Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [12]
This time it was Wolfie who spoke up. “You better,” he grunted.
His meaning couldn’t have been clearer. Skinny was the good cop, the nice guy, the guy who’d bend over backwards to make everyone happy. Wolfie wasn’t. The word on the Boardwalk was that Irvin Wolf had some serious muscle behind him and didn’t hesitate to use it. He didn’t say the words “cement overshoes”—he didn’t have to.
Meanwhile, I was shaking in my Florsheims. The fact is, when I’d told Skinny about the funny stuff Dean and I did together, funny stuff had been the last thing on my mind. Staying employed was the first thing on my mind, with the side benefit of getting a gig for (and seeing) Dean.
Who, now that Skinny and Wolfie had stalked back out, was looking askance at me. “What in Christ’s name did you sell them?” Dean asked.
The words came out in a rush. “I knew you had no gig, they asked me to suggest someone, I suggested you, and they said no, not another singer, so I said, ‘But we do things together.’”
“Why did you do that?” Dean asked.
“Because I wanted you to be here and work and be a friend and pay half of a double room, and I was lonely,” I said.
“Get a dog!” Dean said.
Just then, Skinny leaned back through the door, making me jump. “P.S.—I suggest you guys get something going for the next show,” he said. “I suggest this only because I told a number of my best customers, who will be here for the next show, that you fellas did other shit besides crooning and miming. Capeesh?”
“Yes sir, Mr. D’Amato,” I said.
No pressure!
As Skinny turned to leave, he almost collided with Morris the runner. I took the greasy brown bag and told Morris to keep the change. He gave the fourteen cents in his hand a fishy look, shook his head, and left. Dean and I were alone, with two hours until the midnight show.
I opened the bag, took a pastrami sandwich, and held one out to Dean. “Hungry?” I said.
He grabbed the sandwich. “Gimme that!” he barked. “Of course I’m hungry—hungry and scared shitless. What the hell are we gonna do here?”
“Relax,” I said around a mouthful of pastrami and rye. “I have a plan.”
While Dean watched, I took a makeup pencil from my table, ripped the greasy bag open to make a flat sheet, and began to write, avoiding the grease spots.
I wrote “Filler.”
I wrote “Busboy.”
I wrote “That Old Gang of Mine.”
I wrote “Italian Lumberjack.”
I wrote “April Showers.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Dean asked.
“Okay,” I told him. “This is material. I’m writing down bits I remember from my dad, from burlesque, from all over. ‘Filler’ is how we get from your intro to the Busboy bit, which I think you remember. . . .”
“What’s that say?” he asked, pointing at the bag. “What’s the— what’s that say? The Italian Lumberjack?”
“A variation on a theme,” I explained. “Whatever we do, I’m the kid and you’re the big brother. I’m the busboy, you’re the captain. You’re the organ-grinder, I’m the monkey. You’re the playboy, I’m the putz. Follow?”
He was smiling. “Sure, putz,” he said. Smiling.
“In the Italian Lumberjack, you’re the lumberjack,” I told him.
He grinned. “Naturally.”
“And I’m the kid brother. I say, ‘What do you do for a living?’ You say, in a nice, old-country accent, ‘I cut down the trees.’”
He gave it a whirl in his best Italian accent. “I cut-a down the trees.”
I pitched my voice up a couple of octaves so I sounded maybe eight, nine years old. “Yeah? And what do you do after that?”
Dean narrowed his eyes menacingly at me. “Then ... then I cut ’em up,” he said.
“Bingo!” I told him. “We’re on fire!”
Dean, eating, looked at me as though he knew we’d be OK. I liked that.
Okay: twelve midnight, that night.
The joint is jammed, maybe twenty-four people. My God, they must have been giving something away. Anyway, the orchestra plays its timid overture—the orchestra being the aforementioned piano, trumpet, bass, and drums. Once they started playing, it didn’t take long to realize they sounded just like a piano, trumpet, bass,