I had an idea. “Can I have two tickets?”
“Two? Ah-hah, you want to bring Ms. Restaurant?”
“Why not? You can’t get more romantic than heavyweight wrestling for a first date.”
“It’s clever, Max. She’ll either be impressed or run screaming. Let’s hope she doesn’t turn out to be another Norah.”
“Amen to that.”
My last girlfriend, Norah Silver, was a brilliant, nervous woman who worked as an illustrator for medical textbooks. She loved to travel and we went many places I never would have gone without her. She had surprising stories—she’d gotten close to Mecca; an old boyfriend’s pet python got loose in her car and hid somewhere in the dashboard for five days. She was funny and had kept the most endearing child’s sense of wonder. Both of which helped her over a natural pessimism about things and the belief life was only a series of atoms and events bumping randomly into each other. I got used to her dark moods and it appeared she got used to my unintended aloofness. For a time, for a few months, we felt the light of the world had fallen on us as a couple and we were readying ourselves for a life together. Or so I thought.
Then one night she admitted she’d started seeing a man who flew airplanes. That was how she described him the first time. “He flies airplanes.” As if his profession was enough to justify her betrayal. We were in bed, ten minutes beyond love in that drifting no-man’s-land where truth has a tendency to float up like mist off the sweat and pleasant emptiness of the act.
Why is sex so often both the beginning and the end of a relationship? What is there about it that gives it such range and versatility? Whether Norah was afraid of getting further involved with me, or her Airplane Man had irresistible qualities I didn’t, I honestly couldn’t fathom her action, decision, choice… whatever it was.
Mary Poe was sure she knew the cause. “She fucked the other guy to see how you’d react. Simple as that. Max, I’ve known you most of my life and love you, but you act like getting married is the same as lining a plane up to land on an aircraft carrier. Not until everything’s perfect can you start going in. But that boat’s on water and it’s rocking back and forth, man! You can’t keep dillydallying, or adjusting your flaps and waiting for the perfect moment before you start down. You’ve got to do what you can, then go in hoping God and vision will do the rest.”
“I believe in sticking to something once you’ve begun.”
“Maybe Norah didn’t think you’d begun yet.”
“Baloney! There’s loyalty and there’s trust. We all know what they mean.”
Mary put her hand on my head and slid it slowly down to my hot cheek. “I agree, sweetie. It depresses the hell out of me every day in my job. Seeing these greedy people sneaking around, grabbing for as much as they can, but when they get their hands caught in the cookie jar, they start screaming like six-year-olds, ‘It wasn’t me! I didn’t do anything! Wa-wa!’ That’s what I like about Frank—he’s dumb, but he’s good and I can trust him. The only other women he sees throw tomatoes at him.”
My relationship with Norah spiraled down into two dogs barking at each other through a chain-link fence. It was hopeless. The last time we slept together was the best it had been in months. We talked about that, sadly, until her telephone rang. She grabbed the receiver before the answering machine took it. Listening, she said, “I’ll call you back,” then chuckled when she heard the other’s answer. I got dressed and left. A month later I received a postcard from the Robin Hood Museum in Nottingham, England. On the back was a quote written in her flawless script: “She would’ve been a good woman… if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Before I had a chance to invite Lily Aaron to the wrestling matches, she invited me to a birthday party, Lincoln’s tenth, to be held at his mother’s restaurant. When I asked what sort of present he would like, she said, “A monster. Buy Lincoln any kind of monster and he’ll be a happy man.”
This was one man I most definitely wanted to be happy, so I set out to find the ne plus ultra monster in the city of Los Angeles. I began by going to toy stores and saw attempts that were dumb or only disgusting, but nothing that would bring any genuine delight or surprise to a ten-year-old. A friend tipped me to a place downtown that sold only Japanese robots and monsters. I went and was momentarily tempted to buy a six-foot-tall blowup Godzilla, but that was taking a chance—what if the birthday boy already had a six-foot-tall blowup Godzilla? I could imagine the scene at the restaurant: right in the middle of opening his presents he’d either have to pretend to be pleased or, more like a kid, tell me he already had one. Disaster! This was a strategic purchase, an important moment in the birth of my rapport with his mother. I needed to do it right.
In a pet store I looked hard and excitedly at a gigantic unmoving iguana, but there was already a gigantic Aaron dog to consider and what if the two didn’t mix? Sighing, I left the monster and went searching for one with neither heartbeat nor appetite. For an afternoon I tried sketching the world’s greatest cartoon ogre, six feet high too and enchased with dripping, oozy gore. But children like to do their own drawings. Besides, what if my idea of horrible was only ho-hum to this boy? Another potential calamity.
It gave me a good excuse to call Lily. Exaggerating here and there to make my search sound both strenuous and goofy, I quickly had her laughing. Although her speaking voice was mid-range, her laugh was high and tinkly.
“Don’t be crazy! Just go get him a mask or one of those Beetle-juice figures and he’ll be happy.”
“I don’t want him happy. I want him overwhelmed.”
“I like a man with big plans. You were a hit at the restaurant the other day. I’ve brought people there who think it’s a loony bin. But I think you liked it. Anyway, they liked you. Even Gus. I caught him looking at ‘Paper Clip’ the next day and he’s not the kind of man who reads comic strips. Good luck with your monster. I don’t know who’ll be more excited to see it, Lincoln or me.”
Beware the Ide(a)s of Max. It came while I was drawing and struck me as being wonderful but also something that could backfire easily and cause trouble. So I chose to sacrifice surprise for sure success and called Lily again to sound her out. She liked it as much as I did and said if I could pull it off, her son would be thrilled.
Full speed ahead!
I called the pet store that sold the iguana and, after some explaining, was told to call an animal handler who specialized in training creatures for the movies. This handler heard me out, then quoted a price so outrageous that I could easily have bought a small circus for the same amount.
“You’ve been living with your snakes too long, bud. I think they bit your brain.”
He was still cursing when I hung up on him and his price. I called other pet stores and got more numbers and names to contact. Finally the name Willy Snakespeare was mentioned and that’s where I found what I was looking for.
California is full of people from the dark side of the moon. Whether it is the climate or the fact it is as far west as you can bring your madness before falling into the ocean, there are species of human cuckoos in the state like no others. Willy Snakespeare was a man who reputedly did nothing but talk and live with two boa constrictors named Laverne and Surly. I was told I could find him on Hollywood Boulevard every day somewhere in the vicinity of the Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie store. Where or how he lived I never found out in the two days I knew him. I simply drove to the street, parked, and went looking for a man with a beard and snakes draped over his shoulders. It didn’t take long. He was at an outdoor newsstand looking at a computer magazine. Only one snake accompanied him, but the way its head hung, it looked like it was reading over his shoulder.
“Are you Willy?”
“I’m Willy. If you want to take a picture, it’ll cost you two dollars.”
“What if I wanted to hire you and your snakes for an afternoon? How much?”