“You make yourself miserable, Rock,” I said. I didn’t yell. I didn’t contradict him. “You pick up the hammer and hit your thumb, over and over, and after a while, it gets boring. And maybe that was okay before you had a kid, but now you need to think about him.”
Rocky didn’t say anything. We must have sat there silently for five minutes, and I was proud to think he was considering my advice. Then I said, “Rock?” and he didn’t look at me, and I realized it had happened again. Probably he’d stopped listening when I uttered the word boring. His club, his banquette: he wouldn’t leave. “For Pete’s sake, Rocky,” I said, but he didn’t look at me, he just picked up the salt and pepper shakers and clonked them together, the glass toe of the salt to the silver hat of the pepper, which left dents. Good old salt, surely, was the comic, kicking its highfalutin straight man in the head.
But he forgave me again, on the set of our next rotten motion picture. He needed to complain to someone without being argued with: there’s nothing as dispiriting as making garbage and having some well-meaning person assure you that it’s gold.
God knows we made a of lot movies, garbage and aluminum and fool’s gold if not real gold. Twenty-eight features in thirteen years. Our fan club — oh, our fan club, full of men (mostly) who memorize our statistics the way other men learn baseball scores — has arguments in their newsletter about which of our pictures was best. My daughter Gilda, who reads all that stuff, tells me. “There’s a guy who loves Rock and Roll Rock,” she said once, naming Rocky’s last movie, a solo effort, middle-aged Rocky in an Elvis Presley — styled pompadour. “Isn’t that interesting?”
“It’s unconscionable,” I said.
The club spends a great deal of time defending my reputation. “A great straight man,” they say. “The greatest!” They write long annotations of our pictures, full of cross-references and games: find Shemp Howard. Look for this flubbed line. And they also mention the saddest fact of alclass="underline" that everyone knows that Rocky Carter was funnier (even funnier, they put it) offscreen than on. They wish, more fervently than Carter and Sharp themselves ever did, that just once The Boys had been given a top-notch script to work with. They try to make themselves feel better with Marry Me, Barry, the best of the lot.
Despite the fact that we never made a good picture, they nevertheless over the years got even worse. A little research reveals that most people who’ve wasted time thinking about it would rate Red, White, and Who; Marry Me, Barry; and Ghost of a Chance as our best pictures, all of them made in the first six of our Hollywood years. Problem is, we kept going. We’d always done ghost stories, but after a while our scripts got less and less realistic, probably because the shtick was always to get us in trouble with some unforgiving group, and we’d already antagonized every possible demographic of our time on this earth. So the writers went looking elsewhere: how about pirates? Yo Ho Ho. Mummies? The aforementioned For He’s a Jolly Good Pharaoh. Men from Mars? Elves? Naughty children?
Carter and Sharp Meet Mother Goose was our second color picture. Personally I thought it was pandering, but then our kid fans never particularly cottoned to me, just another grown-up flitting around that large child, Rocky. Rocky played the Piper’s son, Bobby Shaftoe, Little Jack Horner, and Jack Spratt; I appeared as the Piper, Jack Horner’s father, and — in my only drag screen roles — both Mrs. Spratt and Mother Goose herself. Tansy claimed the picture tanked because it came out the same year as Hans Christian Andersen, with Danny Kaye playing so sugary and pure you wanted to bop him in the nose and steal his wooden shoes. But our movie was awful, and we knew it, before we’d even finished filming. Our budget was nothing. I still remember sitting on a hill overlooking a fake lake on the studio back lot; Rocky was
wearing his Bobby Shaftoe outfit, not actually silver buckles slightly below his actual knees. He said to me, “I should have been a silent comedian.”
I said, “What?”
“I would have been famous.”
“You are famous.”
“I would have been great.”
“You are—” I began.
“Like Chaplin,” said Rocky. “Great like that. I’m a B comic. A kid’s comic. I should never have opened my big goddamn mouth.”
But what could have kept him quiet? Nothing. I knew the guy: nothing. Okay, maybe imagine he worked harder, was born a few years earlier, hitchhiked to Hollywood in the teens and talked his way onto a set and then into a movie and then into a scene: All right, the director says, give the kid five minutes of film, let’s see what he can do. The movie’s set in a department store, and Rocky tangos with a tailor’s dummy. Across town, there are men trying to figure out, by means of science, how to make people speak from the screen. For now the fat kid is silent, but dancing. He wants to tell you everything, but he can’t.
And then somehow he does.
The fact is, if Rocky Carter had made it to Hollywood before the invention of sound movies, he would have invented sound movies by force of will. Suddenly, a miracle. Dateline New York City, Duluth, Valley Junction: today in movie theaters across the nation, the image of a comic actor suddenly looked at the camera and therefore the audience, and spoke. “Some stuff, huh?” the comic said, as the audience searched the seats for a ventriloquist. “No, up here, it’s me: I’m the one.” No sliding dialogue card trimmed in white lilies, just the voice, his celluloid co-stars still mute and damp-eyed and milk-skinned.
But for now Rocky adjusted his sailor’s hat. It had a pom-pom on top, like Buster Brown’s. “Who’ll remember me?” he asked. Then he sighed. “It’s okay. I like kids. They just don’t remember anything.”
“There’s no music in silent movies,” I said. Carter and Sharp Meet Mother Goose was a putative musical. We wanted to do a real one; all around us glorious musicals were being made, An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain. I do not believe in reincarnation, but if it exists, please, God, let me come back as Gene Kelly.
“Silent movies are all music,” said Rocky.
“Local music.” I tried to sneer. “The lady organist from the Lutheran church. The idiot cousin of the theater manager.”
“But music,” said Rocky. He got up. His silver buckles were made of tin foil. He walked back to the artificial lake, where he would later be bitten by one of the bad-mannered geese in residence there. Rocky always had bad luck with animals.
In the books about us, Rock’s praised for his pantomime, those moments he dummies up and dances with a mop, savors a single grape as though it was his mother’s home-cooked pot roast. Once he speaks, you can tell that he’s a smart man who knows more than he’ll admit to, miming foolishness and sweetness and hope because they’re funnier than all the education of all the professors — real or imagined — in the wide world. Remember, I was married to a ballerina. People who move beautifully will tell you a million things, they will convey notions with one tilt of the wrist that you can’t imagine successfully hinting at in a ten-page letter. Watching, you will echo their gestures with a hand across your mouth or at the back of your neck, and every single minute, every ankle turn, chin point, elbow tuck, they will be keeping secrets from you.