Chance Meetings Page 6

  He did.

  And that’s how he has had the owl these eight years. And that’s why the owl loves him, and he loves the owl.

  His wife died recently, and his son and his daughter are adults, and well along into their own lives.

  The shoemaker is a year or two younger than myself, he’s sixty-one or sixty-two years old. He is an Armenian, born in Gultik, down from the highlands of Bitlis, but he was taken early in life to Antakya, which is the modern name for Antioch, where St. Paul stopped now and then on his missionary excursions.

  Well, now, this man, Hovaness Shoghikian by name, is perhaps an inch or two under five feet in height, but powerfully built. As a matter of fact he was once a champion weight lifter and wrestler, and has many old photographs to prove it.

  In short, he is not simply a shoemaker, although he actually makes shoes, entire shoes, and for forty years has never worn a pair of shoes he hasn’t made.

  First, it is his trade, and he likes to work at his trade, but nowadays almost nobody wants a pair of shoes made to order, to fit the feet, to fit a cast of the foot’s precise shape. Second, his own feet are small and broad, and the best he has ever been able to do in finding a ready-made pair of shoes (before he began to make his own shoes) was not very good. Ready-made shoes were always something his feet could barely tolerate. But in his own shoes his feet are at home, and standing on his feet in his shop he himself is at home. Naturalists have visited his shop to speak with him about the owl, and about a green bird the shoemaker has had almost thirty years. “She can’t grip with her claws properly,” he says of the green bird. “But she will live most likely another thirty years, they sometimes live to be eighty.”

  Where he found out such a thing I can’t imagine, for he does not look into books for information.

  Without any outside help, or instructions, he long ago discovered that the owl has to have in its diet fur or feathers, otherwise its digestive procedure becomes impaired. And so all these years the owl has been fed thin strips of raw beef, chicken hearts, and live mice, which he buys from people who telephone to let him know there is a mouse in their trap.

  And so of course the shoemaker loves the owl and the owl loves him.

  The owl certainly permits itself to be held by the shoemaker. The two of them have a simple ritual of displaying trust and affection, which involves his saying, in Armenian, “Well, a kiss, then.” Whereupon the owl puts its beak to his upper lip.

  Chapter 26

  When I went to work at the age of twenty-one in San Francisco at the Cypress Lawn Cemetery Company, with offices on the eighth floor of the building that stood and still stands on the southeast corner of Market and Seventh Streets, a building bearing the name of Hewes, which in one of my short stories I gave a better name, Gravity—when I went to work in those offices, for that firm, I discovered that the operation was a family one. The biggest and easiest jobs were held by members of a family named Johnson, but every member had a rather fanciful first name. The top man was called, for instance, Noble Johnson, and the name seemed perfectly right for him, so that almost instantly it was no trouble at all for me to accept it.

  He was in his early thirties, but Noble Johnson isn’t the man I want to remember. My man is the vice-president, a man who had started at the bottom in 1889, and there we were in 1929—forty years later.

  He wore black. He was skinny, he had long fingers, he had a long nose, and he liked to talk things over with people who worked with him, especially new people, and so it happened that when I applied for the job he said, “Now, you’ve come here for the job, and I’m in charge of hiring and firing, so let’s get right down to business.”

  Whereupon he considered my name, age, address, family, nationality, religion, education, wealth, and finally, he asked the key question: “Do you want to make the cemetery business your life work, as I did forty years ago?”

  To which I quickly replied, “Yes, sir, I would really like to do what you did.”

  Well, I got the job, of course. It was easy work, and every day I saw Noble Johnson come in for an hour, and go away. And every day I saw the Jolly Undertaker, as I came to think of the vice-president, come in and stay long after everybody else had gone home.

  And every day I heard him mumble and hum to himself a song that Jimmy Durante had made famous: “Inka dinka do, a dinka dink adinko do. That means that I love you.”

  Well, how could a man so skinny and dry and pompous also enjoy the comic and wild spirit of that song?

  He had to be somebody special deep down inside, I decided. And he was.

  He wrote slogans for the cemetery, although Noble Johnson ruled them out one by one, and wouldn’t allow them to be put on signs or posters or into ads: INTER HERE. Best of all: CYPRESS LAWN CEMETERY: WE GIVE YOU A LOT FOR YOUR MONEY.

  He averaged one good slogan a week. I used to remember them, but everything goes in time, and so of course the old boy himself went, he’s buried right there, free of charge, for faithful service.

  I liked that old stuffed shirt, but I didn’t make the cemetery business my life work. (Or did I?)

  When I quit after a month, he was terribly disappointed, a young fellow who had started out like a son.

  Chapter 27

  My early days in San Francisco might be called the Bohemian Days, since so many of the young people I knew were addicted to art, and were working to achieve success as writers, poets, playwrights, painters, composers, sculptors, or all-around frauds, living on the fat of the land.

  Everybody had something going, and there were a good two dozen of us who met fairly regularly, although by accident. Among these regulars for almost a year there was a strange young woman who gave a first impression of irresistible charm. Soon enough, she revealed more of herself, however, whereupon every man who had imagined he might want to know her more deeply, withdrew, some in astonishment, some in anger, and some with sympathy and courtesy.

  Her full name suggested social solidity, and perhaps even family wealth, if not importance.

  She certainly had a job in public relations or something at the Legion of Honor Museum, and wrote pieces for all of the papers, but preferred the Call-Bulletin, an afternoon newspaper, long since defunct, perhaps because the city editor was Scoop Gleason, who was supposed to be in the romantic tradition of the great American newspaper editors. Ruthless, that is, and always able to get a better story quicker and more dramatically than any of the editors of the competing newspapers of which at that time, in the early 1930s, there were four, although one of them was a half-brother the Examiner, which was the main Hearst paper of San Francisco.

  On her own, however, whenever possible she went out and tried to hustle up a story that would make a hit with Scoop Gleason, if not with Dr. Walter Heil, her proper boss and the administrator of the Legion of Honor Museum.

  She wrote a pretty good mood piece, as she put it, about retired old Italian men playing dominoes in a little coffee shop, who became so caught up in old rivalries brought from Naples that frequently two of them would have to be stopped from trying to strangle one another—and after half an hour of walking in the neighborhood, they would go back to the coffee shop and start a new game.

  “I mean,” she said, “I had no idea such behavior was possible. It certainly isn’t in my family. When we get murderous, we mean it. I have a kid brother somewhere in the world who left home after a fight with my father ten years ago, and he was only sixteen at the time. And my father is still just as mad at him as he ever was.”

  The thing about this girl was a strange and instantly appealing beauty—of figure, complexion, and body style. She looked as if all of her being was open to being challenged, and right now, as it were, which of course made every man upon seeing her for the first time think, “Look at that.” And then say to somebody, “Who is that, pray tell?”

  She herself, on the other hand, wanted only to be somebody active in the arts, and writing was the area she felt she might be able to manage. Eventually
short stories like those of Katherine Mansfield, and after that possibly novels like those of Willa Cather.

  Thus, she and I sometimes used to sit and drink beer and talk, and of course while we talked she revealed more and more of her truth, which was at the very least odd—she had strange fears, for instance.

  She was sure one night soon a black man was going to break into her bedroom, whereupon she was going to pass out cold, from terror, and wake up sometime later, and need a moment or two to remember what had happened, to be terrified all over again, to run to the door and lock it, and then to find a note scribbled by the man, reading something like, “Oh, lady, you were wonderful, so I didn’t take anything else.” And a few months later she was going to discover that she was pregnant. And she was not going to know what to do. Being Catholic she couldn’t get an abortion. She certainly couldn’t tell her mother or her father. She would either have to kill herself or have the child.

  Well, she had two or three fears of that kind, and, as she told them, terrible things happened to her beauty, putting off any ideas any man might have about engaging her in sex.

  Chapter 28

  In 1959, in Paris, soon after I left my house on the beach at 24848 Malibu Road—the very number won my heart when I saw the FOR SALE sign on the house—and also left my room, 1015, not as good as 24848, but whatever the room lacked in numerological appeal, it made up for in size and height of ceiling, hall, and pantry, room 1015 at the Royalton Hotel at 44 West 44th Street, in New York, also a marvelous number, 44 West 44th, and had taken an Italian ship to Venice, with stops first at Lisbon, for a walk in the city, full of memories of where my kids and I had walked only two years earlier, and then in Sicily, in the westernmost town, whose name I keep forgetting, Messina is the easternmost town and I never forget Messina—Palermo, Palermo, that’s the name of the westernmost town—and a stop in Naples, walks in each of these towns, and a stop in Patras, not far from Missolonghi where Byron gave up the ghost theoretically fighting for the Greeks in another of their losing wars with the Turks, but who knows about Byron, about legends, about death, and then on up to Venice, where I left the ship, and after a few gondola rides here and there, took a train to Belgrade, and bought a little car there—what is all this, why don’t I get to the point?

  Because, whoever you are, the point is that getting to the point is quite a problem of travel, and if you are going to get to the point, or even if you are only going to hope to get to it, you have got to travel, and that’s what I’m doing. I paid $1,400 cash for the car with the German motor and the Italian body, and I drove, and drove, and stopped in Cannes, and began to gamble, and pretty soon all my money was gone. I was flat broke, a good $12,000 was gone, and I owed the tax collector back in Washington, D.C., $50,000, so what was happening?

  I drove up to Paris, and noticed that now the month was April. April, 1959. (And that makes it precisely thirteen years ago, as I write.)

  The going was bad, I was living the life of a millionaire, I ate caviar and drank vodka, I stopped at the George V Hotel, I gambled at the Aviation Club, I spent money, I lost money.

  Finally, I went to work, to see about making up what I had lost, and of course going to work for me means sitting and writing.

  And I made it, I got out of that time and trouble, I finished the work I agreed to do for money, and I got the money, and I began to pay off the tax collector.

  On the leftover money I began to live. I rented a great place to which to bring my kids for the summer, but before they arrived in June, late in June I think it was, I had become a regular habitué of the Aviation Club at 101 Champs-Elysées, a baccarat and chemin de fer gambling club, and being the kind of gambler I am, I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. This is not a great achievement. The fact is it is no achievement at all. It is unavoidable at a gambling house that very soon you will know all of the regular habitués. And you will notice the arrival of newcomers, and their departure, generally in disarray and despair.

  Among the regulars were Djingo, from Morocco, and Sergius, from Niger, whose mother was Turkish, he said, whose father was one of the biggest men in Niger politics. Sergius took automobile trips to Amsterdam now and then, and the theory was that he had added diamond smuggling to his other smuggling. But he never seemed to have money for gambling, or at any rate for what I call gambling, although he would take a place in the chemin de fer game and wait for the box to reach him, bet the equivalent of two or four dollars and hope to make four straight passes, and thereby to have suddenly: two makes it four, makes it eight, makes it sixteen, makes it thirty-two dollars. I once hollered at him, “Go again, you’ll win.” He went again and he won, and had sixty-four dollars for two, and passed the box, a thrilled man.

  I liked Sergius and his pal Djingo, because whenever they saw me they smiled so dishonestly and disreputably that I had to bust out laughing: whereupon their own laughter became the most comic sound anybody ever heard—the sound of absolutely pure and authentic irresponsibility.

  Chapter 29

  Knowing about famous people, but never meeting them, that is something people who aren’t famous know about, and then if anybody ever meets a famous person, or an especially famous person, it is a strange kind of experience, as if some kind of nonhuman thing, some kind of legendary thing, some kind of impossible enormity, had been reduced to ordinary human size. And then it turns out that the poor bastard has bad teeth, smells funny, and seems to have his whole being caught up in some kind of insanity, all of his cells are mad, he is composed of a complicated rampage of mad cells forming one crazy entirety, which is himself, virtually unbelievable and altogether unacceptable.

  If a boy of ten hadn’t ever seen his father, and his father suddenly showed up, the boy would know something of what people feel when they meet somebody famous.

  So this is my father? Well, look at him, for God’s sake. He’s nothing, he’s nobody, he’s got hair on his fingers, his nose is out of shape, he smells of tobacco, he seems confused. Is this him? Is this actually the man I’ve heard so much about, thought so much about, the man who is my father and therefore a large part of myself? So this is my father. Well, who would ever have thunk it?

  Well, in Fresno the king of the Raisin Day Parade one year was Tom Mix. Then, Monte Blue. Then, Bert Lytell. These were the most famous people I saw in the flesh in those days, before I was twelve years of age, and apart from the fact that they rode a chariot and had beside them the Raisin Day Queen, a local girl, elected by members of the social families of the town, Tom Mix, Monte Blue, and Bert Lytell were the same as other men, except for the fact that I had seen them all in silent movies.

  Tom Mix was the most impressive, and I wish it had been known in those days that he was a Greek (for that is what I have lately heard). We would all of us had said to one another, “You see Tom Mix up there on that chariot? He’s a Greek.” Alas, we would have been mistaken. He was not a Greek, after all. Small world, just the same, though.

  Bert Lytell on the other hand was only a good actor, in silent films, and then in films with sound, and on the stage.

  But in films or from the stage of a theater, he didn’t have anything like the effect on unfamous people that I have been trying to describe: the strange living reality of the famous person actually alive and standing on two feet.

  Meeting certain people makes certain other people literally sick, and that is the sort of thing I am talking about.

  Their fame makes people sick, and the reason for this is that their fame or the thing they have that has driven them to fame has made them sick. And they have been sick for so long that a stranger feels it immediately upon standing in the presence of that person, and so he also becomes sick.

  Try to imagine for instance suddenly meeting Napoleon himself—not one of the many millions of gentle souls who in some strange distortion of meanings have insisted that they are Napoleon. These nice people make you feel sick, too, but perhaps not for the same reason. Although the reasons aren’t likel
y to be much different, at that.

  For the original is essentially as mad as the imitator.

  That’s because each decides to be something he apparently has no real choice about—in short, his decision is helpless, he’s caught, he’s sick, he’s mad.

  Or try to imagine meeting Adolph Hitler sometime in 1944, for instance: that would surely have tended to make anybody sick.

  And so it might have been to meet Stalin, because these men were fantastic and preposterous versions of human beings.

  Now, sometime before the writing on the wall was clear enough to be readable, namely that a very big war apparently between only Germany and Russia and France was not going to peter out at the Maginot Line but was going to involve the whole world, but especially the United States, I was invited to go to Hyde Park for lunch with Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, along with four or five dozen other writers, actors, and all-around show biz characters, and so I saw that fabled gentleman.

  Seeing him, however, didn’t make me sick, it only made me try to understand why he had to insist on trying to seem to be charming, comic, and adorable, in addition to being great, if that is what he was, or thought he was, or thought he would have to become after the “winning” of the war.

  Chapter 30

  Jack black was a small man who wrote a book about spending half his forty-eight years in American penitentiaries, for robbery. The courts threw the book at him, but he had never done any real first-class robbing, he had done two or three small jobs, without hurting anybody, for enough money to keep him going for perhaps another few days. But he had got caught, and he had begun to do a lot of time, American time, out of the traditional and honorable procedures of American courts, protecting American society.