“The club,” said Rocky. “My club. The Swans. What, you think we got canned by accident? I’m thirsty.”
We’d been fired around 10:30; now it was 11:00. Even if I had to sleep alone, bed did not sound like such a bad idea. “Next time you get fired on purpose, could you ask me?”
“Relax. It’s Providence. Next week we’re in New York, and who’ll care about Rhode Island?”
“I guess.”
“Don’t guess,” he said. “Believe.”
The club was a local chapter of some kind of vaudeville fraternity, one of those dark-doored joints with no windows, filled with smoke and drink and an exhausting forced hilarity. Some of the guys I recognized from the circuit, but Rocky seemed to be bosom pals with every last one. “This is Mike Sharp,” he said, dragging me by the neck. “Be nice.”
“I’m always nice,” I said, and everyone laughed.
“We aren’t,” said some guy in a chalk-striped suit. There was a game of billiards going, and I watched and realized that Ed Dubuque could have made a fortune here. Also there was a cat, the president of the club I was told, and when the cat jumped up on the billiard table the game had to stop until he felt like getting down. It was a club with rules like that. Now I can say it: I never really cared for theater people. Theater men, anyhow. I was fond of merry oddballs like Jack Robertson the monopede dancer, or quiet geniuses like Walter Cutter. Essentially I didn’t like comedians, except Rocky. I thought he was the funniest guy in the world, and there was nothing I liked less than watching him in a room full of funny guys, trying to claim his title.
The membership at the Swans had armies of ants in their pants. Every story, every bit, involved springing up at the very least, and possibly balancing on a chair or the bar or the billiard table. You had to grab sleeves or shirtfronts or pant seats; you had to feign anger or terror or a fainting spell. This crowd fainted more often than a cotillion of corseted debutantes. I wasn’t the only one who noticed.
“Siddown!” said the ham-faced bartender. “Sweet Jesus, you lot are up and down like a whore’s nightgown.” They all applauded. He must have said this every night.
Late in the evening Rocky, pink cheeked with drink, rolled up his shirtsleeves. He leaned in and grabbed my shoulder. His breath had that gin smell, rotten sentimental flowers.
“I am going to teach you how to tango,” he said.
I said, “Rocky, I hardly know you.”
“Nevertheless.” He suddenly scratched his nose with the flat of one palm, and then shouted, “Somebody give me a rose!” For half a second he attempted to hold a pool cue between his teeth. On the bar, the club president napped in a furry ball on top of a discarded newspaper, the tip of his tail schoolmarmishly tapping a headline. Rocky removed him — surely a breach of the club charter! — and commandeered the paper. He rolled up a sheet and artfully tore one end into petals: a rose.
“Tastes terrible,” Rocky said, giving it a nibble. And then he began to dance by himself. We all pom-pommed in an Argentinean way. At first it was a joke, and then it wasn’t. Rocky held the air, and you knew exactly what his imagined partner weighed. Small, especially compared to him, and so he was deferential; he danced on his toes, his feet back, to give her room. You even knew that she tried to get away from him, and then she got more forgiving and passionate. He loved her; she had a temper, she was still making up her mind. Well, I thought, this was worth getting fired for.
He tilted her into a dip. I swear I could see her hand wrinkling the back of his shirt.
Later, he showed me how to cultivate that newspaper flower. I hadn’t noticed that the actual fashioning of it was part of the trick, like Charlie Chaplin making do with a shoe for dinner, two dinner rolls on forks for entertainment, a gag he’d stolen from Fatty Arbuckle anyhow. “Here,” Rocky said to me. He inclined his head toward the rose that emerged from the local editorial, petal by petal, his face undisturbed, curious, watching it bloom.
The All-Girl Cure
Middling success gets exhausting, take my word for it. Rocky ate more, drank more. Fatter was funnier, so he claimed, but really he was just hungry. He couldn’t get enough. He’d clean off his plate and then look at mine, hopeful. At first it was a request, but soon enough it might as well have been written into the contract: once he’d demolished his meal, he got to eat whatever was left of mine. Sometimes he ordered two meals at once, the only man for whom the fried-clam platter was a side dish. You passed an ice-cream shop with Rocky, and two doors down you suddenly realized you were walking alone. Go back, peer through the window, and there he was, instructing the help on how to lay on the whipped cream, the maraschino cherries, like a pharaoh overseeing a pyramid.
As for me, I became a ladies’ man. I’d discovered the secret, which was mostly just deciding to be one. Wasn’t Rocky right? I needed the practice for the act. The more girls I saw offstage, the more my timing improved: I learned the uses of the long look, the pause, the sudden twinkling smile. How could I think I knew anything about comedy, back when I knew nothing about sex? Waiter, another girl please, we’re booked in Chicago next week and I have a piece of business I need to polish. What the hell, I’ll take all the girls in the house. Girls like that never harmed anyone.
I spent my money on clothes, slick plaid jackets and light wool pants. In other words, I became a dandy, a religious affiliation I still cling to. I took up smoking, so I could carry a lighter and a case. I wore my hat at angles that my father would have considered a thumb in the eye of society: the way you wore your hat was not a joke. Nothing, thought my father, was more serious.
Now I was seeing lots of girls, chorines and dramatic actresses and tumblers and hoofers and soubrettes. Not all of them were as eager as the Indian Rubber Maid to come back to my room, but plenty were. Lots and lots of girls. This one smells like roses and that one smells like cake. This one knows the words to the Iowa fight song and will sing them; this one likes to drink; this shy one will surprise you by slipping the cigar from your hand and taking a puff. This one is just your size; this one is smaller; this one outweighs you in a pleasant, daunting way.
I had a lot of fun. What can I say? I made them laugh.
Rocky, though he’d seen it happen, could not understand. He loved women, but he was inept, so romantically amateurish he’d ask anyone for advice. Sometimes I watched him trying to talk to a girl. If he was sober, he came off too brisk and busy. Drunk, he bumbled, overaffectionate, a dog wanting nothing but to lay its head in your lap. He’d go to kiss a girl’s hand, and she’d end up damp to the elbow. He spent endearments like nickels, called everyone Baby and Sweetheart and Darling and Little Friend and Cutie. This worked until he called the bartender Doll Baby, and the girl he had his eye on suspected that Rock’s affection was for the world at large, not her in particular.
“There must be some tricks you’re not telling me,” Rocky would beg.
“What can I tell you?” I’d answer. “It’s love.”
Not that I didn’t have my methods. Ever since the start of the world, girls have been told by their mothers: a certain kind of man is only after one thing. A suspicious mother is almost always right. Some guys (Rocky, for instance) believed that this meant a guy on the make should act innocent, interested only vaguely in the girl’s company, and not at all in the One Thing. But girls didn’t care. All you had to do was convince a girl that it was Her One Thing that you were angling for, hers and hers alone, surrounded as it was by all her charms. Of course you wanted to sleep with her — how will you ever get there if you don’t make that clear? — it’s you, my darling brunette, my beloved redhead, my most glorious bottle blonde. You with the three brothers, or the father with the butcher shop, or a love of Bach. Let me kiss you, because your butcher father writes you letters that quote Tennyson. Come back to my room, because you love Bach.