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Tough Audience

Professor Edwine could hardly ever make his son laugh. From the time Sammy was a baby, the professor had tried to talk to him, had tested at least three dozen different anecdotes on his ears. It was essential to instruct this future chief of the Edwine tribe, to transmit clan lore, to be wise and close and chatty. But the kid hardly ever responded.

Eventually the professor got it refined down to a pair of tales about the olden days that at least held the boy's attention, and even got a slight smile out of him sometimes. It was necessary to tell these in a certain precise way to even get the kid to sit down. The professor fairly had to start talking in tongues, and had to get all physical and gesture a lot. He had to pay close attention to his phraseology and concinnities.

The first story was about the time when he was Sammy's age, and that old bloomer-button Tyrone Power came a-sashaying through the professor's hometown of Freeley, Idaho, on a hunting expedition. In the flesh, Tyrone Power, that handsome heartthrob. He wanted to be like old E. Hemingway because he was researching a part in a Hollywood version of one of Papa's books. Except nobody had been kind enough to tell the silly old thespian that there were no grizzlies or even antelope down this low on the western slope of the Teton Mountains. Tyrone had the cutest little leopard-skin jodhpurs on, all billowy and crinkly around his thighs.

(Here the old professor would prance a bit, knock-kneed, and Sam would watch impassively.)

"And, even though he was the rich bitch, everybody in the bar insisted on buying Ty-baby a drink. Banana daiquiri, if you puh-leeze? But Tyrone was unimpressed and bitchy-looking, like this.

(Here the old professor would pull the appropriate face, glad in his heart that no video camera was at hand, recording this moment to be smuggled into future family reunions.)

"And nobody wanted a big star like Tyrone Power to come away from Freeley with the impression that it was a boring place or anything like that. Oh, perish, Sammy! So they got me, old Easy Edwine, old string bean Edwine, all seven feet, one hundred and seventy pounds of me, clomp clomp, to do my famous trick, where I opened a bottle of beer with my bare teeth, held it straight up in the air with just my lips, no hands, Sammy, and let the whole twelve ounces pour straight down my gullet without swallowing.

(Here the professor would aim his face up at the ceiling and make gurgling sounds. Sammy might chuckle, just a tiny bit, if they were particularly good, gaggy-sounding gurgles, like Linda Lovelace being asphyxiated by a palomino.)

"'Lookit, Mr. Power!' the other Freeleyites yelled. 'Old Easy Edwine, he's a atheist bastard! He don't care!' And Tyrone was so intrigued that, as a climax, he had me break the bottle against my temple.

(Maybe cross-eyes and a cuckoo noise here.)

"Then Tyrone snuck out the back with his body guards and we were all alone, and so there was the nightly fight to the death, Sammy. And I woke up in a dry wash three miles outside of town next noontime, as per usual, with a four-inch gash on the side of my head, and the most elegant autograph on my Adam's apple. Tyrone had to stand on a barstool to reach it!"

The second tale of the olden days was about the time the carnival came to Freeley, Idaho. This was the same carny where Professor Edwine got the reach on the black pro-boxer and won the prize money. But that part had to be saved for his daughter, because his son didn't respond to stories like that, where Daddy was the protagonist instead of the comic relief.

And Sammy never wanted to hear the other heroic, self-complimentary carny tale, where Daddy was watering the elephants to earn his admission and this city woman was just standing in the midway, puffing a Kool in the shade of the tent flap and watching him work shirtless, obviously staring at him, up and down, a full twenty minutes, as he lugged those buckets, and Daddy knew he could have had her, right there on the spot. Old Jumbo could have sloppy seconds. That was a daughter-, not a son tale.

It was necessary to tell Sammy only the weird part of the carnival mythology, about the Pituitary Kid, the ten-foot-tall sideshow freako with a fifty dollar bill bobby-pinned to the crown of his head for anybody to keep who could reach it. Easy Edwine knelt among the crowd while the barker made the pitch, then stood up to his full height, and collected the dough simple as pie. He had to get up close to the Pituitary Kid's face, see his dead eyes, smell his sweet breath, feel the iron braces all up and down his rickety legs. The Pituitary Kid started crying softly and whispered, "Please, don't, Cousin. I'll lose my job. I'll become a ward of the state. Please back off, Cuz." And then the barker announced, through a giant yellow megaphone, to all of Freeley, that if they could bear to part with Easy Edwine, he was invited go on the road with the freak show!

That's where the professor sometimes got a response from his son: never any words, of course, but this slow, low grunting. It was communication, at least. Low-level, but communication. Sam would make the low sound until he got bored again, then just sort of wander away into another room, and the old professor would end feeling strange inside.

But you had to talk to your boy once in a while, no matter what. That was the rule. The only wisdom Professor Edwine still received from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints was their emphasis on the close-knit, communicative family.

The only other time Sammy would act interested in the lore of the olden days and in things pertaining to his father was when somebody brought out the crumbling copy of the September 6, 1939, Freeley Beacon and showed him the photo in the sports section of Freeley High School's new first string center. It was none other than Easy Edwine, his face mostly blank and full of question marks like it always was back in those days, wearing the too-small jersey destined to be retired with him, number double-zero, palming a basketball in each hand, arms out perpendicular in the crucified position, while two little forwards stood on tippy-toe underneath, one joker scowling upward into Easy Edwine's bony armpit and holding his nose.

The professor knew it was not for the right reasons that his son liked that yellowing old picture; but, surely, it imparted at least some sense of the Patriarchal past. And it got something not too unlike laughs out of the usually morose kid, a response.

So, on the day when Sammy said to his mother that certain too-familiar thing, that one extreme time when Sammy called his mom a fucking cunt and the professor disciplined him, smashed him up against the wall and choked him (the last time, probably, that anybody ever laid a hand on the kid in anger or affection or anything else), and Sammy's eyes went dead and he started that slow, low laugh of his, and his mother's fingernails were excavating the meat of the professor's big shoulder--that time, with Sammy laughing, it must have been almost by conditioned reflex, but the professor suddenly came up with another true story from the olden days he thought the kid might like, an actual WWII story, set in the Pacific Theater, where old Easy String Bean Edwine saw action and did his patriotic chore. And he told it in real highfalutin' style as he choked the life out of his only son's eyes.

"The short little Nips, Sammy, the way they run their POW camps makes the Bataan March look like a maypole dance. They starve your old dad's ass for months, keep it in a cage, tie it down to bamboo stakes, stomp on it, and then they get them a great big Nip, descended from sumos and samurais, Sammy, in peacetime a Nip sideshow attraction. And this freak meditates, rises up, screams his kamikaze-banzai scream and swings his sword down with all his fucking might to 'chop-choppee da big Amellican down to size.' Except the sumo-samurai guy knows a secret and profound oriental discipline, Sammy, and he can stop the blade short at just the split-second it just barely slices into the skin and tendons over your old dad's elongated shinbones. And he does it, night after night after night, his pals spitting and kicking, till they've got old string bean Edwine, your old dad, Sammy, laughing and screaming all the time. Even when he's asleep, even when he's chewing his weekly handful of rice husks."

The professor made a long, horrible wail right into his son's face, and they both started laughing. He let go of his son's throat in order to hold his sides. Sammy sank to the floor, gagging and coughing, and the professor hiked up his pants cuffs.

"See the scars, Sammy?"

And he was on the verge of finishing the story: escaping, shitting blood and rice and mucus nonstop in the jungle; and the last part he'd never told a single soul except his wife (only when he was half-asleep, cold sweating, up to his shins in nightmare), the last part showing what treatment like that can do to a guy's manhood.

But Sammy suddenly rolled over on his pudgy back and gasped, "Stop!"

There was a pause.

Sammy glanced over to his mother. The (quote) "fucking cunt" (close quote) had meanwhile sunk to the floor as well, flat on her nice butt, dead-eyed also, and bloody-fingernailed, making this certain "hup-hup hup" noise that meant it would soon be time to drop by the credit union for psych-ward money.

Sammy looked at his mother and listened to her. He used the knuckles of both fists to knead his windpipe more or less back open, and he sighed two times. Then, eyeing his mom as if for approval, he explained in a hoarse whisper why the professor should stop.

"Quit while you've got your audience rolling in the aisles, old Easy Edwine."

Sammy laughed, Ham-like, at his father's naked shins.

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