Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [152]
“No. Yes. Help, Miriam.”
“I have to be up at seven.”
“Oh. Well. I guess in that case …”
“Oh, come on,” she said, tugging me by the hand.
2
Now that I’m beginning to run out of it, time has begun to click past me fast as a hot taxi meter. I’m soon going to be sixty-eight, and Betty, who keeps track of these things, will want to arrange a lunch-time party at Dink’s. Betty, a sentimental type, wants Zack, Hughes-McNoughton, me, and some of the others cremated when we die so that she can mount us in urns over the bar to keep her company. Possibly, I shouldn’t have told her what Flora Charnofsky has done. After Norman hit that power pole in his Mercedes-Benz sports car, dying instantly, she had him cremated and divvied up his ashes. The larger portion went into an hour-glass she had made, and the rest into an egg-timer. “Norm is always with me,” she said.
I’m not going to Betty’s party. There’s nothing to celebrate. Besides, I’m now such an irascible old bastard, I don’t trust myself. Yesterday afternoon I went to Downtown Video to return The Bank Dick, a W. C. Fields favourite of mine, and the young pony-tailed lout behind the counter, who now also wore a nose-ring, said, “Oh oh. There will be an additional three-dollar charge for us to do the rewind.”
“Have you got a pen?”
Baffled, he handed me one, and I took the point and began to rewind the spool clockwise,71 ignoring the five customers waiting behind me.
“What are you doing?”
“Rewinding.”
“It will take ages.”
“It’s only three o’clock, sonnyboy, and this isn’t due back until five.”
“Give it to me, pops, and you can forget about the three bucks.”
Ate breakfast late this morning, and then flicked on the radio, having decided to listen to Miriam live for a change. Hallelujah. I caught her just as she was reading a letter that purported to be from a listener in Calgary:
Dear Ms. Greenberg,
I’m one of those old codgers you read about, a guy who gave the best years of his life to a woman he loved, who then ran off with a younger man. I hope you can make out my handwriting, which ain’t the same since I suffered my last little stroke. As you can surely tell I haven’t had much education. Not compared to the listeners whose letters you usually read aloud. I’m a retired garbage collector or recycler ha! ha! ha! But I sure hope my grammar is good enough to get me on the airwaves. I still miss my wife and keep her photograph by my bedside in the Winnebago I live in out here. Today is Marylou’s birthday and I’d like you to play a ditty that was playing in the dining room of The Highlander Inn, in Calgary, which I took her to when we were celebrating her thirtieth back in 1975.
I can remember a few words to the ditty (which fits my present condition like a glove), but not the title or the background music. The lyrics went:
Full moon and empty arms,
something something your charms …
And the music, as I recall, was mostly on the piano, and was written, she said, by a famous Polack. Wait. I think there was once a film about him, starring Cornel Wilde, and that he suffered from TB, the piano player, not Cornel. I’d like you to play this number and dedicate it to Marylou, who I bear no grudge. Thanks a million.
Yours sincerely,
WALLY TEMPLE
P.S. I really enjoy classical music and I’m a big fan of your show. One of my favourite tapes, which I recommend highly to you, maybe to play another morning, is Mozart’s Greatest Hits.
Miriam paused, and then went on to say, “This letter comes from the same prankster who has also pretended to be Doreen Willis, among others.”
Shit.
“I have read it aloud just to let the listener in question know that he hasn’t fooled me. And, in appreciation of his efforts, I will now play a recording by Louis Lortie, of Chopin’s Études 1–12, Opus 10. This Chandos Record was produced in Suffolk, England, in April 1988.”
The family bush telegraph, or disinformation highway, has recently gone into overload, and I’ve been