The Day the Bozarts Died

by Larry Duberstein

  I cried (and labored) a lot more than Lisa, who was being hassled by her boss. She simply could not afford to wallow, she told me, and split after a couple of days. Maybe she was just as sad underneath; on the surface, she was frantic to get back to Willimantic. I could keep all the damned money, she simply had to go.

  I didn’t even want my half of the damned money. To me the damned money was just a portal into life crisis. With the damned money I could afford to rent an apartment, maybe even buy a condo. I could almost afford to retire—though from what? In any event, as Barney was quick to point out, I could cut my tie to the Bozarts. “You could do it for your mother,” he tried, shamelessly, for Mom never quit urging me to cut the tie, until she gave up and cut the tie with me.

  My response was strong and clear: more than ever I wished to maintain the tie. To stay on and defend the Bozarts as a last bastion of the culture we had never quite managed to have in this country, a culture many of us coming out of the 60’s and 70’s dared to believe was putting down roots, right alongside the equally delayed and denied movements for social justice that had emerged. Besides, the Bozarts was all I had.

  Let me explain about the money, though. I probably seem like a phony, a blowhard, since there was nothing to keep me from refusing the lucre and nothing to keep me from giving it away—to battered women, or inner city scholarship funds. To the Arts, for that matter.

  And I did give away fistfuls. It was a good time for any frayed-looking homeless who crossed my path, a good time for Haitian Relief, Brooms From The Blind, Save The Children. It was good for Maisie, who got the Ford Focus (over Lisa’s protest, as I had to remind her she had left such matters entirely in my hands) and a new laptop loaded with bells and whistles. Nor did the list of winners stop there.

  The real money remained. I kept it. The rationale was this: I could neither foreswear nor entirely squander money that represented my parents’ legacy to me. So far as I was concerned, the legacy lay elsewhere, in the strong teeth, tireless legs, and serviceable brain I had inherited; even moreso in the love and privilege (four years of college on the cuff!) within which they had enfolded me.

  But they were Jersey. They were middle-class, Depression-shaped, alternately God-fearing and God-resenting. To them, a legacy could be counted, saved, and only maybe invested. Certainly it could not be spent, in their lifetimes, nor could it be foresworn or squandered when they were gone. End of story.

  Staging a funeral does serve as a distraction, and the aspects where you deal with what is for some reason called a funeral home do provide comic relief, but losing my mom was tough. I had put her in the ground, and taken the remnants of her life to the dump. It separated the past from the future in a scary way. “Orphan” is the wrong word—an orphan is a kid—but they should have a word that works for you when you are older.

  Back in Canterbury after the smoke had cleared, a wide heavy sadness sat on my head day and night. It followed me into the shower—I couldn’t wash it off. It weakened my legs as I walked. I could never shake off the two stark realities: my parents were dead and I had absolutely nothing going on.

  There were October leaves to see and I saw them, with a mix of melancholy and the small uplift one takes from sheer beauty. I wandered far and wide at the city’s margins: the river, the arboretum, the pond, the grand old landscaped graveyard. These are places where one might well find a lovely young lady scribbling in her diary beneath one of the exotic tagged trees, and I suppose I would have noticed such treasure, but I was looking for something else as I went these miles. I was searching minute by hour, leaf by tree, for my next new beginning, for some notion I could take back and begin shaping into a life, or at least a play.

  A play might be a lifeboat, or a tow rope to grab onto. It amazed me that 20 years had passed since A Cup of Kindness so unexpectedly succeeded, nearly 18 since my one-act plays (Fingersmith and Bigfoot) bombed. Amazed me that so much of my life had seeped away, and that Cup (last reprised in 1998 for a two week run in regional) might be the all of it, my entire contribution to the modern theater. Could what had seemed the beginning be in fact the end?

  Sometime in November (knowing her, it was probably the 5th anniversary of our demise), Nina called me on the pay phone. Said she remembered the number, knew it would not have changed, knew I would be there to answer. Said “I hear you’re not doing too well.”

  This was the first time I had heard her voice in years and the excuse she offered was my mother’s death. They had been close, condolences were in order.

  “No,” I told her, “things are good.” Then I played the child card. Quizzed her on her kids. No more than Chloe, no more than any mother, could Nina refrain from the wonder and the praise, even as she labored (for my sake I suppose) against sounding too happy.

  She was Mrs. Corporate Law now, yet took special pains to avoid any mention of Mr. Corporate Law. It was somehow unclear whether there were two children or three, though I did register that the names were rather plain, John and Jane names, nothing that rose to the level of Tess or Cecil. Silently, I thanked her for that. The truth is that although she had called to be nice to me, I felt as though I was the one being nice to her. Miserable as I was, I honestly wanted to believe Nina was home free with Philip. I had assumed she was.

  Was she? There was no real connection between us, no ambiguity in the air as we spoke. I was part of Nina’s past and she was part of mine; that was the definite subtext. I’m just afraid it sounded as though joy was also in the past for both of us, and that the past was awfully long ago. So I guess time flies whether you are having fun or not.

  Time flew, and it did so without cataclysm at the Bozarts. I did not cut the tie and neither did anyone else: no one kidnapped by terrorists, no one drafted into Rummy’s Army, no one retired to sunny Cancun. The Final Five, if that was what we were, stood intact.

  There were occasional rumors of new blood. One such concerned a documentary filmmaker who needed a cutting room; another time it was a retired dancer who required studio space for her classes. I voted for the dancer. What the hell, say she was 38 instead of 28, with mature timber and still the great turnout. It would have been a real shot in the arm.

  I can’t say I was surprised that no actual filmmakers or dancers materialized, but I was super-sandbagged when Ed and Liz moved out. (As ever, and through sheer coincidence, in lockstep.) Liz’s husband took a teaching job in Maine—a plum, she assured me—that paid well and provided them with a free house on campus. Ed was going to Ohio, where someone in his wife’s family was facing serious health issues.

  Ohio? But the devil was hardly in the geographical details, he, or she, was in the math. I had dared to dream of 5+1=6 (the dancer), now I was staring at 5-2=3. Three. No one left to defend the fort but Clapper, Rose, and myself. This time, finally, the prognosis was so hopeless that I did not bother tracking down Kristen Dane. I was numb, and it seemed best to stay numb as long as possible.

  Either that or stop turning the other cheek and go after them somehow—meet force with force—but I was too numb, too passive, to come up with a plan of action. The very word makes clear my incapacity. Action? I could no sooner act, or imagine a pathway to action, than a cat can swim. We had been pushed right to the brink and I stayed there, teetering, until late summer.

  That’s when Clapper went back to Prague for a month and Rose went down to Cuernevaca to polish up her Spanish. So their story went. Wherever they really were, Hagler was with me. I got custody after all. I was awarded his water bowl, a 50-pound bag of kibbles and bits, and the complete set of ham-flavored nylabones.

  “Everyone wanted him,” averred Rose, “but you were his first choice.”

  “I hope he won’t regret it,” I said, cancelling the reservations I had made for them both in hell.

  Certainly I did not regret the choice. If passivity, and the existential stillness which can accompany it, is your problem, by all means choose Hagler. Hags will activate you. He scratched at me constantly to t
ake him somewhere, anywhere, and I had no good excuses to offer him. Sorry, Hags, I’m in conference all afternoon? Sorry, Hags, I need to get this roast in the oven?

  So we got moving; we were the dynamic duo, men about town. We logged 100 miles a week together and our minds got moving too. Something to do with blood flowing to the brain.

  When the breakthrough came, it happened to come inside a dream, but I am certain the dreamwork bloomed directly out of our bloodstirring regimen, that it was part of an irrepressible subterranean thought process the regimen triggered. Besides which, this particular dream was more like a vision, and a blueprint for action. It crystallized the whole thought process and pointed the way forward.

  There was poor Ed Bellingham, grim-faced and miserable, as a small cadre of unsmiling brownshirts frogmarched him from his studio. His gait seemed peculiar, ungainly, until it became obvious that his ankles were in shackles and chains. Eddie was Guantanamo-bound and then some. Suddenly he spotted me and became animated, jerking and rattling his chains and imploring, “Don’t mourn for me, Stan, advertise.”

  The dream camera zoomed in for a tight close-up as he repeated his plea: “Advertise.” Then they loosed the dogs on him and I woke up, and saw Hagler growling at the door. I leapt up, half expecting to find Ed shackled in the corridor, but there was no one around, nothing afoot. Or nothing but this absolute bulls-eye, this headsmack of uncut truth. And the blueprint.

  The backstory was obvious. Over the years, Steady Eddie’s steadiest money came from the illustrations he provided for historical textbooks, and of these his all-time favorite was a painting he had done of the union martyr Joe Hill. Rendered in the bold style of those old WPA posters, the print had hung on Ed’s wall for so long it was as bleached-out as the Utah desert.

  Joe Hill was unbroken the day he faced the firing squad, insouciant and stoical to the end. And (according to song, story, and the caption under Ed’s illustration) his last words—just before they shot him to death—were “Don’t mourn for me, boys, organize.”

  Ed’s message to me was clear as a bellingham: Don’t let the bad guys get away with this. He was begging me to publicize the Bozarts crisis on the widest possible scale. Bring in ABC and NBC, Newsweek and The Nation, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Let them send forth the word that the arts were being systematically killed off in this country.

  Of course “this country” (Two Nations, Under Bush) happened to be one where art and thought have become virtually illegal. Where watching PBS instead of CBS defines one as a pointy-headed intellectual. People were passionate about their tax bills and the price of gasoline; no one cared about the arts, or the verdict of history.

  So ours would have to be a stealth campaign, a sales job. But Ed knew that—it’s why he used the word “advertise.” He knew it could get ugly too, that we might need celebrities, and we would surely need to rely on the trickledown. Because even if it did start with the Times or The Wall Street Journal, it would have to trickle down through real pulp-wasters like Vanity Fair and Men’s Fucking Health—and worse, through Talk Radio and Sleaze TV.

  Still, there was no questioning Ed’s instructions. Get it on the airwaves, onto Good Morning Americans! and the Jay Letterman Show, because America simply is a big fat horse’s ass that way: advertising actually works!

  This was daunting—not something I would have dreamed up on my own—but it wasn’t a bad fit. After all, I was in need of a project and Newsweek must always need a story. They need a bunch of stories every week, no? That was my outlook going in, anyhow. Journey of 1000 steps? You start with step one.

  I surrendered the keys to Hagler’s engine, rolled up my shirtsleeves, and waded in. I gave the Ma Bell Memorial Quarter a real workout. The quarter has been sitting on the phone shelf since Monk left. He took the previous quarter with him, claiming it was his. But he did pass along the trick of getting the coin back after a call, so I suppose he earned it. That quarter has comprised my entire phone bill for years, and I haven’t finished spending it yet. Long distance? No problem.

  The problem, I grasped early on, was that we lacked access. Roll up your shirtsleeves all you want, you won’t get anywhere unless you “know someone”—‘know’ meaning eat-lunch-with in midtown Manhattan. With access, you can sell anything, without it nothing. It’s the old adage again, that you can knock forever on a dead man’s door; in this case, just substitute Editor for dead man.

  I spent six months knocking on dead men’s doors. I left a virtual mountain of voice mail, to be sure, but I also physically knocked on those doors, rattling the gates of the gated world. They say that 90% of success is showing up, so I showed up. I got as far as a live sitdown with the Assistant Story Editor at one well-known magazine and the Intake Editor at another, each publication supposedly dedicated to charting and analyzing the arc of our society, each in fact up to their eyeballs in the conspiracy of disinterest.

  They palm you off on underlings, watchdogs. The top dogs, the kingpins at these slick shallow empires, remain hidden. To find them, I suppose you would need to hack into Luncheon Reservations around midtown Manhattan. Instead, I hacked my way down the ladder of prestige, from Newsweek to Newspeak, from U.S. News & World Report to The Sandusky Report of Sandusky, Ohio, where Eddie was now headquartered.

  Levels of the game, to be sure, yet even at the lowest levels, even in godforsaken North Dakota, I called and they did not call back. I knocked and they did not knock back. It’s the ultimate knock/knock joke, I suppose: no one asks Who’s there.

  Down, down I spiraled, to a point where soon I would be hounding anonymous bloggers, or sending up bloody smoke signals through Allie and the boys. And there’s the Old Journalism for you, smoke over the prairie, drums in the jungle—anything to get the story out.

  As I was pursuing this quest, feverishly seeking this grail, I became aware I had drifted clear of social connection. God knows I had been busy (the grail, after all) but the existential stillness had given way to a sense of existential danger lurking, and I decided to do something about it. To seek out old friends. Get centered.

  I called Jan and invited her to lunch. Hadn’t seen her in years and when she asked me what was up, why we were doing this, that was exactly what I told her: “We haven’t gotten together in years.”

  “Right. And I’m delighted to see you, Stan. But something’s got to be up. Something’s wrong.”

  Well, you can either cry in your gazpacho and admit you’ve crashed and burned, or you can hang on to the vestige of pride that dictates the rest of the conversation.

  “Nothing’s wrong, Jan. I mean, apart from the fact the world’s gone crazy—”

  “You just broke up with someone,” she said.

  “Absolutely not.”

  When we parted that day, we both said this was nice, let’s do this again soon. And it’s weird, man, because we really like each other, but we both also knew we would not (do this again soon) even if we didn’t know why.

  There was a pennant race heating up over at Fenway, and it struck me that my status with regard to tickets had changed. Not only was I a guy who had money, I was a guy who did not mind wasting it. The agency might as well call themselves Greed, Incorporated. They wanted a hundred bucks a chair, and the chairs were closer to Pesky’s Pole than to first base. Whatever. Cheerfully I laid out two Franklins for them, and asked if they wanted the skin off my nose as well.

  The next question was who would sit in chair number two. That was the point, after all, not the 35,000 strangers, the one friend. Rose Gately was the obvious choice, now that she had been reinstated. She was a Sox fan and she was a mere 20 feet away, albeit baffled by walls.

  “Red Sox and Cleveland, next Wednesday,” I said, waving the ducats from her doorway. “My buddy can’t make it.”

  “Neither can I, unfortunately. Though I sure hate to refuse an offer like that.”

  “Why refuse? Tickets are hard to come by these days.”

  “I know. But Wedn
esday doesn’t work. Maybe if it was the Yankees …” she added, with a lovely face scrunch that implied she might kill to make Wednesday work if the Yankees were in town. But it was Cleveland. “Thanks for thinking of me, though.”

  Barney was out. Apart from being the one human I still saw now and then, he had taken to spending the entire month of August on the Vineyard. His son Alex would have worked (the lad and I had done standing room together when he was 10 or 11) but Alex would be in Edgartown too, as would his foxy girlfriend Lilah, working on those long tan legs.

  I called Kenniston. Kenniston was forever whining about the Fenway elite, and how the real fans could never get tickets. So I offer him a free box seat on the right field line and he turns it down flat.

  “We’ve got a game that night.”

  “We do?”

  “Kelly does. My daughter. She’s pitching that night, and I’ll be coaching third base. Hey, but Stan? Keep me on your short list.”

  Short list is right. I damned near called Monk with an offer to fly him up for the game. What the hell, maybe he could lose a suitcase for real—they probably pay 500 bucks by now. But I let it go and walked over there alone, figuring I’d scalp the seat to a cutie in a tight tee. All the cuties on Landsdowne and Yawkee Way were hairy white males with tickets, though, so I ended up with a hundred dollar seat for my beer.

  I couldn’t see much and I couldn’t care less what I was missing. I drank beer, argued with Chloe in my head about whether or not I was a spectator in my own life, and watched them bat a beach ball around the centerfield bleachers. Steff and I had sat out there a million years ago, waiting for Jim Rice or the Boomer to send one sailing toward us. One of the golden days, man. I left that game after the 7th inning too, if memory serves, only because at the time I had better things to do.…