I didn’t really want to talk to Kendall, the man who hated the Panhandle, nor did I feel like giving him one of my hundred-dollar bills, so I merely copied down the addresses of the three Mr. Burgers, got back in my Cadillac, and drifted north on Heights Boulevard, known simply as “the Boulevard” to people who had grown up in Houston in the thirties and forties.
Then, the Heights had been the fashionable part of town—the fact that it was six or eight feet above sea level, rather than a foot or two below it like most of the city, gave it a certain distinction. Once the Heights had been filled with rather elegantly wrought two-story frame houses with graceful second-floor porches suggestive of New Orleans or Mobile.
Now the area was slowly becoming a barrio; time had brought down the old houses as remorselessly as the Spanish had brought down the Maya and the Inca.
I didn’t seem to be quite in the mood to rush over to Dismuke Street and see if my daughter was at work dishing out burgers. For one thing, it was dark, though not really late. It seemed to me it might be more sensible to approach her during the day, when there was less likelihood she would be irritable from overwork.
At bottom, I just felt silly, and very afraid. I had no real reason to suppose that my daughter was in Houston; the fact that she hadn’t actually denied being here wasn’t really much to go on.
She hadn’t placed herself in Houston, though—my imagination had placed her there, the same imagination that had charted the sad decline of Jenny Sondstrom, mother to a thousand birds.
Somehow, since being lifted by the sight of the big Houston girl putting on her makeup while driving ninety-five, my spirits had lost altitude.
Hoping to arrest their descent, I stopped at a taco stand on Twentieth Street, next door to a dental college; there I purchased a couple of excellent tacos while pondering the downturn my spirits had taken.
The dental college, housed in a moldering green building, was brightly lit; through its big windows I could see a number of would-be dentists, all of them either Asian or Hispanic, practicing drilling techniques on a group of volunteers. Many of the volunteers, who were writhing horribly, probably now regretted volunteering. What must have once seemed a golden opportunity to get some dental work done free was not working out exactly as they had imagined.
Excellent though the tacos were—I went back and purchased two more—their excellence couldn’t quite banish from my thoughts an issue that had been looming larger and larger in my life of late: the issue of self-parody.
Already, in the half hour I had been back, Houston had thrust the issue directly under my nose. If the big girl doing her makeup on the freeway represented Houston exactly as I wanted it to be, Kendall, the man who lived in the dumpster, was all too clearly a parody of what I wanted Houston to be; his appearance had only served to remind me of the decline of Jenny, which in turn made me remember what a parody of its best self “Al and Sal” had become in its final season.
In that season it was as if my imagination had acquired metal fatigue. All that had once been winning and lighthearted about the show became mean-spirited and charmless. Al and Sal’s fights, once so wacky and inventive, became as vicious and bitter as the fights between real husbands and wives; in fact, they became worse than the fights between real husbands and wives. They were just close enough to being parodies of the earlier fights that you remembered the charm of what was gone while wondering where it went.
The thought that was making me gloomy was that the selfparodic not only was beginning to infest my life, it was my life. Day after day, month after month, everything that I did, said, or thought seemed to be a parody of something that I had once done, said, or thought more vigorously and better.
Now here I was in Houston, city of my youth, a place that had never failed me. I had left it just in time, before our love turned to viciousness, as had Al’s and Sal’s. In my thoughts Houston was still a golden town, and the best of all places in which to accomplish the task I was faced with, which was to start a father-daughter relationship twenty-two years late. When the big girl passed me on the freeway, I felt I was right to come; I felt I was still capable of good, nonparodic choices; but when Kendall, a parody of a Houston eccentric if there ever was one, began to talk to me from the rim of the dumpster, my confidence began to ebb away.
What if Houston, too, was now merely a parody of the city I had once known? What if my daughter really was in Miami, far across the salty Gulf, and across the state of Florida as well? What if she had merely been torturing me with phone calls and had no intention of actually letting me find her? What if she had packed her kids on a bus that very afternoon and headed for New York or L. A.? What if I had missed her by an hour, stupidly driving down in my Cadillac rather than chartering a plane, as I had offered to do? What if she never called again and I searched for the rest of my life and never found her?
Being parked in front of a dental college did nothing to check my mood’s descent. Several of the apprentice dentists were having trouble with their volunteers, some of whom had clearly had enough of volunteering. One small Asian man managed to squirm out of the dentist’s grasp; he was out the door and off down the street in a flash, still wearing a blood-splattered dental apron.
The little man’s escape inspired me. After all, the ache I felt inside was a kind of cavity too—a cavity only the sight of my daughter could fill. I started the car, rushed to the freeway, and in minutes had found Dismuke Street, just where I expected it to be.
There, too, was the Mr. Burger, only a few doors from Lawndale; it was brightly lit, and had a number of Mexican teenagers, some of them with babies toddling at their feet, lounging in front of it.
Slowly, very slowly, I eased the Cadillac past the Mr. Burger. My heart was beating as fast as it had ever beat in my life; I had not been so apprehensive since the night they premiered the pilot of “Al and Sal.”
But T.R. was not there. A skinny black girl was working the cash register and a tiny Asian girl was cleaning tables. The Mexican teen-agers began to ogle my car. I eased up to the drive-in window and buzzed my window down. The black girl finished counting a handful of pennies before traipsing over.
When she saw the Cadillac her face lit up. “Look at that car,” she said. “If I had me a car like that I’d leave right now and go to the beach.”
“Excuse me, miss,” I said. “Can you tell me if a young lady named T.R. works here?”
“‘Course she works here, why you want to know?” the girl asked, with a look of suspicion.
“I don’t suppose you know where she lives, do you?” I asked, for some reason reluctant to answer the girl’s question directly.
“I know, but I sho’ ain’t telling you,” the girl said. “Why you want to know?”
“I’m her father,” I said. Just saying it made me feel a little giddy. “At least I think I’m her father,” I amended. I was on new and shaky ground.
“Oh, yeah, you Mister Deck!” the girl said, the big grin coming back. “T.R. said you’d be showing up in an airplane, but I knew that was wrong, unless it was a helicopter. There ain’t no place to land an airplane over here by Lawndale that I know of.”
“I decided to come in the car,” I said meekly.
“Don’t blame you, I don’t like them old whirly helicopters myself, ’less it’s an emergency or something,” the girl said.
“Where is T.R.?” I asked.
“Oh, goodness, I ain’t got the answer to that,” she said, waving the tiny Asian girl over.
“That’s T.R.’s daddy,” she said, pointing at me. “He left his plane at the house and come in his car.”
“Hello, Mr. Deck,” the Asian girl said. “You want fried shrimp? T.R. said you get a discount.”
“Where’d she say she was goin’?” the black girl asked the Asian, who gave a polite shrug.
“She may be dancing,” she ventured.
“Oh, I know she’s dancin’,” the black girl said. “If it’s night and she ain’t workin’, she’s dancin’.
T.R. likes to be out kickin’ up her heels.”
That was cheering—at least it meant my daughter’s spirit hadn’t been destroyed by my neglect.
“What does she do with the babies while she’s dancing?” I wondered. Actually I was curious as to whether there might be some sort of husband in the picture—or at least a beau.
“Oh, they all go,” the Asian said. “The babies go where T.R. go.”
“That little Jesse be dancin’ herself soon as she can walk better,” the black girl said. “You see the way she swings her arms? She’s already got the rhythm.”
“I didn’t know they allowed children in dance halls,” I said.
Both the young women giggled.
“Round here folks allow pretty much what T.R. wants them to allow,” the young black woman said. “She just sticks them babies on a pallet under the table, then when they get sleepy all they gotta do is go to sleep.”
“T.R. very good mother, Mr. Deck,” the Asian said, as if she felt I might be having worries on that score.
I may have looked strange, but I wasn’t having any worries just at that moment. What I felt was immense, adrenaline-soaked relief that my guess had been right. T.R. was in Houston—in fact she was near, kicking up her heels. I wasn’t necessarily going to be faced with a life of hopeless regret.
“It’s nice of you to tell me that,” I said. I wished suddenly to do something to help the young women who had brought me such sweet relief. I had an impulse to hand them all my hundred-dollar bills. But I checked the impulse, which a number of psychiatrically well-informed friends had assured me was no more than a misguided attempt to buy approval.
“Could I just ask your names?” I asked.
“Oh, she didn’t tell you about us?” the black girl said. “I guess she was just too busy meeting her daddy. I’m Dew, ’cause I’m so fresh all the time.”
“Sue Lin,” the Asian girl said, with a smile.
“I’m Danny,” I said, reaching through the carry-out window to shake both their hands. “Dew’s a nice name,” I added somewhat pointlessly. “They’re both nice names.”
I was suddenly feeling pretty tired.
“I’ve had a long drive,” I said. “I think I better get some sleep and meet T.R. tomorrow. If you see her will you tell her I’m at the Warwick?”
“Maybe we can come visit?” Sue Lin said, shyly.
“Oh, sure, come visit,” I said. “And tell T.R. to call me anytime. If she doesn’t call I’ll just drop by tomorrow.”
“You can sleep late,” Dew said. “T.R. don’t go on till noon tomorrow.”
“You know, Dew, I may just sleep late,” I said.
22
I was deep in sleep, indeed deep in dream, when T.R. called.
“How come you decided not to bring the airplane?” she asked.
“What airplane?” I asked, for a moment completely disoriented.
“The airplane you said you was gonna come in,” she said testily. It obviously was not bothering her that I had been asleep.
“Oh, that one,” I said.
“Was that just one of your lies?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “What do you mean, one of my lies? I’ve only known you a day. I haven’t had time to think up any lies.”
“It don’t take long to think up lies,” she said, unimpressed. “I’ve known people who could think up about a hundred a second.”
“I could do that at one point, but now I’m old,” I said. “I’m slowing down. My lie machine’s a little rusty.”
There was a pause.
“Are you old?” she asked in a softer tone. “I don’t think of you that way.”
That was interesting—my daughter thought of me.
“How did you have me pictured?” I inquired. I was beginning to feel a little more wakeful.
“Young and handsome and rich,” she said.
“I was never handsome, and I was young only briefly,” I said. “After all, I’m your father—that implies a certain age. But I am rich.”
“I wish you’d brought the airplane,” she said. “I told the kids about it. They’re gonna be disappointed. They ain’t never even rode in an airplane.”
“Have you ridden in one?” I asked.
“What do you care, you never even come to see me!” she said with a flash of anger. Then she hung up.
23
The dream I had been having when T.R. woke me up was a typical fight-on-the-set dream from the days of “Al and Sal.” Nema Remington had been erupting—volcanic imagery was the only imagery that adequately described one of Nema’s fits. Nema’s worst enemy would not have denied that she was a force of nature; though she was a tiny woman, cyclonic imagery was still invariably used to describe the kind of destructive force she could focus on a sitcom set when she chose to.
Fortunately she didn’t unleash her full power very often. If she had, the show would not have lasted a year. Nema was, in fact, easy to get along with as long as certain conditions were respected. Food, sleep, and sex were three things she required in abundance, but if she even got any one of the three in abundance, the weather on the set was usually sunny. On the whole it didn’t do to starve her in any of the primary areas. A good deal of the time she had spent as an actress had been spent at the bottom of the heap as the cheapest of cheap cuts in the meat market that is Hollywood. For years she had had to scramble even to land a commercial; some years she couldn’t land a commercial and made ends meet waiting tables.
Stardom, therefore, had not given Nema the illusion that life is perfect; she didn’t expect every minute of every day to go her way, but she was sensitive to insult and was often thrown into violent conflict with her costar, Morgan Underwood, the actor who played Al. Unkind items about Nema’s highhanded behavior on the set were always appearing in the gutter press, all of them planted, in Nema’s opinion, by Morgan Under-wood.
Morgan Underwood was no angel—the word “chauvinist” might have been coined expressly to describe his behavior—but as the producer-creator of the show I took a more complex view of the matter, which was that most of the tawdry items that so infuriated Nema were actually planted by Morgan Underwood’s secretary, without his knowledge. Not a few tawdry items about Morgan himself had also found their way into the gutter press—all TV press is gutter press—and these, I knew for a fact, were planted by Nema’s secretary, also without her knowledge.
I could write a book—someday I may—about personality disorders in stars’ secretaries, based on my experience with the forty or fifty Nema and Morgan went through in the nine years of “Al and Sal.” The secretarial disorder most likely to drive producers into early coronaries is a secretary’s tendency to identify too closely with the star she or he works for. Inevitably, secretaries derive their sense of status from the status of the star; just as inevitably they come to believe that they are the star—many stars’ secretaries I’ve known acquire more airs than three-time Oscar winners.
So in my dream Morgan Underwood’s secretary had planted an item in the Enquirer claiming that Nema was fucking a prop man, an item which so infuriated Nema that she started her day by walking into the makeup trailer and squirting Morgan Underwood in the face with Mace, a squirter of which she always kept in her purse for defensive purposes.
This dream was a replay of a real scene: Nema did once Mace Morgan. Headlines the world over read: “Sal Maces Al!”
In the dream I was standing outside Morgan Underwood’s trailer, watching him gag and vomit; I had a stopwatch in my hand, as if I were clocking a gag-and-vomit contest. I was probably just trying to calculate how soon a man who had just been Maced could reasonably be expected to trot back on the set and begin rehearsal.
Then T.R. woke me up. Once she hung up, I felt vaguely uncomfortable, but it was not because I had accidentally provoked my daughter; it was because I needed to know if Morgan had actually recovered and done the scene. In real life a whole day had once been lost, most of it spent trying to persuade
Morgan not to sue Nema. It was ridiculous that I should need to know how much time was lost in the dream replay, but I did. The fact that the show had been closed for four years made no difference. Virtually my entire dream life still took place on the set of “Al and Sal.” My dream strata were not deep; I never dreamed of my childhood, of my marriage; only rarely did I get a flicker from my European years, and those flickers tended to be heart-disturbing: a glimpse of Romy Schneider’s face the last time I saw her, or Françoise Dorléac dancing at a party the very week of her accident. But most of my dreams were American, and firmly anchored in Culver City, on a sound stage so filthy it was the equivalent of a running sore. All my dreams were tension-laden; even the few that were sexual weren’t very exciting; my dream sex was the sex-born-of-boredom variety—the kind of sex Nema might descend to with a fairly nice A.D. if one happened to step into her trailer at an opportune moment.
Why was I always dreaming of that set? I had had a life before “Al and Sal”—I had even had a life after it, insofar as continuing to breathe constitutes a life. How come Culver City got to hog my dreams?
I didn’t know, but I switched on my bedlight, hoping T.R. would call again. I didn’t feel like going back to sleep if the best I could look forward to was a dream about an actor who had just been Maced.
Five minutes later the phone rang again and an operator asked if I would accept a collect call from T.R.
“With pleasure,” I said.
24
“I don’t think you even have an airplane,” T.R. said. “You probably ain’t half as rich as that magazine said you were.”
In the background I could hear a baby crying; also I could hear salsa music and the sound of cars passing.
“Where are you?” I asked, feeling a touch of alarm.
“I’m out in front of the Circle K, talking on this stupid pay phone,” she said.
It was 1 A.M., and the Lawndale area wasn’t the safest part of Houston—if there was a safe part.
“T.R., are you safe?” I asked. “Would you like me to come and get you right now?”
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