The Man Who Cancelled Himself

by David Handler

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “As long as you’re not angling for a hug.”

  He shook his head. “No, no. I just have this thing about germs. I don’t like to touch people. Or things people have touched.” For punctuation he cleared his sinuses by blowing his nose into his fingers, much like a homeless person.

  “Must be rather difficult working around a TV studio,” I observed, as he carelessly wiped his fingers on his robe.

  “I take precautions. Don’t get me wrong, pal. I’m not a nut or nuttin’. I’m just risk adverse.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  He grinned at me. Huge grin. There was nothing subtle about Lyle Hudnut. He came right at you, and he had tremendous presence—partly because of his size, but not totally. He also had that something, that star quality only a few of them have. He demanded your attention and he got it. Just by being there.

  “I’ve already explained to Hoagy about his dog, Pinky,” Katrina squeaked.

  Lyle stiffened. “Dog? What dog?” he demanded, his eyes widening with fear. Paranoia seemed to bubble just under the surface with him, like a troubled septic system.

  Lulu was curled up in the shade a careful twenty feet away, glowering at him.

  “You better keep it away from me,” Lyle warned, a whiny edge to his voice.

  “It is a she,” I said. “And she’ll stay out of your way.”

  “She works with you?”

  “She does.”

  “Why?”

  “Everyone needs a straight man.”

  “And she’s yours?”

  “No, I’m hers.”

  He drew back and gave me a sidelong scowl, one eye brow raised. The Scowl. His trademark mannerism. At once sarcastic, mocking, and caustic. Then he snorted and parked his porky self on one of the picnic benches and stuck his fat, pink feet out before him. Katrina fell to her knees like a supplicant and began putting his white cotton socks and his Birkenstock sandals on for him. It was a dirty job, but I guess somebody had to do it—better her than me.

  “See, I’m leading a hygienic existence these days,” Lyle explained. “No poisons, no germs, no chemicals. This robe, for instance, is totally unbleached, undyed cotton. No formaldehyde. That stuff’ll kill ya—right through your pores. I’m off alcohol and caffeine and my diet is one-hunnert-percent macrobiotic. Rice, beans, and veggies. Tastes great—and, Christ, you wouldn’t believe the butt music. I can do all of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” … I’m gonna be straight up with you, Hoagy. I used to stuff shit into every orifice of my body twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. I devoted my energy to killing myself. These days I’m devoting it to staying alive. I’m clean.”

  He held up a pudgy hand for silence, even though he was the one doing the talking. I could see the fresh scars on the inside of his wrist from when he’d tried to kill himself with a razor blade earlier that summer. A few days later he swallowed the contents of an economy-sized bottle of Uncle Chubby’s children’s aspirin, 277 tablets in all.

  “Time for my readings,” he announced, as if this were as momentous as, say, the Israelis giving up their West Bank settlements.

  They had a whole little routine. First Katrina grabbed his wrist and strapped a pulse monitoring wristwatch around it. His index finger went inside a sensory cuff. When his rate registered, she dutifully marked it on a chart, then removed the watch and hooked his finger up to a cuff that was attached to a digital blood-pressure monitor. She marked that down as well. She examined the chart a moment, brow furrowed, then gave him an approving nod and a kiss on the forehead. Beaming, he made it into a wet, slurpy kiss, pulling her down onto his lap. I had a feeling this was for my benefit. Proof of ownership.

  “Pinky,” she squeaked, giggling as he pawed her roughly. “You’re an animal.”

  “Can’t help it, Katrina. You do things to me.” He winked at me. “This woman saved my life, Hoagy. Her and no one else. Would you believe my blood pressure used to be up over two hundred? I was dying.” He reached for a bottle of mineral water and drank greedily from it, much of it streaming down his chest. “God, I love water.”

  “May I offer you something, Hoagy?” asked Katrina. “Herbal iced tea?”

  I said that would be nice. She went wiggling and jiggling off to the house to fetch it.

  “Wait’ll you taste her tea,” Lyle exclaimed jovially. Although now that the two of us were alone, he seemed to have trouble meeting my eyes. “The greatest. She makes it from scratch. She’s an extraordinary individual, Hoagy. The perfect woman. She’s been a professional dancer, run her own jewelry business, designed this whole place. Plus she happens to be the single greatest fuck in the universe. Of course,” he gloated, “she learned that under a master.” He let loose with his famous laugh, a deep rumble that seemed to start way over in the next county, then build up force until it exploded out of him with a huge hoo-hah-hah. “Seriously, I’ve never met a woman like Katrina. Somebody real. Somebody who loves me for who I am. She stuck by me through all of this, y’know. Never complained. She’s the only one who did. Mickey Stern, my agent, who I considered one of my two or three closest friends in the entire world, wouldn’t even return my phone calls anymore. Ya believe that?”

  I did believe that. Of course, you must remember that TV and movie people almost always mistake their business friends for real friends. This is partly because they want to believe that everyone they deal with truly loves them. And partly because they have no real friends.

  “My other close friend, Godfrey Daniels, blew my doors off before I even had a chance to defend myself,” he said, of the young programming wizard who had engineered his flagging network’s turnaround from third to first, mostly on the coattails of Uncle Chubby. Time magazine labeled him “a genius.” Newsweek called him “Mr. Television.” Everyone in the industry simply called him God. Lyle shook his head in disgust. “I called him up the day after I sent him the first draft of the Uncle Chubby pilot script, and said, ‘Well, God, did you like it?’ And he said, ‘I love it, Lyle. It’s brilliant. It’s perfect. Don’t change a word. I only have one little note: Can you make them robots?’ True story, I swear. I’ll let you in on a little secret: God is an empty sweater.”

  “Yes, I seem to recall reading something about that in the Talmud.”

  “No brains. No taste. No guts. A fucking moron. So’s Jazzy Jeff Beckman, who runs the studio that finances me. Another fucking moron. They’re all fucking morons.” His rage was starting to slip out. He caught it and tucked it back in. “But I’ve set aside my anger,” he vowed. “You have to forgive, and I have.”

  I nodded, though this one I didn’t believe. Something about the decidedly un-Zenlike anger burning in his eyes. And the way he was clenching and unclenching his big fists. Plus there was his reputation to consider. He was supposed to have the most volatile temper in the entire industry, worse than even the legendary Roseanne Arnold. He was a colossal abuser of actors and writers, a screamer, a puncher, a big mean bully. He made people cry. Made them ill. Made them flee. An Esquire writer who hung around the set during the show’s first season wrote, “If you were to cut off Lyle Hudnut’s head, frogs would come jumping out.” Reporters had been banned from the Uncle Chubby set after that. I don’t know about frogs.

  “One thing this whole awful experience has taught me,” he went on, “is to be grateful for what I have. Because it can all vanish just like that.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis, which woke Lulu. She grunted, got up, circled around three times, curled back up and went back to sleep. It doesn’t take her long. Not a lot on her mind.

  Katrina returned now across the patio with my iced tea and a plate of raw carrots for Lyle. She sat next to him on the bench, watching me like a tigress guarding her one and only cub. Alert. Suspicious. Ready to tear my throat out.

  Her cub was waiting anxiously for me to tell him how great the tea was. Lyle Hudnut was one of those—a celebrity in constant need of stroking. Nothing bores me more, except maybe Jurassi
c Park.

  I tasted it. “Excellent.” And it was—as a bracing rub for razor burn.

  He beamed at her happily. “We’ve been getting me in shape for the season. I gotta be in tip-top condition. I mean, I write the show, direct it, produce it, star in it … I’m the show. Me. Always have been. Ever since I first put together the Suburbanites back in college. I’m the one who found us that crummy little basement club where we performed for nickels and dimes. I’m the one who held us all together. And I still am. I’m the daddy, Hoagy. Fifty-four people depend on me. And that takes its toll. I had to have a doctor on the set full-time last season to give me oxygen and B-twelve shots.” He bit into a carrot. “But that was then. Katrina’s involved now, as my coexecutive producer. Second only to me. Which is a huge help.” He put his arm around her, his big paw playing with the heavy silver chain that she made with her own two hands. “Naturally, there’s been a little resentment from the staff,” he allowed. “But anyone who can’t deal with it is free to leave. Katrina is part of my life now.” He spoke of her as if she were a force of nature. The sun. The wind. Katrina.

  “And how did you two crazy kids meet?” I asked.

  Lyle’s face turned red—faster than any man I’d ever seen. “I don’t like to be called crazy!” he roared.

  “It’s just an expression, Pinky,” Katrina said soothingly. “Relax.”

  “You’re right, you’re right. Sorry.” He calmed down, just as quickly. “Katrina was a production assistant last season, a gofer. Leo Crimp, my line producer, brought her in. Leo’s the toughest son of a bitch in the business.” Katrina looked away uncomfortably at this mention of her former boss. I wondered about that, too. “First time she came in the control booth I swear it got ten degrees warmer in there.”

  “Pinky …”

  He grinned at her. “I mean it. I felt her there. Like some kind of animal thing. I stared at her, and she stared at me, and wham, we were gone. Went straight in my dressing room and fucked our brains out.”

  “Pinky!”

  “Well, we did!” he boasted.

  “And how’s the show shaping up for this season?” I asked.

  “We’re shifting in a slightly different creative direction,” Katrina replied delicately, in her Kewpie-doll voice. “There’s been some give-and-take between us and God, in terms of Lyle coming back and everything.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, you’ll find this interesting, Hoagy. Being a serious person.”

  “You must have me confused with someone else.”

  “Believe it or not,” said Lyle, puffing up proudly, “I’ve talked the network into letting me do more issue-oriented episodes this season. Hey, we’re America’s living room. It’s time for us to deal with what America’s dealing with—teen suicide, drug addiction, AIDS.”

  Quite some shift indeed for a man whose chief claim to comic fame was that he knew 126 different ways to say the word snot.

  “We’re looking for more of a reality context,” Katrina added. “We’re also looking more for irony—comedically speaking, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “It’s a national shame, Hoagy,” he went on. “Kids are now our principal underclass in America. Twenty percent of ’em live in poverty. Six million will go to bed hungry tonight. Sixteen million have no medical coverage of any kind. I tell ya, that’s criminal.”

  I nodded, wondering how it is that show-biz figures can get so worked up about social injustice, yet not have a problem with flushing $10 million down the toilet on an obscene house. Somebody ought to write a book about that someday. Not me, but somebody.

  “Those kids are my kids,” Lyle declared. “The ones who used to look up to me.”

  “They still do, Pinky.”

  He waved her off. “Nah, nan. I let ’em down. I know that. So now, I got a responsibility to do good by ’em. From now on, Uncle Chubby is gonna make a difference.”

  “Very admirable, Lyle,” I said. “And what are you giving up?”

  His blue eyes penetrated mine, sizing me up. Or trying. “Giving up?”

  “Katrina mentioned there was some give-and-take. What’s the give?”

  He pressed his lips together and made a short, popping noise which sounded more like flatulence than anything else. “No big deal. We agreed to add a regular love interest for Chubby’s sister, Deirdre.”

  “The testing results showed that our audience would like to see her in a regular relationship,” Katrina explained. “Possibly but not necessarily leading to marriage.”

  “At first, I told God no fucking way,” Lyle confessed. “It’s my show. I make the creative decisions, not you and certainly not the damned audience. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. We can have a lot of fun watching the romance unfold. Really opens up a lotta new possibilities. Chad Roe’s gonna play him. Know him?”

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true. Merilee did Streetcar with him a few years back at the Long Wharf. Chad was one of those aging TV pretty boys who was still trying to prove himself as a serious actor. Mostly, he was a serious clod. “I don’t recall him doing a lot of comedy.”

  “He hasn’t,” Lyle confirmed. “But God loves him. Or rather his Q-score. He went through the roof in that Judith Krantz miniseries he did with Jackie Smith last season. So I’m working with him. Hasn’t been easy so far. Y’know how it is—we’ve got a certain format that works, and Chad’s an outsider. But we’ll get there. He’s a helluva nice guy.” Lyle ran a big pink hand over his big pink face, like he was washing it. “Hey, enough about the show. Let’s talk about you and me. You gonna do this book with me?”

  I stood up and smoothed my trousers. “I’d like to stretch my legs, Lyle. Can we take a stroll?”

  “Sure, sure.” Slowly and with great effort, he got to his feet. It was like watching someone trying to get his butt up out of a deep hole. “We’ll walk on the beach. C’mon, Katrina. We’re walking.”

  She stayed where she was, eyeing me shrewdly, her left eye drifting slightly. “No,” she concluded. “I have some phone calls to make. You boys go ahead.”

  “Aw, gee, ya sure?” He was whining, like a petulant, jumbo-sized kid.

  “I’m sure, Pinky.”

  “Okay. Oh, hey, that reminds me, Hoagy.” He cleared his throat uneasily. “Katrina has something she’s busting a gut to ask you. If ya don’t mind.”

  I did mind, but I owed her one now.

  “I heard the father of her baby was really Sam Shepard,” she blurted out eagerly. “Is that true?”

  “I only know what I read in the papers.”

  She frowned. “You mean Merilee won’t even tell you?”

  “I mean Merilee especially won’t tell me.”

  She tossed her blond mane. “Gee, I don’t understand.”

  “That makes two of us.” Lulu let out a low growl from next to me. “Correction—three of us.”

  And with that we walked down the sandy path to the beach. It was a weekday, and there were very few people out. There was a black nanny in a starched white uniform with a little blond boy, who was crying. There was a teenage girl in a T-shirt and cutoffs sitting on a towel writing someone a letter or a poem. There was us. The tide was out. The Great White Monk wheezed as he clomped through the wet sand, his arms swinging wildly back and forth. I had to walk three feet away from him to keep from getting belted. Lulu scampered down to the water’s edge and chased a gull away, arfing gleefully. Some of the happiest days of her puppyhood had been spent here on this very beach. That first summer, when Merilee and I were golden. But that was once upon a time.

  “I have the perfect woman, Hoagy,” Lyle Hudnut boasted, yet again. “We have unbelievable sex together. Woman’s a Hoover, y’know what I’m saying? She sucks up every last drop, is what I’m saying.” He had a smug, nasty little smirk on his face. I wanted to wipe it off. I would continue to want that the whole time I knew Lyle Hudnut. “And, whoa, you wouldn’t believe t
he clam she’s got on her.”

  “I didn’t come all the way out here to talk about Katrina Tingle’s clam, Lyle,” I said, to shut him up, and because I hadn’t.

  He stopped cold there in the sand, his face turning bright red again, as if clogged with blood. This time his eyes bugged out, too, and he began to breathe swiftly in and out, his thick lips pulled back from his teeth in a menacing grimace. Quite some intimidating presence, really. I doubted there was anyone in network television he didn’t scare the shit out of. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” he bellowed, fists clenched tightly.

  “Which them is that, Lyle?”

  “Them who are always putting everyone else down. Them who are always criticizing. I can’t stand negativism! It’s a cancer. It spreads. It kills.” He shook a fat finger at me. “I’m totally serious about Katrina. I love her. And she loves me. She’s the real thing for me. I even changed my will. Katrina’s my sole beneficiary. If that’s not love, I’d like to know what is.”

  “Don’t look at me. I’m the wrong person to ask.”

  He snorted at me. We resumed walking, past the neighboring showplaces tucked back behind the dunes.

  “Geez, it’s so great here,” he observed contentedly. His mood swings were truly awesome. “Can’t believe I actually live out here. Me. Lyle Hudnut from Bay Shore. Of course, once we go into production I’m in the city full-time. Keep a suite at the Essex House, but all I ever do is crash there for a few hours. Studio’s where I live.”

  “I have to know some things, Lyle.”