get down to business. That’s when Osano’s luck turned bad, though he could still have bailed out if it hadn’t been for his ego.
What screwed it up was one of the most unusual actors in Hollywood. His name was Dickie Sanders, and he had won an Oscar and had been in six successful movies. What made him unique was that he was a dwarf. That’s not as bad as it sounds. He just missed being a very short man. And he was a very handsome guy, for a dwarf. You could say he was a miniature James Dean. He had the same sad, sweet smile which he used with devastating and calculated effect on women. They couldn’t resist him. And as Doran said later, all bullshit aside, what balling broad could resist going to bed with a handsome dwarf?
So when Dickie Sanders walked into the restaurant, it was no contest. He was alone and he stopped at their table to say hello to Katherine; it seemed they knew each other, she’d had a bit part in one of his movies. Anyway, Katherine adored him twice as much as she adored Osano. And Osano got so pissed off he left her with the dwarf and went back to the hotel alone.
“What a fucking town,” he said. “A guy like me loses out to a fucking dwarf.” He was really sore. His fame didn’t mean anything. The Nobel Prize coming didn’t mean anything. His Pulitzers and National Book Awards cut no ice. He came second to a dwarf actor, and he couldn’t stand it. I had to carry him to his room finally and pour him into his bed. My final words of consolation to him were: “Listen, he’s not a dwarf, he’s just a very short guy.”
Next morning, when Osano and I got on that 747 to New York, he was still depressed. Not only because he’d brought Katherine’s average down, but because they’d botched the movie version of his book. He knew it was a lousy script, and he was right. So he was really in a bad mood on the plane and bullied a scotch off the stewardess even before takeoff.
We were in the very front seats near the bulkhead, and in the two Seats across the aisle were one of those middle-aged couples, very thin, very elegant. The man had a beaten-down, unhappy look on his face that was sort of appealing. You got the impression that he was living in a private hell, but one that he deserved. Deserved because of his outward arrogance, the richness of his dress, the spitefulness of his eyes. He was suffering, and by Christ he was going to make everybody else around him suffer too, if he thought they would stand for it.
His wife looked like the classic spoiled woman. She was obviously rich, richer than her husband, though possibly they were both rich. The stamp was on them in the way they took the menu from the stewardess. The way they glanced at Osano sipping his technically illegal drink.
The woman had that bold handsomeness preserved by topnotch plastic surgery and glossed over with the even tan of daily sunlamps and Southern sun. And had that discontented mouth that is perhaps the ugliest thing in any woman. At her feet and up against the bulkhead wall was a wire-mesh box which held maybe the prettiest French poodle in the whole world. It had curly silver fur which fell into ringlets over its eyes. It had a pink mouth and pink ribbon bow over its head. It even had a beautiful tail with a pink bow on it that wagged around. It was the happiest little dog you ever saw and the sweetest-looking. The two miserable human beings that owned it obviously took pleasure from owning such a treasure. The man’s face softened a little as he looked at the poodle. The woman didn’t show pleasure, but a proprietary pride, like an older ugly woman in charge of her beautiful virginal daughter that she is preparing for the marketplace. When she reached out her hand for the poodle to lick lasciviously, it was like a Pope extending his ring to be kissed.
The great thing about Osano was that he never missed anything even when he seemed to be looking the other way. He had paid strict attention to his drink, slouched down in his seat. But now he said to me, “I’d rather get a blow job from that dog than that broad.” The jet engines made it impossible for the woman across the aisle to hear, but I felt nervous anyway. She gave us a coldly dirty look, but maybe that’s the way she always looked at people.
Then I felt guilty at having condemned her and her husband. They were, after all, two human beings. Where did I come off putting them down on sheer speculation? So I said to Osano, “Maybe they’re not as bad as they look.”
“Yes, they are,” he said.
That wasn’t worthy of him. He could be chauvinistic, racist and narrow-minded but only off the top of his head. It really didn’t mean anything. So I let it go, and as the pretty stewardess imprisoned us in our seats for dinner, I told him stories about Vegas. He couldn’t believe I had once been a degenerate gambler.
Ignoring the people across the aisle, forgetting about them, I said to him, “You know what gamblers call suicide?”
“No,” Osano said.
I smiled. “They call it the Big Ace.”
Osano shook his head. “Isn’t that marvelous?” he said dryly.
I saw he was a little contemptuous of the melodrama of the phrase, but I kept on. “That’s what Cully said to me that morning when Jordan did it. Cully came down and he said, ‘You know what that fucking Jordy did? He pulled the Big Ace out of his sleeve. The prick used his Big Ace.’” I paused, remembering it more clearly now years later. It was funny. I had never remembered that phrase before or Cully using it that night. “He capitalized it in his voice, you know. The Big Ace.”
“Why do you think he really did it?” Osano asked. He was not too interested, but he saw I was upset.
“Who the hell knows?” I said. “I thought I was so smart. I thought I had him figured. I nearly had him figured, but then he faked me out. That’s what kills me. He made me disbelieve in his humanity, his tragic humanity. Never let anybody make you disbelieve in anybody’s humanity.”
Osano grinned, nodded his head at the people across the aisle. “Like them?” he said. And then I realized that this was what made me tell him the story.
I glanced at the woman and man. “Maybe.”
“OK,” he said. “But sometimes it goes against the grain. Especially rich people. You know what’s wrong with rich people? They think they’re as good as anybody else just because they got lots of dough.”
“They’re not?” I asked.
“No,” Osano said. “They’re like hunchbacks.”
“Hunchbacks are not as good as anybody else?” I asked. I nearly said dwarfs.
“No,” Osano said. “Nor are people with one eye, basket cases, and critics and ugly broads and chickenshit guys. They gotta work at being as good as other people. Those two people didn’t work at it. They never got there.”
He was being a little irrational and illogical, not at his most brilliant. But what the hell, he’d had a bad week. And it’s not everybody who gets his love life ruined by a dwarf. I let it ride.
We finished our dinner, Osano drinking the lousy champagne and eating the lousy food that even in first class you would trade in for a Coney Island hot dog. As they lowered the movie screen, Osano bolted out of his chair and went up the steps to the 747 dome lounge. I finished my coffee and followed him up there.
He was seated in a long-backed chair and had lit up one of his long Havana cigars. He offered me one and I took it. I was developing a taste for them, and that delighted Osano. He was always generous but a little careful with his Havanas. If you got one from him, he watched you closely to see if you enjoyed it enough to deserve it. The lounge was beginning to fill up. The stewardess on duty was busy making drinks. When she brought Osano his martini, she sat on the arm of his lounge chair and he put one hand in her lap to hold her hand.
I could see that one of the great things about being as famous as Osano was that you get away with stuff like that. In the first place, you had the confidence. In the second place, the young girl, instead of thinking you a dirty old man, is usually enormously flattered that somebody so important could think her that attractive. If Osano wanted to screw her, she must be something special. They didn’t know that Osano was so horny he would screw anything with skirts. Which is not as bad as it sounds since a lot of guys like him screwed anything in pants and skirts.
The young girl was charmed by Osano. Then a good-looking woman passenger started coming on to him, an older woman with a crazy, interesting face. She told us about how she had just recovered from heart surgery and hadn’t fucked for six months and was now ready to go. That’s the kind of things women always told Osano. They felt they could tell him anything because he was a writer and so would understand anything. Also, because he was famous and that would make them interesting to him.
Osano took out his heart-shaped Tiffany pillbox. It was filled with white tablets. He took one and offered the box to the heart lady and the stewardess. “Come on,” he said. “It’s an upper. We’ll really be flying high.” Then
