Funnymen by Ted Heller

Author:Ted Heller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2002-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

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REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV: When Fountain and Bliss came to Omaha, I bought a ticket to the show. The nightclub, a modern but unspectacular place, was called the Stalk Club and had a corn motif. I gave the maitre d' a note to pass to Vic and Ziggy backstage but when I espied other people doing the same thing—most of them females—I realized that my own note might not make it to its intended targets. This feeling was further exacerbated when, several minutes later, I inquired of the maitre d' as to the status of my note, whereupon he informed me that he'd thrown it out. “I know these people,” I informed him, “and they know me. Please tell them that Reynolds Catledge is here.” This seemed to shake the man, and after the show he ushered me backstage.

Vic was in a friendly mood and good-naturedly mocked my appearance and demeanor. “You ain't in the army anymore, Cat,” he told me. “You need to loosen up some.”

The next day was a Saturday and I was roused from sleep very early when my doorbell rang. I was stunned to see Ziggy Bliss . . . I asked him to come in and I put up a pot of coffee for the two of us. (By way of a personal note, I should add that after three years of marriage, my wife, Linda, whom I'd met and married in 1945, had recently left me and taken our son, whom I did not name Reynolds V. I was leading a boring and incredibly solitary, worthless life.)

Ziggy seemed agitated. At first he spoke only about trivial matters but then he got to the point. He had three days free and wanted me to help him track someone down. I tried to tell him that I had no interest in such a project—I even thought about making up some phony matter I had to attend to, but after a moment's reflection I realized that a long drive with one of America's top comics through the middle of nowhere might be just the proper tonic I needed, and soon we piled into my Ford woody and we were on our way to Laramie, Wyoming.

The drive was about five hundred miles long and, given the nature of the American automobile at that time, it took quite a while—long stretches of silence were broken by longer stretches of Ziggy complaining about Vic. “The guy don't even go home on his own honeymoon night!” he told me. He complained that Vic's singing style was so sleepy that he could perform at an insomniac ward and have everyone dozing within the first few bars. He said, “If we ever get some big movie deal, you watch—Vic'll get all the credit and all the girls, I'll do all the work and get nuttin'.” At many points during this screed it seemed he was treating imaginary things as if they had already in fact transpired; he would say, “He's banging the

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