The Autograph Hound

by John Lahr

  “Valve orifices competent.”

  “Check.” Crane makes a note on his clipboard.

  “Pyloric channel is patent. No calcification on wall or plaque formations.”

  “I want you guys to know I’m turning over all my bodily patents to you.”

  “Keep quiet, Mr. Walsh.”

  I try and peek over the top of the picture. Farber pushes me back in place.

  “It’s touch and go, Mr. Walsh. Now keep still.”

  “I live a clean life. No smoking. Three baths a week. Never touch the stuff. I’m not insulted if you find a few faults. I don’t need five hundred dollars.”

  “Stomach. Evidence of ulceration.” Crane makes a note.

  “We’ve got a borderline on our hands,” says Dr. Farber.

  “I’ll take three hundred and fifty. That’s fair for a borderline body.”

  I passed! After dressing and sitting in the Great Moments lobby under a picture of “Galen—Famous Healer of the Middle Ages,” Dr. Farber walks out of the conference room and hands me some forms.

  “Sign the first line. After Benstedt in room seven fifty-six puts ‘Property of Our Lady of Victory Hospital’ on your foot, come back here with the signed document. The nurse will take care of you.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “The tattoo? Some find it excruciating.”

  “Does that mean good or bad?”

  “It depends on what you like.” Dr. Farber smiles at me.

  “I like things to be painless.”

  The tattooist doesn’t hear me. He’s standing by the radio, humming “The Trolley Song” and holding his electric needle. He’s a little man. Bald. Sixtyish. He has two colorful arms—one mostly blue, the other a rainbow of black, blue, and red. He’s touching up the blue one. He turns around with a start.

  “I’ve come for a tattoo, Mr. Benstedt.”

  “You know me from the Boardwalk?”

  “Leo Benstedt—Death before Dishonor.”

  “Did I do you before, kid?”

  “Your shirt’s open. I can read your chest.”

  He looks down and laughs. “My first tattoo. Amsterdam, 1920. I was a kid. Those were the days. Clipperships for three guilders. Snakes. Mermaids. There was an old man on the docks who did dragons as good as Chyo of Japan. He used ivory needles. It was an art then. Look at my schooner. The cut of the jib, the luff of the sail. You don’t see that around these days.”

  “The hospital just bought me. I’ve come for the tattoo …”

  “I just showed you my arm, kid. Don’t say ‘tattoo.’”

  “But that’s what …”

  “I know what they say. It’s body engraving.”

  “Mine has to last a lifetime.”

  “There’s nothing to it. No stencil, no three-tone work. All I do is spitball for fifteen minutes, and you’re through. Forty-eight years behind the needle, thirty-five of them on Atlantic City’s busiest pier, and now I’m stuck in room seven fifty-six with my radio and my memories.”

  “Why aren’t you still on the Boardwalk?”

  “Hospital is the only place you can work in this state since we was outlawed. I’m too old to be a renegade. What else could I do? Not one of my clients got the yellows. I got thank-you letters from all over the world. I was famous. Now, it’s nine to five, one hundred and thirty-five dollars a week plus benefits. I was full of the piss and the vinegar in those days. ‘Death before Dishonor.’ I meant it. I say to myself now, ‘Leo, erase it.’ But I don’t. I want to remember. I’d do five full designs in a day. I was fast, maybe the fastest. I had a flair for colors. Even as an apprentice, I made designs that had never been worn. An art professor came to take pictures.”

  “I collect autographs. They’re memories, too.”

  “Chickenshit. It don’t count unless there’s pain. Then it means something.”

  “What makes you happy can’t hurt. You should have a system like me. My collection’s famous, too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They didn’t pay me full price for nothing. My body’s going to the people in my collection. It’s only fair. They’ve asked for me.”

  “Did you ever get your picture in The New York Times?”

  “No.”

  “Did people come to the city to find you?”

  “No.”

  “Do they ask you to sign your work?”

  “No.”

  “Do you turn people down?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t stand there and tell me you’re famous!”

  Benstedt pounds the palm of his left hand with his fist. He shakes his head. “What’s got into me? I snap at everybody. People come in, sit down. I bathe their foot. They don’t even look at me. I’m not even allowed to put my designs on the wall. Nobody knows.”

  “You were really famous?”

  “Ever hear of Great Omi, the zebra man? That job took five hundred and fifteen million pinpricks. Covered him from head to toe with a black stripe design. One hundred and fifty hours. My longest job. Omi made headlines all over Europe. Look at these hands. Straight as a board. No shaking. I’ve got great designs still in me. But who can I work on? In the old days, I got calls from plutocrats. I had a card with my name on it. Women begged for a king cobra like Lady Churchill’s. Men offered stock for a gremlin like King Frederick’s of Denmark.”

  “You mean you spent time with your people?”

  “You’re the first one I’ve ever told this. I’d sit with them for two days, and they’d talk to me. Their most secret secrets. I wouldn’t do it unless they told me the truth. Loneliness, Love, Adventure, Violence—the whole thing. I got a feeling for them. The first day I’d work on atmosphere. The second, on color. The third, I’d begin. When I finished, their memory—whatever and wherever they wanted—was alive! I didn’t even know the power in these hands.”

  “Could I have your autograph for my collection?”

  “Kid, if it was legal I’d write my name on your shoulder. Today, your hippies and models—they walk around with their faces and legs painted. I hate it. It’s all throwaway. That’s what they call modern. Not for me, mister. I did tableaux. I worked from art books. They didn’t call me Benstedt the Beautifier for nothing!”

  Mr. Benstedt sits me down and tells me to take off my right sock. He puts alcohol in a pan. I soak my foot. It tingles. I won’t go and see the guys at The Homestead after I make my move, they’ll come and see me. I don’t know which restaurant I’ll get, but it’ll be blue chip. Some place that’s been around a long time and that’s staying right where it is.

  “See this.” Mr. Benstedt holds up an inky blue jar. “One color. That’s what they give me. And they call this the Land of Plenty. It’s a mockery.”

  He puts his ear close to the radio. “Listen to that voice. Garland could sing. She’s been a real influence. I’ve done dozens of rainbows. And the other side of the rainbow, too—the bluebirds, mountains, lemon drops, everything.”

  “She made a comeback, so can you.”

  “The public don’t deserve me. Nobody wants the old symbols. The snake was wisdom and truth, the tiger was strength and courage. And who believes in love and constancy these days, so the rose is out. I’d rather stay in retirement and highlight the memorials on my own body. A thousand years from now I’ll be preserved like an Egyptian tomb. Archaeologists’ll have a field day.”

  “You mean your body tells a story?”

  “Details you’d never get in photographs, kid. I made up great designs, but I saved history for myself. The Bonus March. The Bombing of Hiroshima. Joe McCarthy and Roy Conn. It’s all on my stomach. The main events from 1924 to 1965. I made a few mistakes, but after a while you get to know the difference between a publicity stunt and a real catastrophe.”

  “Could you call my tattoo … engraving … history?”

  “It’s only history when you kick the bucket. Your name isn’t there, just the hospital’s. It’s words, not pictures. I’m not even allowed to
jazz it up.”

  Mr. Benstedt pulls up a stool and lifts my foot out of the alcohol bath. It feels cool and light.

  “Can you take pain?” says Mr. Benstedt. The machine’s buzzing in his hand.

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Hold onto the bottom of your chair. Think of something nice.”

  The first bite hurts terrible. The needle moves so quick. I can’t keep up with my pain. My leg pulls back automatically. Mr. Benstedt holds my ankle tight. For an old man, he’s got a strong grip. “Think hard!” he says. “Think big!”

  You need peace and quiet to think of the stars. I’m dripping with sweat. “Stop, Mr. Benstedt! Stop, for chrissake!”

  His machine clicks off. I open my eyes. Mr. Benstedt’s not smiling. “I’m not even up to the ‘e’ in property.”

  “Turn up the music. Maybe that’ll help.”

  Mr. Benstedt goes to the radio and makes it louder. Still Judy. When he takes his seat again, there’s blood on his blue arm.

  “Mr. Benstedt, you’re bleeding.”

  “I did it for her.” He nods his head toward the radio. “Before you came in.”

  “For Judy?”

  “She’s my only modern since 1965.”

  “It’s her slippers from The Wizard of Oz.”

  “I had to do them in blue. That’s all I’ve got.”

  “They’re ruby like she wore.”

  “That’s ’cause of the blood. The engraving’s fresh. Blue and red make ruby.”

  “The blood’s in the shape of her slippers. It doesn’t drip. It’s right in place. Shining.”

  “That’s craft.”

  “It’s magic.”

  Mr. Benstedt turns on the machine. “She was the greatest singer in America. She gave me a lot of pleasure.”

  “Was?”

  “Dead. They just flew her in special from London. If I didn’t have this nine-to-fiver, I’d be up at Frank E. Campbell’s paying my respects.”

  Mr. Benstedt says nobody’s ever walked out while he’s working. I tell him to turn off the machine. He says my foot might get infected in my sock. Too bad. I’m going to see Judy. I’ll be back.

  It’s the way Mom would’ve liked it. Crowds three blocks long. Flower trucks backed up and honking, filled with every kind of fresh flower in every possible design. Mom was here—81st Street and Madison Avenue—when Valentino passed on. He got headlines like Judy, but he wasn’t as big. He was only a sex symbol, you couldn’t hum his work. Judy means more than the physical stuff. She’s the voice of America. Mom came all the way from Ocean Beach for the Valentino Vigil. She stayed up half the night. She said there were 100,000 fans waiting to say good-bye to Rudy. They held pictures and souvenirs like this crowd. Mom was only allowed a few seconds with him. She said that was enough, the black hair, the smooth complexion, the gorgeous head lying on silk sheets in Frank E. Campbell’s. She kept the front page of the Daily News in a frame on her dresser. It’s brown and shredding, but you can still see Rudy’s head and chest, and the guards standing at attention to protect him. Mom said it was one of the greatest moments in her life. “After that,” she said every Sunday when we walked home from Mass, “Death will always be beautiful.”

  Mom would like the way the fans are behaving themselves. She got mad at the women who tried to crawl into Rudy’s coffin. She broke the spruce cane I bought her telling me about the two girls who committed suicide the day Rudy died. She thought they were after publicity. “They didn’t even stand on line.” Mom got into one of her red furies. “They didn’t own him. He wasn’t their property. What did they do for him!” Mom showed me the letters she wrote on Valentino’s behalf—in the early days when all her fingers could move at once. She wrote to every magazine and newspaper that called him a “pink powder puff.” It took months, but Mom did it. “Benny, I swear to you, Rudy was no pink powder puff. He was all man. I saw the movies. I saw him. Believe your mother!” I believed her, but she never stopped telling me.

  We loved Judy. She was the first star to make Mom forget Rudy. Sure, Judy had her ups and downs—marriages, suicide attempts, drinking. But that’s all part of being a star. Judy came through it. Her fans stuck by her. Mom and I never missed her on TV. When she played New York, I’d always hang around the Westbury, where she stayed. Rudy was a big seducer, people fell for his looks. Judy went right to the heart.

  Flashbulbs are popping near the front of the line. It’s Good News Probst and his Instamatic. He’s photographing the kids squatting down on the pavement playing Garland on their portables. He’s with the rest of the Horn & Hardart crowd—Sypher, Macready, Moonstone, and Gloria. He waves me over. “Trigger was dead and stuffed two months before Roy Rogers told us. There was no time to mourn.”

  I duck under the barricade.

  “The nearest and dearest are always the last to know,” says Gloria, touching my arm as if we hadn’t been fighting and were friends again. “She was making such a good comeback in London at The Talk of the Town.”

  “What comeback?” says Sypher. “They were throwing food at her.”

  “How do you know, Louis?” says Gloria.

  “I heard it from one of our international entertainers.”

  “I bet it was roses,” says Gloria.

  “It was food.”

  “Hey, man, cut this food jive. I feel sick.” Moonstone closes his eyes after he speaks. He’s hugging himself like a baby.

  “What’s with him?”

  “When he heard about Garland,” says Sypher, “he went to Walgreen’s and bought bottles of Darvon, aspirin, and Seconal. He took two of each.”

  “Three,” says Moonstone.

  I whisper to Gloria. “I got five hundred dollars.”

  She throws her arms around me and kisses me.

  “Cut it out, Gloria.”

  “He got it! He got it!”

  “Got what?” says Macready.

  “Benny got the money to move to another restaurant. He’s going to have the biggest collection in the world.”

  “That’s good news,” says Probst.

  “Where you moving?” says Sypher.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe Lutèce, or the Basque Coast.”

  “Frog food.”

  “Louis, they’re very good restaurants,” says Gloria.

  “Do they have entertainment?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s the big deal?”

  “Benny’s getting a three-star restaurant. Put that in your pipe, Mr. Waldorf Towers, and puff it.”

  “Is that nice talk for a guy who helped you out at the Majestic?”

  “I forgot,” says Gloria.

  “Wanna get married, sweetheart?” Sypher says. “You’re like my first wife. Everything I asked, she forgot.”

  “Can’t you see she’s embarrassed, Louis?”

  “Slam it, moneybags. Where’d you get the coin?”

  “Sold an heirloom.”

  “An heirloom? I didn’t know you went back that far.”

  “Judy had such a nice family,” Gloria says. “They were helping her with her comeback, giving her strength and backbone. After long hours on the nightclub floor, she’d sit with them by the open fire. Have tea. Joke. Judy’d pick up some old sheet music and sing a favorite. They were so nice together—a team. They were so scrubbed, so talented. Liza the singer, Joey the drummer, and little Lorna.”

  “Don’t cry, Gloria.”

  “You wouldn’t feel bad, lady, if you kept away from newspapers,” Probst says. “I don’t read them. I feel great.”

  “How do you keep up?”

  “Read the almanac. You get all the facts, but a year late. It’s too bad about Judy, but look at it this way—in 1968, over four million Americans established two point one million new families, over ninety-two percent of all Americans live in families. You don’t read about that in those scare headlines. It gives you a boost to think of all those happy people—praying together, bowling together, probably listening to Judy’s s
ongs together.”

  “You’re full of shit, Good News,” says Moonstone.

  “Facts keep you on the sunny side of the street. You can’t worry too much about one suicide when you know Judy’s only one of six thousand, one hundred thirty-eight this year,” says Probst. “I’ve been through serious crises before—the Battle of the Bulge, the Berlin Airlift, the Dodgers leaving Ebbets Field. The almanac’s got it all. In small print, things aren’t so horrible.”

  “Pills, man. Dig it.”

  “That’s just temporary, Moonstone.”

  “Whaddya mean?” says Moonstone. “Sometimes it lasts for days.”

  “Moonstone knows what he’s talkin’ about,” says Macready. “When JFK got killed, he musta swallowed half a bottle of Seconals. He was out like a light.”

  “I had the hungers. Slept for three days.”

  “That was a coma,” laughs Macready. “The police took you to the hospital and gave your stomach a pumping. You had yourself one big coma, jim.”

  “What’s the difference? My eyes were shut, weren’t they?”

  “You took half a bottle of Seconal? They say that’s what Judy took,” says Gloria.

  “Five—I took five Seconals and washed them back with a dozen aspirin and Coke. The blinkers slammed like iron gates, or somethin’. I was flying.”

  “How come you didn’t take the same for Judy?” says Gloria.

  “She was great, but not that great.”

  “You’re too young, Moonstone,” says Gloria. “Your hearing’s bad from all those rock bands. You don’t remember Judy riding in Andy Hardy’s jalopy up Main Street. Or the excitement when we thought Glenn Ford was going to marry her and take her away from all her trouble. You never saw the yellow brick road that the crew painted out of respect in front of her air-conditioned dressing room. I wish I could go to sleep and wake up in a month when this is over.”

  “A month?” says Moonstone, swaying. “You know about Sodium Amytal?”

  “No.”

  “Two with a glass of Gallo. It’s a wipeout.”

  “I’m afraid to take those things. I might dream of Judy. I always do, standing with the Wizard, getting into the balloon to come back to black and white.”

  “No dreaming with Sodium Amytal. Days and days of dead time.”