Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  “Whoa, she look like that girl in the old towel commercial.”

  “Yeah. That's her.”

  I was looking at him looking at her and he said, “I let her down. I let everyone I've ever known down.”

  The next night Vic didn't even go to dinner 'cause he didn't want to see Ziggy. You know what he done? He had that roommate of his sneak him his London broil dinner, into the room. With the au jus. I told Vic's counselor about that right away and he say to me, “Big John, next time that happens, you drag Vic by his neck into the dining hall and you set his ass right beside Ziggy Bliss's.” I looked forward to doing that and, sure enough, the next night I got my chance.

  Me and another orderly carried Vic kickin' and screamin' into the dining-room and we threw him right next to Ziggy. Ziggy was still all zombied out—he had his tray but there wasn't no food on the thing. Ziggy looked at Vic, still thought he was seein' things. Two old bald men who've known each other fifty goddamn years. Vic said to him, “Try the London broil. Heavy on the ‘oh juice.’ And the strawberry Jell-O.” And Ziggy Thorazine-shuffled over and got some London broil and extra au jus and some Jell-O and sat right back next to Vic Fountain.

  “Strawberry Jell-O,” Ziggy said to Vic. (Sounded like a croaking, dying frog. That's what all the medication did.) “You thinkin' the same thing that I'm thinkin'?”

  “Goofin' off on fat Kate Smith's show?” Vic said. “Hell yeah.”

  For the next few weeks, until Vic checked out, they was together quite often. I'd see 'em playing cards in the Sunset Lounge. That lounge had a great view, man. Real sunny. Big picture window lookin' out into the desert and the mountains on the horizon and the sun and blue sky. That's what I miss most about that place, that view. That's about the only thing I miss. And here they were every day, right near that window, the sun streaming in right on 'em, them just playin' pinochle and gin rummy or talkin' or fuckin' around. They'd play some jokes on some of the other people and we sometimes had to put a stop to it. One day I caught the two of 'em trying to hustle another patient at pool. We had to stop that. No gambling. There was an exercise room too; the clinic was big on that. I seen the two of 'em on treadmills together once. They wasn't doin' much work on them treadmills, you can take my word for it. Had 'em in neutral or some shit like that. I said to 'em, “Man, these treadmills ain't but hummin'. Why not try moving a little?” I turned the thing up just a little and they got all sweaty and started farting and so I turned 'em back down again quick. Another time I saw Ziggy holdin' a punching bag while Vic took a few hits on it. Vic punchin' that bag in the shape he was in, he wasn't gonna beat up a gnat. But they were funny: Vic would punch the bag and Ziggy, who was holding it, would pretend that he was the one got hit. I know I seen that in one of the lousy movies they did.

  Both of 'em cleaned up. Did the therapy. Spoke to the doctors, to the other patients. Did what had to be done. Vic got real close to that junkie roommate he had, that young kid. The kid left before Vic did and I saw the two of 'em huggin' when the car come to take the kid away.

  “Man, you was ready to have that kid deported when you first checked in,” I reminded him.

  “I was?”

  “You don't even remember that, do you?”

  “I was all screwy, Timmons,” he said. Said somethin' 'bout ants crawling-over him and eatin' him. Then he looked at the car taking the kid away and said, “He's a good kid. A good kid. I hope he's okay.”

  “Did he know who you are?”

  “He's got no idea who Vic Fountain is. He thought I was just some old lush. And he was right.”

  Few days later, I was playing gin with Vic and he asked me how long I'd been working there. I tell him twenty-five years. He asked me if I remembered a woman name Ginger with long legs who'd once busted out. Tall and strawberry blond. Well, I did. But I didn't tell him I did. Didn't want to upset him. “You sure?” he asked me. And I told him I was.

  His doctor told me, just two days before Vic was gonna be released, that Vic's mother had died. But they wasn't gonna tell Vic while he was inside; his ex-wife or someone like that was gonna tell him when he got out. So for two days every time I saw him I was thinkin': This man's moms is dead and he don't even know it.

  The limousine come to take Vic away on a Sunday. The Chinese driver pulls in and I had to go get Vic from the Sunset Lounge. What a view. That sun was so bright and big it made the mountains look gold and violet and like they was movin'. I seen Vic, he had his little bag all packed right next to him. The night table picture of his son was in his hands. I said to him, “Your ride's here.” He stood up, Ziggy stood up, and they hugged for a few seconds.

  Vic checked out at the front desk. Got all his personal effects back. He say to me, “Hey, Timmons, all that dough and the broads I offered you? Well, you can forget about it.”

  “A thousand dollars for some salami?” I said to him. “Shit.”

  “Well, it'll only cost me five bucks now. Your loss. Okay, see ya.”

  “You forgot this, Vic.”

  I held out my hand and he took the dead blue raccoon from me and he set it on his head. Had it lopsided, the wrong way and crooked, and I straightened it out for him. When I did that I seen him gulp hard, all choked up, like he just swallowed a baseball. I told him, “Okay, man, better get goin'. Now.” And he walked out the place.

  I went back to the lounge and Ziggy was all alone. I looked out that big picture window and I seen Vic Fountain's black limousine beating its way down the highway, toward the mountains, and then the sun swallowing it up like it was on fire.

  I heard some sniffling. It was Ziggy. He'd seen the car going down the road too, into the sun. I said to him, “You gonna be all right?” And he told me he didn't have no idea.

  Until Ziggy was discharged he mostly kept to himself. The other patients—we was supposed to call 'em “guests”—they'd try to get him to be funny. They was always trying to do that. Get him to do this voice, that voice, make a ugly face, tell a joke or some shit like that. But he didn't want to. He always said the same thing to them:

  “I'm too tired to be funny.”

  • • •

  GUY PUGLIA: When Vic got out, I kept waiting for him to come to my shack. Every day I'm in there on the beach and I think Joe Yung's gonna drive him up. Now that his head was screwed on straight. Every time I see a Mercedes roll by, I think it might be him.

  But it didn't happen.

  You know, I went to his mom's funeral. He had dark glasses on. Everybody there did. That was some vicious one-two punch for Vic: drying out in New Mexico and then Violetta dying. Lots of people were walking up to him, kissin' him, patting his shoulders. I don't think he knew who half of 'em were. I snuck up to him from behind and squeezed his shoulder, but he didn't know it was me.

  She was buried right alongside Vince, at Forest Lawn. When they was putting her into the earth I thought of how she was the one who got Vic the singing lessons. I remembered busting into that office in Boston and her waving around that rolling pin like a machete. She believed in him and fought for him.

  Andy told me that a few days after Vic got out of New Mexico, [Vic] and Lulu had gone out to dinner a few times but that they didn't say too much to each other. Vicki dropped by and it was the same thing. Then he told me that Vic had an old flame of his, a Vegas showgirl named Kiki, come by. Vic had told me once she was a real pro in the sack. Knew all the tricks, he said, could do things with her fingernails that'd blast you off to Mars. Guys in Vegas and Tahoe called her “the Specialist.” Well, Kiki was forty now but Ices Andy told me she still packed a wallop. “My asshole slammed shut like a Venus flytrap when I saw her,” he told me.

  Vic and Kiki went straight into the sack. He's in his bedroom with her for two hours, which is a long time for a fella at that age. Finally, the door opens and Kiki comes out, she gets in her Toyota, and drives off. Ices Andy and Joe Yung wait for Vic to come out, and he doesn't.

  “I went into the bedroom, Guy,” Andy tells me, �
��to see if Vic was all right. I mean, I was worried, right? And he's in there, in the bed facedown with his robe on, and he's whimpering. I say to him, ‘Boss, what's wrong? You need a doctor?’ And he says to me, ‘What's wrong? Nothing.’ So I said to him, ‘Well, if nothing's wrong, what's wrong then?’”

  The “nothing” that was wrong was that Vic couldn't do nothin' with Kiki. If you know what I mean. And she was the expert too. She tried every trick in the book and when that book didn't work, she went to the rest of the encyclopedia. She tried the tongue, the nails, her eyelashes, she had things in her pocketbook she was usin', devices and gizmos and whatnot. And she couldn't get a rise out of him.

  Ices Andy makes a couple of phone calls, to this doctor and that doctor, and he gets the phone number of this one guy in Santa Monica. Vic goes to this guy, he gives him some pills, like, some herbal kinda stuff, and then he starts him in on these injections. And these wasn't injections in his arm, you know? It was some kinda wheat germ solution, or oatmeal or wheat grass. I dunno. Alls I know is, it didn't work. Not one inch.

  A few months go by, I don't see or call Vic and he don't see or call me, and I call up Joe Yung and he tells me that Vic's got a girlfriend now. This was good news, I thought. I ask Joe Yung who the girl is and he tells me her name is Reina Harbin. I says, “What the hell is a Reina Harbin?” “I don't know,” Chinese Joe says, “but she Vic's girlfriend now. She live here now. And she not nice to me.”

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: Nobody knows where Reina Harbin came from. They have no idea. All of a sudden, she was just there. She was there and she didn't let anybody else get near Vic. She was a goddamn witch, that's what she was.

  If you ask me, she found out that Vic had gone to Hope Springs. She read it in the papers—oh, it was all over the columns and the tabloid TV shows—and probably circled his name with a red Magic Marker. Her in her goddamn coven with three boiling cauldrons of God-knows-what.

  I don't know what Vic saw in her. But once she was there, she wouldn't leave.

  VICKI FOUNTAIN: I hated her. From the moment I saw her I hated her. Now, I'd met all of Vic's wives and all of his girlfriends. And I gave them a chance, I really did. But the very second I saw Reina I felt like I was going to convulse. That woman scared me.

  We were at a Hamburger Hamlet. Daddy wanted to order a diet salad but she wouldn't let him. She ordered him something else, a pastrami and cheese sandwich. “I don't want pastrami and cheese,” he said to her. “Oh, yes you do, darling,” Reina said. And she ordered it for him.

  After that meal I saw them to their car . . . Daddy had bought her a new Mercedes. Reina was driving, it wasn't Joe Yung. Reina started the car and, out of her earshot, Daddy said to me, “I hope you like her.” I told him that I didn't trust her. “You never liked any of them, Vicki,” he said to me. I said that this one—Reina—I just did not trust. “What do you know about her? Anything?” I asked him. He was thinking about it and Reina said, “Can we go already?!” And Daddy said to me, “All I know is, she takes care of me, honey.”

  It's very sad. Mommy said she was the devil. I really, really wished that Vincent was still around. Reina fired Ices Andy Ravelli after she moved in with Daddy. Andy told me that Reina—who now was controlling the checkbook—had written him a check for $500 and handed it to him. “Vic wants you to have this,” she said to him. Andy ripped up the check, told her to kiss his dago ass, and left.

  SALLY KLEIN: Oh, she was an operator all right, a real pro. Shep Lane was dead and his sons David and Jerome had taken over handling the money. But they get a phone call from Reina's lawyer one day and then four months, five court dates, and three truckloads of paperwork later, Shep Lane's kids aren't handling Vic's finances anymore.

  I was having dinner with Danny at the Polo Lounge one night. And a few booths away were Reina and Vic. Vic looked very tired. He lifted up a fork to his mouth and the food fell off, onto his lap or the floor. And she started berating him. Calling him an impotent old has-been. “Can't you even eat anymore?!” she screamed. Publicly yelling at him so everyone could hear it. And Vic just took it. She was saying just the worst things. He looked petrified of her.

  Danny courageously went over to their booth and said, “Vic, are you okay?”

  “Hi, Danny,” Vic said.

  Danny put his hand on his shoulder and asked again, “Are you okay? Sally's here with me. Do you want us to take you away?”

  Reina ripped Danny's hand off of Vic and said, “I beg your pardon, but can you please get away from us?! My God, I hate it when people come over and ask for Vic's autograph!!”

  GUY PUGLIA: I heard all kinds of terrible stories. From all over the place. They got married in Reno and none of the old gang was invited. I saw a picture in the paper: The rock she had on was the biggest, ugliest diamond you ever saw. Raoul Mouchette, the guy who went over to Vic's house a few times a week to spruce up the wigs, he told me he'd seen Reina hit Vic. She slapped him in the face, called him some kinda name. And the chef that Reina had hired, he told me he knew that Reina was banging this young guy who did their landscaping.

  Joe Yung tells me Reina wants to get to the cellar of the house. The place where no one but Vic was ever allowed to go. She wanted the key to the door. But Joe didn't let her know where it was. She threatened to fire him. “I no have key, I no have key,” he told her.

  Me and Edie went out with Arnie and Estelle one night. I says, “What can we do? We gotta get him outta her clutches. She'll kill him.”

  “I think that's the idea, I'm afraid,” Estelle said.

  Vicki got a lawyer. She wound up getting about five lawyers. Nobody could do nothin'. They were husband and wife.

  VICKI FOUNTAIN: I went on two USO tours to Vietnam with Bob Hope, but the single worst thing I've ever seen was the pictures of Vic by his pool, in the back of the house. Reina had hired a photographer, then sold the pictures to the Enquirer. And Hard Copy ran the photos too. And there's Daddy lying in a chaise longue in his baggy swimming trunks and with his exposed belly, and—I know it was on purpose, just to humiliate him—you could see his colostomy bag. It was so horrible.

  • • •

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: It was one of the weirder coincidences of all time. I'm reading the USA Today about how they're going to dynamite the Oceanfront in a few weeks to make way for some gigantic theme hotel like the MGM Mesopotamia Cradle of Civilization Casino and Resort or something, and the phone rings. It's Ziggy. I'm just about to tell him about the Oceanfront when he says to me, all excited, “Arnie? Didja hear?” And I say, “What? About the Oceanfront?” And he says, “No. Vic! It's Vic! He called me up an hour ago! He wants to get back together!”

  I felt like all my blood cells were dancing a mambo. Was this good news? Bad news? My head was spinning.

  “He wants to reunite with you, Ziggy? You sure somebody wasn't goofin' on you?”

  “Arnie, it was Vic. We're back in business. Line up something for us.” He started singing, “That ol' Latch magic's got me in its spell . . .”

  I called Wanda Conifer. I expressed my most half-sincere condolences about the hotel. She said, “Arnie, I've had a blast here for more time than I can remember.” I said, “Yeah, but wait till all that TNT brings it down, that'll be a blast.” (She didn't laugh.)

  “So, uh, who you got booked for your final week?” I politely inquired of her.

  “It's pretty bad, Arn. We've got an illusionist and an impressionist. Hopefully both of them can combine their talents and make it seem as though there's really an audience.”

  “If I offered you Fountain and Bliss for five nights, what would you say?”

  I think her heart pounded so goddamn loud that it almost brought the whole hotel down right then and there.

  We were in, my friend.

  DANNY McGLUE: I knew quite well that lightning couldn't strike twice in the same place. I knew in advance that it wasn't going to be like old times. But I was lonely. I was very lonely and I needed something. Betsy had been in the
asylum for a long time now. I would visit her twice a month, but after a few years she didn't even recognize me. I'd try to have a conversation with her, to talk about anything, the weather, what she'd eaten that day, the movies they showed there, and sometimes she was coherent. But that was rare. And she may as well have been speaking to a complete stranger.

  It was so rough on me, going there, driving to Santa Barbara, seeing her. I would pull over to the side of the road on the way back and just stare off into space. It would take me thirty minutes sometimes to pull myself back together. It wasn't easy.

  I wish that I'd married Sally. That's what was killing me. For years and years it killed me. It was killing me to even think such a thing. I felt that I was a bad, evil person just to think it.

  I married Betsy and she was a drunk. She was drunk when she was carrying Stevie. And Stevie was in the hospital all the time and he died. Then she had an operation so there would be no more kids, but she didn't need to. Because I didn't want to have any more kids with her. I didn't even want to be near her.

  Sally was the love of my life. I'd felt a connection with her decades ago and it hadn't ever left. So much would've been different. It's not just pie in the sky. I would have had healthy children, a good, happy marriage, maybe become a proud grandfather. But for years and years, I'd been alone. Me and my dumb gags.

  We all met at the office on Wilshire. It was me, Arnie, Sally, Ziggy, and Vic. And Reina too, she was there unfortunately. She would try to chime in, to take part, but she had the sense of humor of a CPA. That was embarrassing, her trying to be funny and everything landing like a big fat dud. Secretly we all enjoyed it, despite our cringes. But we had to be nice to her. We all knew it was her who'd convinced Vic to reunite with Ziggy.

  We worked out some routines, we updated them. Dr. Louie Kablooie, the Slow-Witted Cowboy, the Cockney Barber . . . we brought them all out and shook the dust off. Ziggy had done a Japanese gardener bit during the war—that was a little racist, so we canned that. A lot of times we just sat around and reminisced about the old days. The stories we told! Vic mentioned this one incident in Washington with some sheriffs and we were all in stitches, and Ziggy told us about the time that, when Hilda Fleury died, he literally went out to Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn to pee on her grave and stumbled upon Snuffy Dubin who was already at her grave zipping up. “The puddle was still smokin', guys,” Ziggy said. We spoke about how Ziggy and Vic had gradually turned George S. Collier into a pirate with all their antics on the set. Pernilla would pop in on us with Ziggy's medicine and some food from Canter's for all of us and, you know, she was just the perfect wife for him. She would join in with us too.