Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [13]
“Will you please do as I say?”
I did, and bastard that I am, I was already anticipating the satisfaction I would squeeze out of dropping my bundle and blaming him for it. But a month later both Warner and Paramount pounced, the shares more than doubling in value.
I’m running ahead of myself. Filling my peddler’s office that evening in Beverly Hills, I was obliged to take two functionally illiterate NBC-TV executives to dinner at La Scala; and mindful of Miriam’s parting admonition, I was resolved to be civil. “You should send somebody else to L.A.,” she had said, “because you’re bound to end up having too much to drink and insulting everybody.” And now, into my third Laphroaig, I espied Hymie Mintzbaum at another table with a bimbo young enough to be his granddaughter. Following that brawl in London, whenever Hymie and I ran into each other here or there over the years, at the international stations of the show-business Cross (Ma Maison, Elaine’s, The Ivy, L’Ami Louis, et cetera, et cetera), we acknowledged each other’s presence with no more than a nod. I would occasionally see him, accompanied by a fawning starlet wannabe, and pick up his gravelly voice drifting over tables in one restaurant or another. “As Hemingway once said to me …” or “Marilyn was far more intelligent than most people realized, but Arthur wasn’t right for her.”
Once, in 1964, Hymie and I actually got to exchange words.
“So Miriam didn’t take my advice,” he said. “She finally married you.”
“We happen to be very happy together.”
“Does it ever start unhappily?”
And that night, twenty-five years later, there he was again. He nodded. I nodded. Hymie had obviously endured a face-lift since I had last seen him. He now dyed his hair black and wore a bomber jacket, designer jeans, and Adidas. As luck would have it, we all but collided in the men’s room. “You damn fool,” he said, “when we’re dead it will be for a long time and it won’t matter that the film we did in London was from Boogie’s original story.”
“It mattered to me.”
“Because you were consumed with guilt?”
“After all these years, the way I look at it is Boogie was the one who betrayed me.”
“That’s not the way most people see it.”
“He should have turned up at my trial.”
“Rising from the grave?”
“Flying in from wherever.”
“You’re incorrigible.”
“Am I?”
“Prick. You know what I’m doing now? A film-of-the-week for ABC-TV. But it’s a very exciting script and could lead to big things. I’m with a Freudian analyst these days. We’re working on a sensational script together and I’m fucking her, which is more than I ever got from any of the others.”
Back at my table, one of the young executives, his smile reeking of condescension, said, “You know old Mintzbaum, do you?”
The other one, shaking his head, said, “For Christ’s sake, don’t encourage him to come to our table, or he’ll start to pitch.”
“Old Mintzbaum,” I said, “was risking his life in the Eighth Army Air Force before you were born, you smug, insufferably boring little cretin. As for you, you cliché-mongering little shit,” I added, turning to the other one, “I’ll bet you pay a personal trainer to time your laps in your goddamn swimming-pool every morning. Neither of you is fit to shine old Mintzbaum’s shoes. Fuck off, both of you.”
Nineteen eighty-nine that was. I’m jumping all over the place. I know, I know. But seated at my desk these endgame days, my bladder plugged by an enlarged prostate, my sciatica a frequent curse, wondering when I will be due for another hip socket, anticipating emphysema, pulling on a Montecristo Number Two, a bottle of Macallan by my side, I try to retrieve some sense out of my life, unscrambling it. Recalling those blissful days in Paris, in the early fifties, when we were young and crazy, I raise my glass to absent friends: Mason Hoffenberg, David Burnett, Alfred Chester, and Terry Southern, all dead now. I wonder whatever became of the girl who was never seen on the boulevard Saint-Germain without that chirping chimpanzee riding her shoulder. Did she go home to Houston and