William Gass - Eyes - Novellas and Stories

My selections were never my selections. I got no choice in the matter. I once played a stretch of Chopin. Not so long ago. In this cowboy bar my playing is going on, and some dumb cow comes over and wants “I Dream of Jeanie” or something likewisz, and he asks, rudely, what’s that? what’s that you’re playing? And Doc Holliday says, thickly through a stuffy nose, it’s a nocturne. But to be honest Doc can’t play a note either, nocturne my stencil’d eyebrow, so he’s faking it on me while another guy is nighttiming it up in a corner out of the camera’s eye.

Twenty-two? Twenty-two is the answer to a trivia question. You don’t have to have been there to know that, you only have to have been around bores. They’re on every set that’s supposed to be a bar. Another answer is: Chesterfields. Should have been Gauloises but that wouldn’t have been American. Twenty-two. It’s the number Helmut Dantine — I worked with him once in later years — handsome devil — it’s the number he’s told to bet in order to score at roulette. Rick, a real sog heart, lets the Bulgar newly-woos win the dough for their passage out of the picture. Like me, that Dantine wasn’t paid to talk. I hear he got a contract just because he smoldered.

And working conditions. My strings were detautivating just waiting around in the fug, hot as the damn desert got. Why did they have to shoot the thing in August? though the people I worked for — Warmonger Brothers — were filming every minute of the day and half the night on account of the conflict. You could see shortages coming — of cellulose for film, cloth for costumes, rubber for tires, wood and metal and hair for wigs and crystallized sugar for those breakaway windows. Then actors would disappear, too, sucked up by their commissions. Of course I get no news in the warehouse. The world could’ve been coming to an end and all of us there would’ve just sat still for it. That is the life of a saloon piano. Sitting. It was what I was built for. Sitting. For silence, not music. To have patience, to be calm, to wait until a rollicking tune like “My Gal Sal” gets hammered out of me to amuse a bunch of layabouts whose delight is the sheerest pretense. If this is real life, real life must be a frigging fraud. It probably is. I go dum diddily dumdum but I don’t feel dum diddily dumdum. People hear dum diddily dumdum but they don’t feel dum diddily dumdum either. Dumdum don’t mean diddily to them. They’ve wiszd up. Oop. I warned you about wisz. The same goes for doodahday.

Like I said, everybody was running around crying complaints, ordering requests. You know movies are never thought out in somebody’s head. No one has hold of a whole. There aren’t even pieces. What would they be pieces of? And it aint a mosaic because in a mosaic all those itty bits fit into something — the big picture. No, this was more like, what do they call it?…collage. It’s as if you made a lot of stuff just to cut it up and then you took some of the pieces and pasted a bunch of them back together. A few actors and directors try to control the movement of the movie they are supposed to be making, but helterskelter is what is really going on. Higgledeepiggledee in a pig’s poke.

The cast? Honey — they’re scattered corn. The dumped dame is off the set when the guy who dumped her cries or chortles or phones room service. Half the actors are playing golf. Al Wallis, was it? was walking around with a polo injury. I used to think that when the phone rang someone was there, someone was phoning, because the actors always answer hello or yeah or hi and then feign all ears, lobes awiggle as if a caller was bending them. They practice their reactions — I’m shocked, I’m surprised, I’m sad, I’m nervous, I’m worried — while Boots and Britches says why? why are you sounding anxious when you should be sounding confident…sound confident! I don’t know how to sound confident, I can’t do confident, I have never been asked to be confident…Okay, okay, try seductive, be seductive…My god, that’s seductive? that wouldn’t seduce a raunchy rabbit…Oh now, hon, see here, don’t cry — George — let’s start over, make the phone ring will you one more time. Makeup! We have eyesmear over here!

Oh boy, though, that short moon-faced shit was oily. Boy was that runt ever. With his nasal whine, with that shy smirky smile. He was all wheedle and a yard wide. That wheedle was worth a fortune. And she — she was a beamer. She was a ski slope girl, healthy as a travel poster. No wonder the wife of the star comes storming around the set accusing Rick, the lab-coat guy, of doing the bumpyhumpy with her. Beauguy. That’s him. One of the two walk-of-stars stars. Ilsa the other. I really think she thought that Rick was uncouth. And he was always pissed off because the plot kept changing and he was convinced that was no way to run a railroad. Disremembering lines: I love you truly has been changed to I love you dearly, although tomorrow it may be that I love you deeply. Disremember this, a hit is like a miss, on squat you can rely…The stand-ins used to sing that…our fundaments get spry as time goes by.

And the soundman was doing banana splits because Beauguy kept muttering his cute little cracks so nobody could hear them, his back to the camera signing chits, and the writers would have been writhing if they hadn’t been drunk in Toronto because he said them so soft so fast, too offhand, you know, like when this girl he’s boffing but has no feelings for — sorry, it should go without saying — in this business you don’t boff babes you have feelings for — if you have feelings for anybody you say I’m crazy about you — I’m mad about you — I’m nuts about you — as if Rick had feelings for anybody but Miss Visit Stockholm, the travel poster — as if Beauguy had feelings for anybody, certainly not the lush head he was married to, hey, even himself he aint happy with…Geez, we sort of trilled off the beaten track, didn’t we? I never did do a note of Liszt. I regret that. And when they cast the TV series…shit, sorry…I can’t forget — the shame — in ’83, Rick’s Café Américain , like a kind of coffee, did they contact me? My keys wouldn’t stick for Scatman Crothers…I heard…I heard…yeah, he could play.

…oh…gotcha…back to boffing…um…the scene…you know…like when this girl — the girl he’s boffing — asks him where he was last night (’cause she noticed his thingamajig wasn’t up her) and he says I can’t remember that far back, and then when she asks him if she’ll see him tonight he says I can’t plan that far ahead — well there’s no drum roll for the execution of those lines, thrown away like a stubbed butt. Great stuff, I guess, if you aint chewing popcorn. Maybe that’s why it got a lot of repeaters: girls trying to see through their tears, guys trying to hear what their Karmelkorn wouldn’t let ’em.

Anyway, our hero, Rick, just shoves her — the boffee — out the door, don’t he? Tough guy. Very sympathetic type. In a Western — I worked mostly Westerns — he’d get shot later on. He’d tumble from a roof to the mattress below. You can be short with the girls, indifferent, reluctant, ornery…but you can’t shove them around and pretend to wear a white hat. I liked Westerns because they had decorums and I got to be played, even if there was always a rough house. That’s what split my key. Bottle that was supposed to break like a clay pigeon in midair didn’t break but flew past an aimed-at ear and hit me fairly square — just there — see…I got more wounds than Captain Frog’s got medals.

Don’t push down on me like that. When you surprise my keys they don’t sound. I tell you some folks would set drinks down on the board as if it were stiff with rheumatiz. I could get drunk on licked lips, I’ve endured so many spills. Don’t push down. I’m not in hearty operation, okay? And the leaners. Rick leans on me. Everybody leans. Let’s go into Rick’s and lean on the piano. Bogie, you know, had a lisp. Nothing about him was promising.