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By Root 582 0

legend flowered after an excerpt from his novel-in-progress appeared in the New American Review, but I knew he had written it in Paris something like ten years earlier. All the same, Boogie gradually acquired the reputation as author of the greatest modern American novel yet to be written. The editors of some of the most distinguished publishing houses in New York came a-courting, armed with chequebooks. One of them once dispatched a limousine to drive Boogie to a meticulously engineered dinner party in Southampton, only to discover that he had gone to visit a girlfriend in Sag Harbor instead, the car arriving at the publisher’s dacha without him, adding to Boogie’s mystique. Another editor took him to lunch at The Russian Tea Room. Oozing flattery, he asked, “Would it be possible to see more of your novel?”

“That would be indiscreet,” said Boogie, tending to his dripping nose. “I can’t seem to shake this cold.”

“Possibly we should talk to your agent?”

“I haven’t got one.”

His own best agent, Boogie was noncommittal, or changed the subject, as generous contracts were proffered. The longer he resisted cutting a deal with a publisher, the higher the figures flew. Finally Boogie signed with Random House for an advance that ran into six figures, not unusual today, but I’m talking 1958, the year the Canadiens won their third Stanley Cup in a row, taking out the Boston Bruins 5–3 in game five. Geoffrion and Maurice Richard scored in the first period; Beliveau, and Geoffrion again, in the second; and Doug Harvey, with a seeing-eye sizzler from forty feet out, in the third. So there’s nothing wrong with old Barney Panofsky’s memory, is there? Spaghetti is strained with a colander. The names of the Seven Dwarfs are Sleepy, Grumpy, Sneezy, Doc, Happy, and the other two.68 The Weizmann Institute is in Haifa. Frederick Wakeman didn’t write The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, it was the other guy.69 Napoleon was defeated in that town Spike Jones wrote that nonsense song about:

She’s the pearl diver’s daughter,

And she’s nuts about the water,

WATERLOO …

Boogie is where I was at. He squandered some of the money at blackjack and chemin de fer tables; and drank, sniffed, and mainlined the rest into his arm, and when that vein hid from him, he stabbed his ankle and even his tongue. Then came the day he phoned me at my office. Had I been blessed with foresight, I would have hung up. I didn’t.

“I’d like to crash at your place in the country for a while,” he said. “I’m trying to kick. Can you put me up?”

“Sure.”

“I’m going to need some methadone.”

“My friend Morty Herscovitch will provide.”

I picked up Boogie at the airport, unprepared for how gaunt he had become since I had last seen him, sweat beading his forehead and sliding down his cheeks in spite of the chill in the air, unseasonable for late June. “We’re going to celebrate with a bang-up lunch at El Ritzo,” I said, linking arms with him, “and then we’ll drive out to the Laurentians,” where, I told him, The Second Mrs. Panofsky was awaiting us.

“No, no, no,” he said. “You’ve got to take me somewhere I can shoot up first.”

“I thought you were here to kick?”

“Just one more time or I won’t make it.”

We drove to my house, where Boogie promptly shed his jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, knotted a tie round his arm, and then began to pump it like a windmill softball pitcher, trying to get that elusive vein to protrude, even as I heated up his stuff in a spoon. It took three bloody probes before he was finally able to drive the syringe into the vein. “I guess that’s what Forster meant by ‘only connect,’ ” I said.

“ ‘Do you mind my asking what the syringe is for?’ the druggist asked. ‘Why, I’m cooking a ham Southern style, injecting it with Jack Daniels.’ ”

“Shall we go and eat now?”

“I don’t. Good to see you.”

“You too.”

“How many of those cigars do you smoke a day?”

“I never count.”

“They’re bad for you, you know. Say, whatever became of your friend McIver?”

“Nothing much.”

“He showed some promise, I thought.”

“Ah.”

The Second Mrs. Panofsky was waiting for us on