If the River Was Whiskey: Stories Page 8

  Grief, that’s what it was. Or was it? And then she was thinking of Sonny again—what if he was dead and she was old like Muriel? She wouldn’t be so fat, of course, but maybe like one of those thin and elegant old ladies in Palm Springs, the ones who’d done their stretching all their lives. Or what if she wasn’t an old lady at all—the thought swooped down on her like a bird out of the sky—what if Sonny was in a car wreck or something? It could happen.

  She stood there gazing in on the mess through her own wavering reflection. One moment she saw the wreckage of the old lady’s life, the next the fine mouth and expressive eyes everyone commented on. After a while, she turned away from the window and looked out on the yard as Muriel must have seen it. There were the roses, gorged with water and flowering madly, the impatiens, rigid as sticks, oleander drowning in their own yellowed leaves—and there, poking innocuously from the bushes at the far corner of the patio, was the steel wand that controlled the sprinklers. Handle, neck, prongs: it was just like theirs.

  And then it came to her. She’d turn them on—the sprinklers—just for a minute, to see what it felt like. She wouldn’t leave them on long—it could threaten the whole foundation of her house.

  That much she understood.

  T H E H U M A N F L Y

  Just try to explain to anyone the art of fasting!

  —Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist”

  IN THE EARLY DAYS, before the press took him up, his outfit was pretty basic: tights and cape, plastic swim goggles and a bathing cap in the brightest shade of red he could find. The tights were red too, though they’d faded to pink in the thighs and calves and had begun to sag around the knees. He wore a pair of scuffed hightops—red, of course—and the cape, which looked as if it had last been used to line a trash can, was the color of poached salmon. He seemed to be in his thirties, though I never did find out how old he was, and he was thin, skinny, emaciated—so wasted you worried about his limbs dropping off. When he limped into the office that first afternoon, I didn’t know what to think. If he brought an insect to mind, it was something spindly and frail—a daddy longlegs or one of those spidery things that scoot across the surface of the pool no matter how much chlorine the pool man dumps in.

  “A gentleman here to see you,” Crystal sang through the intercom.

  My guard was down. I was vulnerable. I admit it. Basking in the glow of my first success (ten percent of a walk-on for Bettina Buttons, a nasally inflected twelve-year-old with pushy parents, in a picture called Tyrannosaurus II—no lines, but she did manage a memorable screech) and bloated with a celebratory lunch, I was feeling magnanimous, large-spirited, and saintly. Of course, the two splits of Sangre de Cristo, 1978, might have had something to do with it. I hit the button on the intercom. “Who is it?”

  “Your name, sir?” I heard Crystal ask, and then, through the crackle of static, I heard him respond in the peculiar unmodulated rumble he associated with speech.

  “Pardon?” Crystal said.

  “La Mosca Humana,” he rumbled.

  Crystal leaned into the intercom. “Uh, I think he’s Mexican or something.”

  At that stage in my career, I had exactly three clients, all inherited from my predecessor: the aforementioned Bettina; a comic with a harelip who did harelip jokes only; and a soft-rock band called Mu, who believed they were reincarnated court musicians from the lost continent of Atlantis. The phone hadn’t rung all morning and my next (and only) appointment, with Bettina’s mother, grandmother, acting coach, and dietician, was at seven. “Show him in,” I said grandly.

  The door pushed open, and there he was. He drew himself up with as much dignity as you could expect from a grown man in a red bathing cap and pink tights, and hobbled into the office. I took in the cap, the cape, the hightops and tights, the slumped shoulders and fleshless limbs. He wore a blond mustache, droopy and unkempt, the left side of his face was badly bruised, and his nose looked as if it had been broken repeatedly—and recently. The fluorescent light glared off his goggles.

  My first impulse was to call security—he looked like one of those panhandling freaks out on Hollywood Boulevard—but I resisted it. As I said, I was full of wine and feeling generous. Besides, I was so bored I’d spent the last half-hour crumpling up sheets of high-fiber bond and shooting three-pointers into the wastebasket. I nodded. He nodded back. “So,” I said, “what can I do for you, Mr., ah—?”

  “Mosca,” he rumbled, the syllables thick and muffled, as if he were trying to speak and clear his throat at the same time. “La Mosca Humana.”

  “The Human Fly, right?” I said, dredging up my high-school Spanish.

  He looked down at the desk and then fixed his eyes on mine. “I want to be famous,” he said.

  How he found his way to my office, I’ll never know. I’ve often wondered if it wasn’t somebody’s idea of a joke. In those days, I was nothing—I had less seniority than the guy who ran the Xerox machine—and my office was the smallest and farthest from the door of any in the agency. I was expected to get by with two phone lines, one secretary, and a workspace not much bigger than a couple of good-sized refrigerator boxes. There were no Utrillos or Demuths on my walls. I didn’t even have a window.

  I understood that the man hovering over my desk was a nut case, but there was more to it than that. I could see that he had something—a dignity, a sad elemental presence—that gave the lie to his silly outfit. I felt uneasy under his gaze. “Don’t we all,” I said.

  “No, no,” he insisted, “you don’t understand,” and he pulled a battered manila envelope from the folds of his cape. “Here,” he said, “look.”

  The envelope contained his press clippings, a good handful of them, yellowed and crumbling, bleached of print. All but one were in Spanish. I adjusted the desk lamp, squinted hard. The datelines were from places like Chetumal, Tuxtla, Hidalgo, Tehuantepec. As best I could make out, he’d been part of a Mexican circus. The sole clipping in English was from the “Metro” section of the Los Angeles Times: MAN ARRESTED FOR SCALING ARCO TOWER.

  I read the first line—“A man known only as ‘The Human Fly’”—and I was hooked. What a concept: a man known only as the Human Fly! It was priceless. Reading on, I began to see him in a new light: the costume, the limp, the bruises. This was a man who’d climbed twenty stories with nothing more than a couple pieces of rope and his fingernails. A man who defied the authorities, defied death—my mind was doing backflips; we could run with this one, oh, yes, indeed. Forget your Rambos and Conans, this guy was the real thing.

  “Five billion of us monkey on the planet,” he said in his choked, moribund tones, “I want to make my mark.”

  I looked up in awe. I saw him on Carson, Letterman, grappling his way to the top of the Bonaventure Hotel, hurtling Niagara in a barrel, starring in his own series. I tried to calm myself. “Uh, your face,” I said, and I made a broad gesture that took in the peach-colored bruise, the ravaged nose and stiffened leg, “what happened?”

  For the first time, he smiled. His teeth were stained and ragged; his eyes flared behind the cracked plastic lenses of the goggles. “An accident,” he said.

  As it turned out, he wasn’t Mexican at all—he was Hungarian. I saw my mistake when he peeled back the goggles and bathing cap. A fine band of skin as blanched and waxen as the cap of a mushroom outlined his ears, his hairline, the back of his neck, dead-white against the sun-burnished oval of his face. His eyes were a pale watery blue and the hair beneath the cap was as wispy and colorless as the strands of his mustache. His name was Zoltan Mindszenty, and he’d come to Los Angeles to live with his uncle when the Russian tanks rolled through Budapest in 1956. He’d learned English, Spanish, and baseball, practiced fire-eating and tightrope-walking in his spare time, graduated at the top of his high-school class, and operated a forklift in a cannery that produced refried beans and cactus salad. At the age of nineteen he joined the Quesadilla Brothers’ Circus and saw the world. Or at least that part of it bounded by California, Ariz
ona, New Mexico, and Texas to the north and Belize and Guatemala to the south. Now he wanted to be famous.

  He moved fast. Two days after I’d agreed to represent him he made the eyewitness news on all three major networks when he suspended himself in a mesh bag from the twenty-second floor of the Sumitomo Building and refused to come down.

  Terrific. The only problem was that he didn’t bother to tell me about it. I was choking down a quick lunch—avocado and sprouts on a garlic-cheese croissant—already running late for an audition I’d set up for my harelipped comedian—when the phone rang. It was a Lieutenant Peachtree of the LAPD. “Listen,” the lieutenant hissed, “if this is a publicity stunt…” and he trailed off, leaving the threat—heavy ire, the violation of penal codes, the arcane and merciless measures taken to deal with accessories—unspoken.

  “Pardon?”

  “The nutball up on the Sumitomo Building. Your client.”

  Comprehension washed over me. My first thought was to deny the connection, but instead I found myself stammering, “But, but how did you get my name?”

  Terse and efficient, a living police report, Peachtree gave me the details. One of his men, hanging out of a window on the twenty-first floor, had pleaded with Zoltan to come down. “I am the Human Fly,” Zoltan rumbled in response as the wind snapped and the traffic sizzled below, “you want to talk to me, call my agent.”

  “Twenty minutes,” Peachtree added, and his tone was as flat and unforgiving as the drop of a guillotine, “I want you down here. Five minutes after that I want this clown in the back of the nearest patrol car—is that understood?”

  It was. Perfectly. And twenty minutes later, with the help of an Officer Dientes, a screaming siren, and several hundred alert motorists who fell away from us on the freeway like swatted flies, I was taking the breeze on the twenty-first floor of the Sumitomo Building. Two of Peachtree’s men gripped my legs and eased my torso out onto the slick glassy plane of the building’s, façade.

  I was sick with fear. Before me lay the immensity of the city, its jaws and molars exposed. Above was the murky sky, half a dozen pigeons on a ledge, and Zoltan, bundled up like a sack of grapefruit and calmly perusing a paperback thriller. I choked back the remains of the croissant and cleared my throat. “Zoltan!” I shouted, the wind snatching the words from my lips and flinging them away. “Zoltan, what are you doing up there?”

  There was a movement from the bag above me, Zoltan stirring himself like a great leathery fruit bat unfolding its wings, and then his skinny legs and outsized feet emerged from their confinement as the bag swayed gently in the breeze. He peered down at me, the goggles aflame with the sun, and gave me a sour look. “You’re supposed to be my agent, and you have to ask me that?”

  “It’s a stunt, then—is that it?” I shouted.

  He turned his face away, and the glare of the goggles died. He wouldn’t answer. Behind me, I could hear Peachtree’s crisp, efficient tones: “Tell him he’s going to jail.”

  “They’re going to lock you up. They’re not kidding.”

  For a long moment, he didn’t respond. Then the goggles caught the sun again and he turned to me. “I want the TV people, Tricia Toyota, ‘Action News,’ the works.”

  I began to feel dizzy. The pavement below, with its toy cars and its clots of tiny people, seemed to rush up at me and recede again in a pulsing wave. I felt Peachtree’s men relax their grip. “They won’t come!” I gasped, clutching the windowframe so desperately my fingers went numb. “They can’t. It’s network policy.” It was true, as far as I knew. Every flake in the country would be out on that ledge if they thought they could get a ten-second clip on the evening news.

  Zoltan was unimpressed. “TV,” he rumbled into the wind, “or I stay here till you see the white of my bone.”

  I believed him.

  As it turned out, he stayed there, aloft, for two weeks. And for some reason—because he was intractable, absurd, mad beyond hope or redemption—the press couldn’t get enough of it. TV included. How he passed the time, what he ate, how he relieved himself, no one knew. He was just a presence, a distant speck in a mesh sack, the faintest intrusion of reality on the clear smooth towering face of the Sumitomo Building. Peachtree tried to get him down, of course—harassing him with helicopters, sending a squad of window cleaners, firemen, and lederhosen up after him—but nothing worked. If anyone got close to him, Zoltan would emerge from his cocoon, cling to the seamless face of the building, and float—float like a big red fly—to a new position.

  Finally, after the two weeks were up—two weeks during which my phone never stopped ringing, by the way—he decided to come down. Did he climb in the nearest window and take the elevator? No, not Zoltan. He backed down, inch by inch, uncannily turning up finger- and toe-holds where none existed. He sprang the last fifteen feet to the ground, tumbled like a sky diver, and came up in the grip of a dozen policemen. There was a barricade up, streets were blocked, hundreds of spectators had gathered. As they were hustling him to a patrol car, the media people converged on him. Was it a protest? they wanted to know. A hunger strike? What did it mean?

  He turned to them, the goggles steamed over, pigeon feathers and flecks of airborne debris clinging to his cape. His legs were like sticks, his face nearly black with sun and soot. “I want to be famous,” he said.

  “A DC 10?”

  Zoltan nodded. “The bigger, the better,” he rumbled.

  It was the day after he’d decamped from the face of the Sumitomo Building and we were in my office, discussing the next project. (I’d bailed him out myself, though the figure was right up there with what you’d expect for a serial killer. There were fourteen charges against him, ranging from trespassing to creating a public nuisance and refusing the reasonable request of a police officer to indecent exposure. I had to call in every favor that was ever owed me and go down on my knees to Sol Bank-off, the head of the agency, to raise the cash.) Zoltan was wearing the outfit I’d had specially made for him: new tights, a black silk cape without a wrinkle in it, a pair of Air Jordan basketball shoes in red and black, and most important of all, a red leather aviator’s cap and goggles. Now he looked less like a geriatric at a health spa and more like the sort of fearless daredevil/superhero the public could relate to.

  “But Zoltan,” I pleaded, “those things go five hundred miles an hour. You’d be ripped to pieces. Climbing buildings is one thing, but this is insane. It’s suicidal.”

  He was slouched in the chair, one skinny leg thrown over the other. “The Human Fly can survive anything,” he droned in his lifeless voice. He was staring at the floor, and now he lifted his head. “Besides, you think the public have any respect for me if I don’t lay it all on line?”

  He had a point. But strapping yourself to the wing of a DC 10 made about as much sense as taking lunch at a sidewalk café in Beirut. “Okay,” I said, “you’re right. But you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. What good’s it going to do you to be famous if you’re dead?”

  Zoltan shrugged.

  “I mean already, just with the Sumitomo thing, I can book you on half the talk shows in the country.…”

  He rose shakily to his feet, lifted his hand, and let it drop. Two weeks on the face of the Sumitomo Building with no apparent source of nourishment hadn’t done him any good. If he was skinny before, he was nothing now—a shadow, a ghost, a pair of tights stuffed with straw. “Set it up,” he rumbled, the words riding up out of the depths of his sunken abdomen, “I talk when I got something to talk about.”

  It took me a week. I called every airline in the directory, listened to a lifetime’s worth of holding jingles, and talked to everyone from the forklift operator at KLM to the president and CEO of Texas Air. I was met by scorn, hostility, disbelief, and naked contempt. Finally I got hold of the schedules manager of Aero Masoquisto, the Ecuadorian national airline. It was going to cost me, he said, but he could hold up the regular weekly flight to Quito for a few hours while Zoltan strapped himself t
o the wing and took a couple passes round the airport. He suggested an airstrip outside Tijuana, where the officials would look the other way. For a price, of course.

  Of course.

  I went to Sol again. I was prepared to press my forehead to the floor, shine his shoes, anything—but he surprised me. “I’ll front the money,” he rasped, his voice ruined from forty years of whispering into the telephone, “no problem.” Sol was seventy, looked fifty, and he’d had his own table in the Polo Lounge since before I was born. “If he bags it,” he said, his voice as dry as a husk, “we got the rights to his life story and we’ll do a paperback/miniseries/action-figure tie-in. Just get him to sign this, that’s all.” He slid a contract across the table. “And if he makes it, which I doubt—I mean I’ve seen some crazies in my time, but this guy is something else—if he makes it, we’ll have a million and a half offers for him. Either way, we make out, right?”

  “Right,” I said, but I was thinking of Zoltan, his brittle limbs pressed to the unyielding metal, the terrible pull of the G-forces, and the cyclonic blast of the wind. What chance did he have?

  Sol cleared his throat, shook a few lozenges into his fist, and rattled them like dice. “Your job,” he said, “is to make sure the press shows up. No sense in this nimrod bagging it for nothing, right?”

  I felt something clench in my gut.

  Sol repeated himself. “Right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  Zoltan was in full regalia as we boarded the plane at LAX, along with a handful of reporters and photographers and a hundred grim-looking Ecuadorians with plastic bags full of disposable diapers, cosmetics, and penlight batteries. The plan was for the pilot to announce a minor problem—a clogged air-conditioning vent or a broken handle in the flush toilet; we didn’t want to panic anybody—and an unscheduled stop to repair it. Once on the ground, the passengers would be asked to disembark and we’d offer them free drinks in the spacious terminal while the plan taxied out of sight and Zoltan did his thing.