"Oh, Bruce, this is wonderful," you say. "Where will we go?"
"I bought a camper," Bruce says. "I thought we'd drive around, maybe even leave New Jersey."
You have always hated camping, but Bruce has yet another surprise—he's stocked the camper with food. Dehydrated scrambled eggs, pancake mix, beef jerky. "No more fast food for us," he says.
You travel all day; Bruce has decided he wants to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. While Bruce drives he plays tapes of his music and sings along. You tell him you're impressed with the fact he's memorized all the words. "So what do you think?" he says. "You like the music?"
Though your feet hurt—Bruce has bought you a pair of hiking boots, a size too small—you tell him you think the music is wonderful. Never has a greater genius walked the face of the earth.
Unfortunately, Bruce is irritated by this. The two of you have your first fight. "You're just saying that," Bruce says. "You're just the same as all the rest. I thought you were different, but you're just trying to get on my good side by telling me I'm brilliant."
"What do you want from me?" you say.
Bruce starts to cry. "I'm not really any good," he says.
"That's not true, Bruce," you say. "You mustn't feel discouraged. Your fans love you. You cured a small boy of cancer just because he saw you on TV. You're up there with the greats: the Beatles, Christ, Gandhi, Lee Iacocca. You've totally restored New Jersey to its former glory: once again it's a proud state."
"It's not enough," Bruce says. "I was happier in the old days, when I was just Bruce, playing in my garage."
You're beginning to find that you're unhappy in your life with Bruce. Since Bruce spends so much time rehearsing, there is little for you to do but shop. Armed with credit cards and six bodyguards (to protect you from Bruce's angry women fans), you search the stores for some gift for Bruce that might please him. You buy foam coolers to hold beer, Smurf dolls, candy-flavored underwear, a television set he can wear on his wrist, a pure-bred Arabian colt. You hire three women to wrestle on his bed covered in mud.
Bruce thanks you politely but tells you, "There's only one thing I'm interested in."
"Me?" you say.
Bruce looks startled. "My music," he says.
To your surprise you learn you are pregnant, though you can't figure out how this could have happened. You think about what to name the baby. "How about Benjamin Springsteen?" you say.
"Too Jewish immigrant," Bruce says. "This kid is going to be an American, not some leftist from Paterson."
"How about Sunny Von?" you say.
"Sunny von Springsteen?" Bruce says. "I don't get it. No, there's only one name for a kid of mine."
"What?" you say, trying to consider the possibilities. Bruce is sitting on the couch, stroking his guitar. The three phones are ringing nonstop, the press is banging on the door. You haven't been out of the house in three days. The floor is littered with boxes from Roy Rogers, cartons of White Castle burgers, empty cans of Coke. You wonder how you're going to fill up the rest of the day; you've already filed your nails, studied the Sears, Roebuck catalog, made a long-distance call to your mother.
At last Bruce speaks. "I'm going to call the kid Elvis," he says.
"What if it's a girl?" you say.
"Elvis," Bruce says. "Elvis, either way."
You fly to Hollywood to try to find his real wife. Finally you track her down. She's working as a tour guide at the wax museum. "Admission to the museum is five dollars," she says at the door. "The museum will be closing in fifteen minutes."
"Don't you remember me?" you say. "I'm the person who gave you a lobotomy, who shipped you off to Hollywood."
"If you say so," Brace's wife says. "Thank you."
"I made a mistake," you say. "I did wrong. I have your ticket here; you'll go back to Bruce."
His wife is willing, though she claims not to know what you're talking about. "But what about my job here?" she says. "I can't just leave."
You tell her you'll take over for her. Quickly you rush her to the airport, push her onto the plane. You tell her to look after Bruce. "He can't live without you, you know," you say.
You wait to make sure her plane takes off on time. A sense of relief comes over you. You have nowhere to go, nothing to do; you decide to return to the wax museum and make sure it's properly locked up for the night.
You have the keys to the door; the place is empty, the lights are off. Now you wander through the main hall. Here are Michael Jackson, Jack the Ripper, President Reagan, Sylvester Stallone, Muhammad Ali, Adolf Hitler. You are alone with all these men, waxy-faced, unmoving, each one a superstar.
Something violent starts to kick, then turns, in your stomach.
Life in the Pre-Cambrian Era
I forgot that my mother planned to pay me a visit that day. Or I would have cleaned up. Maybe. Now I, Marley Mantello, hesitate to speak too highly of myself. But even as a toddler, reenacting imaginary scenes of death on the roof of my mother's run-down house, garbed in a matador's tweedley-dee, it was obvious—to myself, to my mother—that I was a boy genius.
Example: my Hollywood-inspired paintings of the Crusaders fighting the Moslems, and in the sky, emblazoned in black letters, the word "GOD." And beneath this word a black cross. Not bad for a kid of eight. But what good does any of this genius do me? There are times when I think that to leave my mark upon the world is simply to curse it with another smear...
After art school I became a starving artist. I starved with a vengeance. My mother approved. All this was for my art. Still, in another sense, it didn't matter one way or the other: I knew I wasn't going to live very long, I expected to keel over at any minute. Every day I had to think carefully: Was I well enough to get up today? Did my stomach hurt? Was an unhealed cut on my finger a sign of cancer? What should I eat for breakfast? And none of these things would have been enough to get me out of bed except for the fact that I had to go paint a picture.
But as much as I wanted to paint, often it took me most of the day to prepare myself for it. First of all, I had to go to the bank to take out another dollar or two. I am a fast walker, but my bank is very far away. It was one of those big banks on Wall Street, an unusually gloomy place, built in a neofascist-religious style. It should have had one of those big organs at the back, or at least a baptismal font. If my bank had had any sense, it would have commissioned me to turn the interior into a chapel. It would have been a real investment for them. It gave me great pleasure to walk down there, even though it generally took me about an hour. I liked the fact that my bank was far away, this way I wasn't tempted to spend money as quickly.
On the streets crowds of people were staggering this way and that, newly released from their office tombs. Grim faces, worn down like cobblestones, never to make anything of their lives. These were the worker bees and drones, who had been imprisoned in American thought-patterns since birth, with no hope for escape but the weekly million-dollar lottery. Walking at a slow speed, which drove me crazy. But what would have motivated them to move more quickly?
I stood out. With my long, lanky stride, my scuffed Italian loafers, and my beat-up, faggoty Italian jacket. It had deep pockets on both sides, ripped because I kept a lot of variables and disregards in the pockets—and the shoulders had a little padding in them, by now somewhat lopsided.
It didn't bother me, the looks and stares I got. People were angry with me, and why? Because I was some sort of freak, an artist. They were trapped, and I wasn't. So I felt smug, even though I was starving.