Aha, you might say to me: she left you, and so you hated her. I toyed with hate, and then chose something harder. I decided I wanted to be her pal. Other people who’d left me had managed by dying, and it seemed a shame to let a whole living woman go to waste. I wanted her to think well of me, which seemed a kind of revenge in itself. Look what a reasonable fellow you just left! Look how you can’t forget him! So I courted her — for the first time — I wrote her letters, which she returned with postcards, and once or twice, though I couldn’t afford it, I called her on the telephone (I tracked her new act’s progress with the week’s Variety). She seemed fresh out of love, but I was sure that somewhere in her luggage, among the makeup and the worn-out shoes, was a tiny package of affection for me, which I kept petitioning for. It belonged to me. Hating her wouldn’t have been so awful, so constant, but that might require her to hate me, and that, I realized, I couldn’t bear.
We’d parted at the Madison Orpheum, after ten months on the road together. I refused to say good-bye; I had a horror of the word. I had not said good-bye to my sisters, I had not said good-bye to my father, I would not say good-bye to Miriam. That last night, I could hear her call my name backstage, but I’d gone to hide among the blades in a sword-swallower’s dressing room. “You’re safe here,” the sword swallower assured me, laughing because he believed I was the heartbreaker. Eventually, Miriam gave up, and went back to the hotel room to pack her things alone. Will I ever see you again? I’d asked, and she’d shrugged. But that’s the thing about the circuit: what you once lost — on purpose, by accident — is delivered to your doorstep sooner or later. And make no mistake: you are delivered, too, even to people who’d like to refuse you. Maybe especially.
The Genuine Article
So I was back to being a single, a comedian, I decided. I figured what most people figure: a comedy act is a business, the comic is the boss, the straight man’s just the hired help. Surely after my time on the road with Miriam, I deserved a promotion. I tried to write some patter songs. One — inspired by my eleventh-grade English class — went this way:
I’ll be a satyr that’s wiser but sadder
if you’re not my nymph anymore.
All of the patter I had wouldn’t matter
if you walked away from my door.
Wasn’t it bliss when we kissed in the mist?
It wasn’t a myth, then, my lips on your wrist.
Insistently kissing my kissable miss.
Mad as a hatter, but what would it matter
if you aren’t my love anymore.
(To write a song, you walk down the street with your head thrown back, hoping some rhyme will trickle down your throat like a nosebleed. Kiss, bliss, sis, bris?
Probably not bris.)
I got some photos made up, captioned Mike Sharp, glad to get my old name or some facsimile back under my own face. Miriam and I had shared her agent, a faceless guy named Maurice who worked out of New York and didn’t care anything about this year’s Savant; he wouldn’t return my calls and telegrams. A juggler I met in Milwaukee said he knew a hungry agent in Chicago who I should cable. So I did, with the words “Find me work!”
Theater bookers didn’t care about this year’s Savant, either; maybe that’s why last year’s Savant had come back to Mimi. I became what was called a disappointment act, a trouper who’d step in anytime someone got sick or drunk or arrested or divorced. For two years I did everything: tap-dancing, singing, tab shows, flash shows, juggling. I was the guy who was merely sufficient. You hired me, or you had a hole onstage: I caught the tumbling Irish acrobat; I sang harmony to the chubby ingenue’s declarations of love; I was the husband who opened the door at the end of a scene to catch my wife caressing the handsome stranger. Mike Sharp: the thumb in the dike.
That was onstage. Off, I looked around and saw: no one. Not my family, not Miriam, and especially not Hattie, who I almost expected to pop up now that Miriam was gone, I’d ignored her for so long. I was a single, an orphan. And lonely. For ten months I’d had someone to say things to. Not serious things, just I wonder if these shoes will last another month or I saw the funniest baby on the street today or My stomach’s upset, but I don’t think it’s serious. In a bar you can discuss politics or women or money, but you can’t tell a stranger that your stomach’s upset but you don’t think it’s serious.
Everyone in vaudeville was strange to me: men and women, slack-rope walkers and animal trainers, Russians and Catholics and Negroes. You couldn’t tell from an act who was real and who’d put on an accent, the counterfeit from the actual. The female impersonators, for instance: some of them were perfectly masculine, big knuckled and ready to fight. Others out of costume still seemed girlish, not like real girls, but like the most pampered eerie fairy-tale girl there ever was. They stood on the sidewalk with their unlit cigarettes, waiting for someone to approach with a match. Someone always did.
I learned as much Yiddish from Gentiles as Jews; for years I wasn’t sure what was actual Yiddish and what was backstage slang. Sometimes I did a Dutch act, sometimes Italian. I even did a Hebe act for a couple of weeks, with a guy named Farnsworth who played an Irish tough trying to wheedle me into a bargain. Already it was appallingly dated, but I waxed my teeth so they looked pointed and worked up a Yiddishe accent modeled, I am sorry to say, on my father’s. Still, being Jewish myself wasn’t really an advantage. For a Hebe act you played smart and stingy, for a Dutch act, stupid and lovable. Anyone could do it.
I don’t know how I got through those years after Mimi left me, except through a combination of pride and rage, the cocktail that young men guzzle down until they either wise up or die from years of consumption. They’re delicious together, pride and rage. I would not go back home. I could not fail Hattie, sometimes because I loved her and believed I was fulfilling her wishes, sometimes because I hated her and wanted to show her what I was made of. I had the worst of all worlds: I was a solo act, except when I was acting.
I’d been doing the Hebe act when I landed in Iowa again, Cedar Rapids, about 130 miles from Vee Jay. Farnsworth, or whatever his real name was, horrified me: he smelled worse than Boris the Seal, and told me every day that he was looking for my replacement. It had gotten to where we only spoke onstage. In Iowa, I moped and thought of my sisters: Rose and Annie in Valley Junction; Ida in Des Moines; Fannie in Madrid; Sadie in Cascade, not far from Cedar Rapids. I sent money home, though I couldn’t afford it. Annie wrote back, care of my agent: Scribble a little note next time. I hadn’t. Now I composed telegrams in my head. Not to Pop: of course he wouldn’t come. But Rose loved comedians, and Annie loved Rose: they could be coaxed, couldn’t they?
To see their brother do a Hebe act?
I was so miserable that week everyone on the bill stayed away from me, except for a blackface tramp juggler and eccentric dancer named Walter Cutter, who played the deuce spot. We nodded when we passed each other backstage. He shook my hand once when I came off, like a critic who’d just been grudgingly impressed with a young upstart’s talent. Nice of him, since he — though not the headliner — was the guy who brought the house down, every single time. He could juggle fourteen balls and make them look like six dozen. He did a stair dance that rivaled Bill Robinson’s (and that’s saying something), rubber-limbed and elegant.