Last Call

Last Call

“She left me with me with sunburned skin, Josh. That’s your name, right? Can I call you Josh? What do you like to be called Josh?”

            “Josh is good.”

            Then he continued to yell.

            “She left me with peels of flesh gathered in my trembling fingers! A first burn gave to another as I salted them up like jerky the desert sun was leaving me.”

            Silence. It wasn’t nine in the morning here in New York. It wasn’t yet five o’clock in Los Angeles, where he was, on the phone with me, ordering this book about old fighter planes used in the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties. 

            “Going out with her was like reentry from outer space Josh. You know what I mean.” 

            The man on the other end of the phone was famous, or had been a decade ago when this call had occurred. He was a comedian. I remembered, then, watching on TV some of stand-up back in the Eighties. He also starred on a sitcom that lasted for a season. 

            Watching him now, I guess you could call it his comeback, twenty years after that call, brought that morning back to me. Now he’s see-through in the face. A sign of what made him explode on the phone twenty years ago. His comeback talks a lot about recovery. He’s still got his slouched-over neurosis concerning his religion, his mother, and his exes, but the overlay is the sticks of gum he would apply on set to hide his drinking. 

            It was a call where he was devoting his entire love life to a book that was a $9.98 sale book in our remainder section (how he found it, I do not know, as remainder sections at our chain of bookstores were not planned). But somehow he had a photo of a plane, a particular page, a particular image of a woman that was painted on the bomber jet, that reminded him of her, the woman he would call, about a hundred times during that call, “An angel and a bitch.”

            The store was opening, and I was still on this phone order call. As the minutes rolled by, the managers in the store would look at me, like I was the one stalling. Like I did not want to face the first customers. I did, believe me, I did. As much as one might think it is exciting to be on the phone with some famous, when that person is off his rocker, when you can hear his eyelashes trying to shut down through the phone lines, trans-continental, sealing off some night of drinking that never stopped, it is not a comfortable feeling. I kept thinking of his stand-up routine; his habit of touching his pendulous muzzle, mooselike as he chewed through his angst, chewed through the black drapes he wore as a stage demeanor.

            “Josh, I can’t remember how to fall. I want peace again. I want to get that fucking bitch of an angel back again!”

When I was in the eighth grade, in Sacramento, California, my mother gave me 300 pennies to go to the matinee. The pennies were not rolled. They were loose, and something that I scraped out of a box my mom handed me. I was embarrassed, but resolute. It was vital that I go see License to Drive starring the two Coreys, Haim and Feldman. I knew my mom did not have a whole lot of money. I never had been comfortable asking her about it. My dad was a doctor. But he also filed for bankruptcy. I ate government logs of cheese and had my school lunches paid for at the same time my dad was trying to sell back his Alfa Romeo. 

My mom received alimony. She also was in what would become a thirty-year relationship with another man, who was an attorney. He paid for things my mother needed.

I took the 300 pennies to the movies. I asked my best friend, Robbie, if I could at least get two quarters from him in exchange for fifty of the pennies. “No way,” and he laughed. The woman at the ticket window counted the pennies while Robbie waited inside the movie theater lobby. After the pennies were counted, I was given a ticket. I was also told, “Don’t ever do this again.”

My mom was always an angel for me. Or, at least, that was how I always painted her picture in conversations that built up my reservoir of courage to leave Fresno and come to New York City. But did I have some of the other side, the other feelings, inside me, too?

The neurotic comedian required his note to the angel bitch to be stuck inside the book, which was a book on bombshells painted on old fighter planes. I was given a specific girl, which of course, reminded the comedian of his angel bitch lost love. I was told that the delivery company would have to drop the book off in the front yard. 

Write about it, Sonny Boy, I could hear my mom tell me while I agreed to whatever the comedian said. My mom would laugh at the three-hundred pennies throughout the years, and while it was happening, and encourage me to write about it. Or use it to fuel a career in soap operas, a profession she held with as much esteem as some parents hold doctors and attorneys. 

At all costs, the comedian said, they must not ring the doorbell. The book must be placed to the side of the front door, underneath some bushes. He gave the name of the woman as “Angel Bitch”, and then he brought me back from my tired journey with him when he stopped for a breath, and asked me what I did for a living. “Are you a book man?” I felt awkward telling this comedian that I, too, wanted to be a comic. I told him about Fresno. He laughed for a couple of minutes, and kept saying, “Fresno crazy son-of-a-bitch!” I told him I had performed only a couple of times, and that was when he said something that I have taken with me ever since. He redeemed himself. I saw this fatherly side to him, and he was not a fatherly type, when he said, “I was not understood for the first three-thousand times I performed. It was the three thousand and first time that they got it.” I had stopped two-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine times short.