Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  Now, me and Vic, we'd had a few blowups over the years. We had 'em when we was at the Monroe, we had 'em when he was on the road with Don Leslie's band and with Ziggy. We had 'em back in Codport, too, way back when. But the biggest one ever was about Hunny.

  Me and him flew to Vegas to see Hunny one night. Vic downed about nine scotches on the plane, he just kept 'em coming. I'd heard that Hunny was havin' some problems, even more so than usual. He was in his usual spot, at the casino door, fastened there. But even with the hook to his belt, he could hardly stand up. All those chips in his jacket pockets was weighin' him down, sure, but he was having trouble even without that. And he couldn't talk no more, he couldn't say the thing they had him sayin'. Alls he could say was, “Good.” He couldn't even say, “Good to see ya here.”

  “Hunny, it's me and Vic,” I says.

  “Good,” he says.

  “What's shakin', Hun?” Vic asked him.

  “Good,” Hunny says.

  Vic and me flew back that night. And I had all kinds of thoughts in my head. Vic had about seven more drinks on the plane. He was as bagged as I'd ever seen him.

  We were on the front steps of his house. He was wobbling even though he wasn't walking.

  “Hunny's in bad shape, Vic,” I said.

  “Yeah. He is.”

  “We gotta put him in a hospital. We gotta give him some dignity.”

  “Hey, he's happy. He's got that belt and the robe, all those chips.”

  “That ain't dignity.”

  He said, “He's so far out of it he don't know what's goin' on.”

  I felt myself get all red. I felt nerves in my fingertips light up.

  “I'm worried about you too, buddy,” I says to him.

  “You're worried about me?” he says.

  “Yeah. You don't care about Hunny!”

  “What? I gotta listen to some guy steams clams for a living telling me he's worried about me?!”

  “What's wrong with you?” I said.

  “Go shower somewhere, get that smell off—”

  “Look, can we maybe—”

  “Why do you think Bogart and you once got gassed together, huh? Why do you think that you and Gleason went to the fights a few times or all those big shots went to your lousy fuckin' restaurant? Why did all those fat broads let you fuck them? Did you ever wonder why? You had lunch with Rita Hayworth once, remember? Ever think why? You think they all wanted to be with some dumb, sawed-off dago without a nose? Nah . . . it's 'cause you was with me. These people didn't want to have nothing to do with Gaetano Puglia from Codport. Nothing. But you were my buddy so they put up with you. You and your fuckin' no nose.”

  “Hey, do you know why I lost my nose, Vic? Do you have any idea?”

  “Yeah, it was Straccio . . .”

  “But do you know why? I lost my nose because I was trying to protect you. I lost years and years of my goddamn life because of you. I never had a life until a few years ago, because I had your life! Why do you think Hunny's the way he is, how he don't even know his own name? 'Cause you kept him fighting when he should've hung up the gloves! Why is your son dead? Why do men treat Vicki like she's a piece of meat and Ginger wound up dead in a whorehouse?! I got no nose and Vincent's dead and Hunny is a goddamn vegetable, all because of you! I don't give a fuck about any big shots and never did. I just wish I'd never given a fuck about you too.”

  I looked at him. His face said nothing to me. He's like a piece of fuckin' stone. Me, I was shakin' pretty bad.

  I says to him, “You ever wanna see me . . . you know where my shack is,” and I left.

  But you know what happened? He kept drinking that night. Joe Yung finds him on the floor pukin' his guts out, pukin' out all kinds of things. “He piss in pants,” Joe told me. “He see things and talk to himself, start screaming.” I asked him what kind of things Vic was seeing, whether they was pink elephants, and Joe said, “No pink elephant, Guy, just ants . . . many thousand ants eating him, talking to him. He very sick.”

  Joe and Ices Andy put him in the hospital. He doesn't get any booze and he gets the DTs and I think they put him in a straitjacket. “I'm all alone!” he was yellin'. “Someone help me! I'm all alone!” He went crazy in there, completely fuckin' nuts . . . ants with sunglasses on were singin' his songs to him and nibbling on his body.

  And then he went off to that clinic in New Mexico.

  SNUFFY DUBIN: I've done only two smart things in my life: marry Debbie and kick the pills. Debbie is my savior, my angel, my messiah. If she don't come into the Colony Club that night, if I don't meet her, I'm a dead man. I'm dead by 1975, I guarantee it. You know why I never had kids? You wanna know why Debbie never wanted to have kids? Because we already had one. We had me. I was the world's biggest kid, I was Debbie Dubin's bouncing baby boy.

  Two shows a night, five, six nights a week, forty cities a year for almost fifty years. You think that's easy? I play Caesar's Palace for a week and then the next night I'm doing the Westbury Music Fair with Miss Leslie Wilson or Lana Cantrell and I look out into the crowd and I recognize twenty faces from Caesar's. So now how'm I gonna make these cats laugh again?

  Funny fuel. That's what it was. Look, I needed them. I'm not gonna lie to you. I must've needed 'em, to spend eight hundred grand on the stuff. Thirty to get up, thirty goofballs to get down, thirty to smooth me out and transition me. I get home at four in the morning, I'm shaking like I'm Julius and Ethel Rosenberg getting electrocuted—how you think I'm gonna sleep? So I got the barbs, the Valiums, the Libriums. My body was like the Smith, Kline & French factory.

  So yeah, cold turkey. I didn't do it in any hospital or in any Betty Ford kind of outfit, I did it in my bedroom in Vegas. And the only one around was Debbie. Nurse Debbie. One day I was runnin' on two hours sleep and was about to head off for the Oceanfront and I fell flat on my face as I'm opening up my car door. Next thing I know I'm in my bed, Debbie's kissing my cheeks. I reach into the night table drawer, where I keep my stash, and the only thing that's there is Kleenex, a TV Guide, and a tub of Vaseline. Debbie had called Pete Conifer and canceled for me. I had three days of sheer hell on earth and the only pill I've taken since then is Tums.

  Ziggy, he hit rock bottom too.

  I think it was '91. He was supposed to film another dumb R-rated cleavage-romp in Germany, of all places—Christ, he must've made ten Big Bavarian-Booby movies in Deutschland; he's got lederhosen, a monocle, and an elf's cap on in most of them. How the mighty have fallen, right? Ziggy does his lines in English, afterward they dub the German in. If the movie's released in America, they dub English back into Zig's mouth, but it's not even his own voice. Anyway, Ziggy's in Sweden now, all alone, and it's a holiday weekend there and he's clean out of pills. He'd been through customs in Munich and he'd left his little black toiletry kit on that conveyer belt thing that goes through security. He wakes up in Stockholm in a fucking panic . . . he calls Lufthansa but it's early and they don't pick up the phone. He calls the American Embassy in Sweden, they don't believe he's really Ziggy Bliss. He's calling every embassy in Europe, all to track down that little black bag in the Munich airport. “I was on the phone for four hours, Snuffles,” he told me, “sweatin' like a wild boar.” He took a taxi to the American Embassy in Stockholm and showed them his passport to prove he was Ziggy Bliss, and the pathetic thing was the young marine guards hadn't ever heard of him. They let him in, though, and he speaks to some guy, some liaison or attaché. The guy wants to know what was in this bag that was so important that he's got to call security at the Munich airport, and Ziggy thinks for a second and says, “My material.” “Your material?” this guy asks him, and Ziggy says, “Yeah, my jokes.” The guy—just out of curiosity—asks him, “What movie were you filming in Germany?” and Ziggy answers, Titanic Teutonic Titties of the Tyrol or whatever it was called.

  Ziggy watches as this guy makes one, maybe two phone calls. Now, nobody knows or cares where this bag is—how much time are they gonna spend on this has-been
comic with a red wig when they got Libyan terrorists to worry about?

  So Ziggy tells this embassy cat he needs a doctor and he's given the address of a hospital. At the hospital he tries every trick in the book; he wants uppers, he says to them, “Alls I do is sleep nowadays, I can't get myself motivated to perform.” He wants downers so he says to them, “Alls I do is perform, I can't get myself motivated to sleep.” He ends up leaving there with two aspirin.

  He goes back to his hotel and he's whimpering and shivering and is tearing-apart the fabric of all his suitcases, hoping that maybe a few years ago half an amphetamine slipped underneath there. The poor guy even tore apart the soles of his shoes. Oh yeah . . . he takes off the red mop wig 'cause his scalp is a sweaty mess now and he fills up the sink and lets the rug sit in there for a spell. He gets a Stockholm phone book and looks in the doctor section and starts calling every doctor's answering service in town and says he's Ziggy Bliss and he can't get motivated. Nothing. Nowhere. He gets the bellhop and asks him, “Where do I go to get some pills in this town? If I don't get pills I'm gonna die,” and he hands the kid twenty marks or kroner or shillings or whatever it is they've got. The kid tells him to go around the main train station and ten minutes later that's where Ziggy is. He's walking up to every shady-lookin' character, every creep with a dangling tongue or who's scratching themselves funny, and telling them he's Ziggy Bliss and he needs pills. No one believes he's Ziggy Bliss. Why? 'Cause Ziggy's wig was still bobbing up and down in the sink! He's just some little bald American with bags under his eyes like a basset hound and about ten coats of perspiration over his skin. No one's helping him out, nobody at all. “I swear I'm Ziggy Bliss,” he's yelling. “I swear to God I am!”

  He takes a walk and winds up in some seedy part of town . . . there's these hookers, these men dressed up as women, junkies all of 'em. Okay, he can smell it now: pay dirt. He walks up to this one tall guy with a blond wig in a long braid and with soccer balls stuffed into his blouse—Anita Ekberg with a mustache—and asks him, “Where can I get some pills? Any pills? I got dough. Help me out.” This guy, who had pockmarks as big as nickels all over his face, asks to look at his wallet. Ziggy flashes the wallet, he's got around three hundred bucks' worth of foreign currency in there. They go to some little hotel, walk up three flights. Now, Ziggy is there to get his pills and that's all he's there to get—he knows this guy is a guy, right? So they go into this small room and the door closes behind him. Ziggy sits on the bed and before you know it he's got a switchblade to his throat. “Take the money! Take the money!” Ziggy says. Well, uh, that was a given, wouldn't you say? The guy, who's got his wig off now—one of the soccer balls had slipped out, too—and is about as blond and Swedish in real life as Fidel Castro, takes the wallet and takes the dough. He looks at the driver's license and sees the name Ziggy Bliss and he says, “You're Ziggy Bliss?” And Ziggy, who's wiping his head with his hanky, says, “Yeah, I guess.” The hooker says, “My father loved your movies. He was a big fan in Bulgaria.” Or Romania or Bratislava or wherever.

  “Can I go now?” Ziggy asks.

  He's heading for the door now and all of a sudden he's thrown to the floor. This cat is on top of him and tearing his pants down. “He was biting my neck like it was a medium rare porterhouse,” Ziggy said. “And he was trying to slip his shlong into my heinie.” But, see, Ziggy was one strong motherfucker. Still. So he throws this creep off his back and he opens the door. But he ain't outta the woods just yet, uh-uh. There's these two junkie slimeballs in leather jackets—maybe they were the hooker's pimps, who knows?—and they start punching and kicking Ziggy, they're kicking him in the stomach and the balls and they break a few ribs. Then they do that Richard Widmark thing, in Kiss of Death: They toss Ziggy right down the stairs. He's unconscious and a few hours later some cop finds him and takes him to the hospital.

  “They gave me antibiotics and patched me up,” he told me. “I had a few teeth knocked out too. I could hardly walk, every bone in me ached. Pernilla flew over. She brought over two fresh rugs for me. One day I'm in the hospital room and the doctor comes in, asks how I feel. I say, ‘Doc, I'm havin' trouble gettin' motivated. I got no get-up-and-go.’ And this doctor, the spittin' image of Max Von Sydow, says, ‘Pep pills? You want pep pills?’ and writes me out a few prescriptions and leaves the room. I look at these prescriptions and I look up and the ceiling and the walls are closin' in on me quick. And I yelled—I yelled so loud, Snuffy, that it cracked the mirror in the room, just like Flo singin'—I yelled out these three words: ‘I HATE MYSELF!’”

  Rock fucking bottom, man. Everybody gets there one way or another.

  JOHN TIMMONS [orderly]: Well, I don't work there no more. They can't fire me. I wouldn't have told you nothin' three years ago—they'd have fired me. Can't do that now. Don't work there no more.

  Vic Fountain, he checked in first. Had some little Chinese man drive him up in a limousine. This driver started getting Vic's bags from the trunk and I said to him, “Oh no, Vic's got to do everything by himself here and that starts right now.”

  Vic was always tryin' to bribe us. The orderlies, the doctors and counselors. Offered me a thousand bucks just to sneak him in some Genoa salami once, offered me a Mercedes-Benz to let him walk out, said something about showgirls in Vegas. I always pretended like he was gonna get to me if he kept upping the offer, but after a while he realized he wasn't gettin' anywhere.

  He wouldn't do nothing at first. Wouldn't make his bed, wouldn't clean his bathroom. Wanted his own room. They had him in a room with some twenty-three-year-old kid addicted to heroin. Nobody in Hope Springs has their own room . . . the queen of motherfuckin' France was to be in there, she'd be rooming with some dope addict. Vic didn't like the pajamas, he wanted his own satin ones flown in. Too damn bad. He had KP duty one week; didn't want to do it. Shit, it turned out he'd never cleaned a goddamn dish in his whole goddamn life. Didn't wanna take out the garbage. Well, I got in his face about that. I got in real close and real loud and I let his ass have it. I tell him if he don't take out the goddamn motherfuckin' garbage he'll wear the goddamn motherfuckin' garbage and you know what he did? Started to cry. Shit. Seventy-year-old man and he's on his bed and he's cryin' like I just took his goddamn yo-yo away from him. When he was doing that I noticed a picture on his night table—at the clinic that was the only thing you was allowed to have. No books, no radio, no TV. I said to Vic, “Who's that?” He said, “My son.” “He a singer like you?” I asked him. “Nah,” he said, “he was in a rock band. And he's dead.” “You think he'd be proud of his old pops cryin' in his bed?” I asked him.

  Well, he wound up takin' the garbage out, and makin' his bed and cleaning plates.

  Two weeks after Vic Fountain checked in, who the hell shows up at that rehab clinic but Ziggy Bliss? Now that's some serious fate for you. The director of the place said to me the day before Ziggy come in, he say, “Big John, we might have a little problem here,” and he explains to me about Vic Fountain and Ziggy Bliss. I tell him I don't care about all that Hollywood shit. I don't care if you had Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine or the Hatfields and the McCoys in there at the same goddamn time.

  You should have seen Ziggy Bliss when we took his wig away from him. Heh heh! “They didn't tell me you'd do this here,” he's cryin' to me, and I yell at him and say, “This ain't nothin', Izzy!” I called him Izzy, Iggy, and Squiggy just to get on his ass. He's grabbin' onto his wig like it's his whole life I'm pullin' away from him. Three other orderlies come by and jump on him and he was a strong little man, but we got that big Brillo pad offa him. He looked just like an old bloodhound dog without that wig. Hell, when we asked for Vic's wig, when he checked in, he wasn't too happy either. But we got it. He said, “Must I?” and I said, “You must.” And he handed it over. Looked like a dead raccoon in my hands. A dead blue raccoon. He was embarrassed without it, wouldn't show himself for a few days.

  I saw them in the dining hall, Ziggy's second day there. Vic was s
itting with his young roommate, working on his London broil. Then he sees Ziggy on the buffet line all alone with his tray. Nobody'd told Vic that Ziggy was comin'—he didn't have any idea. You should've seen Vic's face, man . . . thought he was having the DTs all over again. Know what Vic done? Got up in the middle of his meal and went back to his room and didn't show his face again until the next morning when we caught him trying to escape his ass.

  “You gotta let me outta here, Timmons,” he said to me.

  “I don't have to do shit,” I said to him. “Except force you to clean your bathroom.”

  “Look, forget the Mercedes. I'll make it a Bentley.”

  “You will? A Bentley? Really, my brother?”

  “Yeah. I swear.”

  “I still don't have to do shit. Clean your bathroom. Now!”

  He and Ziggy ran into each other that day, in the Sunset Lounge. They had Ziggy on medication, to take him off all them pills he was taking. He didn't look any more like the Ziggy I'd seen on the TV than I did. He just looked like a little bent-over bald Jewish man to me. All them freckles he had? They'd all faded and his skin looked like rust. But now in the lounge he was like a zombie. That's what Hope Springs did if you was hooked on pills: They took you off what you was on, put you on something else, then slowly took you off that, then kicked your ass outside into the real world. And it usually worked.

  Ziggy saw Vic settin' there playing cards with someone and he didn't believe his own eyes. Thought he was hallucinating. He was doin' that “Thorazine shuffle” dance, taking two-inch steps and teetering back and forth . . . but when he saw Vic he come to a complete stop. Tilted his head like a dog listening to a police siren. Then he just shuffles on.

  I checked up on him that night. He was lyin' in bed on his back, like a dead man, his hands folded over his chest. I said, “You all right?” He said, “I'm alive.” He asked me if that was really Vic Fountain he'd seen, and I told him it was. I asked him, “Who are they?” and he turned to the picture on his night table and said, “They were my parents. And that's my wife.”