A Graveyard for Lunatics

Statue of Liberty crack and fall. Hell. He was Mount Rushmore after an earthquake. Forty times bigger, stronger, greater than Cohn, Zanuck, Warner, and Thalberg rolled in one knish. When they slammed his casket lid in that tomb across the wall, cracks ran all the way uphill to where the Hollywoodland sign fell. It was Roosevelt, dying long before his death.?

Constance stopped for she could hear my uneasy breathing.

Then she said: ?Look, is there a brain in my head? Did you know Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day? Think! It?s all the redwoods in the world cut so the thunder never stops. Antarctica melts down in tears. Christ gapes his wounds. God holds his breath. Caesar?s legions, ghosts, ten million, rise, with bleeding Amazons for eyes. I wrote that when I was sixteen and a sap, when I found out that Juliet and Don Quixote fell dead on the same day, and I cried all night. You?re the only one ever heard those silly lines. Well, that?s how it was when Arbuthnot died. I was sixteen again and couldn?t stop crying or writing junk. There went the moon, the planets, Sancho Panza, Rosinante and Ophelia. Half the women at his funeral were old mistresses. A between-the-sheets fan club, plus nieces, girl cousins, and crazy aunts. When we opened our eyes that day it was the second Johnstown flood. Jesus, I do run on. I hear they still got Arbuthnot?s chair in his old office? Anyone sat in it since with a big enough butt and a brain to fit??

I thought of Manny Leiber?s behind. Constance said:

?God knows how the studio survived. Maybe by Ouija board, with advice from the dead. Don?t laugh. That?s Hollywood, reading the Leo-Virgo-Taurus forecasts, not stepping on cracks be-tween takes. The studio? Give me the grand tour. Let grandma smell the four winds in the fifty-five cities, take the temperature of the maniacs in charge, then on to the Brown Derby maitre d?. I slept with him once, ninety years back. Will he remember the old witch of the Venice shore and let us sit at tea with your Beast??

?And say what??

A long wave came in, a short wave rustled on the shore.

?I?ll say,? she closed her eyes, ?stop scaring my future-writing dinosaur-loving honorary bastard son.?

?Yes,? I said, ?please.?

35

In the beginning was the fog.

Like the Great Wall of China, it moved over the shore and the land and the mountains at 6 A.M.

My morning voices spoke.

I crept around Constance?s parlor, groping to find my glasses somewhere under an elephant herd of pillows, but gave up and staggered about to find a portable typewriter. I sat blindly stabbing out the words to put an end to Antipas and the Messiah.

And it was indeed A Miracle of Fish.

And Simon called Peter pulled in to the shore to find the Ghost by the charcoal bed and the baked fish to be given as gifts, with the word as deliverance to a final good, and the disciples there in a gentle mob and the last hour upon them and the Ascension near and the farewells that would linger beyond two thousand years to be remembered on Mars and shipped on to Alpha Centauri.

And when the Words came from my machine I could not see them, and held them close to my blind wet eyes as Constance dolphined out of a wave, another miracle clothed in rare flesh, to read over my shoulder and give a sad-happy cry and shake me like a pup, glad of my triumph.

I called Fritz.

?Where the hell are you!? he cried.

?Shut up,? I said, gently.

And I read aloud.

And the fish were laid to bake on the charcoals that blew in the wind as fireflies of spark were borne across the sands and Christ spoke and the disciples listened and as dawn rose Christ?s footprints, like the bright sparks, were blown away off the sands and he was departed and the disciples walked to all points away and their paths were lifted by the winds and their footprints were no more and a New Day truly began as the film ended.

Far off, Fritz was very still.

At last he whispered, ?You? son? of? a? bitch.?

And then: ?When do you bring that in??

?In three hours.?

?Get here in two,? cried Fritz, ?and I will kiss your four cheeks. I go now to un-man Manny and out-Herod Herod!?

I hung up and the phone rang.

It was Crumley.

?Is your Balzac still Honore?? he said. ?Or are you the great Hemingway fish dead by the pierside, bones picked meatless??

?Crum,? I sighed.

?I made more calls. But what if we get all the data you?re looking for, find Clarence, identify the awful-looking guy in the Brown Derby, how do we let your goony-bird friend Roy, who seems to be running around the studio in hand-me-down togas, how do we let him know and yank him the hell out? Do I use a giant butterfly net??

?Crum,? I said.

?Okay, okay. There?s good news and there?s bad. I got to thinking about that portfolio you told me your old pal Clarence dropped outside the Brown Derby. I called the Derby, said I had lost a portfolio. Of course, Mr. Sopwith,