Who He? - (1)

CHAPTER I
    Every morning I hate to be born, and every night I'm afraid to die. I live my life within these parentheses, and since I'm constantly walking a tightrope over hysteria, I'm perceptive to the dilemmas of other people as they cross their own chasms.
    I'm a script-writer by trade, specializing in mystery shows. I'm married to an actress. We're both of us second-raters in the entertainment business ... mostly anonymous to the public, fairly well-known to our colleagues. Between us we make from ten to twenty thousand dollars a year, depending on the breaks. This is only fair money in our business.
    It seems like a fortune to our families, and we dazzle them with our glamour. We hate this, but we can't dispel the illusion that General Sarnoff claps me on the shoulder and calls me by my nickname. Now we've given up trying. We realize that people want their friends to be glamorous, so we've stopped trying to avoid undeserved admiration. But I can't stand deception, and if I appear to be cynical in this story, it's because I'm leaning over backwards to tell you the truth. As a matter of fact I'm the reverse of cynical ... rather naive, in love with adventure and romance, with the moral and ethical standards of an Eagle Scout.
    This is all I intend telling you about myself, because the story isn't about me; it's about some tightrope walkers I know, and their strange adventures in this fantastic frontier town we natives call The Rock. The Rock, of course, is Manhattan Island, the only part of Greater New York that we consider to be the genuine New York; and in our business there is a very small society of natives born and raised on The Rock. You'd be surprised at how few there are.
    The Rock is the roaring frontier of the new life we are all beginning to live, a life that is a terrifying mixture of the conscious and unconscious levels of our minds. It is new and terrifying because the unconscious depths which were concealed up to now, have become exposed, and participate openly in our every-day life, turning it into a savage, merciless war.
    It's like those subway rides you take on trains that tunnel deep under the city, emerge abruptly into the daylight to roar past third-storey windows, and then plunge down into the lower levels again. So, when you meet people on The Rock, you never know when some unexpected turn will carry you up for a flashing glimpse through the windows of their souls, or down into the black depths of their hatreds and formless desires.
    Adventurers from all over the world crowd into our town, just as fortune-hunters went west a century ago. In the old days in Denver and Fargo you fought for your life and your fortune, but in our frontier town you fight for your sanity as well. The drives and ambitions, the deep passions and compulsions, the blind search for symbols and compensations that bring the bandits to The Rock are naked and exposed, and this is where the danger lies. A man may declare war on you because you're a threat to his job, or merely because you're the symbol of a threat to his precarious stability. When you cross a street you never know whether you're going to be sandbagged by a thief's blackjack or a neurotic's nightmare.
    The Rock is so wild and wide-open that nobody ever pretends to mask the deep chasms and smouldering fires in their lives. We carry our fears and fixations like naked weapons as we walk our tightropes, and we use them as quickly and murderously as Billy The Kid used his six-gun. The result is that we fight, love and adventure on all levels and never bother to distinguish reality from illusion because both are equally living and dangerous.
    I'll try to separate fact from fancy in this adventure I'm going to tell you, but in the end I think you'll agree that it's unnecessary. Like the classic bartender in the classic Western, you'll duck behind the beer kegs at the first shot, whether it comes from a real gun or the explosive ferment in a man's mind. And don't imagine for a moment that this story is a plug for psychoanalysis. Whether you believe in analysis or not, you must admit that man, like the iceberg, is nine-tenths submerged. I'm simply going to describe what life is like in our frontier town where the submerged levels float up to the surface.
    The locale of this story is a show I never worked. It's a TV variety clam-bake called "Who He?" ... one of those lunatic mish-mashes that started out as a panel quiz show and ended up as a musical. It stars Mason & Dixon, supported by Kay Hill and Oliver Stacy. It's directed by Raeburn Sachs, written by Jake Lennox, with music by Johnny Plummer. It's produced by Melvin Grabinett Associates and costs the client, Mode Shoes, $50,000 a week.
    "Who He?" is not an expensive show as TV variety shows go. It's in the middle bracket. I think you might be interested in a rough break-down on the budget which will give you some idea of the stakes for which the people in this adventure were fighting. The monetary stakes, that is. The network charges $25,000 for a half-hour of coast-to-coast time. Mig Mason, the star, gets $2,000 a week. Diggy Dixon, who is co-starred with him, doesn't get a nickel because Mason's a ventriloquist and Dixon is the dummy. Stacy, Kay Hill and other talent and specialties including the dancers get $3,000.
    The writers, Jake Lennox and Mason's gagmen, split $1,500 between them. Lennox also gets a small cut in the producer's take for helping create the show. Incidentally, one of the gagmen got married for the first time on his forty-third birthday. The marriage broke up after two weeks. The bride went home to Canada and the gagman went down to Washington and became a spy for the government. We're still trying to figure it out. Maybe he decided that any tight rope, even an espionage tight rope, would be safer than the one he was on.
    Raeburn Sachs gets $750 a week for directing "Who He?". How Sachs got started in the business is one of the great legends, and the only explanation for his weird public and private life. He was a stencil clerk in a Chicago advertising office, and one day he drove to work in a new Cadillac. He also wore new clothes and a new look. Everybody asked Ray if he'd robbed a bank. Chicago-type joke. Ray told them proudly that he'd written a hit tune called "Lumbago" or something like that.
    Nobody ever heard of the tune. The office did a little detective work and discovered that "Lumbago" did exist, had truly been written by Ray, and had been recorded as a favor to him by a cousin who led a band working for a Chicago recording company. The gimmick was that there was another side to the record, the Flip, they call it, and Sinatra was on the Flip. Sinatra made the sales, but Ray shared the money. That made him a reputation and started him as a variety expert. He's been trying to justify that wrong Flip ever since.
    Here's a little more budget: Johnny Plummer, married to the most exotically beautiful noodnick in the world, is allotted $1,500 a week for orchestra, copying and his own fee. The noodnick has standing orders to keep out of the theater because she disrupts the camera men, and camera time is counted like radium. Cameras and technicians cost $2,000. Sets and props cost $3,000. Special effects like rain, snow, Acts of God and Rear-Projection cost $500.
    The producer, Mel Grabinett (Mr. Blinky to his enemies; he has no friends) takes $3,000 which he cuts up with Jake Lennox and Ned Bacon who developed "Who He?" with him. Jake and Ned get two and a half bills each. That's $250. Borden, Olson and Mardine, the advertising agency representing the client, adds 15% of the gross cost of the show for agency fee, and that plus prize money and incidentals comes to $50,000 a week to demonstrate the superior quality of Mode Shoes.
    Some forty hard-working, variously talented people put together "Who He?" every week ... artists, technicians and business men. Each of them is walking his own private tightrope, but all of them must walk the communal tightrope of the show on Sunday night at nine o'clock before 37 million viewers. The individual pressures added to the common tension of the show make it seem inevitable that the program will blow up during rehearsal and never get on the air. Yet "Who He?" has appeared 39 weeks in succession without mishap. Without mishap, that is, until the performance on New Year's night.
    It was one of those nightmares. Everyone who saw the show knew something was wrong. Mig Mason performed so badly that you could see his mouth twitch and his neck muscles jerk during the ventriloquist routines with the dummy. Oliver Stacy handed out the wrong prizes. Johnny Plummer missed his cues. Floor managers and stagehands wandered dazedly before the cameras. The dancers went through the production numbers as though they expected the roof to collapse at any moment. Variety happened to catch the show that night and murdered it.
    Variety was unfair. Their reviewer should have checked first. He would have learned that the show went out the window because one man fell off his private tightrope with such a disastrous jar that everyone else was shaken. He would have discovered that less than five feet of sight-line saved the theater audience and the TV viewers from the spectacle of a dead man hanging by the neck from the iron grid above the stage.
    For twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds, stars, actors, dancers and technicians went through the motions of playing "Who He?" under a corpse with starting eyes and swollen tongue ... a victim of the savage, merciless warfare in our frontier town, murdered by the ferment in a man's mind.
    I knew the corpse. I know what killed him. I'm still friendly with most of the cut-throats who watched him die. I've spoken to them, questioned them, and heard what they couldn't say as well as what they said. I've pieced out all the strands that wove themselves into a rope around a man's neck. This is the story of what happened....
    CHAPTER II
    Jake Lennox had been fighting a losing battle with himself for ten years, and it was a struggle he had never been aware of. The two levels of his mind hated each other and were tearing him apart. Jake had a conscious ideal, the model of the man he wanted to be ... austere, kindly, infallible, sophisticated. Like many of us, he suffered from the Mignon Complex. He was bitterly ashamed of his background. He had had a squalid childhood as the son of a drunken Long Island clam-digger, and would have liked to awaken one morning to discover that he was really the second son of the Marquis of Suffolk.
    But deep down inside, Jake was a hell of a rowdy guy; full of laughter and boisterous energy, yearning for ribald friends and a burning girl he could love and marry and riot in bed with. He was not aware of this. He believed in the conscious image of what he wanted to be. And while the lusty passions within him fought to overturn and destroy the world he had made for himself, his conscious mind was fighting desperately to hold it together.
    Occasionally the conscious mind gave way, which is why Jake Lennox awoke on Christmas night in the role of another man. He was convinced that he was Mr. Clarence Fox from Philadelphia. I got this story from Jake and from Aimee Driscoll when I went up to her apartment to claim Jake's overcoat and precious gimmick book. Jake couldn't face Aimee again. She represented the turmoil inside him which he could not acknowledge.
    Aimee (how about that name?) is a blonde with a poached face and the fattest behind and bosom in the hustling racket. If you looked at her through a gin bottle you might imagine that she was a busty Swedish acrobat, which was what betrayed Jake. There are front-men and rear-men, Aimee kindly explained to me, and she parlays both into a lovely living. Mr. Clarence Fox was an All-Around Camper.
    He awoke, still drunk and still bloody from the brawl in Ye Baroque Saloon where he had acquired Aimee. He wore his underwear and was cramped into an overstuffed sofa and covered with a gritty Navajo blanket. It was dark. Lennox let out a roar that slid into a ballad which he'd composed the night before and with which he'd been injuring ears ever since.
    Aimee heard the racket, ran into the living room and turned on the lights. Lennox winced, closed his eyes, and sneezed three times in stately waltz tempo.
    "Less light," he muttered. "A switch on Goethe. I am excessively educated, and all by hand. Need more crud in my blood." He began to roar again.
    "Stop that noise, Clarence!" Aimee called from the door. "Stop that goddam singing."
    Lennox finished the ballad which included every dirty word he knew. Seventeen, by actual count.
    "And stop talking dirty," Aimee told him primly. She was wearing a bra, panties and high black net stockings; not, she pointed out, in hopes of arousing the beast in Mr. Fox. It was her conventional uniform. As a matter of fact she knew he was still drunk and hoped he wouldn't start anything. She waddled to the sofa and bent over Mr. Fox solicitously. He had been very generous to her even though her professional services had not yet been requested. Mr. Fox stared up at her bursting cleavage, then suddenly thrust his heavy hand down into it.
    "The All-Mother," Lennox laughed.
    He hurt her. Aimee squawked and jerked back. Lennox held on to the bra and tore it away. He began to cheer: "Brah! Brah! Brah!" waving the bra like a college pennant.
    "You goddam lousy bum!" Aimee screamed. "You're mean. You're mean dirty drunk. I never liked you from the beginning, you goddam lousy son of a--"
    "No, no," Lennox protested. "An act of admiration. 'Fair is my love, for April's in her face, her lovely breasts September claims his part....' Poem by R. Greene. Speaks for C. Fox."
    He lurched up from the sofa, captured Aimee and clutched her reverently. He pressed his face between her breasts. He had not shaved in a day and a half, and his beard was excruciating. Aimee fought and twisted and thrust him away. Lennox straightened and rocked like a high mast.
    "'But Cold December dwelleth in her heart,'" he mumbled sorrowfully. "Where's the woman who'll give passion with the sweetness of virgins and the lunacy of whores? You give, Aimee, but you taste like money." He staggered, tripped on a mass of cardboard and wrapping paper, and fell heavily into a three-foot Christmas tree that expired with a jingle and pop.
    Aimee burst out laughing. She was revenged. Lennox arose in a fury, seized the Christmas tree by the butt and beat it savagely against the wall. Aimee protested. He leaped toward her and lashed her across the high fat buttocks. Aimee screamed. Lennox slipped and bruised himself on a solid square object covered with tissue paper. He clutched it.
    "You leave that alone, Clarence," Aimee yelled. She forgot all other outrages and ran across the room. She clawed at Lennox and tried to pull him off. The tissue paper tore away.
    "What'r you protecting? Virginity?" Lennox growled.
    "It's the Christmas present you gimme. You bought it last night. Don't you bust it!"
    Lennox peeled away tissue paper to reveal a dark wood console and a twelve inch TV screen.
    "The Monster!" he cried. "The One-Eyed Beast!" He hammered the top of the set with his fists. Aimee fought him helplessly, then darted away and returned with an empty quart beer bottle. She swung it with both hands and clubbed Lennox across the back of the neck. He fell forward into the rubbish like a tackle throwing a rolling block. He was the size of a tackle.
    Lennox climbed to his feet, his throat working convulsively. "Bathroom," he croaked. He was sick. Aimee knew the symptoms well, and no vendetta was worth another cleaning bill. She turned Lennox around and pushed him competently through a narrow door into the small bedroom and then into the bathroom. She turned on the light, flipped up the toilet lid and with the skill of long experience, bent his head down to the bowl. Then she backed out and slammed the door.
    During the preliminary moment of agony, Lennox thought: "They play Boys' Rules. Oh Virgins! Respectables! Learn from them--" Then the purge began.
    When the heaving stopped, Lennox straightened painfully, flushed the toilet, then examined his face in the mirror. To him it was the face of Mr. Clarence Fox, the visiting Quaker from Philadelphia. His cropped hair was still sleek; nothing could ever muss it. But his dark eyes had heavy purple shadows around them, and his lined face was bruised.
    He was purged, still drunk, but beginning to sober. He staggered to the bedroom, found his clothes neatly hung in a closet, and dressed. He went out into the living room. Aimee had straightened it. She wore a white housecoat blemished by green and scarlet petunias, and was kneeling alongside the new television set plugging it into a wall outlet.
    "If you got any on the floor you better clean it up," she said icily.
    "Merry Christmas," he answered. "Happy to pay for damage to life and limb."
    Lennox reached into his pocket, took out his wallet and was fingering through it for money when his eye noticed the identification card.
    "This isn't my wallet," he said.
    "What?"
    Lennox plucked at his shirt dubiously. "Not my clothes either."
    "What are you talking about, Clarence? Them's your clothes." Aimee switched on the set and fiddled with the controls.
    "No. Not mine. Belong to somebody else. Character named Lennox."
    "Who?"
    He extended the wallet for Aimee to examine. "My name's Fox. Clarence Fox from Philadelphia. This is Jordan Lennox, says here. See? Jordan Lennox. How'd he get into the act?"
    The screen ignited, herringboned, then sprang into life. The blast of Johnny Plummer's orchestra filled the room with bright expectation. A Main-Title card displayed white comedy letters against a cartoon background while the voice of Oliver Stacy read it with frenetic sell: THE MODE SHOW ... STARRING MIG MASON AND DIGGY DIXON ... PLAYING--'WHO HE?'
    "Who He!" Aimee called over the burst of studio applause. I love that program. I get every question right. I could make a fortune if I could get on." She backed up, feeling for a chair, her eyes fixed on the screen.
    Jake Lennox's consciousness ignited, herringboned, then sprang into life.
    "'Who He!'" he burst out, stunned and bewildered. "That's my show."
    Clarence Fox stole back to Philadelphia.
    "That's my show," Lennox repeated.
    "How do you mean, your show?"
    "I write it. I own a piece of it."
    "That's a hot one," Aimee laughed.
    "Don't you understand? It's my show. I'm Jake Lennox. I write that--I--What the hell am I doing here? I'm supposed to be at the theater."
    Lennox turned and stumbled out of the apartment. He clattered down the brownstone stairs and fell half a flight. It was bitter cold on the street. Snow and rain were falling, and the air was like ice-water. Lennox ran west to 3rd Avenue, the great exposed nerve of The Rock's delirium. It was empty. The bars exuded urine-colored light. The antique shops blazed with cut-glass chandeliers. Alongside him, a darkened barber-pole still revolved its red and white spiral with the sound of guillotines.
    A small man in a derby, pea-jacket and white duck trousers passed him and addressed him brightly: "Hiya, Dan. Nice to see you again." The man in the derby continued up 3rd Avenue greeting empty doorways in friendly tones: "Hello, Jerry. Long time no see.... Hiya, Pete? How's the family? Glad to see you, Ed." Lennox stared at him, then saw a cab, ran for it and leaped inside.
    "Gotham four one thousand," he called to the driver. He shook his head. "No. That's the backstage number. I--Let's take it from the top. Venice Theater. 50th and Sixth. I'm in a rush, Mr...." He tried to focus on the license card above the glass partition. It would be considerate to call the man by his name instead of Mac or Bud. His eyes bleared and he gave it up.
    He sat on the edge of the seat, terrified by his abrupt return to sanity, fighting to recapture the Lennox he admired and wanted to be ... the sober Lennox, the second son of the Marquis of Suffolk. He found his wristwatch in his jacket pocket and put it on, Nine-three. Mig Mason would be starting the first Mason & Dixon spot on the show. What was it this week? The football routine. Mason in moleskins. The dummy under a sheet. What football player made ghosts famous? For five hundred dollars, Who He? Red Grange. That's ab-so-lute-ly CORRECT! (Applause). Lennox began to shake,
    "What's happened?" he muttered. "Where've I been? I'm in a panic. Why, for five hundred dollars?"
    Lennox sorted through his shattered memory of the past twenty-four hours. He was afraid to unearth, uncover, reveal; yet compelled, like a man exploring the pain of an aching tooth. The fragments were incomprehensible and crumbled under the most delicate touch. A Chinese face appeared, then faded. A series of meaningless explosions sounded like a vanishing execution squad. There was a knot. A gleaming African smile. The knot again. A brass-bound staff and the brazen uproar of gongs. A knot. A target. A knot.
    "And fear," Lennox said. "Fear. For God's sake, I was drunk, that's all. Nothing more. Why am I afraid? What've I done?"
    He examined his wallet. Twenty three dollars left out of four hundred. How much had gone for that television set bought for the blonde.... What was her name? Anna? Mamie? Bought for her by a Quaker. Mr.... Who was it? Charles something? Claude? Lennox winced and shook his head. The memory was going ... going ... like the streets disappearing under the sleet. Twenty four hours, and nothing but veiled patches left. A Quaker. A blonde. A knot.
    "Christ," he prayed. "Dear Christ stand by me. Stand by me now."
    Lennox discovered he was crying. He was outraged. An austere, kindly, infallible, sophisticated man didn't weep. It was that other character he was forgetting with sickening speed ... a lurid, roaring, shameful savage. He pounded his fists together, then looked again at his watch. Nine-seven. Oliver Stacy and Kay Hill in the first song spot. Stacy dressed in sheik's robes singing to Kay wearing an English riding habit and making like Agnes Ayres. For seven hundred and fifty dollars what famous actor was the first famous sheik? Who He? Rudolph Valentino, (Applause). Play-off from orchestra and segue into Intro for drama spot.
    The cab jammed in traffic at 42nd and Vanderbilt, and again at Madison. Lennox resisted the impulse to thrust his head out the window and roar at the hacks and busses. He fought for control. Nothing remained from the lost night but a Quaker, a blonde, a knot and terror. He turned his back on the fragments and the fear and clung to the framework of the world he knew. He was Jordan Lennox who owned a piece of and wrote most of "Who He?" He had never won a Pulitzer Prize but he had never been less than a contract writer in his life. He had never auditioned for a job in his life. He had never been fired from a job in his life. In ten years of brawling and knifing his way up in the business he had never lost a fight.
    "No, by God!" he said suddenly. "What have I got to be afraid of? They're all afraid of me."
    When he got out of the cab at the stage door he was no longer tremulous. He was again the Jake Lennox we all knew, sardonic, hostile, unyielding. He poked a dollar at the driver for the fare, and another dollar for a present. "Merry Christmas, Mac," he said, not unkindly, and walked into the theater. His feet left black prints on the sidewalk. The city too was covered with sleet.
    It was 9:31-30. The show was two minutes off the air. Lennox pushed through the crowd of wives and friends that crammed the backstage corridor and reached the wings. Instantly, he halted. He smelled trouble, and the prospect recharged him with energy. He stared around with quick, guarded eyes.