Authors: Rona Jaffe
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
On saturday morning Gerry Thompson and Mad Daddy sat dutifully in the back seat of Sam Leo Libra’s air-conditioned chauffeured limousine and let themselves be whisked off through the heat haze of an August weekend in New York toward hell. They were both dreading the weekend on Long Island with the B.P.’s. Clean and neat in their proper weekend guest clothes, sadly watching the familiar sights of the city whizz by them, they felt like two kids being banished to a season at a hated summer camp. There was a well-stocked built-in bar in the back seat, and a tape recorder with an ample supply of stereo tapes. Music was playing, and they were drinking a morning refreshant—Gerry, vodka and tonic; Mad Daddy, Scotch on the rocks.
“Funny, I didn’t think you drank,” she said.
“I don’t drink in front of Elaine. I keep thinking I’ll set a good example, but she doesn’t get the hint.” He sighed and lit cigarettes for both of them. “Are you sure you want to go there? Wouldn’t you rather go to Playland?”
“Of course I’d rather go to Playland,” Gerry said.
Mad Daddy leaned forward and rapped on the window separating them from the chauffeur. “Take us to Rye.”
“We’re going to Long Island, sir,” the chauffeur said. He was a tall, faceless young man, like someone from a spy movie.
“We’ve been kidnapped,” Mad Daddy said. He took a bill from his wallet and pushed it through the opening in the glass partition. “We’re secret agents. Turn around and take us to Playland without any questions.”
“Yes, sir,” the chauffeur said, pocketing the money.
“Obviously a mercenary,” Mad Daddy said. “I was afraid he really believed in the cause.”
Gerry giggled. She felt light-headed and free. It was a relief not to have to visit the B.P.’s and put up with all those revolting women in their Guccis and Puccis and Francos, with their gymlithe bodies and whiskey voices, talking about people she didn’t know and places she never wanted to visit because she knew those places would be full of more of the same. And their sexless husbands and gigolos and lovers! She was sure none of them had ever been to Playland, unless they’d managed to have it closed for their private use.
Enclosed in the car she felt free of Dick and all her worries about him. She had still seen him a few times, and he phoned more often than that, just to say hello, but both of them knew the magic was gone. She wished he would just disappear and get it over with. She didn’t have the courage to tell him to get lost because she kept hoping she would get tired of him and that would make it easier. But she didn’t get tired of him. She liked him. She didn’t love him any more, she was sure of that, but she liked him, and she probably always would. What was the point of hating someone you’d once liked enough to have an affair with—
and loved enough to dream of marrying?
That was like telling yourself you’d been a fool with bad judgment who would have been ready to marry
anybody
.
“Elaine’s in Vegas,” Mad Daddy said.
“I know.”
“Maybe she’ll stay and get a divorce.”
“Do you want her to?”
“Oh, I’d love it,” he said. “I’d like nothing better. It would make me so happy. I wish she’d find somebody and fall in love with him. We haven’t gotten along for years.”
“Maybe she will,” Gerry said.
“I feel guilty about it, but people aren’t meant to be miserable together,” he said. “I see people who stay together when they’re miserable and they manage, but I can’t do it. Don’t ever get married, Gerry.”
“All right,” she said cheerfully.
“Are you in love with Libra?”
“
Libra!
”
“I just asked, that’s all.”
“You don’t know very much about me, do you?” she said.
He looked at her seriously as if really looking at her for the first time. “No … no, I don’t. You must be in love with some guy, though.”
“I was. I’m not now.”
“But not Libra. Oh … Dick?”
She nodded.
“Well, he’s not so much,” Mad Daddy said, dismissing Dick with a wave of his hand. “I think he’s a phony.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. He’s so slick. I don’t trust slick men. They act like they rehearsed their lives before they even got to you.”
Gerry laughed. “How about slick women?”
“All women are slick,” Mad Daddy said admiringly. “Even young ones. I love it.”
She knew, of course, about Mad Daddy and the young girls. If she could believe Libra. She looked at Mad Daddy. There was something irrepressibly innocent about him, like a kid with his first crush. She liked him; he was sweet and he made her feel comfortable. He seemed prepared to admire her whatever she was or did, and it was a feeling not many men had given her. And he was so talented! Poor thing, she hoped he would have a happy life and not get into trouble.
“I wonder why I keep getting married,” he said. “Have you been married?”
“No.”
“Women are supposed to be the ones who want to get married,” he said. “But when I fall in love I always want to get married. It’s very expensive. Divorce is, I mean. Not marriage. I like being married, I like a settled life, but when they marry me they always seem to think that marriage is going to be one long Saturday-night date … only better, because they don’t have to wait for me to pick them up because I’m
there
. But you get married so you don’t
have
to run around any more, or at least I always do. It just doesn’t work out that way.”
“Maybe you should try marrying a grown-up,” Gerry said.
“Maybe.”
He poured himself another Scotch. “Do you know how old I am?”
“I think so.”
“Forty,” he said morosely. “It’s a secret, but I’m forty.”
“You don’t look it.”
“I don’t feel it either,” he said. “I used to think: Forty! That’s a mature adult! People who are forty have learned a lot. Well, I don’t know much. Do you realize that forty is technically middle-aged?”
“Don’t be depressing,” Gerry said. “If you were middle-aged you couldn’t write your show, or be in it either.”
“Yeah, it is depressing, isn’t it?” he said. He cheered up, looking out the window and humming to the song on the tape. “Remember the roller coaster?” he said. “Well, now they have these things that look like the endurance tests for astronauts. They have one where they strap you in standing up and then they whirl you around in a circle and upside down. It’s wild! Do you get sick on the roller coaster?”
“I never did,” Gerry said. “Just scared.”
“Me, too. I like the Tunnel of Love. It’s not really scary, but I love being in a boat. And I like darts. I always win.”
“I like cotton candy.”
“Oh, I love cotton candy,” Mad Daddy said. “We’ll get cotton candy first thing. And jelly apples. I’m hungry, are you?”
“Starved. I didn’t have breakfast, as usual. I slept too late.”
“We’re drinking on an empty stomach,” he said, pleased. “Don’t you like doing things that are supposed to be bad for you? Like drinking on an empty stomach, or eating pickles with ice cream?”
“I don’t feel drunk,” she said. “Do you?”
“Of course not. See, nobody knows that the things you’re not supposed to do aren’t bad for you because everybody’s too scared to do them.”
“Like us not going to the B.P.’s,” Gerry said. “Not going was the best idea we ever had.”
“I knew I couldn’t make it,” Mad Daddy said. “I would have liked to go to make Libra happy, but I knew I couldn’t go through with it. I work hard enough as it is, I do all these things I have to do that I hate to do, like give interviews and be nice to people who don’t care a damn about me … you know, those people you meet when you’re a star, they’re just waiting for you to do something wrong so they can hate you for it. When you’re nobody they don’t care if you act like as big a schmuck as the next guy, and when you’re struggling they even feel sorry for you and forgive you for things, but oh boy, when you make it! Then they’re just waiting for a chance to knock you down. They watch every little thing you do. You say something that looks different in print than when you said it … like you were saying something, kidding, you know, and then in print it looks serious, and wow! The hate mail! So when I’m not working, the last thing I want to do is to go to some stuffy place like those Potters and have to answer questions for people who aren’t even interested in the answers. They think I’m some kind of … entertainment for them. Like I’m not really a guest. They don’t want me to have a good time. They make me feel so guilty for being there, eating their food, drinking their booze, breathing their air … they want me to get up and do a
schtick
to pay for it, or better yet, make a fool of myself so afterwards they can tell their friends: ‘See, that star is really a jerk!’”
She hadn’t thought he was capable of anger, but she liked him better for it. “Oh, the hell with them,” she said. “We’ll have a groovy day.”
He smiled at her. “Yeah. Hey, you’re really pretty. I never went out with a girl with freckles before.”
They were mildly high and very hungry when the limousine pulled into the Playland parking lot. The place was mobbed; teenagers on dates and in groups, families with babies and picnic baskets. It must have been nearly ninety degrees outside, but no one seemed to mind. Mad Daddy told the chauffeur to go eat lunch and come back in about an hour, and they set off hand in hand to find the action.
They stopped for pizza at a stand, then hot dogs, then Cokes, then soft ice cream. Then, even though they were feeling a little sick, they had to have cotton candy and jelly apples, because they had been planning for so long to have them. Mad Daddy made a plastic dinosaur at a machine and gave it to Gerry.
“My Dennison of the Deep doll looks better than that,” he said. “Let’s go see if they have it at the Magic Shop.”
The Magic Shop was over by the lake. They dawdled along the midway watching the people screaming on the various new versions of the dreaded roller coaster, glad they were not among them.
“You’ll like my doll,” Mad Daddy said. “Then we can go in the Tunnel of Love, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And the Hall of Mirrors. I always like the Hall of Mirrors.”
“Okay.”
“You can throw that jelly apple away if you don’t want it,” he said. They looked at each other and laughed, and tossed their jelly apples into the nearest rubbish basket, feeling greatly relieved. He lit cigarettes for both of them.
Four teen-aged girls came walking by, then stopped and did a double-take when they saw Mad Daddy.
“Hey!” one said. “Aren’t you …?”
“No,” he said.
“Yes he is! Look, look, it’s Mad Daddy!”
The four girls started to scream and giggle. People were turning around. “Mad Daddy! Look, it’s Mad Daddy! Can I have your autograph?”
Mad Daddy had started to perspire. He gave a weak smile to the kids and pushed Gerry into the entrance of the Hall of Mirrors, thrusting money at the ticket taker.
“You have to have tickets,” the man said.
“How much are they?”
“You get them over there.” He pointed at a ticket booth with a long line in front of it. He had never heard of Mad Daddy and couldn’t care less.
“Can’t I just pay?” Mad Daddy asked plaintively.
“Tickets over there.”
The kids were upon them, at least fifteen of them now instead of the original four, and they were screaming and giggling. Mad Daddy grabbed Gerry’s hand and pulled her with him along the midway again, toward the lake. He was like the Pied Piper. More kids had joined the group that was following them, attracted by the sport of running with a mob, some of them not sure why they were running or whom they were trying to catch. M
AD
D
ADD-EEEE!
“Maybe you should have given them your autograph,” Gerry panted.
“Then we would have been there forever,” he said.
M
AD
D
ADD-EEE!
The girls were screaming, shoving each other, their faces red with excitement and the heat, their long hair stringy, their mouths open, their eyes gleaming. Their legs, fat legs in shred-edged Bermuda shorts, skinny legs in mini-skirts, tan legs, white legs, a few pairs of black legs, were pumping furiously to keep up with their fleeing idol. M
AD
D
ADD-EEE!
Boys who had happened to be their dates were dragged along or ran along forgotten. M
AD
D
ADD-EEE!
There was a line of people at the lake, waiting to have a turn at the boats. Some adults turned around, disgusted at the display the kids were making. Mad Daddy pulled Gerry back toward the parking lot.
There was the limousine, long, silver-gray, grown-up and reassuring. The chauffeur was sitting behind the wheel in the air conditioning, eating a Good Humor. Mad Daddy opened the rear door and pushed Gerry in, jumped in after her, and slammed the door, carefully locking it and all the others. The kids stood around the car, peering in the windows, gaping at them like fish. Some of them knocked on the windows. Most of them knew who Mad Daddy was, but it was clear that some of them did not and were simply happy to have someone to persecute, trapped in a locked limousine and cowering.
“Get us away from here,” Mad Daddy told the chauffeur.
The chauffeur started the car and inched out of the lot. Kids fell off the car like overripe grapes off a bunch.
“I’m sorry,” Mad Daddy said to Gerry.
“Sorry for what?”
“Well, we didn’t get to do any of the things we wanted to. I should have worn a beard or something. I never thought of it. I didn’t think they’d notice me … you know, out of context.”
“This is exactly your context,” Gerry said.
“But I never
go
to Playland. I haven’t been for years. That’s why I wanted to come here today.”
“They don’t know you don’t come here. They think you come here all the time because the character you play on television would come here all the time.”
“That’s why I can’t have any fun any more,” he said.
The chauffeur turned around. “Where now, sir?”
Mad Daddy was looking out the window, watching Playland fading in the distance. He tapped nervously on the window with his knuckle, chewing his lip.