Violencia!

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  The drive had made him sleepy, and he decided to take a little nap. Working preposterously long hours in Homicide, he had developed the knack of taking small, parceled-out dozes, setting his mind like a clock so that he could wake up whenever he wanted to, right on the dot. He hopped onto the bed and fell asleep immediately.

  When he awoke, much later, he knew instantly that the technique had failed him for the first time—and that he was in major trouble.

  It was almost dark; the streetlamps below had already been turned on, giving the seemingly deserted town a harsh, bitter light of the kind that might have been used for Essie Hartog’s Berlin productions. He could imagine actors in black turtlenecks flashing through the streets, inveighing against the social forces that had yanked them prematurely from their mothers’ wombs.

  Gurney had forgotten—or perhaps he never knew—where the orchestra rehearsals were being held. He tore through the empty streets, onto one and out the other, until he finally came to a large barnlike affair, the only structure in the town that seemed big enough to hold an orchestra. He went inside and saw quickly that it was a Jewish center—and that he was in the wrong place.

  As he raced through the streets again, he wondered why tiny Winslow had all those Jews. But then it made sense to him. Jews are known for their support of the theatre, another reason Undertag had selected the town.

  About to abandon hope, he circled the town once again; finally, he heard orchestral sounds coming from the second floor of what appeared to be a deserted department store. Speeding through a ghostly ready-to-wear section, he found a stairway and burst into the orchestra room, just as the first notes of the second-act finale were being struck. Sabatini stopped the orchestra.

  “Willkommen to our author,” he announced, “who is a little late, n’est-ce pas? Andante, formaggio, fortissimo, fuckerooney.”

  Gurney guessed that Sabatini was annoyed because this was the first time he’d gotten to show off his wares; therefore, in his eyes, it was inexcusable for Gurney to turn up late. With his heart in his mouth, Gurney looked around until he saw Hartog, who refused to meet his eyes. The director simply shook his head in wonderment and disappointment. From the start, Gurney had disappointed the old man time after time. He hated himself for this.

  The cast—And God bless them all, he thought—got him partially off the hook by applauding his appearance at length, and vigorously.

  “Please, please,” he said, holding up his hand, “I’m a terrible person. Let me at least feel awful for a while.”

  Sabatini continued on with the finale, a reprise of an earlier number called “My Kind of Dick” in which the young detective hero, played by Matt Tanker, sings the old Chief out of the Bureau. His message, essentially, is that “My Kind of Dick” is fair and has some social conscience while “Your Kind of Dick,” which was once acceptable, is now bullshit and has to go.

  Everything Hartog had said about the first orchestral note was true: It was thrilling. But it soon occurred to Gurney that this applied only to the first note. All that followed seemed saccharine, as though it were originating from the rooftop of a hotel in Cincinnati and being played over car radios.

  Gurney tried to get his blood to surge, but to no avail.

  Ty Sabatini, as a special concession to Gurney, doubled back over several of the songs the orchestra had already played; each of them had that same car radio/rooftop sound to them.

  After the rehearsals, Gurney mentioned this to Norman Welles, who said the orchestrations had been done by a brilliant young fellow named Henry Stange who came highly recommended by composers who’d had hit shows with him.

  “Do you agree with me on those sounds, though?” Gurney persisted.

  “He has one of the finest reputations in the business,” said Norman Welles. “And for Christ’s sakes, he’s young and he personifies everything that’s happening in the theatre today.”

  When Gurney saw that he wasn’t getting anywhere with Welles, he approached Clement Hartog and asked him his feelings about the arrangements.

  “I know, I know,” said the director, holding his head. “Don’t get me sick.”

  Scene 9

  Gurney and Hartog had dinner at a nearby restaurant that seemed amazingly continental for a farflung town like Winslow. It was elegantly appointed, if a little funereal. Gurney could not help but wonder who in the world frequented the place in the barren, seemingly deserted town of Winslow.

  The restaurant was called Sardi’s Pacific Northwest. Hartog and the owner seemed to be acquainted, although the director never got around to explaining how he knew the fellow. The menu was the largest and longest Gurney had ever seen, with a strong emphasis on seafood and rare and exotic Jewish cooking.

  As Gurney was about to put in his order, Hartog leaned across to him.

  “Stick with the chicken,” Hartog said. “It’s the only safe item on the menu.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Gurney.

  “I know these places,” said the director.

  The owner, a gruff and burly Hungarian, came over and presented them with little dishes of jelly beans, which struck Gurney as being an odd sort of hors d’oeuvres. He took a seat beside them and began to complain in a loud voice about how difficult it was to get good help and about his terrible breakage problem.

  Gurney thought it was a little rude of him not to inquire about Violencia and to wish them well. If the show caught fire, it certainly wasn‘t going to do the restaurant any harm.

  Across the room, a young character actress who played an undercover dick in the show signaled to the owner and complained about having to wait more than an hour for her appetizer. He approached her table.

  “You know who I worry about?” he said, slapping a drink from her hand. “My help, not you. You’ll continue to wait.”

  Gurney and Hartog got up as one to intercede on her behalf, the director reaching the owner first.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “She’s just a kid.”

  As he stood by supportively, it was Gurney’s feeling that the remark could have been a lot stronger.

  “Let her go somewhere else if she don’t like it,” said the owner. “If I start losing my help, I’ll be in some pickle. That’s more important to me than some Broadway pisher.”

  When the owner stormed off, Gurney suggested they tell him to go fuck himself.

  “Surely there’s another place to eat,” he said.

  “Where might that be?” asked Hartog. “This, m’boy, is it.”

  “Well, I’d rather eat goddamned potato chips,” said Gurney, but he was saying it for the benefit of the young character actress and knew he didn’t mean it.

  He sat down with Hartog, wanting in the worst way to tell him how sorry he was about missing the first thrilling note of the orchestra rehearsal, even though it wasn’t that thrilling. But he could not convey this with any real conviction. Instead, he told the director he was willing to do whatever might be required, stay up all night if necessary, to sharpen and refine the libretto of Violencia.

  “It’s a little late for that,” said Hartog, generously covering Gurney’s hand with his own.

  Several precious days remained for technical and dress rehearsals. Then, come hell or high water, they would open.

  “And it’s that opening that troubles me,” said Hartog. “You might say, ‘Well, we’re buried way out here in Winslow, a real toilet, so what does it matter? We’re getting ourselves prepared for New York and New York only.’ But it doesn’t work that way. Watch and see who shows up, and I’m not just talking about critics. Everyone in the theatre who either hates us or has reason to be jealous of Essie and me will be here, don’t you kid yourself. To us, it will be just another rehearsal, but the vultures won’t take that into consideration. They’ll go back east and spread the word that we’re a turkey.”

  “Would they travel this far to do something that nasty?” asked Gurney.

  “They’d go to the moon for a little trea
t like that,” Hartog said with a bitter laugh.

  When the two had finished their main courses, Mr. Mortimer arrived, out of breath, his hands raised as though he had soaked them and was hanging them out to dry.

  “You’d better come quickly,” he said. “Mr. Welles has just been poisoned and needs to see you.”

  Hartog and Gurney signed for their meals quickly and then dashed up to Welles’ suite, where they found the composer in bed, doubled over in agony. He said that he had eaten the Sardi’s Pacific Northwest cotellettes á la Kiev, with side helpings of blini, sour cream, and a double order of shashlik.

  “And then I felt a mysterious sharp pain in my side.”

  Hartog apologized for not having gotten to him before dinner and warning him against anything other than the chicken. Gurney was amazed that Norman Welles, who was so health-conscious and took such good care of himself, would order an exotic and risky dish in a strange off-the-path restaurant.

  “Sometimes I fall off the trolley and think I can get away with it,” said Welles, clutching his abdomen. “The only thing I hope is that this doesn’t reduce the numbers of years I have left, even by a little bit. Everyone in my family has lived to be ridiculously old and I certainly don’t want to be the first one to die young. And I probably will, too; I can see it coming. And after all the things I’ve done for myself.”

  Welles’ food poisoning seemed to presage a series of setbacks for the company. The following day, one of the chorus people fell from the top of a Han Nihsu pagoda formation, broke his back, and had to be replaced by a local dancer who was nowhere in his league in terms of grace and precision of movement. And late that evening, Ty Sabatini got a wire from his wife that she had fallen in love with a cinematographer in Rome and planned to divorce the music conductor immediately upon his return. Sabatini, who was subject to severe depression anyway, really went into one this time and ended up going on one of the wildest binges that anyone in the company could recall.

  But all of this paled beside the misfortune that hit the group midweek.

  With the playing of a chord on the piano, Han Nihsu stopped the rehearsal one day to make the following announcement:

  “It is my sad duty to inform everyone that Mr. Mortimer has been found hanging in the clothing closet of his suite at the Hotel Winslow.”

  Everyone was both shocked and sickened by the news. Clement Hartog, of course, canceled rehearsals for the rest of the day, even though there was precious little time to get the show in shape, the lost hours representing a big loss to the production.

  Along with everyone else, Gurney felt awful about losing Mr. Mortimer, who had been a favorite of his; he could not drive the picture from his mind of the large, good-humored old teddy bear of a man hanging from a clothing closet hook. Later, over drinks, Han Nihsu said that Mr. Mortimer had left a note saying he was sick with remorse over a failed love affair with a young stagehand in a traveling company of Uncle Vanya. To compound the tragedy and to make everyone feel especially awful, Mr. Mortimer, before taking his life, had written out a detailed plan for the backstage handling of the props and sets for Violencia. Thus he had insured that it would be an easy matter for his assistant to carry on.

  Despite these setbacks, the production somehow moved on. At the dress rehearsals, Rolf Rienzo’s costumes were unveiled. As far as Gurney could tell, they displayed none of the medieval tapestried look that had gotten Rienzo his reputation. That possibility had concerned Hartog. But the designer had elected to give the costumes a burnt orange theme; obviously, in dressing the criminals and dicks in the bizarre color, Rienzo had in mind some comment he wanted to make on law enforcement. But even before Gurney could venture an opinion, Clement Hartog was at the designer’s side, patiently explaining that his intentions were perhaps a bit too subtle for what he described as “the audience of today.”

  “Would it be possible, Rolf,” he asked, “to tone down that orangy look before the opening?”

  Asked to deal with a request of that nature, the Rolf Rienzo of old might have quietly gone off to slash his wrists—but he seemed to have made a good recovery from his depressive ten-year illness.

  “I’ll do it, Clement,” said the designer, “but I’ll have to come down gradually, one shade at a time.”

  Bess Filimino’s sets presented yet another difficulty. Each one was minimal, but impeccably chosen. A single pair of handcuffs suggested—with some success—the entire detective bullpen; a pair of bloodstained panties represented, with perhaps more power than a stageful of props, the microanalysis department. The entire settings of Violencia could easily have fit into a small boy’s summer camp trunk; yet the very delicacy of these sets made for difficult handling. Each had to be glided into place on strings and runners that would be invisible to the audience. The process required immaculate handling and enormous patience on the part of the harried stage crew. Sadly enough, there was no experienced Mr. Mortimer on hand to see that the procedure ran smoothly.

  Throughout this period, Gurney felt curiously helpless. For some reason, he had pictured the week in Winslow as an opportunity for riotous carryings-on, but as it turned out, the cast was either too busy or too tired to do much partying. Gurney spent a great deal of time as a solitary drinker in his hotel suite. Moving back and forth from his quarters was no easy business, either, since, for some reason, the hotel had posted flat-faced, heavy-shouldered security guards in plain clothes on each floor and at strategic points along the lobby. Each time he tried to enter the elevator, Gurney was forced to show his credentials.

  Annoyed by this nuisance, he complained one night to a guard, who responded in an ominous tone.

  “We run a nice family place here.”

  “Now look,” said Gurney, “I’ve worked around dicks for years.”

  “Really?” said the guard. “You’ll have to tell me about it sometime.”

  Once Welles had recovered from his abdominal pains, Gurney, to vary his routine, had breakfast with the composer in his suite several times.

  One morning, Welles ushered him in excitedly and said: “I just got word from Tippy, who is trusted by them, that the chorus kids are smoking dope and fucking each other’s brains out. That’s why they look so exhausted every morning, and believe me, we’re going to pay for this once we open. Holly, the one you’re crazy about, takes on all four of Han Nihsu’s assistants every night in wild sexual bouts, getting into odd postures for them, which they love and know how to handle. Her friend Jhumpa is involved in something called ‘sandwiches.’ I think we ought to do something about it, don’t you?”

  “What can we do?” said Gurney, who realized he had lost his appetite.

  Later in the day, Gurney studied the chorus kids carefully during rehearsals; it might have been his imagination, but it struck him that they were yawning an awful lot and that their eyes had a glazed and sexually sated look to them. He had the feeling that Welles’ information was probably accurate. What was awful was that he knew of no way to shoehorn himself into the orgies.

  During a five-minute break, he interrupted Holly, who was doing an extravagant back bend; designed to loosen up the muscles, it had the side effect of being maddeningly erotic. He asked her how she felt about having a drink with him after rehearsals.

  “You couldn’t possibly be serious,” she said. “I like you, Mr. Gurney, and you’re cute, but I am so exhausted.”

  “I’ll bet you are,” Gurney muttered to himself—and thought he heard a thin Far Eastern snicker from one of Han Nihsu’s assistants. But when he wheeled around there was no one there.

  Late that night, overcome with loneliness, he went for a walk through the barren streets of Winslow, stopping at a drugstore to page through some magazines.

  “You a dick?” asked the propietor as Gurney flicked through a month-old copy of Business Week.

  Gurney had to chuckle over the question, but instead of detailing his background in homicide—something he generally enjoyed doing—he simply said no, he wa
sn’t.

  “Then check these out,” said the man, handing Gurney a stack of magazines featuring naked Danish girls in frenzied sexual postures. Gurney leafed through them, selected a few for purchase, and, for fun, tossed in a copy of Anal Bike Messengers. As he reached for his billfold, he looked back over his shoulder and became aware of someone staring at him. Spinning around quickly, he saw that it was the brilliantly quirky Hobie Hancock. Somewhat embarrassed, he stuffed the erotic puchases into a brown bag along with the lively information-packed business weekly.

  “How much do I owe you for Business Week?” he asked, winking at the propietor to indicate he didn’t want it known he was taking a bundle of pornography back to the hotel. Gurney’s face was stiff as he walked along the street with Hancock and tried to make small talk. To his credit, the gifted young performer did not comment on Gurney’s purchases, but focused instead on his own yearnings and future in the theatre.

  “I would have thought it impossible, but the work on Violencia has been not only stimulating but also helpful to my budding career. We live and learn, n’est-ce pas?”

  Gurney barely heard a word he said. He was convinced that Hancock knew about the bagful of porn and that it was a substitute for a real woman, Gurney being unable to produce one, even though he was the writer of the show and should have been able to come up with several at a snap of his fingers. For all of his discretion of the moment, the actor, Gurney felt, could probably hardly wait to rush back and unmask the librettist as a lonely hotel-room masturbator. Could the show possibly be a hit with such an unfortunate at the controls? He almost came out and asked Hancock to please not say anything, but he could not bring himself to do this. Instead, he excused himself and went upstairs to his room to call Angela.