Such is the life of the innocent, or someone who kids himself he is innocent. As someone once said to me: “Let’s not be too naive, shall we?”
I wish I had heard and followed that advice on that night in a Chinese restaurant somewhere in the fogs and rains of Dublin.
It was one of those nights when the prophet Elijah did not prevent me—nor did I prevent myself—from drinking too many drinks and spilling too many beans in front of Jake Vickers and his Parisian lady and three or four visitors from New York and Hollywood.
It was one of those nights when it seemed you can’t do anything wrong. One of those nights when everything you say is brilliant, honed, sharpened to a razor edge of risibility, when every word you speak sends the house on a roar, when people hold their ribs with laughter, waiting for your next shot across their bows, and shoot you do, and laugh they do, until you are all bathed in a warm love of hilarity and are about to fall on the floor writhing with your own genius, your own incredible humor raised to its highest temperature.
I sat listening to my own tongue wag, aim, and fire, damn well pleased at my own comic genius. Everyone was looking at me and my alcohol-oiled tongue. Even John was breaking down at my wild excursions into amiable insult and caricature.
I imagined I had saved up tidbits on everyone at the table, and like those handwriting experts we encounter on occasion in life who read more in our hairlines, eyebrows, ear twitchings, nostril flarings, and teeth barings than are written in our Horatio stars or inked on plain pad with pencil, guessed at the obvious.
If we do not give ourselves away in our handwriting or clothes or the percentage of alcohol on our breaths, our breathing does us in or the merest nod or shake of the head as the handwriting expert sniffs our mouthwash, or our genius.
So lining up my friends one after another, against the stockade wall, I fired fusillades of wit at their habits, poses, pretensions, lovers, artistic outputs, lapses in taste, failures to arrive on time, errors in observation, and on and on. Most of it, I would hope, gently done with no scars to bandage later. So I drilled holes in masks, poured sulphur in, and lit the fuse. The explosions left darkened faces but no lost digits. At one point Jake cried, “Someone stop him!”
Christ, I wish they had.
For my next victim was John himself.
I paused for breath. Everyone stilled in their explosive roars, watching me with bright fox eyes, urging me to get on with it. John’s next. Fix him!
So there I was with my hero, my love, my great good fine wondrous friend, and there I was reaching out suddenly and taking his hands.
“Did you know, John, that I, too, am one of the world’s great hypnotists?”
“Is that so, kid?” John laughed.
“Hey!” everyone cried.
“Yep,” I said. “Hypnotist. World’s greatest. Someone fill my glass.”
Jake Vickers poured gin in my glass.
“Go it!” yelled everyone.
“Here goes,” I said.
No, someone inside me whispered.
I seized John’s wrists. “I am about to hypnotize you. Don’t be afraid!”
“You don’t scare me, kid,” John said.
“I’m going to help you with a problem.”
“What’s that, kid?”
“Your problem is—” I searched his face, my intuitive mind. “Your problem is, ah.”
It came from me. It burst out.
“ I am not afraid of flying to London, John. I do not fear. It is you that fears. You’re afraid.”
“Of what, H.G.?”
“You are afraid of the Dún Laoghaire ferry boat that travels over the Irish Sea at night in great waves and dark storms. You are afraid of that, John, and so you say I am afraid of flying, when it is you afraid of seas and boats and storms and long night travels. Yes, John?”
“If you say so, kid,” John replied, smiling stonily.
“Do you want me to help you with your problem, John?”
“Help him, help him,” said everyone.
“Consider yourself helped. Relax, John. Relax. Take it easy. Sleep, John, are you getting sleepy?” I murmured, I whispered, I announced.
“If you say so, kid,” said John, his voice not so amused but half amused, his eyes watchful, his wrists tense under my holding.
“Someone hit him over the head,” exclaimed Jake.
“No, no,” laughed John. “Let him go. Go on, kid. Put me under.”
“Are you under, John?”
“Halfway there, son.”
“Go further, John. Repeat after me. It is not H.G. who fears flying.”
“It is not H.G. who fears flying—”
“Repeat, it is I, John, who fear the damned black night sea and fog on the ferry from Dun Laoghaire to Folkestone!”
“All that, kid, all that. Agreed.”
“Are you under, John?”
“I’m sunk, kid.”
“When you wake you will remember nothing, except you will no longer fear the sea and will give up flying, John.”
“I will remember nothing.” John closed his eyes, but I could see his eyeballs twitch behind the lids.
“And like Ahab, you will go to sea with me, two nights from now.”
“Nothing like the sea,” muttered John.
“At the count of ten you will waken, John, feeling fine, feeling fresh. One, two … five, six … ten. Awake!”
John popped his pingpong eyes wide and blinked around at us. “My God,” he cried, “that was a good sleep. Where was I? What happened?”
“Cut it out, John!” said Jake.
“John, John,” everyone roared. Someone punched me happily in the arm. Someone else rumpled my hair, the hair of the idiot savant.
John ordered drinks all around.
Slugging his back, he mused on the empty glass, and then eyed me, steadily.
“You know, kid, I been thinking—”
“What?”
“Mebbe—”
“Yes?”
“Mebbe I should go on that damned ferryboat with you, ah, two nights from now …?”
“John, John!” everyone roared.
“Cut it out,” shouted Jake, falling back, splitting his face with laughs.
Cut it out.
My heart, too, while you’re at it.
How the rest of the evening went or how it ended, I cannot recall. I seem to remember more drinks, and a sense of overwhelming power that came with everyone, I imagined, loving my outrageous jokes, my skill with words, my alacrity with responses. I was a ballet dancer, comically on balance on the high-wire. I could not fall off. I was a perfection and a delight. I was a Martian love, all beauteous bright.
As usual, John had no cash on him.
Jake Vickers paid the bill for the eight of us. On the way out, in the fog-filled rainy street, Jake cocked his head to one side, closed one eye, and fixed me with the other, snorting with mirth.
“You,” he said, “are a maniac!”
That sound you hear is the long whistling slide of the guillotine blade rushing down through the night …
Toward the nape of my neck.
The next day I wandered around without a head, but no one said. Until five that afternoon. When John unexpectedly came to my room at the Royal Hibernian Hotel.
I don’t recall John’s sitting down after he came in. He was dressed in a cap and light overcoat, and he paced around the room as we discussed some minor point to be revised before I sailed off for England, two days later.
In the middle of our Arab/Whale discussion John paused and, almost as an afterthought, said, “Oh, yeah. You’ll have to change your plans.”
“What plans, John?”
“Oh, all that bullshit about your coming to England on the ferryboat. I need you quicker. Cancel your boat ticket and fly with me to London on Thursday night. It’ll only take an hour. You’ll love it.”
“I can’t do that,” I said.
“Now, don’t be difficult—”
“You don’t understand, John. I’m scared to death of airplanes.”
“You’ve told me that, kid, and it’s time you got over it.”
“Maybe sometime in the future, but, please forgive me, John, I can’t fly with you.”
“Sounds like you’re yellow, kid.”
“Yes! I admit it. You’ve always known that. It’s nothing new. I am the damnedest shade of yellow you ever saw.”
“Then get over it. Fly! You’ll save a whole day at sea.”
“God,” I moaned, falling back in my chair. “I don’t mind being at sea all night. The ferry leaves around ten p.m. It doesn’t get across to the English port until three or four a.m., an ungodly hour. I won’t sleep. I might even be seasick. Then I take the train to London, it gets in Victoria at seven thirty in the morning. By eight fifteen I’ll be in my hotel. By eight forty-five I’ll have had a quick breakfast and a shave. By nine thirty I’ll be at your hotel ready to work. No time lost. I’d be busy on the white whale as soon as you—”
“Well, screw that, son. You’re coming on the airplane with me.”
“No, no.”
“Yes, you are, you cowardly bastard. And if you don’t—”
“What, what?”
“You’ll have to stay in Dublin!”
“What?” I yelled.
“You won’t get your vacation. No final weeks in London.”
“After seven months?!”
“That’s right! No vacation.”
“You can’t do that!”
“Yes, I can. And not only that, Lorry, our secretary, she won’t get her vacation. She’ll be trapped here with you.”
“You can’t do that to Lorry. She’s worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for six months!”
“Her vacation’s canceled unless you fly with me.”
“Oh, no, John! John, no!”
“Unless you change color, kid. No more yellow.”
I was on my feet.
“You’d really do that to her? Because of me?”
“That’s the way it is.”
“Well, the answer is no.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Lorry goes to London. I go to London. And we go any damn way I please, as long as I don’t interfere with our
