Authors: Jerry Stahl
I was too shocked to respond. Did he really think that? Just to do something until my face stopped burning, I announced that I would see to it Virginia got her own room, and find her a doctor. Before I closed the door Virginia was at it again, mewling insanely,
"He did this! I'm bleeding, Maudie . . . He did this to me!"
Who thinks, in moments of panic, about the import of their actions—or the actions of others?
Still in a daze, I ducked out to track down the hotel manager and the physician on duty. After much back-and-forthing, I finally corraled a nervous fellow in wire-rims, one Harry J. Boyle, assistant manager. He informed me, with visible distaste, that the hotel's regular physician, Dr. Beardslee, preferred not to "attend to improprieties." I went back upstairs, where one of the guests, a local entertainer named Mae Taub, summoned her own doctor, a fellow with the odd name of Olav Kaarboe. Minutes later, Kaarboe stepped in with a black bag and monocle. He observed Miss Rappe, tongue lolling out of her mouth as she soaked in the ice bath, and declared—with the full weight of medical knowledge behind him—that she'd "overindulged." Deep.
Before Doc Kaarboe departed, another fellow showed up, a stolid citizen who introduced himself as Glennon, the hotel dick. This Glennon, who had the demeanor of a cinder-block wall, took stock of the situation. He decided it was nothing too out of the ordinary, and—taking me aside by the door—asked if I'd mind if he "stopped in for a taste" before leaving. I told him I didn't mind at all, though I confess I found the request a little peculiar.
The second the doctor and the house detective were gone, Virginia started yelping again. By then I'd just about had it. "I can't have her screaming bloody murder in my suite!" I snapped at Fischbach. "Can't you keep her quiet? She's your friend."
"Oh, but she's much more than a friend to you," Fischbach sneered. Meanwhile, Maude, who'd been guzzling moonshine nonstop since arriving, had passed out at the head of the bathtub and was snoring like a stalled Ford.
"Look, Fred," I said, trying to stay calm. Once I started blathering I couldn't stop. "I don't know what you're getting at, but you know damn well all I did with that girl was try to help, to get her to stop convulsing. Everybody's seen how Virginia gets when she drinks. At Keystone she'd get crocked and rip her clothes off every other week. She looked fit to die when I saw her, so I tried to help. End of story. Now give me a hand while I carry her down to 1227.1 made arrangements with the management. She can stay until she feels better."
Fischbach listened, but didn't bother to reply. He just kept looking at me with that rotten sneer. We lifted Virginia's soaking cold body out of the tub. I wrapped it in my dressing gown and together we carried her down the hall and put her to bed. By this time, I don't mind telling you, I needed a drink. Who'm I kidding? By now I needed a lot of drinks.
Back in the party suite, people were carrying on like nothing had happened. Fully dressed now, I walked back in time to see Lowell Sherman doing his famous chicken walk between two obviously polluted showgirls. He was trying to "peck" their tops off with his gums—a trick at which, for whatever ungodly reason, he was adept—and soon enough he had the first girl naked down to her bra. Swinging her blouse from side to side in his mouth, an unsavory spectacle, the middle-aged Lowell then dropped it and began to chicken-peck at the giggling dancer's brassiere. "Get hot! Get hot!" someone yelled from the other side of the room, and I finally put my foot down.
"Keep it up, Lowell, and I'm going to stick you in a tub full of ice cubes with Virginia. I don't want any bootleg orgies on my nickel, okay?"
I hated feeling like the party poop, so I decided now was a good time to get some air. The truth was, my leg-burn was killing me, and I figured I could kill three birds with one stone—get out of the hotel, line up some morphine if I was lucky, and stash the car on the Frisco-to-Los Angeles ferry, the Harvard Steamer. You had to hit the steamer early to get a spot. And there was no way I could drive back with that kind of pain in my clutch leg. Ever the optimist, I figured the whole mess with Virginia would blow over by the time I ambled back. I could not have been more wrong if I'd bet the farm on the Kaiser.
I got back to the hotel after dark. Riding up the elevator, I could hear the screams before the car even got to 12. When the doors opened, I leaped out and ran down the fleur-de-lis-carpeted hall. I remember the fleur-de-lis 'cause Daddy owned a tie, his only one, of the same pattern. He used to strangle me with it.
I clambered straight into 1227. Virginia's room. Banged through the door just as a silver-haired gent wielding a syringe was leaning over the patient. He dabbed a cotton ball to her exposed buttock—was I the only one who saw bite marks?— then plunged the morphine home. Don't ask how I knew it was morphine. Hopheads are funny that way. Like piggies snuffling truffles in the mud.
"Dr. Beardslee," the silver fox announced, like I ought to recognize the name. He shook my hand after he unscrewed the syringe and packed it back in his bag. Apparently, the St. Francis physician had finally seen fit to make an appearance. "Roscoe Arbuckle," I said, "glad you could take a peek at her." The doctor gave me an odd look, then asked, in the most somber tone imaginable, "What happened to this child?"
"Child?"
I wanted to say.
"She's had more bones buried inside her than Forest Lawn!"
But instead I inquired politely, "What do you mean?"
Before our chat could progress further, Maude Delmont, wide awake now and dressed in what to her demented way of thinking must have passed for schoolmarm garb, grabbed the doctor's arm and led him urgently towards the door.
"I'll tell you what happened!" she cried, casting a backward glance in my direction. "I'll tell you
exactly
what happened."
For an instant I had the jitters, then caught myself and almost laughed. What can she possibly say that would put me in Dutch? Why would she bother? Sure, Maude was a bad bag of applesauce, but really, why would she do anything to me?
Roscoe,
I thought a second later,
don't be a feeb.
For a price, Maude would do anything to anybody. Then again, I
was
paying for her room—and Virginia's. Digs weren't cheap at the St. Francis. And let's not even talk about the five bathtubs of antifreeze Maude guzzled in the course of her stay. I could not imagine she'd want to annoy me and risk getting stuck with the bill. Why look a gift Clydesdale in the mouth? I figured it was the pain in my acid-burned thigh, or the painkillers I'd just bought to kill it, that made my thinking so cloudy.
By now my whole leg was throbbing. I felt like a bear dragging around the trap he stepped in. So I gulped more painkillers, then limped back to the party. I was thirsty for a nightcap. But what I really wanted was to forget all about the alarming Bambina Maude Delmont and the hapless Virginia Rappe. It was my party, wasn't it? Those two were just the flies who buzzed in and gunked up the ointment.
The next morning, a Tuesday, we were slated to check out and head south, back to work. I showered and stepped into the hall in time to see Dr. Beardslee again, flat-footing his way down to Virginia's room. Better him than me was how I figured it. Like I say, I was paying for her room—as well as the lovely Maude Delmont's—and the way those two drank that was no small stack of cabbage. They might as well have run a hose from the still straight to Maudie's tonsils. On the elevator going down, I noticed a pleasant-looking lady, a nurse, giving me the onceover.
"Aren't you . . . Roscoe Arbuckle?"
"Well," I said, "I'd hate to look like this and
not
be Roscoe Arbuckle."
She managed a polite chuckle, started to talk, then stopped, then started back in again. I think the phrase is "cute as a button." "You know, Mr. Arbuckle, I'm a nurse. My name's Meg Jameson, and I have to tell you, this Virginia Rappe, she's . . . she's not well."
"You're telling me," I said.
She wanted to know if I'd noticed any symptoms—itching, burning, redness . . . I realized where she was going—by now we were stopped on seven—and asked her straight out, "You mean she's got the clap?"
"Gonorrhea," she whispered, aiming her eyes at the little lit-up numbers over the door. "Plus she was bleeding. Not fresh blood, though. Like she had some wound that opened up. If I were you I'd get . . . looked over."
I could tell this was as awkward for her as it was for me, so I just held up my hand for her to stop. "Lady . . . I mean Nurse . . . you got it all wrong. I never touched that girl. She collapsed after too much firewater and I tried to help her."
Nurse Jameson squinted at me. "But Miss Delmont, she's saying you . . . " She straightened her uniform and stared down at her white shoes. "She's saying things about you."
"Maude Delmont will say anything about anybody," I told her, trying to keep it pleasant. Two respectable people having a chat. "That's how she makes her living."
The nurse and I parted with a handshake in the lobby. But just to be safe, I called Dr. Beardslee back. He said the patient was doing fine. He'd had to catheterize her, as she'd had some kind of bladder problem and hadn't relieved herself in over 24 hours. "Near as I could tell," he said, "that could be why she had the stomach pain."
"No other complications, then?"
I didn't want to ask about the gonorrhea. Then
he'd
think I was worried about pissing razor blades.
"Nothing to fret about, Mr. Arbuckle."
I left a $50 bill with the doc's name in an envelope at the desk, another 50 for Nurse Jameson, and set off to find Fred and Lowell for the ride to the ferry. The more time I spent in San Francisco, the less I wanted to spend. Everything was painful, starting with my leg, and I had the insane notion that if I just got back to Los Angeles, everything would be better. Or maybe I just wanted to panic in familiar surroundings.
My mind still hadn't wrapped itself around the unfolding drama. But my ass was already sweating.
Los Angeles Bounce
By Wednesday I'm back at the studio, working. Glad to jump in with both of my size 12 quadruple D's.
Freight Prepaid,
our last gem, was in need of editing. And I had some story ideas I wanted to sketch out for our next one,
The Melancholy Spirit.
How's this sound? There's a spirit named Ek that comes down and takes possession of a mild-mannered professor. Whenever Professor Milquetoast's in the grip of Ek, he gets drunk and goes wild. Doing all kinds of stuff the professor wouldn't do. Pretty philosophical, huh? Was Ek making the professor into something he wasn't—or was the spirit just showing the professor for who he was?
I met a real nice girl named Doris Deane on the ferry home. Since Minta—minus a couple of hooch-fueled smooches with Alice Lake—I hadn't really been too involved with the fair sex. But something about this Doris got me. I even mentioned her to Schenck, on Thursday, when we met to catch up on production. "Just make sure she doesn't meet Adolph Zukor" was all Joe had to say. "Right now you're on his disloyal employees list."
In all the hubbub with Virginia, I forgot all about Paramount Week. "He's still eatin' bugs over that, huh?"
Schenck bobbed his head up and down. "Oh yeah, the boss doesn't forget stuff like that." Then we got on the subject of the party up north, and when I told him that Fischbach, Maude, and Virginia had showed up, Joe started playing with his tie. He did that when he was nervous. "I thought I saw Fischbach talking to Zukor at the Formosa. Last week."
Schenck did not have to say why that would seem odd. How often does the King of England slop rashers and mash with a chimney sweep? But I didn't give it much thought. "Maude and Virginia," Schenck went on, in that wrong way of talking he had. "Those two dames . . ."
When I told him, "Yeah, and Fischbach found the bootlegger, so they were all pretty well oiled," Schenck got that spooked expression again. Did everything but strangle himself with his tie. For a sec I misted up thinking about Daddy.
"Roscoe," Schenck said, bringing me back. "I know Fischbach. Fred is not the go-get-the-bootlegger type."
"Uh-oh" was all that came out of my mouth.
That Thursday night I got a weird call. Somebody from a place called Wakefield Sanitarium, in San Francisco. A shaky-sounding guy who called himself Dr. Rumwell asked if I knew a certain Virginia Rappe. At first I thought it was Buster. "Dr. Rumwell" was his style. He'd once woken me up pretending to be Chief Wannaspankee, asking for a donation for the Fat Little Navajo Fund.
I didn't recognize Buster's voice, but for all I knew he could have hauled some rummy off a bar stool to call me. When I said, "Sure, I know Virginia, who doesn't?" the shaky guy kind of cleared his throat and said, " Are you the father?" "This isn't Buster, is it?" I asked. But the way Dr. Rumwell replied, gathering all his shaky dignity together to inform me, "I assure you, sir, there are no Busters in my family!" made me think the call was legit. It sounded so much like something Keaton would say I just knew it wasn't him.
"So, are you the father?" Rumwell repeated nervously.
I told him I may be no spring chicken, but I'm not
that
old. "I think I'd know if I had a daughter 10 years younger than me. I'd be in
Ripley's Believe It or Not."
I figured 10 years was just about what I had on young Virginia.
I could hear the doctor not saying anything for a second of two. Then he sputtered an anxious "Thank you, sir" and hung up.
On Friday, I told Buster about the call, and he gave me a big fake slap across the face. "Wakefield's an abortion clinic. Rumwell wasn't asking if you were Virginia's father, numbnuts. He was asking if you're the spud who made her a mother."
When
that
sank in—us big lovable galoots can be naive—all I could do was shake my head. I told Buster about Maude Delmont, and we both figured maybe she was trying to shake me down on a paternity suit. Buster stroked his chin and made that deathbed-serious face of his, and we both burst out laughing.