Authors: Larry McMurtry
“Have you ridden in one?” I asked.
“What do you care, you never even come to see me!” she said with a flash of anger. Then she hung up.
The dream I had been having when T.R. woke me up was a typical fight-on-the-set dream from the days of “Al and Sal.” Nema Remington had been erupting—volcanic imagery was the only imagery that adequately described one of Nema’s fits. Nema’s worst enemy would not have denied that she was a force of nature; though she was a tiny woman, cyclonic imagery was still invariably used to describe the kind of destructive force she could focus on a sitcom set when she chose to.
Fortunately she didn’t unleash her full power very often. If she had, the show would not have lasted a year. Nema was, in fact, easy to get along with as long as certain conditions were respected. Food, sleep, and sex were three things she required in abundance, but if she even got any one of the three in abundance, the weather on the set was usually sunny. On the whole it didn’t do to starve her in any of the primary areas. A good deal of the time she had spent as an actress had been spent at the bottom of the heap as the cheapest of cheap cuts in the meat market that is Hollywood. For years she had had to scramble
even to land a commercial; some years she
couldn’t
land a commercial and made ends meet waiting tables.
Stardom, therefore, had not given Nema the illusion that life is perfect; she didn’t expect every minute of every day to go her way, but she was sensitive to insult and was often thrown into violent conflict with her costar, Morgan Underwood, the actor who played Al. Unkind items about Nema’s highhanded behavior on the set were always appearing in the gutter press, all of them planted, in Nema’s opinion, by Morgan Under-wood.
Morgan Underwood was no angel—the word “chauvinist” might have been coined expressly to describe his behavior—but as the producer-creator of the show I took a more complex view of the matter, which was that most of the tawdry items that so infuriated Nema were actually planted by Morgan Underwood’s
secretary
, without his knowledge. Not a few tawdry items about Morgan himself had also found their way into the gutter press—
all
TV press is gutter press—and these, I knew for a fact, were planted by Nema’s secretary, also without her knowledge.
I could write a book—someday I may—about personality disorders in stars’ secretaries, based on my experience with the forty or fifty Nema and Morgan went through in the nine years of “Al and Sal.” The secretarial disorder most likely to drive producers into early coronaries is a secretary’s tendency to identify too closely with the star she or he works for. Inevitably, secretaries derive their sense of status from the status of the star; just as inevitably they come to believe that they
are
the star—many stars’ secretaries I’ve known acquire more airs than three-time Oscar winners.
So in my dream Morgan Underwood’s secretary had planted an item in the
Enquirer
claiming that Nema was fucking a prop man, an item which so infuriated Nema that she started her day by walking into the makeup trailer and squirting Morgan Underwood in the face with Mace, a squirter of which she always kept in her purse for defensive purposes.
This dream was a replay of a real scene: Nema did once Mace Morgan. Headlines the world over read: “Sal Maces Al!”
In the dream I was standing outside Morgan Underwood’s trailer, watching him gag and vomit; I had a stopwatch in my hand, as if I were clocking a gag-and-vomit contest. I was probably just trying to calculate how soon a man who had just been Maced could reasonably be expected to trot back on the set and begin rehearsal.
Then T.R. woke me up. Once she hung up, I felt vaguely uncomfortable, but it was not because I had accidentally provoked my daughter; it was because I needed to know if Morgan had actually recovered and done the scene. In real life a whole day had once been lost, most of it spent trying to persuade Morgan not to sue Nema. It was ridiculous that I should need to know how much time was lost in the dream replay, but I did. The fact that the show had been closed for four years made no difference. Virtually my entire dream life still took place on the set of “Al and Sal.” My dream strata were not deep; I never dreamed of my childhood, of my marriage; only rarely did I get a flicker from my European years, and those flickers tended to be heart-disturbing: a glimpse of Romy Schneider’s face the last time I saw her, or Françoise Dorléac dancing at a party the very week of her accident. But most of my dreams were American, and firmly anchored in Culver City, on a sound stage so filthy it was the equivalent of a running sore. All my dreams were tension-laden; even the few that were sexual weren’t very exciting; my dream sex was the sex-born-of-boredom variety—the kind of sex Nema might descend to with a fairly nice A.D. if one happened to step into her trailer at an opportune moment.
Why was I always dreaming of that set? I had had a life before “Al and Sal”—I had even had a life after it, insofar as continuing to breathe constitutes a life. How come Culver City got to hog my dreams?
I didn’t know, but I switched on my bedlight, hoping T.R. would call again. I didn’t feel like going back to sleep if the best I could look forward to was a dream about an actor who had just been Maced.
Five minutes later the phone rang again and an operator asked if I would accept a collect call from T.R.
“With pleasure,” I said.
“I don’t think you even have an airplane,” T.R. said. “You probably ain’t half as rich as that magazine said you were.”
In the background I could hear a baby crying; also I could hear salsa music and the sound of cars passing.
“Where are you?” I asked, feeling a touch of alarm.
“I’m out in front of the Circle K, talking on this stupid pay phone,” she said.
It was 1
A.M.
, and the Lawndale area wasn’t the safest part of Houston—if there was a safe part.
“T.R., are you safe?” I asked. “Would you like me to come and get you right now?”
“Come get me and do what with me?” she asked, after a pause.
“Bring you and the kids to the hotel,” I said. “I could get you a nice suite.”
“No,” she said. “I been dancing. I ain’t dressed right.”
“It doesn’t matter how you’re dressed,” I said. “It matters that you’re safe.”
“Why’d you ask me if I’d ever ridden on an airplane?” she asked, belligerence in her tone.
“Well, we were talking about airplanes,” I said. “I didn’t see anything wrong with asking.”
“I ain’t never ridden on one, if you must know,” she said defiantly. “If that makes me low class I guess I’m low class.”
“Honey, I never meant to imply that you were low class,” I said gently. “You sound anything but low class. You sound wonderful to me.”
She thought my compliment over for a minute.
“I don’t know how you’d know if I’m wonderful or not, since you’ve never seen me,” she said.
“I have heard your voice now, though,” I reminded her.
“You’ve mostly heard it hang up on you,” she pointed out.
“You are apt to hang up frequently,” I admitted. “But your voice is very lovely. It’s the kind of voice that could only belong to a wonderful person.”
“Right now it’s the voice of somebody who’s danced herself sleepy,” she said. “If I wasn’t holding this phone I’d probably just sit down and go to sleep right here in front of the Circle K.”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “I’m sure that wouldn’t be safe. Why not let me come and get you?”
She didn’t answer. For a moment I thought she was going to carry out her threat and go to sleep on the sidewalk.
“Where are the babies?” I asked.
“They’re right here in their laundry basket,” T.R. said. “I think Jesse just pooped. She just got that little look of concentration she mostly gets when she’s wetting or pooping.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, what are they doing in a laundry basket?” I asked.
“I found the basket in the Goodwill,” T.R. said in a voice that sounded sleepier and sleepier. “It’s a mighty nice basket and it only cost seventy-five cents. I pack the kids in it while I’m dancing. Otherwise there’s no telling where they’ll wander off to. Once Jesse gets her speed up she can wander off real quick.”
“I can’t wait to meet them,” I said. “They sound like wonderful children.”
“I wish you’d stop talking about how wonderful we are,” T.R. said. “You ain’t even met us, and you may not have the slightest idea what to do with us when you finally do.”
“I can’t claim much experience, I admit that,” I said. “But I’m willing to learn.”
“I’m getting too sleepy to think about you,” T.R. said. “Little Dwight just about danced my socks off tonight.”
“Dare I ask who Little Dwight is?” I asked.
T.R. chuckled. “I don’t know, Daddy,” she said. “Dare you or don’t you?”
“So who is he?” I asked.
“He’s one of those people you might meet if you’re really willing to learn,” she said.
Then she seemed to wake up a bit.
“Yep, Jesse pooped,” she said. “I can smell it. You better go back to sleep there in your fancy hotel, because once you meet up with this crowd of kids I got you’re gonna need more than willingness—you’re gonna need energy, and plenty of it.”
“I’ll be asleep in five minutes,” I said.
I wasn’t asleep in five minutes, or fifty minutes either. The thought that on the morrow I would finally be assuming not only parental but grandparental responsibilities made me wakeful. I spent an hour or two reading a wonderful book on Peru. It was called
Cut Stones and Cross Roads
and it convinced me that the Incas must have known more about the qualities of stone than any people who ever lived. One of the things I learned was that the Incas could lay stones together so skillfully and delicately that the stones could even pass the shock of earthquakes from one to another in such a way that the building they composed wouldn’t fall down. Spanish buildings erected over Inca buildings fell down in seconds, but the Inca buildings remained.
It was a saddening fact, however, that the Incas themselves hadn’t remained—just their superb stonework. They themselves had succumbed to Spanish diseases and Spanish greed. Their civilization proved fragile, and, on a vastly smaller scale, so did my mood. At reading of the sadness of Peru, I became depressed. Resolving never to go to Peru didn’t help much, either. One reason I read so much travel literature is that it helps me avoid places where I might get too sad. This time, however, I got as sad as if I had actually been walking in the streets of Lima or Cuzco. Part of my sadness was the realization that I was getting a migraine. It seemed to me that the cells in my head were arranged more on the Spanish than the Inca model; instead of passing the shock of events or moods along from synapse to synapse, they allowed the shocks to fall with earthquake-like force right on my brain, whereupon my whole systemic mass began to shudder with migraine.
It shuddered with migraine for several hours at the Warwick. I knew that fear of meeting my daughter caused the earthquake that was pounding my brain cells to mush, but knowledge didn’t help—it never helped. I turned on the TV but could scarcely see it—a certain amount of visual distortion is likely to accompany my migraine quakes. I thought I heard the voice of Don Ameche, though.
I got up, gobbled four amphetamines, filled a bathtub with very hot water, and sank into it. The speed and the heat of the water soon began to reduce the force of the tremors. I kept filling the tub, keeping the water as hot as I could stand it. Eventually my brain stopped quivering, the aftershocks subsided, and I was able to get back into bed. I felt a little spacy from the speed, but the main quake was over.
Since there was no likelihood of my going right off to sleep, with all that speed in me, I picked up the phone and called my message machine.
The first message was from Viveca Strindberg, another of my lost continental loves.
“Allo, this is Vi-ve-ca,” she said, pronouncing each syllable distinctly. “I love you. Call me sometime.”
I could have called her right then; it was late morning in Paris, where Viveca lived. But Viveca had a certain Baltic heartiness that didn’t fit well with my after-quake mood. She wasn’t working too much these days, but she had married a rich Finn who let her bat about the world pretty much as she wanted to—last time we talked she had been to Bangkok and had taken opium. “What a hangover!” was her comment. “I am depressed ever since and I don’t want sex either.”
I decided I’d call and catch up with Viveca in a day or two, and took the next message, which was not a message but just one of the many occasions when Gladys and Godwin picked up phones at the same time, oblivious to the fact that the machine was recording.
“What do you want now?” Gladys demanded to know. “I’m on my coffee break.”
“Your whole life is a coffee break,” Godwin said irritably.
“How would you know, you ain’t in this part of the house ten minutes a year,” Gladys said. “I slave my life away, and who cares?”
“If Leroy calls while I’m in the shower please be polite to him,” Godwin said. “He’s rather shy, and easily frightened.”
“If he’s easily frightened, what’s he doing running around with a sex maniac like you?” Gladys asked.
“Oh, do what you’re told, you ugly slave!” Godwin said.
“You ain’t paying my wages!” Gladys reminded him, at which point I fast-forwarded until I was well past their argument. I came in on a message from Jeanie and had to backtrack a few beats to get the beginning of it.
“Hi, Danny, was it your daughter?” she asked. “Are you there, are you there?
“I guess you’re not there,” she went on, a little sadly. “But maybe that’s good, maybe that means you’re with your child. That’s gotta be good, if you’re with your child. Look, I’m gonna get off.”
There was a click, then, immediately, another message from Jeanie.
“Danny, I’m just gonna take a minute to describe this script,” she said. “It’s about this woman who devotes her life to birds. She’s kind of a zoologist and has a lab in her garage. Now the thing that’s not too good is that she lives in Nebraska, and I don’t know if I could play a person who lives in Nebraska. I don’t think it’s very urban out there. Otherwise, though, I like the woman and I like the script. She’s kind of like that woman you had in ‘Al and Sal’ who was crazy for buzzards, only this time it’s sandhill cranes, which I guess are a troubled species or something. Her name is Nellie, which I also like—I could be a Nellie, probably—and she gets more and more obsessed with cranes and starts neglecting her husband and children and stuff, which I could also easily do if I had any to neglect. Also she offends a lot of people, the governor and people who make the rules about birds, and in the end she just sort of loses track of normal life completely and becomes a crazy bird woman.”