Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [185]
I’m in two minds about funerals. At my age, staring down into one of those six-foot-deep pits gives me the chills, but there is some satisfaction to be squeezed out of witnessing the burial of somebody else. Anybody else, save for Miriam or any of our children. But, to my astonishment, I wept hot tears at McIver’s funeral. We had once been young and footloose together in Paris, roistering provincials, and, looking back, I regret that we never became friends.
Digression, but a pertinent one. I recently flew down to New York to see Saul, and to catch Gregory Hines and that young prodigy, Savion Glover, in Jelly’s Last Jam. I think Glover is the most gifted tap-dancer I have ever seen, and I was back to watch him again the following night. The next afternoon I met Leo Bishinsky for drinks at the Algonquin. “I’m sixty-eight fucking years old now,” he said. “I don’t get it. It had to happen while I wasn’t looking. I’m sixty-eight years old, married and divorced four times, and worth forty-eight million dollars, even after my handlers have stolen all they can. I’ve been on the cover of Vanity Fair. People has done me I don’t know how many times. I’m quoted in Liz Smith’s columns. I used to do Johnny Carson and now it’s Leno or Letterman. I’ve had a retrospective at MOMA. I’m famous. My father would have been amazed to learn that paint brushes can pay better than mix-and-match ladies’ wear. My mother would be proud. But that Aussie shit-face Robert Hughes does me in Time, it’s a carve-up. The guys I used to shmooze with at Le Coupole, or is it La, who cares, or the Sélect or the Mabillon, all hate me now. I go to one of their vernissa?es and they either cut me dead or say, wow, we’ve got a star here, you slumming, Leo? Goddamn it, we used to sit together in those cafés, cracking up, waiting for Walter Chrysler, Jr., to come over and look at our stuff, and maybe buy something. We were friends for life, I thought. Going through the fire together. The hell with them. These days I’m invited to A-list dinners on Park Avenue or in the Hamptons. Hey, show some respect, you’re looking at a guy who’s had a nosh at the White House. I’m invited to these dinners and my esteemed host is either an arbitrage guru or a former junk-bond shark with a gabby trophy wife, and there could be one of my chatchkas hanging on the wall, it cost the prick maybe two million, and I want to carry it away with me, because sitting with any of them for more than five minutes drives me crazy. I’m sitting there, I’m so ashamed, and I ask myself did I do all this for you? When I was eating one meal a day, was it their approval I was striving for? I’ve got six different kids from four wives and I can’t stand any of them, or the thought that they’re going to be so rich when I croak. One of them is a producer of hip-hop records. From Mozart to rap, or hip-hop, is some trip. Who am I to talk? From Goya to me is also a stretch. They did a biopsy on my prostate yesterday and I’m waiting for the bad news. Meanwhile everybody envies me my bimbos, but I get into bed with one of them and I’m terrified of being limp and laughed at. Shit, Barney, we used to have so much fun. I don’t understand where it went and how come it was so quick.”
McIver, to give him his due, persevered against long odds. He rode a small, unnecessary talent to recognition in his own country, which is more than I ever did, or dared. I should not have been so cruel to him. Following