Fifty Cents For Your Soul

by Denise Dietz

  Grapes, I thought, shoving the palm directly beneath Andre’s heroic chin. The grapevine! Samson’s bitchy remark!

  “Those fuckin’ writers killed me,” Andre said, lifting his face. “Remember the new script? Today I died.”

  “But the death card was meant for me,” I said.

  A BROOKLYN PLAYGROUND - 1963

  Staring up at his six-year-old sister, Chaim Mostel could feel wood beneath his butt and cement beneath his feet.

  This morning his mother had said the sidewalk was “hot enough to fry an egg on.” The playground’s concrete was even hotter, but Chaim’s bare heels and toes didn’t budge.

  His pretty sister was etched against the blue and white sky, just below a dark, evil-looking shadow.

  The shadow of…a giant bat?

  No.

  A bird?

  Maybe.

  What kind of bird? How about…a vulture?

  A vulture chewing ruby-red carrion!

  “Yeah, perfect,” said Chaim, sliding off the end of the seesaw.

  Peggy Mostel squealed, pedaled the air with her Keds, and clutched the seesaw’s handle. Her end hit the cement with a thud, and she smelled wee-wee, having peed her pants on the way down.

  “Jeez, I’m sorry,” her thirteen-year-old brother said, but he didn’t look sorry. He looked nasty. The Rabbi had once showed her and her friend Patsy a picture of a man watching skinny Jews get shot by other men. Chaim looked like the man who watched.

  Rising to his feet, he helped her stand up, brushed off her shorts and Winnie the Pooh T-shirt, then carefully placed her Dale Evans cowgirl hat on top of her head. When he finished fussing, he stretched his fingers into the shape of a pretend-camera and said, “Click.”

  Then he said, “Perfect, Peggy Piglet, I like the way that red hat matches your cheeks. I wish your eyes were black like mine, instead of gray, it would make a better picture. Oh jeez, did you hurt your tush?”

  She felt as if she’d been spanked, but she didn’t want to tell him that because she knew he’d look nasty again. She tried real hard, but couldn’t stop her hands from moving to her sore behind and she couldn’t hold back the tears that rolled down her face.

  “Aw, don’t cry, Peggy Piglet,” her brother said. “There’s snot coming out of your nose and that ruins the picture.”

  What picture? she thought, as her brother wiped her nose with the hanky he carried in his pocket. The hanky was new and had the ‘nitials V.M. Most kids wore blue jeans and T-shirts with an upside-down Y in the middle of a circle, but Chaim always wore black slacks and a black shirt, even a black jacket when it was cold. He hated shoes, but when he had to wear them, he put on black socks and black penny-loafers.

  Sometimes Mama let Chaim use her camera, but Peggy didn’t like the scary pictures he took. Once she and Mama stood on the porch and her brother said, “Say cheese.” But when the picture came back from the store, the porch looked big and she and Mama looked little and the window looked like it wanted to eat her and Mama.

  “If you stop bawling,” her brother said, “I’ll take you to the movies. They’re showing Disney this afternoon, Lady and the Tramp and some Pluto cartoons.” He held his Mickey Mouse watch up to his eyes so he could see the numbers better. Mama said he needed glasses but there was no money for glasses. “If we hurry, we’ll make the previews,” he said.

  “I can’t go,” she said, new tears brimming. “I peed my pants.”

  “Oh, wow,” he said. “Ma’s gonna kill you.”

  She poked her thumb inside her mouth.

  “Unless we stay here until your pants dry,” he said. “Wanna swing, Peggy Piglet? I’ll push you.”

  She looked at the swings and thought how nice it would be to fly through the air. The sun would dry her shorts and panties. The wind would dry her tears. And if you swung high enough, you might even touch a cloud with your toe. She stared at her big brother. He looked nasty again.

  Her mouth opened and her thumb fell out. Windmilling her arms, she raced down the path toward home, her legs churning, her sneakers scattering leaves, pebbles and popsicle sticks. Wee-wee trickled down her thighs; she’d peed her pants again.

  Chaim squinted toward the swings.

  Three…no, ten vultures perched on the overhead support, their beaks ripping at the flesh of the corpse who swung back and forth…

  Shit! The dead body would fall off the swing!

  Unless another vulture, the giant vulture who’d flown over the seesaw, maybe, stood on the swing…no, hovered directly above the swing, its barbed talons digging into the corpse’s rotting shoulders, keeping him…her!…stationary. Her dead eyes would be open, and as the swing swung, millions of people would see her white panties…like Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch.

  Yeah! Perfect!

  Too bad he couldn’t un-crypt Monroe’s body and put her on the swing. Except the goddamn autopsy would have left her empty inside and the vultures would have nothing to feed on.

  He strolled toward a nearby park bench, where he’d left his shoes, a small portable radio, and a dozen comic books ‑‑ one Lone Ranger, one Superman, the rest horror. New York State had passed a law banning the sale of horror comics to anyone under 18, but Chaim knew the law couldn’t be enforced, especially in Brooklyn.

  Every morning, riding his bike, he delivered newspapers. Every weekend, riding his bike, he delivered pizza for Moon Pizza Pie (“When the moon hits your eye” ‑‑ stupid slogan) and people tipped him good because he was good looking and there was something in his eyes and it wasn’t fucking moons.

  Even working both crummy jobs, it had taken him over a year to save the money for his movie camera, safely hidden inside his bedroom closet, on the top shelf, behind some old shoeboxes. Ma would kill him if she found the camera. He was supposed to be saving his paper-pizza money for college, except he wasn’t sure he’d go to college.

  Some kids wanted to be actors, like New York City’s own Tony Curtis. Except for the color of his eyes, Chaim looked like Tony Curtis, who came from the Bronx, even though everybody thought he came from Brooklyn. Chaim, however, wanted to be a famous director.

  He didn’t mind using his own name, but sometimes people couldn’t say it right so he’d picked out a new name ‑‑ Victor Madison.

  Six and a half weeks ago, his half-Russian, half-German father, soused on cheap wine, had been plowed down by a truck while staggering across the street. Wearing a moth-eaten cardigan sweater over an undershirt, Isaac Mostel’s trousers and underpants were missing, and his last words were: “Wo sind die toilettenpapier?”

  Chaim had “borrowed” the last roll of toilet paper from the neighborhood bar his father frequented, just before Isaac took a dump. So, in a way, Isaac’s fatal accident was all Chaim’s fault. Not that he felt guilty or anything.

  “Isaac Mostel was meshuga,” said the Jewish neighbors.

  “Fucker had a few screws loose,” said the black neighbors.

  “Mr. Mostel was tetched,” said the Irish-Catholic crone who lived next door and always mispronounced Chaim’s name.

  Kiang she called him, so he’d looked “kiang” up in the dictionary, and since it meant “a wild ass” he’d never corrected her pronunciation.

  His neighbors, however, were right-on! Papa was meshuga, had a few screws loose, and was definitely tetched in the head.

  So be it! Chaim Mostel was the son of a madman. Mad-i-son.

  Every night he scribbled his signature…

  Tony Madison

  for Tony Curtis. Then he changed it to…

  Victor Madison

  for victory.

  Now, seated on the park bench, he listened to his radio belt out “Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer.” Flipping through the back pages of his comic books, he scanned the ads for horror paraphernalia. By next week he’d have enough money to order the blood-stained rubber knife and the werewolf mask. Wouldn’t that scare Peggy Piglet to death? Especially if he arranged the bedroom lamp so that on
ly the knife and mask were visible.

  Before Isaac Mostel had tempted fate by drunkenly jaywalking across the street, he had often been heard to say “If you were born lucky, even your rooster will lay eggs.”

  Isaac Mostel had cashed in his insurance policy for booze money rather than toilet paper money, so the Russian proverb turned out to be Chaim’s only legacy, which was fine by him.

  Because he knew he’d been born lucky. And smart. And talented.

  And bisexual.

  On the day of his bar mitzvah, he had fucked the Rabbi’s daughter. Then he’d fucked the Rabbi’s son.

  Chapter Eleven

  After Andre had puked approximately four quarts of Madeira into our potted palm, I helped him to bed, wrangled the sneakers from his defiant feet, and covered his body with an eiderdown quilt.

  The drunken snores of my beloved vibrated in my ears as I slanted a glance toward the dresser that Nana Jen’s mother, my great-grandmother Frances, had ordered from a 1909 Sears Consumers’ Guide. According to Nana Jen, the dresser had cost a whopping $6.95. Mom hated it. I loved it.

  Jenny Rosen had been born in 1909, on the one-hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. She died in 1989 and some of my memories are vague, but I can still recall the perfume on her breath. Cherry Lifesavers. When my dad bought his first convertible, Nana Jen used cucumber slices to smooth her “automobile wrinkles.” And once, while pointing to her dresser, she said, “That’s a genuine, hand-carved, French bevel mirror, Frannie.”

  Would click-beetles emerge from its genuine, hand-carved frame? Not a chance! Rescued from my parents’ attic and U-Hauled to the city, Nana Jen’s dresser had possessed buggy residue. But every single spider web had been carefully and thoroughly feather-dusted away.

  I returned to the living room, wrapped dry cleaners’ plastic around my vomitus palm, walked out the front door, strolled halfway down the hall, and shoved my corpus delicti into the chute that ended in front of a basement crematorium. Then I rescued a Diet Pepsi from the benign jaws of my refrigerator.

  The phone rang. It sounded unobtrusive and congenial. Definitely not my mother!

  “Frannie,” said Bonnie, “I saw a shadow pass into your body.”

  “Peter Pan’s,” I said, feigning laughter. “He has this habit of losing his shad ‑‑”

  “I saw you sitting in a dark room with candles and an altar, and I was scared because I couldn’t tell if the spirit was good or bad. After the form passed into you, your face and body looked strange, all contorted, but then I saw a glow around you, an aura, so I called to tell you that everything’s okay. Your good angel is protecting you. Don’t be afraid. The bad spirits will leave you alone if you trust to loving forces.”

  “It’s my choice, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  Immediate assumption: Bonnie had visualized my personal séance because she knew about my Forever Asmodeus interviews. She knew how I rehearsed; had been with me inside Samson’s loft the morning of the day I tried out for Grease; had helped me tape Travolta to the wall and zip up my old high school prom dress; had put the movie’s soundtrack on Samson’s CD player. “Wella, wella, wella…oomph,” Samson’s speakers had blared while Bonnie cued me.

  “Thanks for being tuned in, for caring,” I said sincerely, then told her about the screen test. “Hey, Bonnie, there’s this character in the book who befriends Robin before her transformation. A young teacher. French. Her name’s Martine. You speak French.”

  “I do not.”

  “You do too. Every time we watch Gigi, you parrot Leslie Caron.”

  “I speak high school French, Frannie, and I don’t parrot Caron, I sing along with Caron. In English!”

  “Right. Okay, here’s the game plan. Meet me at the studio and I’ll introduce you to Victor Madison. Maybe the role hasn’t been cast yet.”

  “No can do. Tomorrow I have an audition for a new diet cola.”

  “Spokesperson?”

  “Crowd scene.”

  “Madison’s movie will be more fun. And more profitable,” I said, appealing to Bonnie’s pragmatism.

  She heaved a deep sigh. “If my horoscope agrees, I’ll meet you at the studio. Tell me where and what time.”

  I gave her the address. “I have to be there at eight, for makeup. The testing should take place around eleven.”

  “Then I’ll see you tomorrow…maybe. Meanwhile, sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  Shuddering at the thought of bugs, bed or otherwise, I told Bonnie about Andre’s soap opera demise and the potted palm’s demise. But I didn’t mention the click-beetles or my erotic aerobics session. I guess I didn’t want my best friend to think I’d totally lost it, so I finished my brief recitation, said good night, and hung up the phone.

  Noises drifted up from the street, filtered through an open window. Dogs barked and sirens wailed and the cadence of falling raindrops hit my patio like the plop of hollow Ping-Pong balls. The city sounds were soothing. Why hadn’t I heard them during my spiritual reverie?

  I curled up in front of the TV for the eleven o’clock news. Watching our esteemed Governor mouth clichés, I wondered if he had ever bargained with a demon for popularity and/or campaign donations.

  My mind strayed, tuning out the usual reports of Manhattan’s murders and mayhem. Mom had accurately forecast each catastrophic event during last Sunday’s cookout, in between bites of her kosher hot dog and homemade strudel.

  There was a brief intermission ‑‑ Andre’s shaving gel commercial ‑‑ then the screen’s image changed to an enlarged weather map as the weathergirl predicted rain. No shit, I thought, glancing toward the patio. The weathergirl looked like an ebony version of the smiley-face sun that now graced her map as she stated, with authority, that tomorrow would be clear and calm.

  “Well, hell, Scarlett,” I drawled in my best high school Southern. “After all, tomorrow is another day.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The weathergirl was dead wrong. Clear and calm? Maybe she’d misread the cue cards and had meant to say, “Overcast and flatulent.”

  Last Sunday, while Mom chattered on and on about my cousin Marlene, sister of the fertile Charlene, Daddy had furtively slipped me an envelope filled with grocery money. So I splurged on a taxi.

  Silently cursing the driver, who navigated corners like an Indy 500 reject, I blessed Marlene, who’d recently become engaged to a “Negro” named Fahd Kareem something. Poor Mom. She didn’t know if she should play up the pending marriage or critique the racial-religious diversity. So she settled for Sammy Davis Jr. ‑‑ a “Negro” whom she’d unequivocally admired. Looking pointedly at me, then Andre, Mom said she hoped Marlene’s fiancé would convert, too.

  It isn’t every day that one has a Victor Madison screen test and I felt nervous. No. Panic-stricken! When I’m panic-stricken, I compose rap lyrics. I’d barely chosen the lyrics for Charlene, Marlene, Fahd and Sammy Davis Jr., when my cab pulled up to the curb and I woefully discovered that Daddy’s grocery money had shrunk faster than a wool sweater inside a Laundromat dryer.

  It took Sol Aarons three hours to apply my makeup. As my nervous panic dissolved, I tried not to yawn.

  Hair grew out of fake eyebrows while my real brows were covered with latex. Greens and purples were blended into my skin until my cheeks looked sunken to the bone. The makeup built up, layer by layer. Each piece of latex had to be smoothed without a wrinkle. I pictured my Nana Jen’s porcelain complexion, remembered her remark about automobile wrinkles, and made a mental note to buy cucumbers.

  Sol used a special glue that burned wherever my skin was tender. I silently damned Andre for sandpapering my fragile jowls with his unshaven chin during his brief good-luck mumble and kiss. Very brief, because Andre’s breath smelled like dead chicken breasts. Correction: the rancid Styrofoam the breasts came packaged in, trashed under our kitchen sink while waiting for cremation.

  When Sol finished, I couldn’t move my mouth. “You’
ll get used to it,” he said. “Eventually it will start to move with your face.”

  What face? My features were hidden beneath a grotesque latex mask. Even my hair had been vaporized with black atomized spray.

  Clothed in a Wendyish nightgown, I walked onto the set ‑‑ and the crew laughed. Damn! If I wanted to be taken seriously, I’d have to play Robin from the inside out.

  Madison had left instructions for me to test a few special effects. In the book Robin projectile vomits all over her parents and Joe Bob Lancaster, the evangelist. Madison’s hand-picked crew set out test materials ‑‑ bowls filled with cottage cheese, marmalade and peach preserves. Following directions, I spooned a mouthful from the first bowl and spit toward the camera.