Mitla Pass (10 page)

I was ready for my suite at the writer’s mecca, the Algonquin Hotel. Bloody suite cost over twenty bucks a day, but what the hell. I was ready when I was invited to lunch at their famed Round Table, graced by the literary lights of the day. Halfway through the meal I realized these assholes took their one-upmanship seriously.
The New Yorker
crowd. Would-be Oscar Wildes. I stopped the show with a couple of blunt, crude remarks to watch them gag and turn pale. Val didn’t catch the drift of my humor at all. In fact, she was furious with me.

“I suppose you think your vulgar Marine gutter talk was amusing.”

“Oh, for Christ sake, Val. Don’t you see what a bunch of fakes they are? The whole goddam gang of them haven’t written anything for ten years. Who in the hell are they to dictate public taste?”

“You had a chip on your shoulder the minute you entered New York.”

“This scene runs on too much bullshit. Look at the bullshit at the ‘21’ Club. Look at the bullshit with the owner himself, in person, ushering us past the peasants into the chummy Cub Room reserved for the hotsy-totsy elite. The publisher picked up a tab of over sixty dollars—over sixty dollars. For what? Bullshit.”

“Relax, buddy, enjoy,” she said. “You’ve made it. Stop waving a red flag. Everyone knows G. Zadok isn’t a member of the establishment. Take a cold shower.”

Maybe Val was right. I’m nice to most people. I just don’t like phonies. I was just mixed up. I wanted to be me but I was having difficulty finding out who me was. I couldn’t hang out around the newspaper and suck on beers at the corner bar anymore. My old buddies looked at me differently these days. Like I was some kind of tin Jesus, or something.

Are guys like J. III my new life? Fight, don’t fight. I don’t know how I’m supposed to act.

“Rough transition, Gideon,” Val said. “They’ll find out how tough you are soon enough. So, relax.”

“Yeah, I guess I’d better.”

“How about you and me taking a walk up Fifth Avenue to look for the real Gideon Zadok?” she said.

“The real Zadok’s in this room with you, baby, and he wants to put you flat on that bed.”

“You crazy guy,” she said, taking my kisses.

I stroked her hair later and kissed her a lot and found myself looking out of the window down on Forty-fourth street. It was hysterical down there. “Getting the first book accepted is like getting shot out of a cannon. I guess water has to find its own level.”

She sat up in the bed. I never got tired of looking at her. “You’ll be okay,” she said. “You’re really a nice guy.”

“There’s a pile of good plays on here. I want to see them all.”

I settled down and enjoyed all those things I thought I was ready for: the interview with
Variety,
the 50,000-watt clear-channel station, the bow on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the blurb in Winchell’s column. Be graceful, be decent. Remember, buddy, none of it means a damn if anything is wrong with Val or Penny or Roxy.

The war had been over for nearly a decade and I hadn’t returned to Baltimore. Now I was ready. Kid’s stuff, I know, but I rented the biggest, blackest Caddy convertible and drove down for the long-delayed family reunion. When I parked it in front of my sister Molly’s house, it took up half the street. All the kids gathered around it and gawked and the neighbors tried to steal a glimpse of me. I went up to them and gave them hugs and they blushed and stammered. Yeah, it was nice and everyone enjoyed it. The champ was home! The American dream lives!

In
Look
magazine there was a photo of Radio City’s Rockettes in their dressing room reading
Of Men in Battle
all in a pretty row.

And an A.P. wirephoto of the heiress Barbara Hutton getting off the plane in Vegas to get another divorce, with a copy under her arm, and one of Floyd Patterson reading it on the night before he creamed Hurricane Jackson.

There was my first autographing party at Stationers Book Store in San Diego. San Diego. Of the early moments of the early days of the victory tour, this was the answer to my wildest dream.

I’d done my boot camp in Dago. Back then I was a kid, seventeen, and war had just broken out. I had enlisted in the Corps. It was in Dago that the writer’s dream took on first reality and life. I now had something to say to the world. I’d walk Broadway past the Y and the sleaze joints and get pissed on a fake I.D. card. And in Dago I had my first lay by a whore.

I’d get on the ferry to Coronado and find a place off by myself and ride until liberty was about up and I’d dream of the story I’d tell someday.

The El Cortez Hotel crowned a small hill near Broadway. I’d look up to it, a symbol of rank and affluence, and I’d say to myself, “someday.” Dago was a war-hardened town that had sent off hundreds of thousands of boys to do battle in the Pacific. Now, over a decade later, it stopped for a moment and bowed to Gideon Zadok, Private, USMC.

The day before the autographing party, I entered the Marine Corps base and was whisked to the commanding general’s office and I stood next to him while the graduating recruit battalion passed in review.

“We’re proud of you, Marine,” he said to me.

Sounds like the old boys’ club stuff, I know. Schlocky. Corny as hell. But I’d written a new and different kind of war book. Most of the war novels had expressed deep hatred for America and the services. God knows I hated the war, but I didn’t hate the men I fought it with. I loved them and I respected my officers and I knew why I was fighting. I was glad the Corps was proud of me.

Val and I had left the girls in Coronado with their grandmother and we took a suite at the El Cortez. We had dinner in the Skyroom restaurant with all of Dago and all of her ships and planes and lights spread below ... and for the moment, I was king of the hill.

“You look so pensive, honey,” Val said.

“Lot of things running through my head,” I answered.

Later that night, we made some of the randiest love of our marriage. It started in the cocktail lounge. Val came in first and took a table by herself. In a service town like Dago, drinks start appearing like magic when a single lady enters a bar. She rejected them with thanks.

Enter great new American novelist looking for a pickup. I befriended the bartender and surveyed the room.

“Any action?” I asked.

“Little slow tonight,” he said.

I nodded toward Val.

“She alone?”

“She’s not accepting.”

“What’s she drinking?”

“Whiskey sour.”

“Fix me up one.”

“I think you’re wasting your money.”

As I sidled over to her, She crossed her legs enticingly.

“Hi. Your drink,” I said.

She looked me up and down. “Thanks, but no thanks. You’re a little short for my taste.”

“I’m tall in the saddle,” I said, taking a seat opposite her. (Tonight Val was the wife of a Navy flier out in the Pacific, somewhere.)

“Writer, huh?”

“Author. One of the best.”

“If truth be known, I’ve already turned a trick here tonight. He didn’t do me much good.”

And so forth and so forth and so forth. When I whisked her out to my suite two drinks later, the railbirds at the bar gawked and the bartender gave me a V for victory sign. Nothing, fellows, really nothing.

It was two in the morning. I couldn’t sleep. Val flicked on the bed lamp.

“Honey, you’re dressed.”

“I’ve got to get some air,” I said.

“Everything okay?”

“I’m just a little on edge about tomorrow. I won’t be out long.”

I walked down the hill toward Broadway and stopped in front of Stationers Book Store. The window held several dozen copies of
Of Men in Battle,
along with a blowup photograph of me—my first author’s photo, pipe, patches on the elbow of a corduroy jacket, the whole thing.
Meet the Author, Autographing Party, Friday at 2
P.M.

Was I really standing there! So much flooded through me. The old memory of Broadway came alive and the street was filled with hundreds of swabbies and gyrene recruits and I could hear the voices of my buddies pretending they were tough and having fun. Seventeen years old, a long way from home, and all the world out there ahead of me.
Meet the Author.
What beautiful words ... meet the author ... you don’t know me, do you? I was one of those bewildered kids sick to the stomach from too many Singapore slings.

It was empty. Not a soul around. My books in the window. I started to cry.

“Looking for company, mister?”

It was Val. She’d thrown on a dress and coat and followed me from the hotel.

A squad car pulled up and one of the cops jumped out.

“What’s going on?”

Before I could answer, he saw my photo in the window.

“Hey! That’s you!”

“Jesus! Hey, Sean. It’s the author! Gideon Zadok. We heard you over the radio this evening. This broad bothering you?”

“She’s the mother of my children.”

The cop had been a Marine. He wouldn’t hear of us walking back up the hill. We had a couple of drinks with them in the old Mexican section and they drove us back to the El Cortez. I took their names and addresses and said I’d send them books.

Although the evening ended up with laughs, there was a disturbing undertone. The instant Val had broken my reverie before the store window, I felt put upon. I wanted to be alone, dammit, alone with my buddies. I wanted Pedro to be proud of me now.

Why was I so ticked? Val and I had shared everything. Or had we? I’d never told her about Pedro.

April 10, 1953

My Son! My Son! The first copy of your novel was received by me with its beautiful inscription. Confidentially, I don’t like, too much, the colors on the cover. And for why were they trying to hide your name?

Nevertheless, your leap into American letters comes as no surprise to me. From the time you were a little boy I helped you grow, encouraged you and now the fruits of our labors have been realized. My son the writer! And I, a humble paperhanger, a celebrity in my own right. I did not have any chance in my life to achieve in the arts, so you will realize for me, all my dreams.

Every night now we have over to our humble apartment, friends, filled with good wishes. “How will Gideon react when he is famous and wealthy?” Some would like to believe that Gideon will become like all other celebrities, go live in luxury, forget the little man and soon his writing will decline in quality and he will adapt his writings to the taste of the less literary minded. But
we the majority
categorically defeated that school of thought.
We
the majority are convinced that fame and riches will never degenerate Gideon, because Gideon Zadok the writer is bigger in heart and mind than money and the gilded objects, that Gideon Zadok the writer and human being will never forget the people he came from.

My wife, Lena, your stepmother, who loves you as her own son, says she is afraid she will have to buy a ticket and stand in line to see you and that her borsht and knishes will not be good enough for you to eat. So son, you should reassure her by return letter and tell her you plan to come with the family immediately to Philadelphia and put her, and everyone else’s fears to rest. You still like borsht and knishes? No? And also, son, you should always mention her in your letters as she is sensitive. Say something personal and nice. Lena says we should have made a child together so we could have a genius of our own.

And what do you have against Philadelphia? Why are you avoiding?

You will forgive in advance a few observations and advice from me. Although the circumstances of life kept me from being a writer, I am still considered an educated and literate man. So, thank you and think over carefully, namely:

Stay away from red baiting.

Try to make your next book more profound, with deeper thinking and more meaningful characters. Your plans to write a book about fighters and prostitutes frankly doesn’t sit too well with me.

You should be thinking more in terms of Jewish themes and themes of the struggles of the working class.

Don’t make so much dirty dialogue. It is untasteful.

I have many, many, many more criticisms of which I will advise you in my forthcoming letters, for only through criticism will you grow.

You will have thousands of fans in Philadelphia. I wish you wouldn’t snub so much this town. Perhaps you will even consider moving to Philadelphia as it is more of a literary and cultural center than so-called San Francisco and God forbid you stay in Los Angeles, a notorious center of anti-Semitism.

I have given your address to a number of relatives now desirous of making your personal acquaintance, although many of them snubbed me for years. I hold no grudges. You are now my personal representative.

And now, to a serious subject. There is a feeling among intellectuals that once a writer makes his debut in Hollywood, his literary abilities, his ambition to write important subjects becomes negligible, that he is degraded, that he gives up his talent, his name, for what? Money? Glamour? And soon his name is forgotten once the glitter of gold and diamonds is before his eyes. Of course, Hollywood has the genius to produce good artistic and educational pictures, but the ignorant masses instead prefer sexy
shmattes.

And lastly, being in Hollywood doesn’t mean you must not write to me every week. And now that Valerie is a woman of leisure, she should also write more regularly. It is the fourth commandment that she should write. She believes in the ten commandments, doesn’t she? Your loving father, Nathan

P.S. My love also to the girls. I hope they don’t become corrupted by the glitter of Hollywood. Otherwise I and Lena are fine, with the usual aches and pains of old age.

Before I left to do the screenplay in Pacific Studios, I wanted the comfort of knowing I would return to writing my second novel. I sent an outline and the first two chapters of
The Tenderloin
to J. Bascomb III and asked for a contract. I found out that J. III didn’t trust his own judgment. He edited by round table and his reply consisted of the reports of five editors ...

“A one-shot novelist.”