.