The Howling Man

by Beaumont, Charles

  A guy was in the chair, getting a haircut. He had a puffy face and a nose full of broken blood vessels. You could smell the cheap wine across the room.

  Behind the bum was maybe the oldest guy I'd ever seen outside a hospital. He stood up straight, but his skin looked like a blanket somebody had dropped over a hat-rack. It had that yellow look old skin gets. It made you think of coffins.

  Neither of them noticed me, so I stood there a while, watching. The barber wasn't doing anything special. He was cutting hair, the old way, with a lot of scissorsclicking in the air. I knew a bootblack once who did the same thing. He said he was making the rag talk. But he gave it up, he said, because nobody was listening any more. The bum in the chair wasn't listening, either, he was sound asleep, so there had to be a lot more. But you couldn't see it.

  I walked over to the old man. "Are you Eddie?"

  He looked up and I saw that his eyes were clear and sharp. "That's right," he said.

  "I'd like to make an appointment."

  His voice was like dry leaves blowing down the street. "For yourself?"

  "No. A friend."

  I felt nervous and embarrassed and it came to me, then, that maybe this whole thing was a gag. A practical joke. Except that it didn't have any point.

  "What is his name?"

  "Shecky King."

  The old man went back to clipping the bum's hair. "You'll have to wait until I'm finished," he said. "Just have a seat."

  I went over and sat down. I listened to the static and the clicking scissors and I tried to figure things out. No good. Shecky could buy this smelly little place with what he gave away in tips on a single night. He had the best barber in the business on salary. Yet there he was, down the street, standing in the hot sun, waiting for me to make an appointment with this feeble old man.

  The clicking stopped. The bum looked at himself in the mirror, nodded and handed a crumpled dollar bill to the barber. The barber took it over to the cash register and rang it up.

  "Thank you," he said.

  The bum belched. "Next month, same time," he said.

  "Yes, sir."

  The bum walked out.

  "Now then," the old man said, flickering those eyes at me. "The name again?"

  He had to be putting me on. There wasn't anybody who didn't know Shecky King. He was like Coca-Cola, or sex. I even saw an autographed picture of him in an igloo, once.

  "Shecky King," I said, slowly. There wasn't any reaction. The old man walked back to the cash register, punched the NO SALE button and took a dog-eared notebook out of the drawer.

  "He'd like to come right away," I told him.

  The old man stared at the book a long time, holding it close to his face. Then he shut it and put it back in the drawer and closed the drawer.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I don't have an opening."

  I looked around the empty shop. "Yeah, I can see, business is booming."

  He smiled.

  "Seriously," I said.

  He went on smiling.

  "Look, I haven't got the slightest idea why Mr. King wants to have his hair cut here. But he does. So let's stop horsing around. He's willing to pay for it."

  I reached into my left pocket and pulled out the roll. I found a twenty. "Maybe you ought to take another look at your appointment book," I said.

  The old man didn't make a move. He just stood there, smiling. For some reason-- the lack of sleep, probably, the running around, the worry--I felt a chill go down my back, the kind that makes goosepimples.

  "Okay," I said. "How much?"

  "One dollar," he said. "After the haircut."

  That made me sore. I didn't actually grab his shirt, but it would have gone with my voice. "Look," I said, "this is important. I shouldn't tell you this, but Shecky's outside right now, down the street, waiting. He's all ready. You're not doing anything. Couldn't you--"

  "I'm sorry," the old man said, and the way he said it, in that dry, creaky voice, I could almost believe him.

  "Well, what about later this afternoon?"

  He shook his head.

  "Tomorrow?"

  "No."

  "Then when, for Chrissake?"

  "I'm afraid I can't say."

  "What the hell do you mean, you can't say? Look in the book!"

  "I already have."

  Now I was mad enough to belt the old wreck. "You're trying to tell me you're booked so solid you can't work in one lousy haircut?"

  "I'm not trying to tell you anything."

  He was feeble-minded, he had to be. I decided to lay off the yelling and humor him. "Look, Eddie . . . you're a businessman, right? You run this shop for money. Right?"

  "Right," he said, still smiling.

  "Okay. You say you haven't got an opening. I believe you. Why should you lie? No reason. It just means you're a good barber. You've got loyalty to your customers. Good. Fine. You know what that is? That's integrity. And there isn't anything I admire more than integrity. You don't see much of it in my business. I'm an agent. But here's the thing, Eddie--I can call you Eddie, can't I?"

  "That's my name."

  "Here's the thing. I wouldn't have you compromise your integrity for anything in the world. But there's a way out. What time do you close?"

  "Five p.m."

  "On the dot, right? Swell. Now listen, Eddie. If you could stay just half an hour after closing time, until five-thirty, no later, I could bring Shecky in and he could get his haircut and everybody would be happy. What do you say?"

  "I never work overtime," he said.

  "I don't blame you. Why should you, a successful businessman? Very smart, Eddie. Really. I agree with that rule a hundred per cent. Never work overtime. But, hear me out, now--there's an exception that proves every rule. Am I right? If you'll stretch a point here, this one time, it'll prove the rule, see, and also put some numbers on your savings account. Eddie, if you'll do this thing, I will personally see to it that you receive one hundred dollars."

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "For a half-hour's work?" A cockroach ran across the wall. Eddie watched it. "Two hundred," I said. It was still fifty bucks shy of what Shecky was paying Mario every week, whether he worked or not, but I figured what the hell.

  "No."

  "Five hundred!" I could see it wasn't any good, but I had to try. A soldier keeps on pulling the trigger even when he knows he's out of bullets, if he's mad enough, or scared enough.

  "I don't work overtime," the old man said,

  A last pull of the trigger. "One thousand dollars. Cash."

  No answer.

  I stared at him for a few seconds, then I turned around and walked out of the shop. Shecky was standing where I'd left him, and he was looking at me, so I put on the know-nothing face. As I walked toward him I thought, he's got to dump me. Any agent who can't get Shecky King an appointment with a crummy Third Avenue barber deserves to be dumped.

  "Well?" he said.

  "The guy's a nut."

  "You mean he won't take me."

  "I mean he's a nut. A kook. Not a soul in the place and, get this--he says he can't find an opening!"

  You ever see a man melt? I never had. Now I was seeing it. Shecky King was melting in front of me, right there on the sidewalk in front of the tattoo parlor.

  "You okay?"

  He couldn't answer. The tears were choking him.

  "Sheck? You okay?"

  I saw a cab and waved it over. Shecky was trying to catch his breath, trying not to cry, but nothing worked for him. He stood there weaving and bawling and melting. Then he started beating his fists against the brick wall.

  "God damn it!" he screamed, throwing his head back. "God damn it! God damn it!"

  Then, suddenly, he pulled away from me, eyes wide, hands bleeding, and broke into a run toward the barber shop.

  "Hey," the cabbie said, "ain't that Shecky King?"

  "I don't know," I said, and ran after him.

&
nbsp; I tried to stop him, but you don't stop a crazy man, not when you're half his size and almost twice his age. He threw the door open and charged inside.

  "Eddie!" His voice sounded strangled, like a hand was around his throat, cutting off the air. Or a rope. "Eddie, what have I got to do?"

  The old man didn't even look up. He was reading a newspaper.

  "Tell me!" Shecky pounded the empty barber chair with his bloody fists.

  "Please be careful of the leather," the old man said.

  "I'm a success!" Shecky yelled. "I qualify! Tell him, George! Tell him about last night!"

  "What do you care what this crummy--"

  "Tell him!"

  I walked over and pulled the newspaper out of the old man's hands. "Last night Shecky King was voted the most popular show business personality of all time," I said.

  "Tell him who voted!"

  "The newspaper and magazine critics," I said.

  "And who else?"

  "Thirty million people throughout the world."

  "You hear that? Everybody. Eddie, don't you hear what he's saying? Everybody! I'm Number One!"

  Shecky climbed onto the chair and sat down.

  "Haircut," he said. "Easy on the sides. Just a light trim. You know." He sat there breathing hard for a couple of seconds, then he twisted around and screamed at the old man. "Eddie! For God's sake, cut my hair!"

  "I'm sorry," the old man said. "I don't have an opening at the moment."

  You know what happened to Shecky King. You read about it. I knew, and I read about it, too, six months before the papers came out. In his eyes. I could see the headline there. But I thought I could keep it from coming true.

  I took him home in a cab and put him to bed. He didn't talk. He didn't even cry. He just laid there, between the Hong Kong silk sheets, staring up at the ceiling, and for some crazy reason that made me think of the legless guy and the sign that said WALK. I was pretty tired.

  The doctors ordered him to a hospital, but they couldn't find anything wrong, not physically anyway, so they called in the shrinks. A breakdown, the shrinks said. Nervous exhaustion. Emotional depletion. It happens.

  It happens, all right, but I wasn't sold. Shecky was like a racing car, he operated best at high revs. That's the way some people are engineered. A nice long rest is a nice long death to them, because it gives them a chance to think, and for a performer that's the end. He sees what a stupid waste his life had been, working 24 hours a day so that people can laugh at him, or cry at him, running all the time--for what? Money. Praise. But he's got the money (if he didn't he wouldn't be able to afford the rest) and he's had the praise, and he hasn't really enjoyed what he's been doing for years--is it intellectual? does it contribute to the world? does it help anybody?--so he figures, why go on running? Why bother? Who cares? And he stops running. He gives it all up. And they let him out of the hospital, because now he's cured.

  A lot of reasons why I didn't want this to happen to Shecky. He wasn't my friend--who can be friends with a multitude?--but he was an artist, and that meant he brought a lot of happiness to a lot of people. Of course he brought some unhappiness, too, maybe more than most, but that's the business. Talent never was enough. It is if you're a painter, or a book writer, maybe, but even there chutzpah counts. Shecky had it. Like the old story, he could have murdered both his parents and then thrown himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he was an orphan. And he could have gotten away with it.

  The fact is, the truth is, he didn't have anything except chutzpah. His routines were written by other people. His singing was dubbed. His albums were turned out by the best conductors around. His movies and TV plays were put together like jigsaw puzzles out of a million blown takes. His books were ghosted.

  But I say, anybody who can make out the way Shecky King made out, on the basis of nothing but personality and drive, that person is an artist.

  Also, I was making close to a hundred grand a year off him.

  What's the difference? I wanted him to pull out of it. The shrinks weren't worried. They said the barber was only "a manifestation of the problem". Not a cause. An effect. It meant that Shecky felt guilty about his success and was trying to re-establish contact with the common people.

  I didn't ask them to explain why, if that was true, the barber refused to cut Shecky's hair. It would only have confused them.

  Anyway, I knew they were wrong. Shecky was in the hospital because of that old son of a bitch on Third Avenue and not because of anything else.

  All the next day I tried to piece it together, to make sense out of it, but I couldn't. So I started asking around. I didn't really expect an answer, and I didn't get one, until the next night. I was working on a double scotch on the rocks, thinking about the money we would be making if Shecky was at the Winter Garden right now, when a guy came in. You'd know him--a skinny Italian singer, very big. He walked over and put a hand on my neck. "I heard about Sheck," he said. "Tough break." Then, not because he gave a damn about Shecky but because I'd done him a few favors when he needed them, he asked me to join his party, and I did. Another double scotch on the rocks and I asked if he'd ever heard of Eddie the barber. It was like asking him if he'd ever heard of girls.

  "Tell me about it," I said.

  He did. Eddie had been around, he said, forever. He was a fair barber, no better and no worse than any other, and he smelled bad, and he was creepy; but he was The End. I shouldn't feel bad about not knowing this, because I was one of the Out people. There were In people and Out people and the In people didn't talk about Eddie. They didn't talk about a lot of things.

  "Why is he The End?" I asked.

  Because he only takes certain people, my friend said. Because he's selective. Because he's exclusive.

  "I was in his shop. He had a lousy wino bum in the chair!"

  With that lousy wino bum, I was told, three-fourths of the big names in show business would trade places. Money didn't matter to Eddie, he would never accept more than a dollar. Clothes didn't matter, or reputation, or influence.

  "Then what does matter?"

  He didn't know. Nobody knew. Eddie never said what his standards were, in fact, he never said he had any standards. Either he had an opening or he didn't, that was all you got.

  I finished off the scotch. Then I turned to my friend. "Has he ever cut your hair?"

  "Don't ask," he said.

  I had a tough time swallowing it until I talked to a half-dozen other Names. Never mind who they were. They verified the story. A haircut from Eddie meant Success. Until you sat in that chair, no matter what else had happened to you, you were nothing. Your life was nothing. Your future was nothing.

  "And you go for this jazz?" I asked all of them the same question. They all laughed and said, "Hell, no! It's those other nuts!" But their eyes said something different.

  It was fantastic. Everybody who was anybody in the business knew about Eddie, and everybody was surprised that I did. As though, I'd mentioned the name of the crazy uncle they kept locked in the basement, or something. A lot of them got sore, a few even broke down and cried. One of them said that if I doubted Eddie's pull I should think about the Names who had knocked themselves off at the top of their success, no reason ever given, except the standard one. I should think about those Names real hard. And I did, remembering that headline in Shecky's eyes.

  It fit together, finally, when I got to a guy who used to know Shecky in the old days, when he was a 20th mail boy named Sheldon Hochstrasser. He wanted to be In more than he wanted anything else, but he didn't know where In was. So he stuck close to the actors and the directors and he heard them talking about Eddie. One of them had just got an appointment and he saw that now he could die happy because he knew he had made it. Shecky was impressed. It gave him something to work towards, something to hang onto. From that point on, his greatest ambition was to get an appointment with Eddie.

  He was smart about it, though. At least he thought he was. You don't get a good ta
ble at Chasen's, or Romanoff's, he said to himself, and to his buddy, unless you're somebody. For Eddie, he went on, you've got to be more. You've got to be a success. So the thing to do was to succeed.

  He gave himself fifteen years.

  Fifteen years later, to the day I'll bet, I met him at that bar on Third Avenue. Either he'd been thinking about Eddie all that time or he hadn't thought about him at all. I don't know which.

  I turned the tap up, then, because he wasn't getting any better. I found out the ones who had made it and talked to them, but they weren't any help. They didn't know why they were In or even how long they'd stay. That was the lousy part of it: you could get cancelled. And putting in a word for Shecky wouldn't do any good, they said, because Eddie made his own decisions.

  I still had a hard time getting it down. I'd been around for fifty-four years and I hadn't met anything like this, or even clost to it. A Status Symbol makes a little sense if it's the Nobel Prize or a Rolls Royce, but a barber! Insanity, even for show business people.

  I started out with money and didn't make it, but that didn't mean he didn't have a price. I figured everybody could be bought. Maybe not with dollars, but with something.

  I thought of the calendars on the wall. They're supposed to be for the customers, but I wondered, are they? You never knew about these old guys.

  I found the wildest broad in New York and told her how she could earn two grand in one evening. She said yes.

  Eddie said no.

  I told him if he'd play along, I'd turn over a check for one million dollars to his favorite charity.

  No.

  I threatened him.

  He smiled.

  I begged him.

  He said he was sorry.

  I asked him why. Just tell me why, I said.

  "I don't have an opening," he said.

  Two weeks and two dozen tries later, I went back to the hospital. The Most Popular Show Business Personality of All Time was still lying in the bed, still staring at the ceiling.

  "He'll give you an appointment," I said.

  He shook his head.

  "I'm telling you, Sheck. I just talked with him. He'll give you an appointment."