Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [45]
I had a one o’clock appointment, and set out in a foul mood, but in good time. Unlike Miriam, I took pride in being punctual. Then, suddenly, I stopped. All at once I couldn’t remember what I was doing on … the sign on the corner said Sherbrooke Street. I had no idea where I was going. Or why. Overcome by dizziness, sliding in sweat in spite of the cold, I shuffled over to the nearest bus stop and collapsed on a bench. A young man waiting for the bus, his baseball cap worn back to front, leaned over me and said, “Are you okay, pops?”
“Shettup,” I said. Then I began to mutter what is becoming my mantra. Spaghetti is strained with the device I have hanging on my kitchen wall. Mary McCarthy wrote The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit. Or Shirt. Whichever. I am once a widower and twice divorced. I have three children — Michael, Kate, and the other boy. My favourite dish is braised brisket with horseradish and latkes. Miriam is my heart’s desire. I live on Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal. The street number doesn’t matter, I’d know the building anywhere.
My heart thudding, threatening to fly free of my chest, I groped for a Montecristo, and managed to light and then pull on it. Smiling weakly at the concerned young man who still hovered over me, I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude to you.”
“I could call an ambulance.”
“I don’t know what came over me. But I’m fine now. Honestly.”
He seemed dubious.
“I’m going to meet Stu Henderson at Dink’s. It’s a bar on Crescent Street. I turn left at the next block and there it is.”
Stu Henderson, a struggling free-lance TV producer, who used to be with the National Film Board, was waiting for me at the bar. John, already rooted on his customary stool, sat beside him, seemingly lost in a reverie. Back in 1960, Stu had already made a prize-winning but boring documentary about the Canadair CL-215, a water bomber, then still being tested on various Laurentian lakes, that could scoop up 1,200 gallons of water without coming to a full stop, and drop it on the nearest forest fire. And now he had come to pitch a project to me. He was looking for seed money for an independently produced documentary about Stephen Leacock. “That’s very intriguing,” I said, “but I’m afraid I’m not into cultural projects.”
“Considering all the money you’ve made producing shlock, I —”
A glassy-eyed John intruded, “Non semper erit aestas, Henderson. Or, in the vernacular, no soap.”
I suffer from a wonky system of values, acquired in my Paris salad days and still with me. Boogie’s standard, whereby anybody who wrote an article for Reader’s Digest, or committed a best-seller, or acquired a Ph.D., was beyond the pale. But churning out a pornographic novel for Girodias was ring-a-ding. Similarly, writing for the movies was contemptible, unless it was a Tarzan flick, which would be a real hoot. So coining it in with the idiotic McIver of the RCMP was strictly kosher, but financing a serious documentary about Leacock would be infra dignitatem, as John would be the first to point out.
Terry McIver, of course, did not subscribe to Boogie’s value system. As far as he was concerned, we were an unforgivably flippant bunch. Louche. Our shared political stance, nourished by the New Statesman, resolutely left-wing, struck him as pathetically naïve. And Paris was a political circus in those days, animal acts to the fore. One night the rabidly anti-Communist goons of Paix et Liberté pasted up posters everywhere that showed the Hammer and Sickle flying from the top of the Eiffel Tower, the caption underneath reading, HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO