The Dakota Winters, page 13
“So what’s the answer?” Donahue asked.
“I asked him that, and he said, ‘Live in the present. Be here.’”
“And . . . ?”
“And that was it. And then the song ‘Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys’ came on. And my Jewish Buddhist cowboy friend yelled out, ‘It’s too fricking late for that!’”
“But he didn’t say ‘frick.’”
“That’s correct.”
“But that was never my issue. I live in the moment. I just have trouble sometimes figuring out what all the moments add up to. And at some point it occurred to me that I wasn’t going at the answers in the right way.”
“What’s the right way to go at the answers.”
“It’s to learn how to listen, and not just to what’s said.”
“To the truth beneath,” Donahue said.
“Yes,” Buddy said, reveling in his role as talk-show sage.
Before the commercial break they showed another clip of the misty-eyed tuxedoed Tyrone Power in The Razor’s Edge, this time explaining his restlessness to a worried Gene Tierney by telling her of a soldier he saw killed in the war. “The dead look so terribly dead when they’re dead,” he says.
When they resumed, Donahue said, “So now you’re at peace.”
“Which poses a whole new set of issues.”
“How so?”
“You make this realization that the peace and serenity, and even the comprehension, is at odds with ambition, the fuel of which is rage and dissatisfaction not only with the world but with yourself. That’s your drive. Once you have bliss, peace, you want to sit back, and sleep, or take a walk, or go for a swim, all good for your soul, but maybe not your career. The drive itself is about filling a hole inside you, and once it’s filled what the hell do you write about.”
Donahue nodded thoughtfully.
They talked then about how Jack Paar had also walked off his show over a battle with the censors over an innocuous joke. His Tonight Show audience had liked it. But NBC replaced it with five minutes of news. Paar steamed off his show the next night and in his words “wound up in Hong Kong.”
“He returned after three weeks, and they gave him his show back,” Buddy said.
“And then he quit two years later,” Donahue said. “Passed it on to some guy named Carson.”
It was catharsis as entertainment, and the audience ate it up.
At the show’s conclusion the camera settled on Donahue’s charitable face.
“A few weeks ago it dawned on me why so many of us have felt lost in these turbulent times. Maybe it’s this: that the night Buddy Winter left the stage was the night we lost our guiding spirit; that at the end of a bewildering, mad-as-hell day we always felt sane again watching you.” He turned and faced Buddy, seated alone on stage. “So please come back, Buddy. Wherever you turn up, we’ll tune in, so you can once again decipher this upside-down world for us, and make us laugh and think along the way.”
After the taping, I stood with Harry Abrams, as we waited for Buddy.
“Remember what I said about our Olympic back story,” Harry said.
“This was it?”
“Now we go for the gold.”
18
I too once vanished.
I remembered this as we left the studio. I was ten, and Alex and I decided not to head home after school as we always did. We would occasionally go to one or the other’s apartment, and then call home to check in. This day, without telling anyone, we went to Loew’s 83rd and watched a double feature, and then we made the poor decision to watch the first movie a second time. Meanwhile our mothers had called each other, and then some other mothers and then the school and then the police.
I think we didn’t call because we knew they’d be pissed at us, and we’d be punished, and the adventure would be over. So instead we watched three movies and then we went to a pizza place and had slices, and when we walked out a police car spotted us and put its siren on. They pulled over and took us in.
We’d been gone seven hours, a shitty thing for me to do to my mother. I thought of that day when Buddy was missing in silence for fifteen hours, and then when he chose to stay away for weeks. I was less worried than angry once we heard from him, because I didn’t understand why he couldn’t just come home. Buddy’s breakdown had to do with his brain being a radio antenna tuned to all the best stations, and to too many stations, and then to none at all. He wasn’t Larry Darrell in The Razor’s Edge, as Donahue intimated. His demons weren’t from a war or from the things he never did, because he married well, picked the right job, and had the right kids, or at least he always said so. Buddy had new and hard-earned things to say about the mind and the human spirit, which made for watchable television, but a part of me feared his comeback would consist now of public sessions of amateur psychoanalysis, Band-Aids of “meaning” to follow a recounting of his blue moods and sleepless hauntings (“It began a period of darkness in Buddy’s life . . .”), which I’d rather not see. Not on TV. Not across from the cloying Barbara Walters or the noxious Tom Snyder, or that smug David Frost. I wanted to move on to whatever came next.
But it wasn’t my call. He’d gone out there and had fun of all things. People applauded, and Harry was thrilled. All in all, I was too.
While I’m confessing things I should add here that I found four journals Buddy had stashed away, with his diary notes from his travels. I’d opened one up, read a page, and then backed off, out of respect for his privacy and fear of what I’d find.
AFTER MY SHIFT I FELT WIRED STILL FROM THE DONAHUE TAPING, AND from my hours at the Tavern, and so rather than go home I went to the park with Ricky, a bartender, and Manuel, a pantry cook, and two waitresses, Bronwen and Janet.
We drank pints of Guinness (nicked from the bar) on the benches around Bethesda Fountain, where a dozen or so people were hanging about, among them a man playing Arlo Guthrie songs on the guitar, seated on a blanket with a long-haired kid playing bongo drums, and a couple in matching gold jackets and shorts roller-boogieing around a transistor radio.
Ricky was recalling the birthday party Yoko Ono threw John and Sean—they shared the same birthday—at the Tavern last fall in the glass-enclosed atrium, a party my parents had attended, a fact I didn’t share. I’d seen photos at the restaurant, John dressed in black and wearing plastic yellow sunglasses, and the rest of the guests in T-shirts Yoko had printed up with their names under a huge red heart.
“He’s a really cute kid. Sweet too,” Janet said.
“He’s got a life ahead of him, doesn’t he?” Bronwen said.
“‘Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight, carry that weight a long time,’” Ricky sang.
“Remember that letter they wrote?”
The Lennons took out a full page of the New York Times explaining their years away from the limelight and that it didn’t mean they didn’t love their public—they just needed some respectful distance.
Not everyone liked the letter.
“You know what she said once?” Janet said. “She said that if she was a Jewish girl during the Holocaust she would find a way to be Hitler’s girlfriend, and after ten days of sleeping with her he’d do whatever she said.”
“Hitler cums, then succumbs,” I said.
I made her laugh. It was a crazy boast, Yoko’s, but I bought it, that she’d believe in her power through sex over famous men.
“I love that it’s ten days of fucking, don’t you?” Ricky said.
“I’d really like to fuck John Lennon,” Bronwen said.
“Who wouldn’t?” Manuel said.
“You want to fuck him.”
“I would,” Manuel said.
“I thought you liked young guys,” Ricky said.
“I do, but for a Beatle I’d make an exception.”
“I don’t think he goes that way.”
“I heard he did a few times. Did you hear that, Anton?”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“Are we making you uncomfortable? We make everyone uncomfortable.”
I took a long draw of a joint that was going around. It felt like they were performing for me, as if to say, Aren’t we crazy? Can you handle us?
“Are you high yet?” Bronwen said.
“Getting there.”
She took what sounded like an enormous hit.
“Come here, Anton,” she said. “Open your mouth.”
I did; she blew smoke in.
“She’s a tease, dude,” said Ricky.
“I’m more than that,” Bronwen said. “But work is work and pleasure is pleasure and the two don’t mix. Just ask Ricky.”
Manuel said, “Ricky fucked one of the managers.”
“Which one?”
“Who do you think? Becca.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said. Becca looked like Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac and had supposedly dropped out of Barnard. Her father was friends with Rowan.
“One time.”
“And.”
“She’s a mess, my friend. I mean she’s an animal, but a very complex human being. You don’t want to go there, believe me.”
“Anyone ever fuck a customer?” Manuel asked.
“I did once,” Janet said. “I mean we dated for a while.”
“And you liked him.”
“Well, yeah. We dated for three months.”
Someone other than Elena’s boyfriend, I thought.
“Who ended it?” Ricky asked.
“None of your business.”
“He did,” Bronwen said.
“No, I did,” Janet said.
“You cheated on him.”
“Well, yes. But it was with someone I used to go out with so it wasn’t like I started something new.”
“Did he catch you together?”
“Can we get off this subject?”
“Holy shit, I’m right,” Ricky said.
“Anton, spill the beans. What do you have going?” Bronwen asked.
“Boys or girls?” Manuel asked.
“Those are my only choices?”
“You’re single I’m guessing,” Bronwen said.
“Decidedly so.”
“Good for you. That won’t last long. Not in this city and not working nights. It gets crazy,” Ricky said.
Manuel blew out smoke and said, “Hell yeah, motherfucker.”
BRONWEN AND I LEFT THE PARK TOGETHER AND I GOT MORE OF HER story. She was a nightclub singer, she said, but for now she was auditioning for commercial jingles. She’d gotten two small radio spots and had just missed getting a national TV commercial, for L’eggs panty hose. Like everything else in the world, she said, around twenty-five people sang 90 percent of the jingles and if you were one of that prized group you made a good living.
I asked what they looked for in a jingle singer and she said good diction, a good ear, an ability to make even the most ridiculous lyrics sound real. I asked her to sing one.
“Airline or beer?”
“Airline.”
She closed her eyes, and then like Lena Horne sings “Stormy Weather” she sang, “Pan Am makes the going great, Pan Am makes the going great.”
“Fucking brilliant,” I said.
“Thank you.”
I then said, “Beer please,” and she sang, “It’s refreshing not sweet, it’s the extra dry treat, why don’t you try extra dry Rheingold beeeer.”
“I’d listen to you sing a parking ticket,” I said.
We walked to her subway station at Seventy-Second and Broadway, and along the way stopped to buy hot dogs at the Papaya King. I told her beyond jingles she should be singing in a Broadway show. She said it was a hard world to crack, that all the best things were within closed circles. She asked me with all my connections why I was bussing tables, and I said because I didn’t know what else to do, and that it was as good a job as any, and that I was Rowan’s neighbor and he asked me. She said Rowan would probably move me quickly to waiter, that I’d have her job soon, that there were a lot of people at the restaurant gunning for her.
I wondered if she saw in me exactly what she was up against, that there were people like her with talent and ones like me who knew people, and if it was someone like me against someone like her, the ones like me usually won, which was unfair, but how the world worked. I wanted to find something of my own that had nothing to do with Buddy, where I sailed on my own merits and nothing more.
“If it’s your job, I wouldn’t take it,” I said.
“It’s nice to think that,” she said. She kissed me on the cheek and slipped down the stairs toward her train.
19
I received my first check from Buddy the next day in Fielding’s mailbox, three hundred dollars, with the subject line Project Renaissance. I was to log in my hours each week, and include overtime, which I wouldn’t do because we were, in Rachel’s words, hemorrhaging money. My mother said we were okay until summer, we had some rainy-day accounts we could cash in, that I shouldn’t worry, which made me worry more.
Buddy spent hours in his study, writing jokes and his thoughts on a yellow legal pad. He’d begin with the things he felt in a broad sense; then he’d free-associate until he landed on something funny. At his best he was stupefying to watch. It drove Harry crazy, he told me once. He’d have an essay to write, a few jokes, or a skit, and he could bang it out in around ten minutes and it would be letter perfect. “Something that would take a human two hours to write.”
I saw these things on his notebook—
No tired truths.
Sharp humor needs fresh modes of seeing.
Figure out what it is you have to say.
To do: write a new monologue every day, no ifs or buts.
When we weren’t working on the show, we’d pretend to be Parisians or Germans touring the city. We’d go to places like the Frick, the Museum of Natural History, the planetarium, the Paley Center for Media, and on a warm day in early April to one of our favorite spots: the Explorers Club for a talk on the Kon-Tiki, presided over by two of the participants.
“Someone is meeting us there. I’ll leave it a surprise.”
“Who?”
“Would it be a surprise if I told you?”
The city’s transit workers were on strike, which meant no buses or subways, and the city was transformed, bikes everywhere, and people on roller skates or skateboards, or just walking long distances in running shoes. There was something unifying about things like this—and blizzards and heat waves and blackouts—that made it feel like we all lived in the same glorious and flawed small town.
“Everyone’s smiling today, but let’s see what happens when this goes on for three weeks.”
The worst unifier by far we all lived through together was the garbage strike, when the city was a dreamscape of garbage, ten thousand pounds a day of rotting food and bottles and cans and fast-food packages, and moldy, bruised fruit in overflowing paper bags, and rats everywhere, and no clear spot on the sidewalk on which to walk, and the streets themselves covered in refuse, cars rolling through to the crunch of breaking glass. The day they cleaned it all up felt like a miracle, and I remember my mother stopping in the street to hug a sanitation worker.
As we strolled around the Explorers Club looking at the photos, a man in sunglasses and a baseball cap descended on us.
“Did you come by skateboard?” he asked.
John sometimes, with his hair tied back and that downsloping nose, looked to me like someone doing an amazing John Lennon impersonation.
“Roller skates,” Buddy said. “We raced, and I shamed my poor son. I think it’s the malaria.”
“Keep your kids sick if you want to stay on top.”
Until recently the Explorers Club had been located on our block.
“This is my favorite ocean voyage story,” John said. “Casting out to sea in a balsa-wood raft with five men and a parrot. Eating the flying fish that topple aboard and waving at the sharks. Fuck being a rock star.”
We circled around the exhibit.
There were photographs of them chopping down trees in the Ecuadorian jungle for the balsa logs, and another of them lashing the logs together with hemp ropes.
“No nails or metal allowed,” John said.
There was an enticing photograph of them out in the currents with the sails billowing, two of them posed at the top of the masthead.
“Look at that. That could be you and me, Buddy Boy. . . .”
More pictures of them sailing through high seas. They covered as much as seventy-one miles in a day, and averaged more than forty.
“That’s the life. At the mercy of the winds for five thousand miles.”
On the same wall was a great shot of Thor Heyerdahl at the steering oar with a rising mountain of water behind him. Another of Torstein Raaby holding up a three-foot snake mackerel that had leapt onto the boat and somehow wriggled into his sleeping bag.
“Not the type of nighttime visitor you’d want on a lonely night at sea,” Buddy said.
“Too skinny,” John said. “Give me a shapely dolphin and I’d be happy.”
In the next room were scenes of them hanging out in the bamboo cabin under a roof of plaited bamboo and banana leaves, which made them feel, Heyerdahl said in the label copy, like they were in a virgin forest; then scenes of food preparation, and of all the fish they caught, which Heyerdahl wrote could have fed a flotilla of boats.
We sat for the lecture. Thor had pitched a story to National Geographic, but they passed, saying it was a suicide mission, that they would surely drown at sea.
“This is my next life,” John said after.
“You want to sail around the world.”
“Not all the way, but a small bit of it, yes. I’m buying a sailboat you know.”
“You said you might.”
“What kind are you getting?” I asked.
