by Alan Alda
My father had written a sketch with his partner, Hank Henry, that involved a small pig. Midway through the sketch, Hank would say, “Get out of here and don’t come back until you can bring home the bacon.” My father would leave the stage, and at the end of the sketch he would come back with the pig under his arm and say, “Well, I brought home the bacon!”
Blackout.
It’s hard to imagine this getting a laugh from an audience—or their playing town after town with this gag and making a living. But in order to be able to do that one blackout line, they lugged the pig from theater to theater. He rode in the back of their car. They fed him, gave him a place to sleep, and, what I was most jealous of, they took him everywhere they went, without me. For a whole summer, I was stashed in Wilmington with my mother’s aunt Betty and aunt Anne, while Hank and my parents drove around the burlesque wheel with the damned pig.
I burned with anger and jealousy. On the way to Wilmington, my mother had been very cheerful, telling me what a great time I was going to have. “Aunt Anne is a very fine woman,” she said. A fine woman. A phrase soaked in phoniness. “And Aunt Betty is so jolly. She’s really, really funny.”
Aunt Betty was not jolly. She had a nervous laugh and a couple of large warts on her nose, and she tended to wear her stockings rolled down around her ankles. She smiled at everything. You fell down, she smiled. She was peculiar—which for my mother was jolly.
Aunt Anne was skinny and stern. She had been a nurse among the Chinese before the war. I didn’t know what this meant, but I didn’t like the sound of it.
My parents left me with these strange people, these civilians who were pretending to have something to do with our family. My parents would come by to visit me when they were playing near Wilmington, and they always brought a little suit of clothes for me, a uniform of some kind. They dressed me up in a sailor suit or a Royal Mounties outfit or a policeman’s uniform, and then they took me into the yard with a box camera and took my picture, usually saluting.
On their first visit, after they took the picture, they took me over to the back of the car and showed me the pig. I could tell they expected me to be excited because he was this fat little pink animal.
I hated him. He got treated better than I did. For all I knew, he was the one going up to the chorus girls’ dressing rooms now instead of me.
My parents stayed for a couple of hours, then drove off with my little brother, the pig, and I was left with these crazy civilian sisters. When the summer was over, I went back on the road with them, but it wasn’t long before they had to store me away again.
When it was time for first grade, my parents realized they couldn’t keep lugging me from town to town, so they signed me up at a Catholic boarding school in Manhattan. I remember the place in tones of black and white. Gray walls around an exercise yard full of screaming boys; in autumn, cold hands, smudged with city grime, holding a weekly treat of a cheap ice-cream bar, licking rivulets of fake vanilla as they ran down my fingers, tasting more of dirt than ice cream.
Once a week, I would be called to the office, where, at a wall phone, I would hold the black cylinder of a receiver to my ear and listen to my mother as she tried to cheer me up. I dreaded the calls because within a minute she would be telling me how much she missed me and sobbing.
The other children played games I didn’t understand. “Come on,” they said, running by me in the yard, “we’re playing Nazis and Jews.” I ran with them for a while before I realized they had chosen a boy at random to be the Jew. We were chasing him down, and he seemed truly terrified. I stepped out of the chase and watched as they took turns shoving him to the ground.
My parents had sent me a soccer ball, then later a second ball. This was not appreciated by the other boys. A delegation came to see me. “You have two balls,” one of them said. “We’d like to borrow one.” He said it with that look that goes through your eyes to the back of your head. I said yes, knowing I wouldn’t see the ball again.
Then someone came and tried to take the other ball. I held on to it, and he pushed me down. I fought back instinctively. Within moments, I was in an ecstasy of rage. Somehow I had turned him facedown and I was sitting on him, pounding his back with my fists. The boys around me said, “That’s enough,” but I had never hit anyone before and there was no measure or thought in my fury. I kept pounding until they lifted me off him.
I was frightened by what I had done and scared by how out of control I was. I kept away from the other boys after that. I waited out the year, not knowing that I would be rescued soon from this gray place. My father had been asked to make screen tests by three movie studios and was offered a seven-year contract by Warner Bros. I traveled with them as he finished a tour in nightclubs, where we heard them playing “Brazil” every night through the floorboards and my mother expressed her discontent with a paring knife, and then we put all that behind us and headed for Hollywood and sunshine.
chapter 3
NEVER HAVE YOUR DOG STUFFED
He was a large black cocker spaniel with long flaps for ears and a fat behind that moved from side to side when he wagged his stub of a tail. He jumped onto my bed and began licking my face. I was sick with polio, and my father had brought home a dog to cheer me up. Overcome with happiness at our instantaneous friendship, I threw my seven-year-old arms around him and kissed him back.
I’d come down with polio just a week after my father had begun acting in his first movie. He was playing George Gershwin in a film biography called Rhapsody in Blue. So we called the dog Rhapsody.
The Gershwin biography would turn out to be one of the big pictures of the year. Having spent years in burlesque and nightclubs, my father was almost instantly a movie star. It sounds a little better than it was.
We were living in Hollywood—the real Hollywood—a block north of Hollywood Boulevard on something called Yucca Street in a dark bungalow. Its windows were covered by the leaves of overgrown banana trees. Although he was playing the lead in a big movie, my father’s long-term contract paid him a salary per week that would nowadays buy dinner for two with domestic wine. If his pictures became successful, he could be loaned out to other studios for a large amount of money, which would be pocketed by Warners. This was the common practice at all the studios at the time. At that age, of course, I knew none of this. It didn’t occur to me that my father was making so little money working for the Brothers Warner that we couldn’t live in a drearier place if we were in a story by the Brothers Grimm. Our house was not much bigger than a cabin, but I loved it.
Our patch of tangled yard was an exotic foreign country. I had spent so much of my life in dark theaters and dim hotel rooms, where the only thing green was the peeling paint on the walls, that this seemed like nature to me. This was where I had my first bite of a mud pie; where I set up a card table and mixed household chemicals, toothpaste, and my mother’s face powder, doing what I called “experiments.” Now that I was sick, I wasn’t allowed out of the house, but when I stood on the headboard of my bed, I could look through a high window into the backyard and see the concrete wall I used to climb over with my friends. We’d sneak under the cover of the banana trees and light matches I had stolen from my mother’s kitchen. I could just reach the big box of wooden matchsticks she kept on the top shelf of the old four-legged gas stove. Sometimes my friends and I would soak paper airplanes in kerosene and pretend we were sending German fighters down in flames. For ten cents, a gas station down the block would sell us enough kerosene to blow ourselves up. It’s not clear why we didn’t.
But now, as I looked out through the window, there was just the gray concrete wall. No friends.
The country was in the throes of an epidemic. People were afraid to go to public swimming pools or theaters for fear of contagion. Having any contact with someone known to have polio was thought to be reckless. I’d been declared by the doctors to be out of the contagious period for weeks now, but my friends’ parents had forbidden them to see me. All except on
e, who sat uncomfortably for a few minutes on a wooden chair across the room and chatted with me. After he left, my mother explained that it must have been hard for his parents to allow him to come. Over the next couple of weeks, I thought about this, about how kind he was to visit me. I also noticed he didn’t come back. But, after all, a plague mentality was in the air.
I had come down with polio a couple of weeks after starting second grade. My parents had enrolled me in a military academy, possibly acting once again on their weird fetish for uniforms. For the first two weeks of school, I was introduced to the fine points of drilling, marching, and standing guard. Standing guard involved walking in circles for an hour or two and being able to recite, if asked, a list of ten special orders. There were rumors among my classmates about what would happen to you if you got any of the orders wrong or in the wrong sequence. Older boys would come up to you and fire off questions, as if they were the officer of the day: What’s order number three? What’s order number five? This was an interesting departure from standing in the wings watching Miss Fifi take off her clothes.
At some point during this slightly stressful period, I came in contact with the virus, and a few days later on a Saturday night, we went out to the movies. We always went to the Warner Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, because after my father asked for “professional courtesy,” the manager would let us in for free. We were watching, maybe, Casablanca. The theater was packed and we couldn’t get three seats together, so I was sitting a few rows in front of my parents.
As I watched the movie, I developed a stuffy nose and I kept trying to blow into a handkerchief. I made a honking sound, even during the love scenes.
“Play it, Sam.” Honk.
No matter how hard I blew, I couldn’t clear my nose.
“We’ll always have Paris.” Honk.
“Louis, this could be the honk of a beautiful honk.”
After the movie, in the backseat of the car, I started honking again. “Was that you?” my mother asked. “I couldn’t believe it. I heard you all through the movie.”
When we got home I had to throw up. They held my head as I leaned over the toilet. My knees buckled and I nearly fell into the bowl. They caught me and held me up. I could hear my mother whisper to my father. “My God, he has polio.” My father whispered hoarsely, “Come on, will you? You always think the worst.” But she insisted. She’d been reading about polio in magazines. She read magazines about only two subjects: crime and health. When I was about four, she took me to a nutrition lecture in Manhattan where we were encouraged to eat the peels of oranges. We went home and shared an orange peel together. She made sounds as if she were enjoying it, but we could barely choke it down, and we never ate another one. She never gave up on reading about health, though, and she knew the symptoms of the disease that was taking out thousands of children. She was sure I had polio, and she would not be talked out of it.
My father gave in, and early the next morning they called a doctor. By then my neck was stiff; I couldn’t bend it to drink the pineapple juice they handed me. The doctor came and examined me and told them they had to get me to a hospital for a spinal tap. We got into the Oldsmobile and drove to the hospital. My mother was jolly—singing, telling stories to keep my spirits up. I had a feeling this was going to be another Aunt Betty.
At the hospital, they stuck a long needle into my spine and told me they were taking out some fluid. A few hours later, I saw my mother peeking through a small window that looked out onto the parking lot. She was waving and smiling cheerfully, but I saw her despair. I had polio.
I didn’t really know what it meant to have polio. It didn’t seem so bad. Every day, a new toy arrived in my hospital room from a Hollywood gag and gift shop: magic cards; the disappearing penny trick; the straw tube you put your fingers in and then you can’t get them out again.
But eventually, when I was back home in my bedroom, lying in bed half listening to the radio and looking at the empty wooden chair where my friend had sat for a few minutes, I began to notice that my life had changed.
Rhapsody jumped onto the bed and let me scratch his belly and try to tie his ears into knots on top of his head. His appetite for affection was like his appetite for food: It didn’t stop. His behind was getting heftier from scooping leftover meals off the dishes we left on the floor for him.
I don’t remember his being in the room during my treatments. He may have been let out into the yard to spare him the sound of the screaming, which he wouldn’t have understood.
I didn’t completely understand it myself, and I was the one screaming.
Following the protocols of the Sister Kenny treatments, my parents would wrap my limbs and torso in pieces of hot wool that they had cut from blankets and folded into triangles. The blankets were heated in the dry top pot of a double boiler, so that they’d be nearly as hot as the steam under them, without the scalding wetness. But they were still plenty hot. They wrapped the hot wool around my arms, legs, chest, and belly and pinned it tightly into place. Two hours later the wraps had cooled, and it had to be done again. This was repeated all day long. In the evening, I was given a double wrap and allowed to sleep the night through.
My parents couldn’t afford nursing help, and they did all this themselves. The hot packs were often too hot for them to fold into triangles without burning their fingers, and they lost control and dropped them onto my bare back. This was when I started screaming and pounding the bed with my fists to distract myself from the pain. I understood that wrapping me in packs had to be done, and I knew how hard it was for them to hear me in pain, but there was no way not to scream. If Rhapsody was in the house, he was probably hiding under the stove.
And then there were the massages. Three times a week, I was laid out on the dining room table in my Jockey shorts while a physical therapist took each of my limbs and tried to unscrew it from its socket. Sometimes she ripped an arm off and had to plug it back in again, but usually she was satisfied just to keep bending it until I agreed to turn over playmates who were members of the French underground.
The idea was to stretch the muscles that were in spasm. This and the hot packs were the discovery of Sister Elizabeth Kenny, a nurse in Australia. She was invited to teach in the United States about three years before I came down with polio, and by then the “Sister Kenny treatments” were popular throughout the country. I grew up knowing that she had saved my life, or at least had made it possible for me to walk without braces. So, it felt strange one day, as an adult, to be walking down a hospital corridor with a scientist, telling him how Sister Kenny had saved me and to hear him casually say, “Well, there’s some question now about the efficacy of those treatments.” I was surprised to hear there was even a question about their efficacy. This was not a thought that would have been welcome to the seven-year-old waiting for the hour to strike, as the pot on the stove bubbled under the woolen wraps.
The treatments went on for months. My eighth birthday passed. Then the skies cleared and it was spring. I could get out of bed.
The doctor said that swimming would be good for my muscles. My parents had saved enough from my father’s small salary to make a down payment on a house with a pool. Amazingly, it came with a guesthouse, a barn, twenty chickens, three pigs, a horse, a cow, and a peacock—all on eleven acres of land. It also came with the owner, an eccentric German inventor, who agreed to the low monthly payments in exchange for our letting him stay on in the guesthouse.
We packed up our stuff in the Oldsmobile convertible, I held Rhapsody on my lap, and we headed for our new home in La Tuna Canyon on the other side of the San Fernando Valley. We drove for hours. La Tuna Canyon, apparently, was in Kansas.
Finally, three miles after we passed through a town called Roscoe (not so much a town as a pair of train tracks, a hardware store, and a barbershop), we made a left off the highway onto a long dusty road that turned out to be our driveway. I’d never seen anything like this—large open fields, olive trees, animals. The house was
surrounded by mountains. Rhapsody and I jumped out of the car and started exploring. His tail was flicking, his behind was wagging. So was mine.
Exhausted at the end of the day, we went to sleep in our new house. On the second day, somehow in this wasteland, we found a Chinese restaurant and celebrated by eating out. We brought home the leftovers and set them out for Rhapsody, who went right into the food headfirst.
We left him in a little utility room off the kitchen. When I closed the door he had his nose in the food and was chewing industriously. A couple of minutes later, I heard yelping. It was a yelp of panic, of pain and desperation. I opened the door to the utility room, and the panic seized me as well. Rhapsody was running in circles, screaming in his dog voice, uncontrollable. The walls were spattered with excrement. With every lap, more of it flew against the white walls. I closed the door on the sight of him circling the room and went tearfully to my father. He said we should let him out of the house. He would be all right. Animals have a way of caring for themselves. We opened the back door and he ran out.
But he didn’t have a way of caring for himself. He began circling the house, running as fast as he could. Once around the house, twice around, still screaming in his dog voice. Then, on the third circle of the house, on the porch, a few inches from the front door, he died.
Somehow, my dog had died from eating Chinese food. I could picture the sharp fragment of bone he must have gulped down and the damage it had done to his soft insides.
The next morning, Rhapsody was still there on the front porch. My father and I lifted him onto a blanket. There was still a stain on the brick floor where his body had been. It crossed my eight-year-old mind that he’d been there long enough for the stain of his sweat to have dried. This was more like the stain of death.
