The bank representative made an effort to pin the swindle on me, as I was the one who created Wolf’s identity, but it didn’t work, as they were negligent in not authenticating the cardholder’s signature and checking his nonexistent credit score.
At length, the bank rep promised to look into the matter and assured me that our credit was for the time being still in good standing.
Wolf Poolside
Arguing with Harry over the credit-card issue had for the rest of the week left me feeling stressed. One day in particular, I considered exercise to decompress, though the late August weather was too hot for a jog.
The pool was to be used only by tenants and their guests. Since no attendant was ever on duty, the residents from neighboring buildings often sneaked in and partied until management chased them off.
I brought Wolf down to the pool area with me so that Harry couldn’t have at him again. His presence also served to thwart unwanted advances from strangers. I did, after all, look rather alluring in my yellow-and-black polka-dot bikini.
Despite the pool area being surrounded by a six-foot-high chain-link fence, it was packed with local gatecrashers, most of them sunbathing teenagers slumped in patio chairs or sprawled on beach towels scattered about. Fortunately I found a chaise lounge beneath an umbrella made of dried palm fronds, a suitable adjunct to Wolf’s Panama hat and his wraparound aviators held on his head by an elastic band.
I tilted the hat over Wolf’s sunglasses and arranged him in a masculine position, sitting in his sweat suit with his raised knees apart and his hands on his pelvis. Stepping back to admire him, I thought about the meaning of body language. I once read that 70 to 80 percent of information between individuals is exchanged through body language, primarily expressions, gestures, and, of course, eye contact. In short, what people say often has less impact than the way they say it.
In pondering body language, I realized that the transference of meaning is not limited to animate objects. Great works of art, statues, portraits, and so on, are totally inarticulate, yet art buffs often assert that such works speak to them.
Speechless though my manny was, he also conveyed meaning. He came equipped with an entire glossary of manny-isms. He spoke volumes to those willing to listen. And right now, his macho pose was saying, “I got it going on, so just back off.”
Confident Wolf appeared to be just another poolside occupant ogling scantily clad teens, I dove into the deep end. I swam several laps before I noticed teenagers lined up at the high board, taking turns performing stunts. They made the pool water so choppy that it sloshed over the coping. Unable to swim because of the activity, I paddled to the shallow end and climbed the submerged steps.
At that very instant, someone yelled, “Man overboard.” I turned in time to see a man, projected from the high board, splash headlong into the center of the pool. For a split second, the man floated face down in the water with a Panama hat bobbing over his head. Then as if from the effect of the waves created by the teenagers, the man began to capsize. Seeing a pair of wooden hands thrust upward and hearing bubbling sounds, I realized that the drowning victim was Wolf. And he was sinking fast.
Panicked, I plunged back into the water and pushed off the side with such force that I reached the center of the pool in no time. I lunged for the immersed manny, curled my left arm around his neck, and, using a side stroke, swam toward the steps at the shallow end.
As I lay Wolf supine on the poolside concrete, I could hear people chattering. “What’s goin’ on?” someone asked, and someone else said, “A guy drowned and his girl friend’s givin’ him mouth-to-mouth.”
“Anybody call nine-one-one?” came the question.
“No wait,” I yelled, checking a blur of faces, all tilted toward Wolf, on the ground with bright sunlight reflecting off the lenses of his sunglasses. “He’s okay. I got it under control.” Moving at warp speed to avert what I foresaw as an impending event: paramedics checking Wolfs nonexistent vital signs and using a defibrillator to start his nonexistent heart, I sprang to my feet.
Just then, someone in the crowd took me for an EMT demonstrating a water rescue. My manny could be one of those dummies used in simulated medical practices and car crashes. But, when I lifted Wolf and bent him at the waist to let the water drain from his eye sockets and joints, someone said, “Hey, lady, where’s his Do Not Resuscitate sign?”
While the gawkers dispersed, some pointing and giggling behind their hands, I wrapped Wolfs wet body in a large towel. With my flip-flops back on my feet, I donned my terrycloth robe, schlepped Wolf back into the building, and hopped the elevator to my apartment. I had to get him out of the wet clothes and onto the sunny balcony where he could dry before his limbs warped or his paint peeled.
My task completed, I noted that while Harry was in the apartment when I left, he was now nowhere in sight. I’d assumed that what happened to Wolf at the pool was a teenage prank, but as I once again reflected on Harry’s animosity toward the manny, I worried that he might have been responsible for the event.
If so, it meant that things had taken a turn for the worse. Forcing Wolf to walk the plank—that being the high board in the pool area—and deep-sixing him was as much in line with Harry’s nautical approach to manny-cide as was his expressed desire to hang Wolf from the yardarm.
I had sat for some time, considering my predicament, when Harry burst through the front door, winded from racing up four flights of stairs with a gallon of milk. It seemed the elevator had to be put on hold while the handyman mopped up the water.
“But that’s not all.” He jabbed his thumb at the front glass slider that overlooked the street. “As I’m driving home, I see this crowd and realize it’s in front of our building then I look up to our balcony, and holy crap! There’s your dummy buck naked in sunglasses with his knees up and his hands between his legs.”
“Macho body language. A manny-ism.” I took the milk from Harry and sniffed his sweat-dampened shirt, not the source of the definite stink of dog poop that filled my nostrils. “Harry, your shoes!” I then drew back and wrinkled my nose. “You must have stepped in one of Mad Dog’s deposits on the stairs.”
Harry kicked off both shoes through the opened sliders, onto the balcony not far from Wolf. “The video guy’s still out there,” Harry whispered, looking wild.
“Oh, right, he films the ‘We Tip’ news for local TV.” I put the milk in the fridge and turned to see Harry standing with his back close to the wall.
“Our apartment building has become a media circus because of your dummy. I asked him what’s happening, this time. You have any idea what he said?”
I bit my lip, afraid to ask, but Harry aimed to give it to me anyway.
“A naked man masturbating on one of the front balconies. He showed up too late for the water rescue.”
Wolf’s Nude Shots
Harry was furious over the mistaken prestige of Wolf’s activity on the balcony, but I had bigger troubles. The video guy had not simply caught Wolf experiencing a minor wardrobe malfunction. Wolf had been memorialized on video, stark naked, suggestively exposing himself in the bright sunlight. Humiliated, I paced the living room, wringing my hands. There’d go his reputation, and by association, mine, too.
I thought of pleading with the video guy to delete the recording. But making an issue of it would only pique his curiosity. Then what if he blackmailed me? What if he posted the photos of Wolf over the Internet whether I refused to pay or not?
I hoped this experience hadn’t corrupted the morals I’d imagined for Wolf. It could be like what happened to Pinocchio himself. There he was, a naive wooden puppet caught in the clutches of the criminal element, lured away from school, and sold to a no-good gypsy, who forced him to sing and dance on stage. Finding out the little dummy was valuable, the crooks then recaptured Pinocchio and, for an even higher price, peddled him to a wicked coachman to be carted off to Pleasure Island and turned into a jackass.
What a minute! Pinocchio had tak
en on some pretty hideous qualities before his transformation into a real boy. Besides growing a nose as big as a flowering branch with a bird’s nest on its end, he sprouted the ears and the tail of a donkey. If it hadn’t been for the intervention of the Blue Fairy—
I caught my head, freaking at the thought that Harry could be right about Wolfs wanting to take him over. That might mean there’s an intermediate stage where a puppet—and, by association, a person—can take a turn for the better or worse.
I willed myself to calm down. Wolfgang had no conscience; he couldn’t distinguish right from wrong. I was the one without integrity. I had failed to think of the negative aspects associated with selling mannys en masse, but not anymore.
In the sale of mannys, I would see that they were not used for immoral purposes. Since mannys were to be custom made and produced only in limited editions, I could accomplish this by doing background checks on potential customers.
It didn’t matter that this approach slowed the process. Manny manufacturing would at the outset be a shoestring operation, the ole start small and think big. The important thing was that Wolf would never bear the stigma of a nasty sex object.
Let the video guy have his dirty pictures; let him dare to shake me down. With determination in my step, I entered the kitchen and turned on the flame beneath the tea kettle.
Harry, who until a few minutes ago had been on the balcony cleaning dog doo off his shoes, followed close on my heels. “How come Wolf looks like he’s catching cold?” Harry gestured to Wolf now sitting on the sofa, wrapped in an electric blanket turned up high enough to steam up his sunglasses.
“His wood is still damp.”
Harry motioned toward the thermometer and aspirins on the end table at Wolf’s elbow. “Judy, he’s not a human being.”
“Cars aren’t human either, but you’d never know it from the way some people treat them. Look at Ernie, the way he loves his old gas-guzzling hog of an SUV. He polishes it, vacuums it, and changes its fluids every three thousand miles. He even talks to it, sings to it, and kisses its hood when he thinks no one’s looking.
“So we should imbue the manny with some semblance of humanlike qualities. That way, their new owners will reconsider before taking liberties and turning them into…sex toys.”
Harry scratched his head then with a strained expression, said, “If that happens, you can congratulate yourself for setting the precedent by leaving your brainless wonder on the balcony, exposing himself.”
Willy
One morning over breakfast, I told Harry that if I learned to throw my voice, Wolf and I could go on stage doing a ventriloquist act. Harry shook his head, saying it wouldn’t work because the dummy doesn’t move his mouth.
“That’s what makes our act different.”
“Then why bother?”
Not seeing why Wolf had to move his mouth as long as I moved mine, I had not considered this a technical hitch. Actually, I considered it a plus. It would add a whole new dimension to our act since the audience might not be able to tell which one of us was the actual ventriloquist.
The idea must have provoked something in Harry because right away he got off on a digression. “You think your precious Wolfie is such a goody-goody. You ever consider he’s got a dark side?”
“Oh, Harry, that is so ridiculous. Hello, he’s too deficient.”
“He can be supplemented.” Harry nodded for emphasis. “Sorcery’s one way he can get hold of the extras he’s missing.”
“Black magic?” Here we go again, Harry and his superstitions. I assumed I was about to learn how Wolf without benefit of glue or nails might acquire an enviable hickory penis along with a coveted set of oaken balls. But Harry had much more than new genitals in mind.
Still nodding, he went on. “Black magic, sorcery, witchcraft, whatever you want to call it, it all amounts to using these little wooden or waxen or even clay figures to get results. Trust me, Judy. I’ve been in a few rough seaports, and I’ve seen some of the damage that can be done.”
“Geez, Harry, it never occurred to me.” I got the picture. A voodoo priestess mouthing incantations whittles a stick of balsa wood in her candle-lit sanctuary. She shapes the pliable wood into a small figure with a tiny face that looks like her targeted subject. To achieve a desired end, she with a lunatic cry lifts a sharp pin and plunges it into the balsa body.
Harry winced and stared at me as if stuck. “All I’m saying is that mannys can be hurtful. They can be used to do evil.”
I flagged my hand. “You’ve got to be kidding. Supplemented or not, my manny couldn’t hurt a fly.”
Harry narrowed his eyes. “Tell that to Jerry Etherson.”
Seeing that I didn’t understand, Harry explained that he was a ventriloquist in an old Twilight Zone episode called The Dummy. Jerry’s alter ego was his wooden partner named Willy who Jerry is sure has a will of his own and is out to get him.
“Ah, will, Willy,” I cut in.
Nodding, Harry went on. “Because Jerry drinks too much, his manager thinks the problem’s all in Jerry’s head. But Jerry rejects this idea and tries to escape from Willy by locking him in a trunk and performing his act with Goofy Goggles.”
“A dummy without a will of his own,” I again interjected, and Harry again nodded.
“Pretty soon Jerry starts hearing Willy’s taunting voice and seeing his shadow in places he shouldn’t be. Freaked, Jerry rushes back to his dressing room at the club. He unlocks the trunk, pulls out the dummy, and smashes it to pieces. What happens is that while Willy, in a voice-over, mocks the action with malicious laughter, Jerry just stares in horror because he’s destroyed Goofy Goggles instead.”
I took a second to consider the tale. “So you think Willy was like a voodoo doll?” I glanced at Wolf, doubtful that the nice old Mr. Gippo would have pawned a cursed item off on me.
“Worse than that,” Harry resumed. “Later on, at the opening of their next nightclub gig, you find out that Willy has been changed into the ventriloquist. Now Jerry is his dummy.”
I mulled over Harry’s concerns that taken together, had begun to seem like a blend of myths and legends, all leading to the same end. Wolf would become Harry and vice versa.
“There’s something I don’t quite get about the story,” I said after some consideration. “If Willy became the voice-thrower, why couldn’t Jerry fight back and reverse the roles all over again?”
“Because that’s not the way black magic works,” Harry answered.
“Seems that’s not the way the plot worked. Considering Jerry was the original owner of his own body, getting back to it should be easier than getting kicked out of it. It’s not like identity theft. I mean, where’s it written that if you get shape-shifted in one direction, you can’t get shape-shifted back?”
The rigid Harry would have none of it, for he had somehow already acquired a one-way ticket to the Twilight Zone.
A Hit Man
As soon as I opened the letter addressed to Wolfgang Kin, I trashed it in the can under the mailboxes in the wall of Whitehall’s lobby. Since having his identity stolen, Wolf had been offered a preapproved home loan, a preapproved car loan, and now, a preapproved life insurance policy, requiring no medical exam.
Each time Wolf received anything in the mail, preapproved or not, Harry went ballistic. Not about to mention the latest, I shuffled through an envelope full of coupons and chose one promising a deal on business cards if I acted now. I had discarded the rest and was about to start back upstairs when I heard a trio of recognizable male voices coming from the office across the hall.
“Those women are up to something,” Whitehall’s handyman said. “It’s strange, I saw that Judy from up on the fourth. She was in the back alley, building this coffinlike box. Next thing you know, different women are going in and out of her apartment. And it always seems to involve the same guy.”
“Who is he? Does he live around here?” Jason asked.
The handyman, whose job familiarized h
im with many of the residents in the buildings on the block, said he doubted it. “He’s a shady-looking character with slick-back hair like a foreigner. Your wife, Ruthie, knows him,” the handyman said to Jason. “Leastwise she’s been talking with him over drinks under an umbrella by the pool.”
My ears perked, the comment seemed to confirm the rumor I’d heard from the bank teller some weeks back.
“You know something, Ern,” Jason said to Whitehall’s owner, “that could be the same guy I heard Lisa whooping it up with to tango music down the hall from my place.”
“Lisa? My Lisa?” Ernie sounded surprised.
Hearing that two of my best friends were sharing the same guy hit me hard. And here I was, an innocent pawn, turning my manny over to a couple of fem fatales probably as a stand-in to throw the hounds off the scent.
“Now that you mentioned it, that tango dancer coulda been the same guy I saw out back—black shirt, white tie, white straw hat. Dressed like he’s right outta Miami Vice” the handyman said.
I jerked to attention. A tango dancer who ends up under the garden umbrella in the backyard began to sound like Wolf on loan. Client confidentiality, of course Lisa and Ruthie’s husbands don’t know about Wolf.
“I’m out there clipping a few hedges,” the handyman went on, “and I hear Ruthie saying something about taking somebody apart piecemeal.”
“Taking apart! Is that what she said?” Jason asked.
“That’s what it sounded like, but it was hard to hear from behind the bushes with the clippers on.”
“So what’d the guy say?” Ernie asked.
“Well, here’s the interesting part. The guy never moved a muscle, never said a word. He just sat there, taking instructions.”
Me and My Manny Page 8
