MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 6

I came into possession of Grampa’s journals after the funeral of an aunt who never threw anything away. I also inherited a lovely silver tea service and an edible-tissue incubator that operates on good, old-fashioned solar power. After having read the journals, I put them aside in a corner of a closet, a dark corner, befitting a family’s shame. This was about three years after Flicky and I first met. Three years of drinks by the pool, looking from Flicky’s patio at the top of Palisades Island out over the Pacific Ocean. Three years of awards ceremonies and private screenings and martini dinners at Musso and Frank’s. Three years that included Flicky’s major crisis, when he faced trial for assault and battery, and struggled to survive a year-long public excoriation of his character until his accusers, Johann and Alberta Transvaaler, were outed as pathological frauds. Even for a star of Flicky’s magnitude, rebuilding one’s reputation after such a scandal is a project with little hope of success. That Flicky won back his public is a testament to his will and charisma, as well as to the quality of fan he attracts, and to the reasons for the attraction: the generosity of his heart and the sense of honor with which he engages the world.

Coming through that ordeal seemed to give Flicky a new sense of himself. Having fought for his reputation and succeeded, he evinced a confidence, a self-possession, that evoked in me the image of a soldier returned from a war, in whose face one can no longer recognize the innocent young man who’d shipped out. There were times when he reminded me of Pacino at the end of Serpico when he has been disillusioned by the corruption of the police but remains hopeful and, ultimately, undefeated. I never saw Flicky cry after that, the way he had when we met in the Snerd. There was at once a firmness in his attitude, a nobility in his eyes, a solidity of purpose in all he did, and a kind of wisdom in his face. Tenderness was in his touch, but it came from a place of power within him, and when he was gentle in his dealings one had the sense of a towering angel of fire and ice holding in his palm the most delicate orchid.

Flicky had been in the habit, during the thick of the scandal, of thanking me for standing by him. It got to the point where I had to break him of it, telling him that, as far as I was concerned, there was never a question. One has a responsibility to one’s friends. I felt intrinsic to my constitution the desire to see right prevail. And, watching those two con artists trying to smear their filth over a being with the kind of complexity of virtue as Flicky possessed, the thought of withdrawing my support wouldn’t have occurred to me anymore than the thought of deliberately poking myself in the eye with a sharp stick.

As I indicated above, after his ordeal Flicky never cried again. But about a year later, sitting in our booth at Musso’s, I saw him mist up a little. I had not two days earlier relegated Grampa’s journals to their crypt, and the contents of them had yet to settle into a permanent neural arrangement in my brain. So I talked to Flicky about them, about how Grampa had been obsessed in the most impotent and embarrassing way with fame. About how he had fallen in love with Maria, whose name never failed to bring to my mind the song of that name from West Side Story. And about how he had died in a recursion echo on the very day of the Sluice.

I say I saw Flicky mist up a little. What I actually saw was his body taken over by an upwelling of emotion, albeit for only a moment. I took this as an empathetic reflex. Perhaps something in his past had come rushing to his forebrain, I thought, causing feelings that briefly wracked him but which he immediately chastened. He finished the cigarette he was smoking. Then he excused himself, he was suddenly exhausted. I didn’t hear from him for nearly two months after that.

In the final novel of Mark Leyner’s six-volume masterpiece, Hateful Lovers, the narrator speaks of a phenomenon called “drunk dialing:” “Aside from violence and threatening suicide to extort sex, drunk dialing is the nadir of any relationship. The jilted lover’s delusions are exposed. At the time of night the French call the petit matin, a voice comes over the phone, channeling the spirit of the title character in the Doobie Brothers’ ‘What A Fool Believes.’ It’s sickening. Even Gandhi thought so. Read Satyagraha. There is no example from history where drunk dialing has ever resulted in sex. Loneliness and regret are its electricity. Love, or at least sex, is its goal, but its effect is exactly the opposite. Why evolution has not yet expunged this behavior from the human behavioral palette is a question that casts Darwin’s theories into doubt.”

What Leyner describes is the marriage of perversity and sentimentality that accompanies lone nocturnal alcohol consumption. It is not limited to defunct romances, and it isn’t always a bad thing. Any of drunk dialing’s contemporary equivalents can be a way for an otherwise reserved entity to break the social barrier of sound judgment, so that something difficult and possibly dangerous might be achieved.

And that is why I woke in Mr. Leyner’s “petit-matin” to a teleclay transmission from Flicky after so long not having heard from him. He was reclining in the antique Eames chair from which he always made his teleclay calls. His appearance in teleclay on my night table, even at this late hour, was a welcome sight. His miniature form, in his miniature chair, smoking a miniature cigarette with miniature smoke rising from it, always brought me to a kind of Buddhist mindfulness, sort of a trance of alertness, however paradoxical that may sound. Seeing a friend in teeny tiny form is incredibly endearing. Little teeny tiny things are so very precious, and friends are precious, and the two together compound the preciousness exponentially.

I always keep teeny tiny props and sets in my nightstand drawer, so when people call on the teleclay I can involve them in dioramas of my choice – without their knowing it, of course. Flicky knew of my eccentric practice, as we had both had a lot of fun at the expense of sundry pompous film industry types. And I’m sure he was aware that I sometimes did it to him – and he knew there was no malice in it. Honestly, it was an almost unconscious habit – done as it was during a trance of alertness. Now, however, he was n sheets to the wind, and I was loopy from having just woken up in the petit matin – to cut to the chase, before I was three-quarters aware what I was doing, miniature Flicky was dressed as Cleopatra, sitting in an Eames chair in an old west saloon softly orating to an attentive semi-circle of five Johnny-Reb pawns and one Jeff Davis from a Civil War chess set, a pair of grooms from a wedding cake (naked but for top hats), a Rasputin nightlight, a Marilyn Monroe-shaped yortzheit candle, a hardboiled egg with a wax mustache, a porcelain chipmunk salt shaker, Jesus and Mary corn holders, and a shot glass with feet and a sombrero. The instant my focus dollied out from the details to encompass the entire tableau I had wrought, I stifled a laugh, and Flicky leapt to his tailfin.

“What the hell? Are you playing dolly dress-up with me now? Have you heard anything I’ve said?”

“No.”

You never heard a flounder cuss the way I heard one do then. Still, even through the barrage of pelagic profanity I could see that Flicky made an all-too-perfect Queen of the Nile. I butted in to say, “Hey – I didn’t put eye makeup on you.”

Miniature Flicky walked in place as the Eames chair retreated and disappeared behind him. Then he was daubing his eyes with face cream. “I forgot to take it off when I got home from the Mephisto reading.”

“You wore makeup to the reading?”

“Mephisto, baby. I wanted to help the guy out. Make a good presentation. It’s an indy project.”

“Who’s the director?”

“Satyajit Speilberg. Of the disinherited Speilbergs.”

“You’d be great in the role.”

“Yeah, they don’t appreciate what I’m doing. They just want to be able to tell the money that I’m attached. And the script has been worried into a piece of crap.”

“Too bad. How’s the kid?”

“Satyajit? I don’t know, smart. Could be talented. I suspect he’s out for revenge, as in ‘nothing revenges like weaseling one’s way to the top of the industry once ruled by one’s reviled ancestor.’”

“I’m not familiar with that saying.”

“What you’re not familiar with could fill a book. And usually does.”

“Kiss my ass.”

“Faxiloid it to my lawyer.” Flicky had rinsed his face and was patting it dry with a butter-colored towel. “Anyhow, are you coming, or what?”

“Coming where?”

“You really didn’t listen to a word I said? I was pouring my heart out. About you and me and fate. Uch. It doesn’t matter, I was just beating around the crybaby bush with a drunk stick. You’re a good friend, and it’s my privilege and duty to share something with you about your grandfather. It involves me picking you up tomorrow at noon. So go back to sleep.”

“Grampa? Did you find something of his?”

“Don’t try to guess, okay? Just be ready at noon. Oh, and bring his journals. And wear swim trunks. Goodnight.” Flicky cut out of the teleclay, which collapsed back into the nightstand top. The motley audience in the old west saloon were left watching empty space. The corn holders looked especially glum. This hint of a mysterious “something” about Grampa – you would think it might have been the kind of teaser fit to propel the mind to endless insomniac spirals. Yet I had no trouble getting back to sleep. How interesting could it be? Had someone found Grampa’s dirty underwear in a vintage store? Or, at best, his experimental subject ID card? That was the assumption I operated under as I hit that interface between waking life and dreaming known as “the pillow.”