Authors: Jerry Stahl
I landed on a pine-top piano bench that ended the evening as firewood, but I didn't feel a thing. Even Goody was laughing, though I could see Meyers stewing on his unicycle, spinning around in tight, angry little circles just offstage.
I won the five dollars. As promised, I gave Pansy two. She gave me a smooch when we got back to the hotel, and my heart felt like a burst pumpkin. It was all I could do to breathe. She waved goodbye with her pinky, the way fast girls did at that time, and scampered off toward the bar while I slunk to my cubbyhole.
Later that night, emboldened by a half-full short dog of rye I found in the Men's latrine, I left the broom closet and went searching for Pansy in the lobby. I saw her in a dark corner, sitting on a man's lap. The man looked distinguished. Even his lap looked distinguished. I was 13, and not distinguished at all. I started back for my closet, hoping she hadn't seen me, but Pansy called me over. When I'd skulked across the lobby to their couch, she introduced the distinguished gent as Mr. Grauman. "Of the Grauman theater chain."
I'd never crossed paths with an important man before, and when Mr. Grauman took my hand, I didn't know whether to shake or just let him hold it. But Mr. Grauman grinned. "Heard about your stunts, son. Pretty fast on your feet for a husky fella. You and I may be doing business someday."
You hear that, Daddy}
I thought to myself, then wondered if I'd said it aloud, and looked at Mr. Grauman. But he was still smiling—like any man would with Pansy on his lap. When she pecked his distinguished forehead, Grauman winked at me. "I'm not kidding, son. I'll be watching out for you." Between Grauman's wink and Pansy's pecking, I felt like I was having my heart broken and my hope lifted all at the same time. The combination made me dizzy. Though it may have been the rye I found in the bathroom. The inside of my head felt stuffed with dead little animals.
Spilled Meat and Chihuahua Fear
Events after this take on a speedy and peculiar turn. I'm driving a meat wagon for Bill, picking up prime steaks and cutlets, when a giggly girl with a chihuahua in her purse hops out of a doorway onto the seat. I didn't even see her!
The rule was no riders. Especially female riders. (Pansy told me the last meat-boy had a habit of trading ground round for a round on the ground. I had no idea what this meant, so she explained that he gave girls free meat if they were nice to him. I often felt that she was entertaining me at her expense, but how could I mind?) Only it wasn't the female that got me into trouble. It was her pipsqueak pup.
Right away, the horses got skittish at the smell of dog. Rounding the corner in front of the hotel, they bolted. The cart tipped over and skidded, sending the meat spilling into the gutter. Giggling wildly, the girl jumped out, holding her Mexican hairless to her breast like a baby. She scampered off at the exact moment Bill came tearing out to see what the ruckus was. Plenty of hotel guests saw the accident, and those who didn't heard progressively inflated versions of it. (In one I was riding bareback, throwing chunks of prime rib at a pack of lady bandits.) Those ignorant few who ordered steak at dinner found themselves picking grit out of their T-bones.
I tried to tell Booker that I didn't even know the girl. She was some stranger who jumped me out of nowhere. "Sounds like my first wife," he said, with surprising good humor, considering. As we stooped to scoop up the strewn chops and flank steaks, I thought I was off the hook until my employer added, almost as afterthought, "I'm not accusing you, Roscoe. I'm firing you."
Now I'm no Hindu, but this was the second time I'd been blamed for doing something with a woman that I didn't really do. The first, of course, was when Daddy blamed me for breaking Mom's "vageena." (That's how he pronounced it, if that tells you anything:
"vageena"
like
"Pasadena")
If a swami'd walked up and told me that I'd been a tight girdle in a past life, and
that's
why women in this one kept making me miserable, I would not have called him crazy. I would not have said anything but "Thank you, O Mahubba Bubba. Where do I sign up for my monk-suit?" Because that's exactly how it felt—like I'd done something I didn't know I did, and now I was being punished for it.
Still, this being
my
story, bad always leads to good—before it leads to more bad. I walked straight from the hotel to the Empire Theater. The manager, a seedy Brit named Thurwell who affected a monocle, saw the ratty suitcase in my hand and immediately made me an offer. "I'll give you the Friday night slot and a fin, but if you want to kip here, you gotta pluck gum off the seats and scrub floors."
Deal!
Top Billing
The night after I moved my worldly goods to the Empire dressing room, I pulled a Woolsey. I was shining the spittoons when the unicyclist—my old friend Meyers, King of the Unicycle—staggered into the lobby clutching a torn-out newspaper page, tears streaming down his hatchet face. "Calamity Jane died," he wailed, and turned around and staggered out again. The manager ran after him, then ran back in the theater, literally pulling his hair, and started screaming that his opening act was too distraught to perform. "The idiot wrote letters to that cowgirl. He thought Calamity Jane was gonna jump off her Palomino and hop on his uni."
Well, sure I felt bad, but when you're broke you always look for an angle, so I told Thurwell I could fill in. At first the manager said no. "Opening act they want acrobats. Ring-spinners. The unicycle act was the best I could do—and now he's murphied out on me." Then I said I could sing, and Thurwell said he'd think it over. And that's how, much to the consternation of the other acts, "Roscoe Arbuckle, Boy Singer of Illustrated Songs" ended up on the marquee.
I'd waltzed in and pulled a Woolsey—stolen top billing from more established acts. And I'd have to pay.
As an illustrated singer, I offered up popular songs against a screen on which happy scenes and lyrics were projected. My job was to get the audience to sing along. Of course, I didn't mention that I had never actually experienced such happy and romantic scenes myself. Never frolicked with my sweetheart in a wooded glade. Never been the boy in the straw boater on the porch swing beside his special girl. Never snuggled close to Sally Cinnamon on a moonlit hayride. But, thanks to Pansy, I had memorized five songs which could be sung while tableaus depicting a kind of happiness and romance I'd never known flickered behind me.
All I had to do was remember the lyrics. A task made harder, on the occasion of my first marquee appearance, by the stagehands' savage scenery-banging—punctuated by the overloud farts and whinnies of my fellow performers from the wings.
Lesson learned. Soon enough, I learned something else. After I'd been opening for a couple of weeks, ladies began to visit me backstage. Ladies my mother's age. I'd tell them how Mama died and they'd bring me picnic baskets stuffed with poundcake and beef buns. They'd tap the sofa for me to sit beside them and then talk to me about church. They'd get dewy-eyed, pull me close to their fragrant bosoms, and tell me how much they'd like to have me as their own son. Sometimes one would put her tongue in my ear.
Girls from the troupe would come giggling into my tiny room after these ladies left. Irene, the box-jumper in a magic act, told me that if I'd "give 'em a good bomp," these Backstage Betties would give me a lot more than supper and a cuddle. When I mentioned this to Thurwell before a Saturday matinee, he worked his lips up and down and spat tobacco juice into the spittoon I'd just polished. "All actresses are snatch-peddlers, kid. Don't listen to 'em."
I never went any farther than cuddling. Not because I thought that was bad, but because I still didn't know there was any farther to go. The most I received from one of these backstage ladies was a whole meatloaf and a brush-and-comb set monogrammed with the initials LLR. I'd never seen a monogram before. The letters stood for Lucky Little Roscoe, she told me. And I believed her.
A Big Thirteen
I was as close to happy as you can get if you're a homeless pre-pube the size of a polar bear. Every day I'd learn a little bit more about juggling, or a new dance step, or a line of patter from one of the Hungarian, Italian, or German dialect comics. I even met celebrities.
Cy Young worked the Empire on a swing through the West. He demonstrated the pitches he used to beat the Pirates twice and help win the first World Series for Boston. The second part of his presentation focused on physical hygiene, and at one point I was supposed to come onstage and ask him how I could get to be as strong as him. The gag was, Cy tells me I should get more exercise and cut out sweets, and I pretend to faint.
That same night I nearly fainted for real. I was setting out a chair for my legs before going to sleep—I'd gotten used to catnapping sitting up between shows, and had taken to spending my night that way—when I heard a voice that made my milk curdle. I knew before the door swung open.
"Hey, fat-ass?"
"Daddy?"
"Shut up and pack. I'm taking you away from these people. It's a good thing I saw your name on that marquee poster, or we might never have found you."
I felt like a runaway slave tracked down and dragged back to the old plantation. Except the plantation was a dirt farm outside Santa Clara, and the massah was a mean drunk who cursed the day I tore his wife's innards coming hiney-first into Kansas. I couldn't meet anyone's eyes as Daddy led me out. The whole troupe ran up to watch my kidnapping, but nobody could muster the courage to say a word about it. Daddy's glare
dared
anybody to step in his path and challenge his authority over his wayward heifer. I kept my eyes on the ground in front of me, a habit I'd acquired as a child in the face of Daddy's rage.
Turns out Daddy had remarried. Once he got me to his ragged farmhouse, he pinched my neck until I raised my eyes from the earth long enough to see his mealy-mouthed new wife and called her "Mother." I was used to quick changes, but not like this. I'd gone from performing and sleeping on theater chairs, surrounded by show folk, to sharing a moldy bed with a gang of rangy "brothers." They were athletic and good-looking and hated me from the gitgo. Or did, until the next week, when I won a county fair pie-eating contest and came home with a blue face and a trophy. The following Saturday I consumed 43 hot dogs in 10 minutes, a local record. After these triumphs my perfect stepbrothers began to brag about me. I had my sport, and I was a champion. The sport just happened to involve shoving a week's worth of food down my throat in five minutes.
Beyond the glory of pie-eating, farm work was mostly just trudging around in the mud digging up boulders. Miserable as it was, it was still better than going to school. Onstage I could charm an audience of strangers twice my age, but in the classroom I got nothing but scorn. So Daddy and I made a deal—without ever saying that's what it was. In return for me staying home (the name of this play is
Unpaid Day Laborer)
Daddy didn't belt me when I snuck off to San Jose to moonlight as a singing waiter at the Pabst Beer Cafe. At the Pabst I served all the beer I couldn't drink, and warbled for the clientele till the wee hours.
One night Sid Grauman, whom I'd met with Pansy, ambled into the cafe for a drink with
his
Daddy, David. Grauman Senior heard me sing and asked if I wanted a job at the Unique Theater in San Jose. "You got connections?" I asked, playing the rube. Like I didn't know who Dave Grauman was! But the old character played it straight. "I don't need connections, Slim. I own the joint."
Just like that I was back where I swore I never wanted to be again—in the Illustrated Song biz—and d-double e-lighted to be there. But this didn't mean I was free from Daddy's business. He let me spend my evenings working in the theater as long as I spent the rest of the night working for him—at his new hash house.
Seeing the cash that floated around the Pabst, the old man decided the real money was in all-night eateries and sold the farm. When he wasn't ranting about how Orville Wright gypped him of his biplane plans, or the time Hank Ford—it was always, for some reason, Hank—drunked him up on rotgut and pinched his idea for the assembly line, Daddy liked to lecture his stepsons about Where the Real Money Was. Not that he ever found it.
Much as I grew to hate the work, slinging hash to hacks and insomniacs in Daddy's dive did not make me nostalgic for agriculture. Sometimes a theatrical company would troop in after their last show and I'd pretend my restaurant job was an act. I learned to flip pancakes behind my back, which always snagged a lot of laughs—and came in handy down the road.
Every night I'd die a little, watching the troupes head to the station while I returned to serving burned biscuits and fatback. I'd learned a bit about meat in my hotel days, and knew enough to tell that whatever Daddy was slapping on his plates and calling T-bone had probably started off life as a pony. From then on, I shaved a year off when people asked how old I was. I didn't count the year I spent breathing grease and serving Man O'War at Daddy's 24-hour ptomaine parlor.
Goodbye, Pig-in-a-Blanket
One night, after I finished my rendition of "Darling, I Adore You (But Mother Does Not Approve"), old Mr. Grauman showed up in my dressing room at the Unique. Owners did not often frequent their own venues, unless they were on fire. So I hoped this meant my pig-in-a-blanket days were over. When Grauman asked if I'd want to sing at the Portola Cafe, in San Francisco, for $18 a week, I did a jig on the spot. I'd have signed on as a talking dog if it meant getting out of the horse-frying business—and away from my jackass of a Daddy.
I'd been San Francisco's favorite light-on-his-feet-fat-boy singing waiter for a year before I considered writing the old man with my whereabouts. Eighteen bucks was 11 more than the 7 Daddy was supposed to pay me every week and never did. Even better than the greenbacks was the mattress. After sleeping rough for so long—on sod as a kiddie, on chairs in theaters—I still got giddy at climbing into a real hotel bed every night. This was the best sleep I'd had since my stint in the department store window with Marvo the Magnificent.