My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things: True Stories

by Joseph Skibell

  It’s from Tiger, of course. He wants Dad to tear out the yellow pages from the phone book listing all the pet stores on the island and send them back to him by return post, in an envelope he’s provided. The special deliveryman waits while Dad does all this. Taking the envelope, he fires up his bike. Dad climbs back into bed, and for the next half hour he’s up, listening to the engine getting softer and softer as the motorcycle gets farther and farther away.

  “But Birdicure was a success,” Dad tells me. “Tiger went to New York and got Birdicure listed with Kress and Woolworth, and he actually made some money on it.”

  And with that money, Tiger finally did what he always wanted to do, which was to make movies, of course.

  TIGER MADE ONLY two films that I know of.

  The first, from 1957, was called Rock Baby Rock It. Billed as “the original rockabilly rhythm ’n’ blues cult classic filmed on location in Dallas,” it featured local bands from the period. The plot: “Every bobcat, kool kitten and crazy combo in town get together to save the local Hot Rock club and give the mob the ‘weenie’ once and for all.”

  Tiger’s second film came out three years later. Many Ways to Sin is the story of a magician named Dante. Lately, he’s been having trouble distinguishing between reality and the world of his stage illusions (a problem Tiger was no doubt familiar with). Someone has been murdering Dante’s beautiful assistants—Velma, who assists in his guillotine act, for instance, is found decapitated—and the film plays out as a cat-and-mouse between Inspector Evans, who is investigating the murders, and Dante, who may or may not be committing them.

  A friend of mine recently found a black-and-white glossy from the film online. In it, the actor playing Dante levitates one of his leggy assistants while two other assistants, equally leggy, look on. The whole thing seems fairly amateurish. Dante’s beard, which resembles Tiger’s, is clearly and clumsily glued on.

  Though the film, retitled Victimes du Démon, played in Paris at the Midi-Minuit for a week in 1966 and was released as Immer bei Nacht in Germany the same year, no print of it survives.

  Dad saw it. “Tiger had a private showing in New York. It was sad, really. He’d write these movies, do all the production work and the rewrites, but it was a shell game. He’d talk all these star-struck kids into acting for free, then he’d con people into investing in it. But then he’d run out of money, because he was living on the investors’ money, plus he had expenses with all the equipment and everything, so he’d write a new movie, and he’d sell the idea for that movie to new investors, and he’d take the money from the second movie to start making the first one, and so on and so on. His problem was he never wanted to make a hundred dollars, he only wanted to make a million.”

  THOUGH NONE OF Tiger’s other film projects ever saw the light of day—idea stolen . . . funding lost . . . investors backed out—he spent the last years of his life laying the groundwork for what promised to be the biggest deal he’d ever pull off. Everything was in place. All he needed was a Letter of Intent from the Indians. He wasn’t well, that was the only thing, and he worried that he might not live long enough to ink in the contracts, and so he asked Dad to come with him to Tahlequah, hoping his presence there might reassure the Cherokee.

  Dad flew to Tulsa. He rented a car and picked Tiger up at the Greyhound terminal. But it was a wasted trip, he told me. “Tiger’s cancer was in remission. Supposedly. But the chemo had taken its toll, and he looked a mess. He had a coat and a tie, but he was wearing yellow cotton pants with bright yellow suspenders designed to look like yardsticks. His hair was sparse, and what little he had left was dyed a vibrant red. His beard and his mustache were also a bright red. He was wearing a kangaroo cap. And—oh, yeah—a black cape. His shoes were two-toned golf shoes with tassels handed down to him years ago from your grandfather. He’d unscrewed the cleats so he could walk on them. But when he crossed his legs, you could see the little holes on their bottoms, and he was so weak he could barely walk, even with a couple of canes.”

  Still, he was well versed in what was going on with the Indians in New York State. “They were the first to put in a casino, and they’d made a fortune with it, and Tiger was trying to duplicate that with the Cherokee.”

  There was only one sticking point. “No one was going to put up a dime until the Indians gave up their sovereignty. They couldn’t be held accountable in an American court otherwise.” The investors wanted a level playing field, and it was Tiger’s job to convince the Indians to sign a Letter of Intent, legally renouncing their sovereignty. And it wasn’t only the Cherokee. Tiger had been speaking to Indian chiefs throughout the Plains states and the Southwest, riding from reservation to reservation on a thirty-day bus pass. Things were moving forward on all fronts, but the Cherokee, Tiger felt, were ready to sign. He’d found a resort in Pennsylvania—because the Cherokee had once been in Pennsylvania, they qualified to buy land and go into business there—but it wasn’t only going to be casinos.

  “Oh, he had a lot of ideas,” Dad says. Mostly, he wanted to make movies at the resort. “That way, working on Indian land, you wouldn’t have to pay union scale, you see?”

  “And what are you saying to him as he’s telling you all these things?” I ask my father.

  “I’m just listening. I’m trying to get him to scale everything back. First do one thing, then worry about the next, but there’s no arguing with him. I mean, to tell the Indians about museums and the movies, you’re just going to overwhelm them. Let’s see if we can first get the gambling and then worry about the other ramifications.”

  “And when he spoke to the chief, did he do that or did he mention everything?”

  “No, he mentioned everything.”

  I try to imagine Tiger, pacing in his decleated golf shoes and his black cape, waxing euphoric over the river of money that will flow to the Cherokee from the casinos he will build and the films he will make on their ancestral lands once, thanks to certain loopholes in the American tax code, they renounce their sovereignty.

  “You have to understand,” Dad says. “The chief is the chief, but he’s also just a working guy, probably in his mid- to late fifties. He’s polite, he’s considerate, but he’s not going to sign any Letter of Intent. He’s not giving away his people’s sovereignty. Jack invites him to lunch, but the chief’s got other meetings, so we take some of the office people out, so Jack can talk over the deal. This all takes about two hours, and then we’re back in Tulsa. Tiger gets on the bus—he’s got his thirty-day pass—and he’s off to talk to another tribe. And that was Tahlequah.”

  A WEEK ON my calendar finally opens up, and I call Dave Cole and arrange to come out to his farm. We agree on a date and a time, and he gives me overly precise road directions which include the location of various speed traps and a lengthy history of his brother’s alcoholism. Ethan meets me at the airport, and the next morning, we head out. Ethan and I have been studying Yiddish and Hebrew together twice a week on the phone and we’ve become closer perhaps than we’ve ever been as adults. Two variations on the same genetic theme, we share a lifetime of references—familial, cultural, personal—and are sensitive to the subtlest change in each other’s intonation. Instantly responsive to the smallest suggestion, we can turn on a dime, leaping from reference to reference, following each other into an imaginary world.

  Somehow, over the course of our studies, we’d invented an entire classroom led by a strict teacher named Mrs. Pilsner. The good student was named Jimmy, and the bad student—at the time, I had no reason to think it had anything to do with Tiger—was called Jack.

  One afternoon, Ethan was quizzing me on verb tenses, and I either didn’t know the answer or I hesitated in giving it. His voice, over the telephone, grew instantly stern. “Don’t tell me you didn’t study!” he said.

  As instantly, I assumed the quaking voice of a miserable, humiliated child.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Pilsner. I didn’t have time to study because . . .”

  Ethan bec
ame Mrs. Pilsner: “No more of your excuses, Jack!”

  “Yes, Mrs. Pilsner. But it’s just that my father . . .”

  “I said enough of your excuses!”

  “. . . was drunk and raving in the kitchen. He hit my mother and sent her to the hospital and . . .”

  “Does anybody here know the correct answer?”

  “I do, Mrs. Pilsner!” I called out in the voice of another student.

  Mrs. Pilsner’s voice sweetens. She’s clearly talking now to the teacher’s pet.

  “Ah, Jimmy, yes! Go on. Please, share the correct answer with everyone.” Her voice grows cross again: “Are you listening, Jack?”

  Jack, downcast, says, “Yes, Mrs. Pilsner.”

  “You had better be!”

  The scenario was fluid. Sometimes I played Mrs. Pilsner and Ethan played Jimmy or Jack, and there were other students as well: Sally, an inattentive flirt in love with Biff, a jock who, though he never studied and never knew the correct answer, was never shamed by Mrs. Pilsner, a circumstance that only increased Jack’s sense of humiliation. Jack’s life and his love of learning were being destroyed by Mrs. Pilsner, but Ethan and I were having a great time.

  ETHAN ACTUALLY WORKED for Tiger, though only for a week or so. Tiger was shooting a film in New York called The Perils of P.K., and Dad had gotten Ethan the job in the hopes of advancing his acting career.

  “Move all this mail from here,” Tiger told Ethan, pointing to one side of his office, “to here,” he said, pointing to another. “And if anybody calls for a Joe Green, he’s not in. Joe Green is not in, and David Davidian is also not in. You got that? There is no Joe Green here and no David Davidian.”

  “Can I quit?” Ethan asked our mother before his second week was through.

  “I used to see him on the streets of New York,” Ethan tells me in the car, “and there was always a moment of shock, because he not only looked homeless but he looked so much like Dad, and for a moment, I’d think it was Dad, sitting on the curb or on a fire hydrant with his pants rolled up to his knees.”

  ETHAN AND I turn in at a sign that says COOPERTON FARM FRESH EGGS and arrive at a house with black shutters and yellow siding. I walk to the front porch and knock on the door. Ethan gets out of the car. He puts his hands into his back and leans into them, stretching.

  “Are you getting a kind of Deliverance feeling here?” he says, looking around the place.

  No one answers the door, and I call Dave on my cell phone. A telephone starts ringing inside his house. When I hang up, the phone inside the house stops ringing.

  I call Richard and tell him that we’ve arrived, but that no one seems to be here.

  He tells me not to worry, that he’ll call Dave, and a moment later, the phone starts ringing inside the house again. After it stops, Richard calls me back.

  “Nobody answered,” he says.

  “I know,” I say. “We can hear the phone ringing inside the house.”

  “Well, give him a minute. He’ll be there.”

  I can’t shake the feeling that someone’s inside the house, watching us. I look around the property. There’s a rusted-out pickup truck with flat tires. Branches from the bushes are growing through its broken windows. The earth seems to be rising up around it, reclaiming it, along with a long metal chicken coop that’s lying on the ground, twisted up like a broken accordion.

  I get my camera out, but there’s only one exposure left. I search through my bag, but I’m out of film.

  We passed a little store about a mile back, and I suggest to Ethan that as long as Dave isn’t here, we could dash back and pick up some film.

  “And maybe he’ll come back in the meantime.”

  When we return to the farm, there’s a piece of white paper hanging on the front door of the house.

  “Hey, that wasn’t here before?”

  We get out of the car. The note on the door reads:

  KEPT LATE AT COUNTY FAIR IMPOSSIBLE

  TO GET BACK SEE MY DAUGHTER

  HOUSE END OF ROAD.

  DAVE

  We look at each other. I knock on the door, but no one answers. I dial Dave’s number. The phone in the house starts ringing. I want to shout, I know you’re in there! But I don’t, of course. None of this makes sense. The time sequences make no sense. If Dave were being kept late at the fair, when did he put this note on the door? Before going to the fair that he couldn’t get away from now?

  “Which end of the road do you think he even means?” I say.

  Ethan looks at me, as though to say, You see, this is exactly why I don’t do these sorts of things.

  WE DRIVE TO the main road. I ring the doorbell at a couple of houses, but no one answers here either. We return to the farm and walk around the property on our own, but we can’t find anything resembling a barn filled with canisters of film. It’s already midafternoon. I’m ready, though reluctantly, to call it a day, and Ethan’s heart was never in it to begin with. As we’re heading back, we pass a large two-story house with a big circular drive. It’s right where the road bends, and it occurs to me that a person might think of this bend as a kind of end.

  “Do you think that’s Dave Cole’s daughter’s house?” I say.

  “I doubt it,” Ethan says, slowing to a stop.

  “Listen,” I say. “There’s music coming from the back. If someone’s there, maybe they can at least tell us how to find the daughter.”

  Sighing, Ethan puts the car into Park.

  “Hello?” I call, walking towards the back. “Hello?” No one answers my call. The moment I return to our car, though, someone pulls out from behind the house. Already speeding, tires squealing, throwing gravel up from the driveway, the driver tears out onto the main road.

  I jump into the passenger seat. “Follow that car!” I shout at Ethan.

  “What?” he says, looking confused.

  “Follow that car!”

  “No! I will not! Follow that car!”

  “Why not? Come on! They’re getting away!”

  As though I were Laurel and he Hardy, Ethan gives me a slow-burn that says, Do I really have to explain this to you?

  “Well, when you put it that way,” I say.

  We sit in the car for a moment. A teenager, with thick glasses and thicker acne, trots past us on a horse. He leans down, peering into the car. I lean across Ethan to shout up at him. “Hey, do you by any chance know where we might find Dave Cole’s daughter’s house?”

  He stares at us coldly as he passes by.

  “Great!” I say to Ethan. “First Blake and now Yeats!”

  “What are you talking about!” Ethan says.

  He shifts into Drive and is about to pull out onto the road when a car swims up next to ours, blocking us in. The driver, a woman, sits face-to-face with Ethan. She introduces herself as Dave Cole’s daughter, and she invites us to follow her back to the farm. Once we’re there, she leads us straight to the barn. It’s right behind the house down a well-marked path. I don’t know how we could have missed it.

  Inside, everything is pretty much as Dave described it on the phone: a mountain of stuff, Tiger’s things, sixty feet long, fifty feet wide, maybe ten feet high.

  Dave’s daughter tells us that she and Jack were friends. He had all this stuff in a storage locker in Manhattan, but when the locker began to flood her father offered him the use of his barn. It took fourteen trips back and forth between Middletown and Manhattan to haul it all up.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it,” she says.

  Ethan and I nose around a bit. I open one of the boxes of books and take out a cheap paperback. Inside the front cover is written “Movie of the Week?” There are boxes that look like someone simply swiped his arm across a messy desk, throwing everything into it, intending to sort through it all later. We find a bag of coins and a couple of thirty-year-old girlie magazines and cards for an escort service. There are large canisters of 16-mm films and hand-drawn posters for a never-released comedy called “Out to Lunch.” />
  The barn isn’t airtight. The wooden walls have openings in them. A few of the windows are broken. Through them, I can see that the sun has already set. The sky is a dark red, charred with blue. We’ve only been in the barn about thirty minutes, but it’s already too dark to see, and the amount of stuff is overwhelming. Ethan and I barely get through a fraction of it.

  Back home, I call Dave Cole and ask him to send me a few canisters of the film. Richard pays him to cart everything else to the dump. I store the film in my office at work, thinking one day I’ll hire a projectionist to screen it, but of course I never do. Years later, I’m out of the country when I see an email on the college list-serv: torrential rains have flooded the top floor of my building. The only damage seemed to have been sustained by canisters of film stored there. It takes me a moment, so far from home, to realize that the office in question is my office and that the films are Jack’s.

  NEAR THE END of his life, Tiger disappeared, and no one knew where he was for days until he phoned Richard from Harrisburg, needing cash. Richard called Dad. Dad called the Harrisburg police. The Harrisburg police found Tiger sleeping in the park. They committed him to a psychiatric hospital for observation. They said they’d release him to a family member, so Dad flew up. The cancer had returned and was affecting Tiger’s brain. Tiger believed the VA had a hit list of patients they’d been treating too long. He was on the list, but he’d fled before they could zap him with their lasers.

  All he had on him when Dad arrived at the hospital was a paper sack filled with contracts and letters of intent for the Indians. The Plains tribes were having a big powwow, and Tiger was hoping to get back to Oklahoma where he could find all the chiefs in one place. Dad brought him to Dallas. Working in concert, his cousins placed him in a Jewish home for the elderly. Tiger told the staff that he was adopted, that he wasn’t really Jewish, and that he had no right being there. As a result, they put him on a locked Alzheimer’s ward. Richard saw to the paperwork, trying to get him his military benefits, but he couldn’t get too far. Even when he was in the marines, Tiger had used his sister Marion’s Social Security number.