Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  Search me.

  Rife with theories, a theory-shtupped middle-American cripple—that the palm tree is the basic building block of the California style, that it is the California style inasmuch as Western Civilization is essentially a wooden civilization, and that palms are not wood but some goofy subspecies (if not a different genre altogether), and where wood doesn’t obtain, fuel doesn’t obtain, carpentry and architecture, all the familiar, conventional as-we-know-thems, throwing up in lieu thereof some sprawled geometry, low on the horizon and various as signature, loose as anarchy. That palm trees—consider their bearded, soily crowns, their long, long leaves—are only this sort of exposed, visible root system, essentially comic, topsy-turvying nature and encouraging, for culture, the bright, colorful calypso equivalents, authorizing (where nothing seems authorized, properly zoned) calypso-facto, some suitless, coatless, tieless world, oddly, in the matter of dress code at least, a child’s world, this, well, un-Europe. (Think of California’s bricklessness and stonelessness, its stilted beach houses like a kind of car park for architectural Hovercraft.)

  So many theories. Because everyone thinks about California. It’s almost a subject, like abortion or the deficit. (Once, years back, I was offered a job at UC Santa Barbara and came out for the summer to see what it would feel like. I turned the job down, finally, because I didn’t know what I would do for conversation, the only talk, even decent talk, being about California itself, who was a native—sabras, I think they’re called—and when the rest of us came over. It could almost have been shop talk.) It would be my subject here.

  Only—I told you it wasn’t incidental—I’m disabled, and, after sizing up the bathroom situation and thinking over the long, restless night about what has to be the California innkeepers’ image of their fit and fettled clientele, after worrying all the tub’s footholds and handholds, and contemplating, serious as a mountain climber, the alternative routes and faces of his ordeal, or a jeweler where best to strike a diamond, I fell out of the shower. Tumbling the towels, tearing the rack that held them out of the wall, flailing, absurd, my pale Missouri body falling from grace—only no one falls from grace so much as from its absence—recovering, almost calm, observant and objective as someone in a near-death experience, shooting a palm to the top of the toilet tank to break my fall, to save my life.

  David Milch, the TV-mogul horse player, would tell me later that my thirst, desiccative, monumental as drought, meant I was “diuressing,” only a sort of dangerous stress—that I mustn’t worry, and to keep my nitroglycerin dry. It could be. His father before him was a doc. Mine, before me, was a patient. Something was going on. Here, at the end of the road to Manifest Destiny, I’d become a sort of Dust Bowl, as if I’d swallowed an Okie, say.

  I’m on the phone to Judy Zwicker, my chairman’s wife, a sabra returned to L.A. on a visit, filling her in, panicked handouts from my front, the casualty figures, this witness to dark acts, unable to organize, to shade, stipulating my condition in pure diuressed Cottonmouth like a language even its speaker doesn’t understand; and fixing assignments, what she should do—should the queered gown of my clumsied muscle come down to it—with my body. In a rage now of indiscriminate explanation, half dressed, here a shoe, there a shirt, pocket paraphernalia—wallet and handkerchief, room key, change, and gum, useful numbers and addresses—scattered about (because I’ve forgotten my cripple’s own credo—that you never do anything twice), dragging her willy-nilly into my life and laying dark charges like some guy eliciting promises on a deathbed. Because sabra or no, Judy’s in town from Missouri, too. She’s seen the seasons operate, watched leaves drop off actual wooden trees. She is, here in L.A., my connection to earth, a talisman from reality and the middle distances. Desperately, I’m trying to explain about the upper reaches of my tuxedo shirt.

  In crisis and farce, everything happens at once. My mogul, Milch, whom I’ve arranged to meet for breakfast, is at the door. (“Think when I’m out there,” I’d airily told management from my lower ZIP code, “I’d like to sit in on a power breakfast, fly-on-the-wall sort of thing. Oh, and I’ve another idea for the piece. I go into this boutique on Rodeo Drive, pick something out, anything, doesn’t make any difference. A tie, a shirt, whatever. I ask what it costs. Guy says, ‘That tie, gouache on Canadian silk, will run you $245.’ I make a counteroffer of eleven bucks. He throws me out. I say, ‘It’s a waste of time trying to bargain with these people, the natives won’t dicker.’ If he comes down, I tell the reader not to pay the asking price, you can do better.” Only no one wants me at their power breakfast, of course. This one, fly-on-the-wall sort of thing, I’ve had to arrange on my own.)

  Dave Milch and I go back. I knew him when.

  Except for his mogul-in-Hollywood’s big, oversize clothes, his wide, vaguely Dutch-boy pants, he looks about the same. Clearly he’s easy as ever. David is this Look-Ma-I’m-an-Egalitarian kind of guy, the sort of fellow who makes a point of not closing the door when he does number one, drilling his pee into the toilet bowl like a laser. A forceful hugger of men. You know the type. Anyway I do. Built as I am, shaped to condescension, practically asking for it in every gee-whizzed-out fiber of my being. This pardoned, made-allowance-for, governor-reprieved clemency monger catching all the waves of mercy like a surfer. That’s how we go back, I expect. Because, like most poor relations, I’m a good listener. You could eat my awe off me. And here I am, small in the doorway, rocked in his arms. He couldn’t have asked for better. When I saw him fourteen years before at Yale, I wasn’t even limping yet, the M.S. still only up into my posture, slanting me forward as if I were trying to stand in place before a stiff wind. Now he takes in the cane, the brace, my orthopedic shoes. I fill him in on all my humpty-dumpties, as I’d filled Judy in when it was her turn in my confessional. He checks out the bathroom, my unrigged tile.

  “Shmuck,” he says, “there’s no grab bars in there. What were you trying to do, shower above your station? You need a different room. I’ll make the arrangements.”

  Now my memory is, I’d made the arrangements, but in the event I let David make them again, make them better. He’d see the guy at the front desk, he said, lay a few bucks on him, get me the grab bars I deserved. (Hotel lessons, in the time I was an American in California, everyone was to give me hotel lessons. Taxicab, waiter-and-wheelchair lessons, all the tipping clarifications, the Higher Honoraria. Two weeks later, B.K., the editor who helped me with my curbside check-in at the San Francisco airport the day I left, handed me, for reasons that are still unclear, I don’t know, a ten-spot, six or seven dollars more in loose bills. Earlier I had given her five dollars, I think to tip someone or other when she checked me out of the hotel. Perhaps this is what you get for your finif upon the waters out here. In any event, I handed the money, the sixteen or seventeen bucks, over to the ancient Asian skycaptress who pushed me in my chair to the gate. B.K., possibly because she didn’t see me giving money away, excused herself and ran after her and, how do you say, what was my surprise, when I saw her stuff still more loose bills into the old lady’s wrinkled palm. “Don’t you know,” I demanded, “that the going rate for cripples in airports these days is three dollars? Tops?” These, I believe, were our only harsh words during my ten days in the Gratuity State.)

  Over breakfast, Milch fills me in on life in the fast lane. “Shmuck,” he tells me, “I’m married to a beautiful lady, I have a beautiful kid, I own a string of twenty horses.” He explains claiming races, he explains how the TV writer’s place in the Hollywood hierarchy is greater than the screenwriter’s, he explains about the Golan brothers, he explains, three months before the fact, why Milken, the junk-bond king, will be arrested. I don’t understand anything he’s talking about, nothing, not claiming races, not anything. He will take me, he says, to Santa Anita, what do I have on for the day after tomorrow. Gee, I can’t, I tell him, the day after tomorrow’s The Newlywed Game. (Another theory—that if California is to be understood, it must be understood through its gam
e shows, that that’s where the echt California types live, on the game shows. Milch has no idea what I’m talking about.)

  He picks up the check in the restaurant, leaves the tip for the waitress, tips the bellman who has transferred my clothes and effects (because I’m still diuressing; because I still think I’m going to die), and even runs back to the room I’d abandoned for a few California theory notes I’d left on the nightstand. Earlier I’d explained why I’m so worried. It’s what I’d been trying to tell Judy when David showed up. Joan prebuttons my shirts before I put them on. She buttons the cuffs, everything except the collar button and the button beneath that one so I may slip the shirt on over my head in the morning, as you’d slip on a T-shirt, as you’d pull on a sweater. Except for the top stud, except for the collar button, Joan had fixed my studs for the Reagan dinner before I even left St. Louis, loading them into the tuxedo shirt like bullets in a cartridge belt. It stymies me still, how these are to be managed, even, though it isn’t the kind you tie yourself, the bow tie that has to be fastened about my neck. Who will help me with this? (It’s a kind, though for me it hasn’t quite come to this yet, of incontinence really, this being crippled, a second infancy, such dependence. One must respect one’s parameters, learn, like some athlete of the odd, the daredevil, say, who must work out to a fraction of the inch the clearance of his stunt, the customized turf of one’s limitations. It’s very brave of me being an American in California, or would be if I weren’t so terrified.)

  I didn’t ask him. It could be grandstanding. Self’s old hat trick, but Milch volunteers to send one of his production assistants over to the hotel to work my shirt for me that evening. Or earlier. Right now, if it will make me any easier. I’m in a suite. She could stay in the living room, or outside, posted in the hall, downstairs in the lobby.

  “My,” I say, “a production assistant. What a production.”

  Milch, his hand on one of the suite’s three phones, affable and easy in California’s balmy gravity as a body comfortable in water, is waiting to dial.

  “You call it.”

  “Well,” I tell him, grateful, bamboozled, but not entirely comfortable to be one of his strays, “I do need help with the shirt.”

  And that was the morning of the second day. The afternoon of the second day, I’m in a taxi on the way to lunch. It won’t be the last time I notice that cab drivers here seem nervous about their bearings and destinations. Maybe it’s the lack of good public transportation, that there aren’t enough buses to follow, or the absence, once one leaves the beaten paths, of landmarks, but a hack in the Los Angeles area—and this might be a clue, that L.A. is an area, not a place: that there’s plenty of there there, just not enough here—seems to want the passenger drawn into his thinking, as if, by offering options, by making him a co-conspirator, he’s preparing a kind of deniability, some break-bread sharing of responsibility for getting the both of them lost. But I didn’t tell him to go into his profession. I’m a stranger here myself, still worried about what tomorrow’s shower may bring, still diuressing for that matter, and contemplating, Milch or no Milch, that final stud, all the ways there must be to live and die in L.A. I no longer care to hear the driver’s anxious opera about where such a restaurant at such an address on Santa Monica Boulevard could be. My God, I’m thinking, I’m only an American in California, and even I’ve heard of Santa Monica Boulevard. Anyway, I’m a little ticked they’ve chosen—the editors from the magazine—a venue so far from my hotel. Because I’m suspicious by nature, not so much tight as this strict accountant of my outlay in life, generous enough with my own, more than, to a fault in fact, a soft touch, mushy in fact, and with others willing, even anxious (lest, God forbid, someone have a bad opinion of me, think me cheap—or what would that largesse in the San Francisco airport be all about?) to pay my fair share, but a stickler; not so much tight as uptight—and this isn’t incidental, either—worrying the tip, the receipt, desperate to keep expenses down because I’m wondering if I should quit, resign, pack it in, tell them hello, how are ya, glad to meetcha, and turn around and catch the first cab out, back to the hotel, then back to the airport, then back to America. I’m of two minds. Then, before I know it, the cab pulls to the curb, and Andy, who doesn’t even ask for a receipt, is pushing a twenty-dollar bill through the window and into the driver’s hands.

  Then, because I’m gone mad now, certifiably insane, furious inside my unquenchable thirst, out of my element, or no, probably in it, actually, as at home in my rage as if it were a levee, some salon I host, inside the restaurant, which looks like a hangar, I tell them how it stands with me, or tell B.K., rather, my contact in the Production Assistant State, though I haven’t met her until this minute, and am still resigning as we are shown to a table.

  “My blood,” I tell her, “is on your hands.”

  The others, embarrassed, examine their menus, while someone, maybe Bob, maybe Andy, recommends the chicken sandwich.

  “Sure,” I say, “I’ll have that. The chicken sandwich. It better be good.”

  “It was written up.”

  And somehow it’s decided that after lunch B.K. will call Joan, that they’ll bring in Joan, that Joan will come thousands of miles to guide me in and out of bathtubs and the story will be saved, though both of us know that if Joan comes it’s to lift the blood curse from B.K.’s mitts, and only I know that she won’t come, that Joan didn’t tell me to go into my profession, just as I didn’t tell the cabbie to go into his. And this is what happens, too. And I, of the two minds, of at least two minds, always of at least two minds, because every choice cuts off every other choice and the only real choice is both to have Joan come and bring me safely through California’s difficult showers and toilet arrangements and to keep her down in St. Louis and hold my options open because here I ain’t been in California quite twenty-four hours yet and I’ve already got a production assistant to do a wish on my collar button for me.

  So I’m calming down, and B.K., mistress of ceremonies here, and a veteran, I suspect (because she has this tendency to speak glowingly of everyone, assuming, like the more fortunate everywhere, that, by and large, everyone now living, assuming you could only find a table big enough to accommodate them, would make companionable guests at a dinner party, and because, too, no one’s called “B.K.” unless she’s born with a silver service for eighty-two in her mouth), of far more complicated arrangements than any I could ever possibly provoke, is going over the itinerary, scratching out a scheduled two or three days in Santa Barbara and extending my stay in Los Angeles, revoking (sizing me up or, more probably, down) an outing to a Lakers game with Bob, and penciling in, Jesus, I don’t know, bedrest. We still have no official word on whether Shelby Coffey III, the new editor of the Los Angeles Times, will be escorting me to the Reagans’ Welcome Home do at the Beverly Hilton that night, but if not Shelby Coffey, Andy. In any event, it’s the beginning, as I’m passed off from hand to hand, of my bucket-brigade life.

  It looks, I swear to you, like a giant bar mitzvah! A bar mitzvah with secret service, G-men in tuxes. A bar mitzvah with movie stars passing through metal detectors. (Andy wants to know how Mr. T. will ever make it through that thing. It’s a good question, but this is a hotel in Los Angeles, Bobby Kennedy country, and somehow—I spot a federale, circumspectly hiding his gun hand under his tuxedo jacket, half a foot or so down the back of his pants—I’ve never so forcefully been made to feel the lack of due process before.)

  A bar mitzvah—but I don’t know, I don’t get out much anymore—with all the latest wrinkles. (I speak of the long haul, of the march of affluence. Once it was enough, like jacks and oranges in a Christmas stocking, rubber balls, packages of chewing gum, if you gave the guests coffee, if you let them eat cake. Then—this is history, you could look it up—things got elaborate. Menus became more impressive, invitations. There was a place, right there on the R.S.V.P. you sent back in the mail, where you could mark off your choice, fish or fowl, and you thought, This is it,
these are the last days; we have come, that is, deep into the moving parts of modern times, what will they think of next.) This is such an affair—what they thought of next, all the latest wrinkles.

  There’s the press in the lobby, clusters of celebrity, white, under the media’s lights, as platinum. Everywhere I look there are minicams. (I’m willing to bet some are government issue, only History locking the barn door, getting its bearings.) When one focuses in on me—everybody plays, no losers here, a prize in every box—I am cool, cooler than the stars, cooler than Heston, cooler than Ed McMahon. My version. To stand up straight, to try to draw myself within at least five or six inches of my former six feet. To scrape all expression from my face, like an art restorer removing pigeon shit from statues. But it’s an effort. At the champagne reception, I have to sit down or die. Andy organizes a chair and sets it next to a row of only four or five other chairs in the entire room. For other old-timers, looks like, folks like me, up past their bedtimes. I plop down next to this robust old bird. He extends a hand.