Changing the Past

by Thomas Berger

  Riggins stopped and scowled. “You done me a big favor, but I’m going to have to trim your ass if you talk like that about Betty Jane. She’s an angel.” He glowered at Kellog until he got an apology.

  Jack added silently: I just fucked your angel, Gordo, and left her beggin’ for more, and I tell you she ain’t much. Furthermore, he continued doing so on and off for half a year more, and though neither of them took any precautions, being ignorant of how to do so (rubbers were only for protection from disease, as could be read on the wrappers), it was so long before Betty Jane got pregnant that she came to believe that losing her hymen on the bike had also affected her capacity to have children. During all this time, Riggins’ love endured though never being requited, and he continued to urge Kellog to press his case with Betty Jane. In no other area of life was Riggins that dumb: in fact, he got better grades than Kellog, and in exchange for Jack’s services as Cupid often helped him with the mathematical part of chemistry, which Kellog was taking because his father wanted him to go on to work his way through pharmacy school.

  Then B.J. (as he called her, because except for sex he thought of her as a sort of boring guy) did miss a monthly, and despite Riggins’ help he was flunking chemistry, and he had never had any intention of going on to any kind of formal education, and he feared that the next time his father struck him he might kill the old man with a butcher knife—so Jack Kellog, who had now turned seventeen, blew town.

  JACK HAD never before been far from his hometown, a middle-sized place in the western provinces of the East, but he knew how to thumb a car for a ride, and as it turned out he had good luck with the first vehicle to stop (after being passed up by all others for some time): it was occupied by a couple in their early fifties, the male member of which, and sole driver, intended to make it to Florida nonstop, with the aim of beating his brother-in-law’s record for the same route. Jack slept from time to time in the rear seat, but when he was awake he maintained a repartee which kept the Bosemans in stitches, so the arrangement proved successful for all concerned. He told them he was in flight from the nasty woman whom his father had married on the death of his mother, and would seek refuge with a benevolent aunt in Hollywood, Fia., a name he had heard and remembered because of its incongruity with the idea of the California film capital. Mrs. Boseman maternally fed him from the carton of food she had brought along so that they might eat while continuing to roll, and when Hollywood was reached, the Mister wanted to deliver him to the door of his supposititious aunt, but Jack faked a gas-station phone call and pretended she had demanded to come and fetch him in place.

  The season being April, he slept on the beach at night and managed, by prudent expenditure and starving himself, to live almost three weeks on the fourteen dollars that were his life savings, earned from caddying and mowing lawns, for in those days a hotdog could still be bought for a dime. At first he could not find employment, but finally was taken on as a busboy in a third-rate nightclub that was reputedly owned by mobsters, the floor show consisting of a glib emcee who began with a monologue of jokes and then introduced a series of strip acts. Except for this ringmaster, the performers were all female—so Jack assumed until once in the men’s room, dutifully washing his hands as the regulations demanded, he saw the snake-dancer, who had the largest bosom of the entire company as well as the most elaborately made-up eyes, enter breezily and, lowering the sequined G-string, take a male organ in hand and pee into the wall-hung urinal.

  This dancer used the stage name of Tanya. He had a real python, and in his act he lay on the floor and writhed with it, as a finale pressing its inscrutable wedge-head into his pumping groin and pretending to reach a female climax. After the performance he could sometimes be seen doing a spirited fox-trot with one of the patrons, all of whom were men. Whether in his case it went further than the dance floor, Jack could not say, but he was well aware that the sexual services of the female dancers were always for hire, though they were constrained from soliciting as such, owing to the local ordinances. Jack used to run errands for them, fetching cigarettes and drinks, and sometimes a paper bag containing some ready-made reefers from a guy who came into the kitchen through the alley door.

  The girls were generous with Jack, whom they called Kid. If he had to go off the club’s premises for some item, say to the drugstore for mascara, he was usually tipped if the transaction had been in cash, but Marie would run up a tab of three or four errands and then let him take it out in trade. Which is how he got his first blowjob as well as the first encouragement in his projected profession.

  Marie and he sometimes had serious talks about their respective aims in life. She was saving up for a little house with a yard, where she and her daughter, now two and a half and being raised by her mother, could live until some clean-cut Christian would come along and marry them. For his part, Jack wanted someday to have a job like Buster Kline, the floorshow emcee. “Aw, gee, I bet you go a lot further than that loser,” said Marie. “He’s here because he couldn’t never get nowhere better. But you’re just a kid, Jack: you gotta whole life ahead of you. Kid like yourself, with a quick mind like yours, you could be a headliner someday. And when you get there, remember who tole ya so.”

  Meanwhile he studied how Buster did it, sometimes to the detriment of his job as busboy, and the waiters gave him a hard time. One even kicked his ass behind the partition between main room and bar. He might have been fired had the manager not been a faggot with a yen for young males and would settle if need be even for the likes of Jack Kellog, who was fat and sloppy though his skin was gradually clearing up. “Oh, come on, Jack,” Vince would say when he had contrived to arrange a private encounter that he hoped would end in a discreet success (for he erroneously supposed he had kept his taste a secret from those of his subordinates whom he had not solicited). “You oughta learn that one hand washes the other in this world of ours. You be nice to me, I’ll be real grateful to you. You could be a waiter, next opening.” Jack was insulted by Vince’s low assessment of his ambition, but he did not say so. Nor did he say yes. Instead he would look uneasy and mumble about his tender age, but the inclusion of “yet” in the rejection did not make it final.

  Buster Kline, Jack’s model, was a very thin, almost cadaverous man who was probably a good ten years older than his announced thirty-eight. He wore an inferior toupé and real sideburns that he dyed one or two degrees darker than the purchased hair on his scalp. His long upper lip was the kind that looked as though it had been, and perhaps should still be, the home of a mustache. His smile, crafted to accommodate a partial dental plate, could have been a sneer; his widest grin, a smirk. He chain-smoked, even when on stage. When performing he spoke in rapid-fire until he arrived at a punchline, then would pause for a moment and complete the joke as if he had all the time in the world. “These-two-colored-girls-go-to-a-photographer-and-have-their-picture-taken. Photographer-goes-back-of-the camera-and-puts-the-black-hood-over-his-head. ‘Whuh he gone do?’ asks-one-girl-to-the-other. “The-other-says, ‘Focus.’… So the first one says, ‘Bofe…of…us?’”

  Buster had a lot of Negro jokes, as well as jokes about Jews, Irish-Catholics, Americans deriving from Latin America, Scandinavia, and China, and white-trash Southerners, all of which he performed with appropriate accents. Colored folks were invariably characterized as shiftless, sexually amoral, and likely to pocket anything of value while its owner was distracted, but this portrait, in intention anyway, was an affectionate one, as if its subject were a venerable family pet. Buster’s Scandinavians were invariably dairy farmers and therefore owned milking machines which could be put to indecent purposes. The Irish jokes usually had a priest in a prominent role; the Chinese, a hand-laundryman; the Hispanic, a boy trying to sell a female relative to an American tourist. The Dogpatch rednecks were hilariously incestuous: “Billy Bob gets out of his sister’s bed and says, ‘Gee, Sis, you’s better’n Maw.’ ‘That’s jess what Pa always says,’ she tells him.”

  Buster was himself a
Jew, and his jokes that referred to this people often employed words or phrases in Yiddish, the mere sound of which was enough to send the Jews in the audience into paroxysms of laughter and applause. The terms were new to Jack, in whose hometown Jews were rare, but he soon acquired a vocabulary that was essential to the American comedian: gonif luftmensh, alter kocker, yenta, and a multitude of words beginning with the sh sound, any of which when heard by a Jewish ear was guaranteed to produce hilarity: shelp and shlock and shlemiel and shlimazl, shlub, shlump, shmalz, shmooz, and shmuck, which represented just the tip of the iceberg. A pun on the Hebraic name for the ceremonial ram’s horn was responsible for Buster’s most successful joke with Jewish audiences (Gentiles laughed because it was filthy in its simple meaning): “Two old colored men were walking past a temple when they heard this sound: Oooooo. ‘What dey doin’ inside dere?’ asked one. The other says, ‘Dey blowin’ de shofar.‘ ‘Man,’ says the first, ‘them Jews sure know how to treat their help.’” One kind of joke that was for a long time not to be heard in Buster’s routine, for obvious reasons, was any pertaining to Italians.

  Vince was merely a salaried manager. The owners of the club stayed permanently in absentia, so far as the rest of the staff was aware. It was presumably off the premises somewhere that Vince handed over the week’s take, including a hefty commission on the girls’ supposedly private prostitution: sixty percent, according to Marie, who was bitter but too scared to misrepresent her tips by much. The john paid the fee directly to Vince. “They think of everything,” she told Jack. “If you complain it oughta be at least fifty-fifty, they say, ‘C’mon, you hold back your tips.’”

  But Vince himself turned out to be the one who had been holding back money, at least in the opinion of the owners, and one morning his body was found in the back seat of his car, the throat slashed and his severed penis in its mouth. On the assumption that it was the murder of one pervert by another, which in those days was of little official interest, the cops worked over a few known queers and then shelved the inquiry. Not to mention that according to Marie as well as Max the bartender, Vince had also been stiffing the police on their weekly payoffs, which were supposed to be based on the club’s income for the same period. Max shook his grizzled head. “Now, that’s the way to score big in life. Try to fuck both the mob and the cops. Now, that makes sense.”

  The new manager was an impressive man named Mr. Charles. Unlike Vince he never wore a tuxedo, and he stayed mostly back of the closed door to his office, not even emerging on the occasions when there was trouble out front. It had been Vince’s practice at such times to come out and first try to placate the drunken patron, and when that did not work, have a couple of the huskier waiters and bartenders throw him out. There had been no regular bouncer. But under the regime of Mr. Charles, the troublemaker was immediately bracketed by some efficient persons who had been posing as fellow customers, and it never failed that simultaneously the man passed out and was helped to his car and, unless he came to, even was driven home or to his hotel. Max explained this to Jack, who had assumed that Mr. Charles’s men simply rubbed the guy out.

  Not long after his arrival, Mr. Charles called Buster Kline into the office and told him it wasn’t right that he never told Italian jokes: it made it seem like they either wasn’t good enough or on the other hand was too good to be true, see? In either case, it lacked respect. “Only not the organ-grinder shit, you know?”

  Buster told Jack, now his confidant, about this, and asked, “Say, kid, you know any Italian jokes? My mind suddenly went blank.” Jack admitted with chagrin that he had never even known any Italians, “But maybe you could just substitute Italians for the people in the other jokes.”

  Buster set him straight. “Most gags if they’re any good just apply to whoever’s being kidded. You got to be specific to be funny: it’s more than just switching spaghetti for matzoh balls. I would have to know Italian slang the way I know Yiddish. You gotta be real when it comes to yumah. Tragedy, you can make it up. But to get people to laugh you got to come up with the real McCoy.”

  All Buster could manage for the next show was: “Hey, what’s the fastest thing in the world? Mussolini going through Harlem on a bike!” The war between Italy and Ethiopia was a dim memory, if that, to the audience that evening at the Club Coronado, so Buster, who was nothing if not quick on his feet, immediately shouted; “Then what’s the heaviest thing in the world? Shit—even an elephant can’t hold it!” And got the boffola reaction he had been denied for the preceding. After the show Mr. Charles called him into the office once more and spoke in disappointment. Though no threats had been made, Buster retired to his one-room apartment, lowered the Murphy bed, and took to it with a nervous complaint.

  He made it to the club the following evening and even began the first show, but when hardly into his monologue, he clutched his heart and staggered offstage. Marie came out sooner than she would have under normal conditions and did her act, always a crowd-pleaser, for she had terrific knockers, big but also firm and high with outsized nipples, and at the end she removed one G-string to uncover another, and finally that one was replaced by her hand, which was sufficient to conceal her snatch, so carefully was it trimmed of excess pubic hair. She strutted offstage, and with whistles and hoots and foot-stamping, the audience summoned her back. She smiled and bowed and brought both hands to her lips, then blew invisible kisses to the crowd. Suddenly, her mouth still in an O, her thin-penciled eyebrows climbed and she squeaked in fake dismay. Her naked pussy was on view! Quickly she grasped it with both hands and ran off, tits flopping, ass wiggling, to uproarious laughter and wild applause.

  The next act was Elaine, a skinny-buttocked, pointy-nosed artificial redhead not in her earliest youth. Tonight, without Buster there to provide a lead-in—he and she would banter, he pleading lasciviously, she by turns hostile and teasing, with repeated bumps and grinds—she lacked conviction in her strip, not to mention that she had been unsuccessful in concealing with makeup the black eye given her by her current boyfriend when she had come home with too little money to defray his losses at the track that day.

  “Buster didn’t want an ambulance,” Jack told Marie. “He just went home.”

  “He’s had one foot inna grave for years,” said she, indifferently. What worried her was the show, for Marie was a real trouper. And perhaps she too feared the reaction of Mr. Charles. She was staring dolefully from the wings, “After Elaine, there ain’t nobody else tonight, so that’s the show. Barbara’s got the rag on, and Tanya got rolled and beat up by a sailor he took home, the stupid little bitch, he gets so hard up: it ain’t the money.” She cracked her gum. “Ordinarily you could count on Buster to stretch with somepin, you know, dig deep down for some old material from the Year One, take on a heckler, or whatever…”

  Elaine was doing her finish, pumping her crotch into the edge of the curtain while the drummer in the three-man band (piano and sax) made accompanying rim-shots on his snare and, after an exceptional hump, adding a crash of the high-hat.

  Without a conscious thought Jack strode onto the stage in his busboy’s red mess jacket. The lights were brighter than he anticipated, but that only added to an atmosphere which was both that of make-believe and heightened reality. He felt the master of himself and all he surveyed.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he said to Elaine in a new, piercingly clear voice that he produced by instinct. “Let’s give the little lady a hand, oh yeah, oh yeah.” He grasped his groin. “Hey, Elaine, I got a big hand for yuh!” The audience guffawed. “Now, I don’t want any of you comin’ up here, smel-lin’ that curtain. That won’t leave me with anything to do after the show!” He sniffed audibly. ‘“Hi, you-a girls,’ said the blind Italian as he passed the fish store.” Next, Jack shouted, “Why is a police station like a men’s room?…It’s where the dicks hang out!” Without being signaled, the drummer began to hit a rim-shot after each punchline, just as he did for the strippers’ bumps-and-grinds.

  He got
off a dozen jokes in rapid-fire, hitting them with the next before they had recovered from the previous gag, understanding instinctively that handling an audience has much to do with rhythm and pace, and of course confidence, which he had had from the first, perhaps because he despised these men who had nothing better to do than swill drinks and leer at women they couldn’t have except for a fee, and many of them were servicemen, some with colored ribbons over the breast pocket, for the war had not been over long. Whereas he was just a punk kid, manipulating all the people in the room.

  Mr. Charles called him in when he left the stage. “Kid, I got ta hand it to yuh: you got balls. And you ain’t bad, you ain’t bad.”

  Still swollen with a sense of triumph, Jack said, “I think I did great!”

  The saturnine manager pointed a finger at him. “Don’t get too fresh too soon. I said not bad: I didn’t fuckin’ say great. I liked the Eyetalian gag; it was comical yet respectful.” He pointed again. “So you do the rest of the shows tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll think about it. I don’t know about Buster. He might be ready for the pasture.” Mr. Charles had never been seen to smile. Now he added dolefully, “Listen, anybody come up and ast how old you are, you say twenty-one. If we keep you on as a comic, we’ll fix you up with I.D. You ran away from home, right? You ain’t registered for the draft, are ya?”

  Jack was settling down now, ready to deal with reality, and therefore he answered with simulated submissiveness. “No, sir.”