Mr. Vertigo

by Paul Auster

  “Wait a second,” Dizzy said, wagging his finger at me as a sudden, unexpected glow of delight spread across his face. “Wait just a second. Now I know who you are. Shit, I knowed it all along. You’re that kid, ain’t you? You’re that goddamned kid. Walt … Walt the Wonder Boy. Christ almighty. My daddy took me and Paul and Elmer out to the fair one day in Arkansas, and we seen you do your stuff. Fuckin’ out of this world it was. I always wondered what happened to you. And here you are, sittin’ right across from me. I can’t fuckin’ believe it.”

  “Believe it, friend. When I told you I was great, I meant great like nobody else. Like a comet streaking across the sky.”

  “You were great, all right, I’ll vouch for that. The greatest thing I ever saw.”

  “And so were you, big man. As great as they come. But you’re over the hill now, and it breaks my heart to see what you’re doing to yourself. Let me help you, Diz. Death isn’t so terrible. Everybody has to die sometime, and once you get used to the idea, you’ll see that now is better than later. If you give me the chance, I can spare you the shame. I can give you back your dignity.”

  “You’re really serious, ain’t you?”

  “You bet I am. As serious as I’ve ever been in my life.”

  “You’re off your trolley, Walt. You’re fuckin’ looped outa your gourd.”

  “Let me kill you, and the last four years will be forgotten. You’ll be great again, champ. You’ll be great again forever.”

  I was going too fast. He’d thrown me off balance with that Wonder Boy talk, and instead of circling back and modifying my approach, I was charging ahead at breakneck speed. I’d wanted to build up the pressure slowly, to lull him with such elaborate, airtight arguments that he’d eventually come round on his own. That was the point: not to force him into it, but to make him see the wisdom of the plan for himself. I wanted him to want what I wanted, to feel so convinced by my proposal that he would actually beg me to do it, and all I’d done was leave him behind, scaring him off with my threats and half-baked platitudes. No wonder he thought I was crazy. I’d let the whole thing get out of hand, and now, just when we should have been getting started, he was already standing up and making his way for the exit.

  I wasn’t worried about that. I’d locked the door from the inside, and it couldn’t be opened without the key—which happened to be in my pocket. Still, I didn’t want him pulling on the knob and rattling the frame. He might have started shouting at me then to let him out, and with half a dozen people working in the kitchen at that hour, the ruckus surely would have brought them running. So, thinking only about that small point and ignoring the larger consequences, I opened the drawer of my desk and removed the master’s gun. That was the mistake that finally did me in. By pointing that gun at Dizzy, I crossed the boundary that separates idle talk from punishable crimes, and the nightmare I’d set in motion could no longer be stopped. But the gun was crucial, wasn’t it? It was the linchpin of the whole business, and at one moment or another it was bound to come out of that drawer. Pull the trigger on Dizzy—and thus go back to the desert and do the job that was never done. Make him beg for death in the same way Master Yehudi had begged, and then undo the wrong by summoning the courage to act.

  None of that matters now. I’d already botched it by the time Dizzy stood up, and pulling out the gun was no more than a desperate attempt to save face. I talked him back into the chair, and for the next fifteen minutes I made him sweat a lot more than I’d ever intended to. For all his swagger and size, Dean was a physical coward, and whenever a brawl broke out he’d duck behind the nearest piece of furniture. I already knew his reputation, but the gun terrorized him even more than I thought it would. It actually made him cry, and as he sat there moaning and blubbering in his seat, I almost pulled the trigger just to shut him up. He was begging me for his life—not to kill him, but to let him live—and it was all so upside-down, so different from how I’d imagined it would be, I didn’t know what to do. The standoff could have gone on all day, but then, just around noon, someone knocked on the door. I’d left clear instructions that I wasn’t to be disturbed, but someone was knocking just the same.

  “Diz?” a woman’s voice said. “Is that you in there, Diz?”

  It was his wife, Pat: a bossy, no-nonsense piece of work if there ever was one. She’d come by to pick up her husband for a lunch date at Lemmele’s, and of course Dizzy had told her where she could find him, which was yet another potential snag I’d neglected to think of. She’d barged into my club looking for her henpecked better half, and once she collared the sous-chef in the kitchen (who was busy chopping spuds and slicing carrots), she made such a nuisance of herself that the poor sap finally spilled the beans. He led her up the stairs and down the hall, and that was how she happened to be standing in front of my office door, pounding on the white veneer with her angry bitch knuckles.

  Short of planting a bullet in Dizzy’s head, there was nothing I could do but put away the revolver and open the door. The shit was sure to hit the fan at that point—unless the big guy came through for me and decided to play mum. For ten seconds my life dangled from that gossamer thread: if he was too embarrassed to tell her how scared he’d been, he’d keep the imbroglio to himself. I put on my warmest, most debonair smile as Mrs. Dean stepped into the room, but her sniveling husband gave the whole thing away the instant he set eyes on her. “The little fucker was gonna kill me!” he said, blurting out the goods in a high-pitched, incredulous voice. “He was holdin’ a gun to my head, and the little fucker was gonna shoot!”

  Those were the words that knocked me out of the nightclub business. Instead of keeping their reservation at Lemmele’s, Pat and Dizzy tramped out of my office and headed straight for the local precinct to swear out a complaint against me. Pat told me they were going to do as much when she slammed the door in my face, but I didn’t stir a muscle. I just sat behind my desk and marveled at how stupid I was, trying to collect my thoughts before the bulls showed up to cart me away. It took them less than an hour, and I went off without a peep, smiling and cracking jokes when they put the cuffs around my wrists. If not for Bingo, I might have done some serious time for my little stab at playing God, but he had all the right connections, and a deal was struck before the case ever came to court. It was just as well that way. Not only for me, but for Dizzy too. A trial wouldn’t have been good for him—not with all the flak and scandal-mongering that would have gone with it—and he was perfectly happy to accept the compromise. The judge gave me a choice. Plead guilty to a lesser charge and do six to nine months at Joliet, or else leave Chicago and enlist in the army. I opted to walk through the second door. It wasn’t that I had any great desire to wear a uniform, but I figured I’d outstayed my welcome in Chicago and that it was time to move on.

  Bingo had pulled strings and paid bribes to keep me out of the can, but that didn’t mean he had any sympathy for what I’d done. He thought I was nuts, ninety-nine-point-nine-percent nuts. Bumping off a guy for money was one thing, but what kind of dimwit would go after a national treasure like Dizzy Dean? You had to be stark raving mad to cook up a thing like that. That’s what I probably was, I said, and didn’t try to explain myself. Let him think what he wanted to think and leave it at that. There was a price to pay, of course, but I wasn’t in any position to argue. In lieu of cash for services rendered, I agreed to compensate Bingo for his legal help by signing over my share of the club to him. Losing Mr. Vertigo’s was hard on me, but not half as hard as giving up the act had been, not a tenth as hard as losing the master. I was nobody special now. Just my old ordinary self again: Walter Claireborne Rawley, a twenty-six-year-old G. I. with a short haircut and a pair of empty pockets. Welcome to the real world, pal. I gave my suits to the busboys, I kissed my girlfriends good-bye, and then climbed aboard the milk train and headed for boot camp. Considering what I was about to leave behind me, I suppose I was lucky.

  By then, Dizzy was gone, too. His season had consisted of one game, and
after Pittsburgh shelled him for three runs in the first inning of his first start, he’d finally called it quits. I don’t know if my scare tactics had knocked some sense into him, but I felt glad when I read about his decision. The Cubs gave him a job as their first-base coach, but a month later he got a better offer from the Falstaff Brewing Company in Saint Louis, and he went back to the old town to work as a radio announcer for the Browns and Cardinals games. “This job ain’t gonna change me none,” he said. “I’m just gonna speak plain ol’ pinto-bean English.” You had to hand it to the big clodhopper. The public went for the folksy garbage he spewed out over the airwaves, and he was such a success at it that they kept him on for twenty-five years. But that’s another story, and I can’t say that I paid much attention to him. Once I left Chicago, it had nothing to do with me anymore.

  IV

  My eyes were too weak for flight school, so I spent the next four years crawling through the mud. I became an expert in the habits of worms and other creatures who slither along the ground and prey on human skin for nourishment. The judge had said the army would make a man of me, and if eating dirt and watching limbs fly off soldiers’ bodies is proof of manhood, then I suppose the Honorable Charles P. McGuffin called it right. As far as I’m concerned, the less said about those four years the better. At first, I thought seriously about swinging a medical discharge for myself, but I could never find the courage to go through with it. My plan was to start levitating again in secret—and bring on such violent, crippling attacks of pain that they’d be forced to send me home. The problem was, I had no home to go to anymore, and once I’d mulled over the situation for a little while, I realized that I preferred the uncertainty of combat to the certain torture of those headaches.

  I didn’t distinguish myself as a soldier, but I didn’t disgrace myself either. I did my job, I avoided trouble, I, hung in there and didn’t get killed. When they finally shipped me back in November 1945, I was burned out, incapable of thinking ahead or making plans. I drifted around for three or four years, mostly up and down the east coast. The longest stretch was in Boston. I worked as a bartender there, supplementing my income by playing the horses and sitting in on a weekly poker game at Spiro’s pool hall in the North End. It was only medium-stakes action, but if you keep on winning those ones and fives, it begins to add up. I was just on the point of putting together a deal to open a place of my own when my luck turned sour. My nest egg dribbled away, I went into debt, and before many moons had passed, I had to sneak out of town to slough off the loan sharks I was in hock to. From there I went to Long Island and found a job in construction. Those were the years when suburbs were sprouting up around the cities, and I went where the money was, doing my bit to change the landscape and turn the world into what it looks like today. All those ranch houses and tidy lawns and spindly little trees wrapped in burlap—I was the guy who put them there. It was dreary work, but I stuck with it for eighteen months. At one point, for reasons I can’t explain, I let myself get talked into marriage. It didn’t last more than half a year, and the whole experience is so foggy to me now, I have trouble remembering what my wife looked like. If I don’t think hard about it, I can’t even remember her name.

  I had no idea what was wrong with me. I had always been so fast, so quick to pounce on opportunities and turn them to my advantage, but now I felt sluggish, out of sync, unable to keep up with the flow. The world was passing me by, and the oddest thing about it was that I didn’t care. I had no ambitions. I wasn’t on the make or looking for an edge. I just wanted to be left in peace, to scrape along as best I could and go where the world took me. I’d already dreamed my big dreams. They hadn’t gotten me anywhere, and now I was too exhausted to think of any new ones. Let someone else carry the ball for a change. I’d dropped it a long time ago, and it wasn’t worth the effort to bend down and pick it up.

  In 1950, I moved across the river to a low-rent apartment in Newark, New Jersey, and started my ninth or tenth job since the war. The Meyerhoff Baking Company employed over two hundred people, and in three eight-hour shifts we churned out every baked good imaginable. There were seven different varieties of bread alone: white, rye, whole wheat, pumpernickel, raisin, cinnamon raisin, and Bavarian black. Add in twelve kinds of cookies, ten kinds of cakes, six kinds of doughnuts, along with breadsticks, breadcrumbs, and dinner rolls, and you begin to understand why the factory was in operation twenty-four hours a day. I started out on the assembly line, adjusting and preparing the cellophane wrappers that went around the pre-sliced loaves of bread. I figured I’d stick around for a few months at most, but once I caught the hang of it, it turned out to be a decent place to earn a living. The smells in that factory were so pleasant, and with the aroma of fresh bread and sugar wafting continually through the air, the hours didn’t drag as heavily as they had on my other jobs. That was part of it in any case, but even more important was the little redhead who started making eyes at me about a week after I got there. She wasn’t much to look at, at least not compared to the showgirls I’d horsed around with in Chicago, but there was a bemused flicker in those green eyes that struck a chord with me, and I didn’t waste much time in getting to know her. I’ve made only two good decisions in my life. The first one was following Master Yehudi onto that train when I was nine years old. The second one was marrying Molly Fitzsimmons. Molly put me together again, and considering the kind of shape I was in when I landed in Newark, that was no small job.

  Her maiden name was Quinn, and she was this side of thirty when we met. She’d married her first husband straight out of high school, and five years later he was drafted into the army. By all accounts, Fitzsimmons was a friendly, hardworking mick, but his war had been less lucky than mine. He took a bullet at Messina in ‘forty-three, and since then Molly had been on her own, a young widow without any kids looking after herself and waiting for something to happen. God knows what she saw in me, but I fell for her because she made me feel comfortable, because she brought out my old wise-cracking self and knew a good joke when she heard one. There was nothing flashy about her, nothing to make her stand out in a crowd. Pass her on the street, and she was just another working stiff’s wife: one of those women with pudgy hips and a broad bottom who didn’t bother to put on makeup unless she was going out to a restaurant. But she had spirit, Molly did, and in her own quiet, watchful way, she was as sharp as any person I’ve ever known. She was kind; she didn’t bear grudges; she stood up for me and never tried to turn me into someone I wasn’t. If she was a bit of a slob as a housekeeper and something less than a good cook, that didn’t matter. She wasn’t my servant, after all, she was my wife. She was also the one true friend I’d had since my days in Kansas with Aesop and Mother Sioux, the first woman I’d ever loved.

  We lived in a second-floor walkup apartment in the Ironbound section of Newark, and since Molly wasn’t able to bear children, it was always just the two of us. I made her quit her job after the wedding, but I stuck with mine, and over the years I rose through the ranks at Meyerhoff’s. A couple could get by on one salary back then, and after they promoted me to foreman of the night shift, we had no money worries to speak of. It was a modest life by the standards I’d once set for myself, but I’d changed enough not to care about that anymore. We went to the movies twice a week, we ate out on Saturday night, we read books and watched the tube. In the summer, we drove down to the shore at Asbury Park, and nearly every Sunday we got together with one of Molly’s relatives. The Quinns were a large family, and her brothers and sisters had all married and begotten children. That gave me four brothers-in-law, four sisters-in-law, and thirteen nieces and nephews. For a man with no kids of his own, I was up to my elbows in youngsters, but I can’t say I objected to my role as Uncle Walt. Molly was the good fairy godmother, and I was the court jester: the chunky little guy with all those quips and slapstick gags, Rootie Kazootie rolling down the steps of the back porch.

  I spent twenty-three years with Molly—a good long run, I suppose, but n
ot long enough. My plan was to grow old with her and die in her arms, but cancer came along and took her from me before I was ready to let go. First one breast went, then the other breast, and by the time she was fifty-five, she wasn’t there anymore. The family did what it could to help, but it was an awful period for me, and I spent the next six or seven months in an alcoholic stupor. It got so bad that I eventually lost my job at the factory, and if two of my brothers-in-law hadn’t hauled me off to a drying-out clinic, there’s no telling what might have happened to me. I stayed for a full sixty-day cure at Saint Barnabas Hospital in Livingston, and that’s where I finally started dreaming again. I don’t mean daydreams and thoughts about the future, I mean actual sleep dreams: vivid, movie-show extravaganzas almost every night for a month. Maybe it had something to do with the drugs and tranquilizers I was taking, I don’t know, but forty-four years after my last performance as Walt the Wonder Boy, it all came rushing back to me. I was back on the circuit with Master Yehudi, traveling from town to town in the Pierce Arrow, doing my act again every night. It made me incredibly happy, and it brought back pleasures I’d long since forgotten I could feel. I was walking on water again, strutting my stuff before gigantic, overflowing crowds, and I could move through the air without pain, floating and spinning and prancing with all of my old virtuosity and assurance. I’d worked so hard to bury those memories, had struggled for so many years to hug to the ground and be like everyone else, and now it was all surging up again, blasting forth in a nightly display of Technicolor fireworks. Those dreams turned everything around for me. They gave me back my pride, and after that I was no longer ashamed to look at the past. I don’t know how else to put it. The master had forgiven me. He’d canceled out my debt to him because of Molly, because of how I’d loved her and mourned her, and now he was calling out to me and asking me to remember him. There’s no way to prove any of this, but the effect was undeniable. Something had been lifted inside me, and I walked out of that drunk tank as sober as I am now. I was fifty-eight years old, my life was in ruins, and yet I didn’t feel too bad about it. When all was said and done, I actually felt pretty good.