The Day the Bozarts Died Read online

  “I understood I was throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” says Cloud. “And I’m sure I would have managed to keep it going—everyone wanted me to, Edie needed the income, Monk needed the opportunities—if not for Stanley’s bizarre pathology. Eventually it became the joke, that Stanley was literally addicted to sex. You know, that he should have to register as a certified pervert living in the neighborhood. Celia started that routine, after she saw something about Wade Boggs on television. But the point is this: it isn’t a joke. It’s who Stanley is.”

  * * *

  Barney was looking good on his prediction that “nothing” was what I would have. I had my gig at Furniture in the Raw and my Passamaquoddy musical-in-progress. What I did not have (and what Barney meant I would not have) was a new true love. Not even close. Unless you count total strangers, I could not even be called a man with prospects. (If you do count them, I had plenty, as in the movie where a detective in a nation of 23 million admits he has “either no suspects or 23 million.”)

  Suspects, prospects, none of them had come forward as an enabler, to feed my alleged addiction. Or have I neglected to mention that bit of happy horseshit, the Wade Boggs Analogue? It was the purest nonsense, to be sure, and yet Boggs himself may be vaguely germane to our story.

  He was a ballplayer who in his best years with the Red Sox became famous for three habits, none of which had anything to do with baseball. The first was that among his many rituals and personal festivals of manic repetition (and Boggs was our go-to guy for OCD before Nomar came to town) was an insistence on eating chicken. Nothing but chicken, that is. Chicken three meals a day, chicken for breakfast somehow. Reputedly, he had 1000 chicken recipes, or 2000, so he was tagged The Chicken Man. Which was endearing in a way. Quirky; clucky.

  Then there was the habit, possibly derived from a military upbringing, of referring to himself by name in the third person. “When Wade Boggs decides upon a course of action, Wade Boggs acts,” he would say. Or, “You won’t see Wade Boggs skipping any workouts this spring.” And this could be confusing to the uninitiated. “Hang on a second,” Nina said, first time she witnessed this phenomenon on the Six O’Clock News, “I thought that guy was Wade Boggs.”

  Indeed. Wade’s third peccadillo was unveiled on nationwide television, when Barbara Walters sat Boggs and Mrs. Boggs down on a couch to hash over his extramarital affair. For they were in this together, Wade and maybe Debbi, they were prepared to confront as a team the problem of his “sex addiction” after she caught him fooling around.

  So there are what, 800 major league ballplayers, approximately three of whom are faithful to their wives, and only Boggs gets caught? Only Boggs feels a need to explain himself on prime time teevee, no doubt assuring the accusing camera that “Wade Boggs takes full responsibility for Wade Boggs’ mistakes.”

  Well and who better? The trouble started next morning in the coffee room, when Boggs’ confession somehow implicated me. I was assigned responsibility for Wade Boggs’ mistakes. All’s cool, the 12-potter is brewing, and Beryl is portioning out one of her sensational apple dumplings, when Celia raps her spoon on the table and comes out with this canard.

  “Attention, people, attention please. I wanted you all to know, we finally have a diagnosis.”

  Humor coming. No one is ill, no one awaiting scary test results, plus Celia is wearing that lemon-sucking smirk which signifies she’s got the goods on someone. The woman can paint a little, but her true medium has always been gossip.

  “All this time we were laughing at Stanley” (laughing?) “or even shunning him” (shunning?) “we should have been trying to help him. And now we can. The diagnosis is SSA, severe sexual addiction, a rare yet treatable disorder. Especially with early detection.”

  Several people had watched the TV show and were guffawing on cue even before she gave us the synopsis. Boggs was lauded, tongue in cheek, for possessing the strength of character to acknowledge his “addiction” (as though one affair and a tendency to like sex made him anything but human) and then the floor was thrown open to some serious Stan-bashing by his erstwhile friends. For where Boggs had seen the light and sought to atone (My name is Wade and I am an addict?), Stan was unenlightened and unapolegetic.

  Most of the tales being told were dubious. Personally I had no recollection that someone named Candace, in the nude and brandishing a fry pan, once pursued me down Thalia Street in the snow. Or that someone else whom Ed remembered as “Candy” (and how unlikely is that, the Candace/Candy nexus?) left gifts for me, which I ignored, and then suicide notes, which I ignored, and finally homicide notes. Even apart from the names, Ed’s account was implausible. Who ignores a fucking homicide note?

  “You may not have bothered to read it, Stanley,” Celia smirked. “You were awfully busy in those days.”

  In those days, maybe. If I was a sex addict (if anyone could be a sex addict) I sure went cold turkey on that cheerless night in Nina’s vestibule. I was through the cold sweats and still without prospects as springtime approached … and passed, then summer, and another fall.…

  I hardly knew where to look anymore. My social circle had been Nina’s. I no longer had close contacts in the theatre world. At work the only squaw was Smiley’s sister Janice, who did the bookcooking for him on Wednesdays and who in any case looked exactly like Smiley, only in a dress.

  There is always the bar scene, you point out, but I quickly discovered that the bars (now called pubs though we remain stateside) had fallen into the hands of new generations. The power transfer had taken place while I was doing my time on Euclid Street. Making my way around town now, I did feel not unlike a convict imprisoned during one era and released into another whose mores he is hard pressed to navigate.

  Nina and I were not reclusive. We got out, and I was conversant with the $4 beer and the $6 dessert. What I had not noticed (being a good boy) was the system of organizing young ladies into packs of three and four that cannot be broken down chemically. They arrive as a group and depart as a group, treating the notion of one man and one woman as a bizarre twist in the social experiment.

  I gave it a shot. I gave it a dozen shots. Sought after my goddess at Gods & Monsters, trolled for tutees at The Constant Scholar. To begin with, these places are all so mercilessly loud that your best lines are wasted. Vacant looks, man: either they didn’t get it, or they didn’t even fucking hear it. So the odds are maybe 10 to 1 your first night on the crawl, and then (along with your confidence and your cash reserves) they drop like a stone as the losing streak lengthens.

  “Want to help me cash a 50 to 1 wager?” I tried on a tall green-eyed creature, miraculously freestanding at the G & M bar. She was as rare in her isolation there as a bubinga tree in a copse of sugar maples. “I’ll split my winnings with you.”

  “What’s the bet? And what do we win?”

  I had won already, in a way: she heard and she spoke. “I bet you would let me buy you a drink.”

  “Bet who?”

  “Vegas. The odds-makers out in Vegas.”

  “Yeah right.”

  “I use an offshore bookie, in the Caymans, for my more serious wagers.”

  “Such as?” (Say this for Green Eyes, she was succinct and direct.)

  “Why don’t we get you that drink and I’ll tell you about it in detail?”

  “That’s all right, I’m good. But thanks.”

  And then, extracting a wedge of lime from the fruit caddy by the taps, she was gone, sliding back to rejoin some friends at the corner table. (Not an iceberg after all, merely a floe broken off from one.) When a moment later, no doubt having heard her whispered tale, they examined me in appalled and gigglous amazement (“That guy?”), I fully grasped that Barney’s son Alex, whose diapers I once changed, had a better shot at nailing that green-eyed amazon than I did.

  You keep plugging away, though—what choice, really?—and one evening, for a fleeting flickering instant, I could see myself cashing the 100 to 1 bet after all. A slim-hipped ball
oon-breasted brunette listened intently as I talked some politics (for there on the giant screen above the bar was poor Colin Powell, so painfully pinched and miserable, abandoned in Bush World) and, eyes bright with pleasure, issued a smile that lit her whole face like a winter campfire. I had said something right, something winning and witty—something that caused her to register my existence.

  No such luck. She had been engaged with a microscopic cell phone (hence the winning tilt of her head, the wrinkled brown hair waterfalling to one side), and her lovely smile was for someone else entirely, or for a voice tucked inside the tiny device. Back at her table, she kept it clapped to her ear, continuing her conversation even as she sat amongst friends. Before I could be offended on their behalves, I noticed they were dialing tiny phones of their own.

  You don’t believe me. At the very least, you think me disingenuous for pretending not to catch on sooner. But those telephones were incredibly small, they looked like cookies, man, and the bar was crammed, all bustle and jostle, one big scrum.

  Plus, frankly, I didn’t believe it either; did not believe my own eyes. Here was this exultation of card-carrying hotties, their credentials in order, each (I am sure and will so stipulate, site unseen but pun intended) branded with the requisite caudal flower, the blossom that tops the bottom, gathered at Gods & Monsters for conviviality and converse … and yet they were not conversing. Or not with one another.

  My mom would have had a cow. Mom was a real stickler for manners, she had rules, man, one of which was you never make or take a telephone call when you have “company.” And I agree with her, especially after the treatment I endured at Doc Selby’s office, during and after my root canal.

  Nina had insisted I take her cell phone to the dentist “just in case” (whatever that meant) so I had the damned thing in my shirt pocket through the two harrowing hours I spent tilted back “past horizontal” in the chair. When finally released from this impossible posture, I was bathed in such relief that I consented to pay on the spot. Or not pay, exactly, so much as permit an imprint of my credit card to be taken.

  Furthermore, I was so excited at the notion I soon might resume a life of chewing that for quite some time I stood patiently at the front desk as the receptionist juggled incoming calls. Indeed I felt some sympathy for her, harried by these intrusions into her peaceful cubicle.

  Then, as the heavy thrum of incipient pain began pushing through the merry tingle imposed by novocaine (and as I considered the situation more clearly, that there I was, in the flesh, so far as she knew to give her money, while she continued making and cancelling appointments for next month) I began to wonder if I should start flapping my arms and shouting. Waving greenbacks at her.

  I had time to imagine how Jack Nicholson might handle this classic Jack Nicholson situation. Reach over and grab her by the nose? Growl at her, “Listen up, pussycat, Jack Nicholson does not take this from anyone.” (But I thought you were Jack Nicholson …) Or maybe make the punishment fit the crime: this was a dental office, Jack might bite her, or at least chomp down through the land line to gain her attention.

  Then it struck me that here was a technology I possessed, this phone-in shit. I could do that. Doc Selby’s number was right there on her plexiglas panel. I dialed it up and was instantly patched through (by way of the sun, moon, and stars) to the dunce sitting right in front of me. I not only heard, I saw her singsong answer: “Dental office.”

  You know the rest. I “paid” my bill by MasterCard, a more or less continuous transaction at the conclusion of which she told me (apparently unaware of my voice sounding in the room, or my looming corporeal presence blocking her light) to be sure and have a nice day. Though later, when I could not be sure this unfathomable event had actually taken place, I considered the possibility that she did see me, yet hesitated to interrupt me while I was on the phone. To do so, after all, would be rude.

  Lisa’s note arrived, assigning me to bring the turkey. Outside there was dull sun on bare branches: sure enough, it was November again. Somehow a year had slipped by.

  I don’t know how Wade Boggs did that year, but Stanley Noseworthy drew the collar. No hits. Celia Firestone once said (in what I judged not merely a crude remark, but also an inadvertent unkind slap to several good friends of hers) “Stanley will fuck anything,” but Stanley fucked nothing that entire year. “Fornication? That was in another country, sir, and besides the wench is dead.”

  Jokingly, I asked Barney (“off the record”) what he knew about escort prostitution. Off the record means I enjoy attorney/asshole privilege and he can’t tell Chloe.

  “It’s torts, bud. Not tarts.”

  “Research,” I assured him, when he pitched me the hairy eyeball. “I need a character.”

  “You need a character who takes a credit card by any chance?”

  “There is that aspect. What is it, two hundred bucks a pop these days?”

  “Only if you insist on a Seven Sisters graduate, with a Master’s degree.”

  “Will you get off that horse.”

  “A word of caution, bud, just in case you decide to take the plunge? Watch out for the Brazilian women. Half of them are men. And for what it’s worth, they’re not Brazilian, either.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Why the hell did you ask me, if you thought I didn’t?”

  “It seemed possible you had a client. Or a case.”

  “And I have had, a few of them.”

  “Anyway, it would be cheating. Like Wade Boggs giving a pitcher money to groove a fastball. The hit wouldn’t count.”

  “Hopefully not. But at least Boggs wouldn’t get the clap.”

  When you think about it—life without sex—it does not seem likely to happen. How could it happen? But then, day by day, it just does.

  Barney assures me the “older swinging singles” are found in church groups. “You’d be surprised. Ham and bean suppers, bud, that’s where the action is. And it doesn’t cost money.”

  I’d be surprised all right, the day I list myself as a swinging single. Excuse me: an older swinging single. Ouch.

  I had only work to sustain me, insofar as I was sustained, and I do not mean the job of delivering furniture, I mean the job of shaping my fellow workers into good theatre.

  Allie would be my protagonist. Talking trash, exuding a non-stop confidence, Allie was their big chief, though at times his swagger seemed little more than a system for deflecting despair with gallows humor. “What’ll he do, shoot me?” was his fallback line, when tempting Smiley’s rage. He felt bulletproof; nothing in this setup could harm him.

  Periodically, almost ritually, Smiley fired him. Fired, Allie would chill a while up at the Res in Maine. Then he would drive back down in his rusted, heavily bandaged Dodge Dart and get himself rehired. He and Smiley did this little dance.

  Allie enlivened our days with a steady stream of brash jokes that went to their targets like—well, like arrows. (Sorry.) The others (each of whom he addressed as Tonto—sorry again) made up his appreciative audience, though they caught many of those arrows in the butt. I liked them all. I saw the easy humor, the camaraderie, and I saw an impressive philosophical comfort with the shameful injustice they endured. Sure, they cheated Smiley with aplomb, but I never caught any hint they would cheat one another. They were a tribe, and they were fighting a small war here.

  They really were a tribe, of course. They were Indians. (Or so they believed. No one had convinced them they were “Native Americans.”) The tricky part for me was not in the terminology, it was in a handful of unblinkable realities: they lived happily in considerable squalor, they were lax about hygiene, averaged about four teeth per head, and (perhaps the toughest hurdle) they did turn all income quite directly into drink. Firewater. Should I lie about this in pursuit of political correctness? Or could I relate such stereotypes and still manage to convey the distinguishing grace and humor by which they lived?

  I spent months delineating their personaliti
es, detailing their quirks. For example, Freddy talked about his mom all the time, and Allie about his girlfriends. Sammy loved to sing (very softly, “The Yellow Rose Of Texas”) until Allie (letting go of Tonto briefly) would bark out “Clam it, Cochise” and the music would cut off as suddenly as in musical chairs.

  Doughnuts? It was glazed for Sammy and powdered for Charlie, with merry hell to pay if you got the order wrong. I charted all of this. Charted characteristic phrasings, a rich trove there (“Motorfuckers,” Freddy would mutter whenever we got stuck in traffic) apart from Charlie, who rarely uttered a word yet boasted a wide vocabulary of facial tics that could be boffo on stage.

  I would invent situations (such as the cops pull them over and hassle them, or we go into the bar and someone’s got a rifle) then play around with their imagined responses. Before Smiley got around to firing me for the first time (he caught me taking notes and figured I must be compiling evidence against him) I had accumulated 40 pages of these five-fingered exercises. I had the guys down—their gestures, voices, and postures. All I lacked before I could set them roaming across the boards was a story, and I was closing in on that when Smiley canned me and I lost the thread.

  It was a bad time of year. Christmas alone, a lot of days running together, a lot of blank hours, blank pages. I wanted to see my unpaid vacation as an opportunity, a chance to pull the play together, but I had lost the thread and I lost heart. After a few weeks, I felt my characters beginning to slip away. Wherever my Cubans had gone (The Little Home for Lost Characters?) my Passamaquoddies were headed there too.

  Which left me kind of nowhere. The play I could set aside, wait and hope. But I did not have a lot else going on, to understate the case extremely. That was the year it began snowing on New Year’s Day and didn’t stop till spring. And as those ceaseless snows began piling up on the streets of Canterbury, I struggled against becoming an outright shut-in.