The Autograph Hound Page 7

  Johnny looks the same as ever—thin and handsome. He’s the richest man on TV, and the most famous. Johnny’s whispering, saving himself for the show. A man in a blue suit with a stopwatch around his neck bends over to listen. I think he’s the producer. Other men stand behind the producer, but no one else moves close to hear Johnny. You can tell when Johnny means something, even if you can’t hear him. His hands move up and down very quick. Just seeing him makes you want to laugh. I have to bite my lip to keep quiet.

  The producer acts like Garcia at a staff meeting. Everybody understands English, he doesn’t have to shout. Johnny pulls him back. The producer apologizes to him. He listens. Finally, Johnny’s hands stop moving. Manuel comes forward and picks up his painting where he left off. The producer turns to the others. “Johnny wants us at tomorrow’s meeting circa eleven.”

  I’d never have known Joe and Johnny needed makeup. Their faces are their trademarks, and people like them just as they are. Frieda dabs white stuff on Joe’s most famous feature—the lines on his forehead which come from looking for pay dirt and red dogs. The smiling lines around his mouth are gone—you’d never believe he was ever at a victory party. Manuel’s putting brown lotion around Johnny’s chin and mouth. When my spots wouldn’t go away, Mom gave me this lotion to put on my face. She said it was skin colored, but everybody at school could see.

  “Voilà,” says Manuel.

  “Voilà,” says Frieda.

  I can see my face in the mirror if I peek out from behind the door. Johnny and Joe look perfect. Their faces are smooth as satin. There are no bumps or lines or circles under their eyes. You can’t see black hairs on their chin. They could’ve stepped off a tropical island. Somehow, when it’s all over, the tan makeup makes them look natural.

  “See you on the air, Joe.”

  Joe cocks his finger like a gun. “Not if I see you first.”

  Johnny gets up. I push against the wall. I don’t want them to see me, especially after what I’ve overheard.

  Once they’ve left, Frieda shuts the door. She sees me.

  “You two did a wonderful job,” I say. “You’re artists in your own right.”

  She’s flattered. She puts her hands over her mouth as if I’d said she was Queen for a Day. But Manuel doesn’t know how to take a compliment. I hear the same mierda from him that Garcia uses at me. I run out before he’s finished the sentence.

  Everywhere I turn there’s a bad-mouth Puerto Rican.

  Gloria has saved a seat in the first row. I read her my quotes.

  “Is that all they said?”

  “You had to be there.”

  “I’ve never been in a TV studio,” says Gloria.

  “Your network debut.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The camera watches us at the beginning and the end of the program. If you whistle, if you have something to catch its attention—they show you coast to coast.”

  “Should I keep my veil up or down?”

  “Let the camera get a good look at you.”

  She fusses with her hat. “Be honest, Benny, which way do you like best?”

  “Keep it down.”

  Gloria powders her nose. “Will it see us from different angles?”

  “The angles are for Johnny.”

  “I can’t wait to see him.”

  “He looks very good tonight.”

  “Really?” says Gloria. “I hope he does the advertisements.”

  “He’s the best.”

  “Where is he?” says Gloria. “It’s show time, and I don’t see him.”

  “You’re looking at the stage. It’s television, look up at the screens.”

  Gloria counts seven large TVs around the studio.

  “Right now, all they have is that peacock. Soon, Johnny will be on all seven.”

  Gloria keeps watching the screens. She straightens her hair.

  “Talk to me, Benny.”

  “What’ve I been doing?”

  “You talk. I’ll watch for when we’re on.”

  “In the days of the old Today show, I used to get up early and come down here. They let us stand outside the window then, and at 7:24, just after Jack Lescoulie finished the news roundup, one camera took a picture of the crowd waving, or, in the winter, blowing hot-air hellos. People from all over the world with signs and funny sayings. I’m telling you the competition was rough. Once, when I hadn’t written Mom for a while, I sent her a card and told her to watch the Today show. I gave her the time. She could see for herself that I was okay. Sure enough, at 7:24, there I was waving at her in Asbury Park. Mom wrote me and said she’d asked in a few of her new friends from Home-with-a-Heart. They spotted me and my sign right off.

  VICTOR MATURE

  SAYS ‘HI MOM’

  “The camera stayed on me at least fifty seconds, wondering if I was really Victor Mature—actually, he’s taller. If I’d have written ‘Benny Walsh,’ that could’ve been anybody. There’s only one Victor Mature.”

  “Here he is,” says Gloria, pointing to the screen.

  “Victor?”

  “Here’s Johnny.”

  At the first commercial, Gloria leans over and squeezes my arm. “It’s great.”

  “If you weren’t here, if they weren’t showing film clips from the League Championship, I’d be more professional. I’d be out in the alley getting a good spot by the stage door.”

  “You’d miss the fun.”

  “All you see on the TV screen is heads and shoulders.”

  “It’s more exciting than that,” says Gloria.

  “In the alley, when the stars come out, you see all there is to see.”

  “Maybe there are things the public shouldn’t know.”

  “You feel their clothes, smell their perfume, look at their jewelry, hear the little things that microphones can’t pick up.”

  “They have close-ups in TV, Benny.”

  “It doesn’t bring you close enough.”

  “What’s happening?” says Gloria.

  “Oakland Raiders. The play-off. Twenty-seven to twenty-three.”

  The crowd’s cheering louder than I’ve ever heard.

  Gloria says, “A penny for your thoughts.”

  “Third and five with two minutes to play.” She doesn’t know football. This is no time for chatter.

  Joe’s dropping back. He’s in the pocket. He’s got time. He hits me with a hard spiral. The crowd’s screaming my union number—1-2-6-0. DON’T GO! DON’T GO!

  In the huddle, Joe says, Nice catch. I say, Nice pass.

  The guard doesn’t treat people as nice as Johnny and Joe do. He tears my coat showing me to the exit. Gloria’s waiting.

  “You shouldn’t have walked up there without permission.”

  “They’re good guys. I got their autographs. Didn’t you see?”

  “Everybody saw. It was on all seven screens.”

  “For sure?”

  “Mr. TV Star …”

  “I don’t remember …”

  “What guts. You were prime time.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You could’ve been on the team, the way you dodged those cameramen. Everybody around me wanted to know your name.”

  “No kidding.”

  “You should’ve seen the look on their faces when you yelled ‘We’re number one.’”

  “My stomach feels fuzzy.”

  “Let’s look at the travel shops. That’ll calm you.”

  We walk past the Golden Man at Rockefeller Plaza, past the Bronze Man holding up the world at 50th Street and Fifth. Gloria stops to look at his muscles. The man’s left foot’s slipping off the platform. I get nervous standing under such a big weight. This is New York, people are always dropping things.

  “The ‘Go Greece’ window at Olympic last month was beautiful,” says Gloria. “Water bluer than Lake George. Beaches pure white.”

  “The beaches were empty, right?”

  “I rush home to catch their ad on the
TV,” Gloria says. “The Greek music. The dancing. It puts you at ease, gives you a taste of what’s in store.”

  We walk past a beautiful poster of Miami Beach. I can’t take my eyes off it. Neither can Gloria. A girl in a pink bikini’s running hand in hand down a beach with a man as tanned as she is. Her hair’s blond and floats behind her like a cloud. He’s got a washboard chest. They kick up water. Underneath, the poster says:

  YOU ONLY GET ONE CRACK AT LIFE.

  LIVE IT UP.

  “That’s my motto,” Gloria says. “When I’ve saved enough money, I’m going to have some of these guaranteed good things.”

  An ambulance wahoos down the street. “Fucking noise!”

  “Take your hands off your ears, Benny. It’s gone.”

  “I hate those ambulances. They don’t show respect. It’s Fifth Avenue.”

  “My father drove an ambulance.”

  “I’m sorry, Gloria. I still hate them.”

  “That driver had it on steady wail. A grade-A driver would’ve used the ‘whooper.’ It costs a hundred twenty-five dollars extra, but it’s not as scary.”

  “You said your father was polite. Have you seen how these ambulances scream around the city—pushing people off the road, running traffic lights, making noise?”

  “In Lake George it was different. He called it ‘The Silver Savior.’ We had some good times, Benny. I can still see us driving through the snow-cleared road to Old Forge. ‘The Savior’—Omaha orange and silver—sliding around the icy curves, spinning a powdery trail behind us. Dad sat in the front seat wearing his Red Cross cap, one hand on the wheel, the other on the intercom talking to me in the back, lying on the multilevel rolling litter. He’d run the siren all the way to Old Forge and back.

  “It sounds pretty dumb to me.”

  “You wouldn’t talk that way if you knew Pop. We’d go over to Tulley’s after the ride and sit by the fire. He’d let me sip from his Utica Club. ‘Gloria,’ he’d say. ‘You deserve the best.’”

  “Ambulance drivers were the ones afraid to kill Jerry in the war. My mother told me. She volunteered. They wouldn’t let her fight, though. She had to take care of me.”

  “My father taught me a lot of things to help me in life. Ambulance drivers have to know how to fix fractures, control bleeding, make a cardiac arrest.”

  “What good does it do you?”

  “An ambulance driver’s trained to recognize death. One. The luster of the eye. Two. The color of the tongue—ashy blue. Three. The earlobe—cold and blue. Four. Body stiff—total lack of response.”

  “I take back what I said about your old man.”

  “Believe me, Benny, Pop had a way about him. He knew his business.”

  By Bergdorf Goodman, Gloria takes my arm. She does it like Kay Thompson in Funny Face. I feel very Fred Astaire.

  “Sing me your song, Gloria.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “I wasn’t being fresh.”

  She keeps walking. Finally, she says, “I was just thinking … I brought you luck.”

  “Let’s eat. I’m hungry.”

  “You mean to celebrate?”

  “Mondays, H and H has a meatloaf platter.”

  Sypher holds Gloria’s chair. She thanks him. He pushes the yellow seat in with his knee. “See that, Walsh? I have a way with a chair. They wanted to promote me to captain. I said no dice. Nobody’s puttin’ no stuffed shirt on old Louis the Lion-Hearted.”

  Gloria picked the fish cakes. She takes her silverware off the tray. “Let me do that!” Sypher reaches over, grinning, and puts Gloria’s plate in front of her. He pulls a paper napkin out of the black holder and flicks it in the air. It unfolds like a flag. He lays it on her lap. “All these years thinkin’ Walsh here was acey-deucey, and now he turns up with a lovely tit-bit, if you’ll pardon my French. It’s a great end to a great day.” He squeezes Gloria’s arm. “Nice,” he says. “Very nice.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Sypher.”

  “I’m number two. We try harder.”

  Gloria laughs. “Benny signed up Johnny Carson and Joe Namath on TV tonight. It was exciting.”

  “The maiden voyage is always a thrill. Right, Walsh?”

  “I don’t remember …”

  “He’s teaching me. Before Benny, I never had a plan. He’s showing me the ins and outs.”

  “I go for quantity, not quality. Two bucks a head, fifteen for a famous, twenty for an international. The money’s in the turnover.”

  “Benny just ran up and made them sign.”

  “While he was getting two household names, I got fifteen. This arty-farty stuff don’t pay the rent.”

  “Pass the salt,” says Gloria.

  I hand it to her. Sypher takes it back and gives her the salt and pepper together. “Waldorf style,” he says. “You get better service …”

  “It’s a nice place, Benny,” says Gloria.

  “The twenty-five-cent minimum keeps the wineheads out,” says Sypher. “You can sit down and have a good conversation, right Walsh?”

  “Right.”

  “I’d like to make a toast,” says Sypher.

  We raise our glasses. Sypher clinks ours with his. “To Louis Newbold Sypher—who just struck it rich!”

  “Really?” says Gloria.

  Sypher gulps down his tomato juice. “Remember Delia, Benny? The frump with the hump. This afternoon I’m walkin’ past The Homestead and I see her. ‘What’s happenin’, Delia?’ She’s slow, but she knows when they’re around. She shows me her latest. ‘Some old fuck,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want him, but he was the only one I could catch.’ I look at the paper and right away I iron-clad my face. I show nothin’. I whip out two of my regulars—Soupy Sales and Mary Tyler Moore. Delia’s blabbin’ about the old days when she had all of ’em. I offer to swap. She don’t think twice. I keep my hard edge. She don’t suspect a thing. I walk down the street with a piece of paper as good as a C-note. Igor Eat-Your-Heart-Out Stravinsky.”

  “That wasn’t very nice,” says Gloria.

  “It’s a winner take all, sweet one.”

  “You got Igor Stravinsky and you sold him?”

  “Cash on the line, Benny. I don’t carry no wallet. I keep the big bucks in my money clip. Fives and ones—crisp as crackers. All night I been spittin’ change like John D. Rockefeller. No noise in my pockets. Nothin’ weighin’ me down. You see, friends, the secret’s to work hard and play hard. Tonight, I’ll get me a few Italian silk ties. Maybe I’ll stroll over and cut a rug at the Flamingo. Buy a yard of tickets. All those good-lookers in black velvet dresses givin’ you the nut rubs, strokin’ the back of your neck after a hard day’s work. That’s what it’s all about. The joy de vive.”

  “Could I have a cup of coffee, Benny?”

  “I’ll get it,” says Sypher.

  “Gloria’s with me.”

  “Save your money,” says Sypher, slapping me on the shoulder. “You’ll need it.” When he comes back with the coffee, he says, “Myself, I stay anonymous. I’m slippery like a shadow. I don’t like hearing about any of us getting on the air.”

  “You’re the one who got written up in The New York Times, saying all those dumb things about it being a hobby. It sounded like you had the big collection.”

  “Just coverin’ my tracks, Benny-boy. I don’t want people knowing how much I make. Autographs are a good gig. If the wrong people found out, I could be in a higher tax bracket.”

  “I’m glad Benny doesn’t do it for the money,” says Gloria. “He’s interested in other things.”

  “Pretty soon, he’ll have to start eating his profits.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You do, don’t you, Benny?”

  “All the time yapping, Sypher. Yap, yap, yap.”

  “Delia told me. News travels fast. It’s up and down in this business.”

  “What’s he talking about, Benny?”

  “Would you like another cup of coffee?”


  “He was fired, sweet chops. Tin-canned.”

  Gloria stares at me. “Do they know about your collection?”

  “I’ve got till the end of the week. Chef’s trying to pull strings.”

  A busboy wheels his cart near us. He scrapes Gloria’s plate into a can. He uses a brush, but the food sticks on his hands. His blue jeans are stained with other people’s leavings. He takes a brown rag out of his back pocket and wipes the yellow tabletop. “We’re not finished,” says Sypher. The busboy’s moving too fast to hear. He lifts up Sypher’s plate and makes a few damp circles on the Formica. The bandanna around his head doesn’t stop the sweat. His eyes flutter with the salt sting. A few tables away, four old ladies are calling for him to hurry. One of them waves her cane. He puts his weight behind the cart and shoves it toward their table. “It’s a pigpen here, mister. Food’s getting cold. You see us waving?”

  Our spoons ping against the china cups. Everybody’s staring at the whirlpool in their coffee. Sypher looks up. “You can always work here.”

  “Maybe somebody’ll see you on TV,” says Gloria. “You never know what can happen.”

  “One in a million,” says Sypher.

  “Julius La Rosa got a record contract after the Arthur Godfrey Show. Steve and Eydie were so good with Steve Allen that the public kept asking for them. The rest’s show-biz history.”

  “They had voices, Benny,” says Louis.

  “All Dr. Brothers had was the answers to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. I know as much about autographs as she did about boxing. Now she’s an announcer.”

  “Can’t you help him, Mr. Sypher?”

  “The Waldorf’s my turf.”

  “Benny, I have some friends who might …”

  “Don’t get me wrong, honey. Sypher’s a man who likes competition. This body of mine’s the product of free enterprise. I wouldn’t want to be the only one around … I’d get lazy. My body’d go soft. It feels good bein’ hungry, right, sweet Gloria?”

  “Let’s go, Benny.”

  “Think of it this way, Walsh. The Homestead’s been around a long time … All that cowboy stuff’s kinda corny … This may be your lucky break.”