The Straight Man - Roger L Simon Read online

  The Straight Man

  Roger L Simon

  1986

  For

  Raphael and Jesse

  Introduction

  by ROGER L. SIMON

  I had two inspirations in writing The Straight Man: my personal experiences in psychotherapy (I wouldn't bore you with them), and my adventures working with Richard Pryor on a movie called Bustin' Loose 9anything but boring). After writing the script of The Big Fix, I had a temporary—everything in Hollywood is temporary—reputation for being a good comedy writer. I was asked if I wanted to write a screenplay for Richard Pryor. Pryor, easily the greatest standup comic of our time and an idol of mine, was close to the hottest thing in the business in those years (1980) and I said yes instantly.

  So I was taken out to Pryor's house by a couple of Universal executives who shall be nameless because they might be in a position to hire me again (highly unlikely, they've been fired too may times themselves since, but still . . .), and we sat in Pryor's office waiting for the great man. After about a half an hour, he staggered in with a glass of bourbon in his hand. He took one look at the junior of the two execs and declared quite instinctively: "You don't like me, do you?" The exec flushed and stammered something like, "Oh, no, Richard. No, no, no. I like you very much. I promise. I really like you." He did everything but bow down and kiss the comic's feet. When the exec got through genuflecting, Pryor flashed me a conspiratorial grin and I knew immediately why I admired the man so much.

  That was only my first adventure with the comedian who, many will recall, nearly burned himself to death that same year freebasing. I wasn't present for that event, but I was there on other occasions that had, shall we say, an edge to them. A few weeks later, when I actually started writing, I would arrive at his house for an appointment at three in the afternoon to go over the pages with him, only to be informed by the staff that "Mr. Pryor is asleep." This went on three or four times until I figured out that "asleep" was a euphemism in the Pryor household for "upstairs frying his brains."

  I did my best to ignore this until, finally, I was admitted to the inner sanctum. Richard eyed me suspiciously from behind a brick of cocaine the size of a small bus, wondering whether I was some judgmental white boy. Nervously, I had a couple of toots with him to lighten the mood and from then on we worked together pretty successfully, so successfully in fact that by the time we had finished the script, Richard wanted me to direct the movie. This, not surprisingly, sent the aforementioned execs up the wall and within another couple of weeks I found myself mysteriously fired from the film altogether. Three weeks later, though, I was rehired and then fired again and then rehired once more after Pryor had his freebase disaster. This did wonders for my bank account but not much for the finished film, which was something of a hodge-podge. Thanks to Pryor's popularity, however, it was the number one box office hit for several weeks.

  People often ask me what I thought of Richard and I have to say, despite his wildly self-destructive mood swings, I liked him immensely. When he was sober, and even when he wasn't, he could be extraordinarily generous both on a personal and social level. Once, when I was sitting in his office, he got a solicitation phone call from a hospital in South-Central L.A. After what seemed like only a few seconds, Pryor offered them a hundred thousand dollars if they promised they wou1dn't use his name so it didn't seem as if he was doing it for the publicity.

  As an artist, Richard is a national treasure and it is a tragedy that the man will spend the rest of his life coping with spinal meningitis. He is, of course, the model for Otis King in The Straight Man and I owe him big time for the book, which was nominated for the Best Novel Edgar in 1987.

  Roger L. Simon

  Los Angeles, CA

  THE STRAIGHT MAN

  When the analysis is over, the problems begin.

  —Sigmund Freud

  1

  There's nothing like a shrink for making you feel depressed. Five months ago, when I walked into Dr. Eugene Nathanson's office, wondering what to do with my life, I wasn't feeling that bad. And it wasn't just that he was a shrink. He was a cripple. Sitting there in a wheelchair, for crissakes. Here I was with my little problems and this guy had had poliomyelitis or something at the age of six or whatever and still was a full-fledged psychiatrist with a thriving practice in Santa Monica Canyon.

  He smiled at me politely as I sat in a beige leather Eames chair angled between his desk and a photograph of an aging Jewish bohemian I later learned was Fritz Perls, the founding father of Gestalt therapy.

  "What can I do to help you'?" he asked, pressing a servocontrol that straightened the motorized back of his wheelchair.

  "I'm not exactly sure." I hesitated, looking at Nathanson. He was a dark man with thick eyebrows, and the dim lighting in the room gave him an ominous, almost menacing cast. "I just quit a job as security director of a computer company and I don't know what to do next."

  "What would you like to do?"

  "Maybe expand. Start my own detective agency. But . . ." I shrugged.

  "You are a detective . . . ?"

  "A private detective, yes."

  He didn't react, although I assumed he didn't have a lot of PIs wandering into his office. At his location he was more likely to get lawyers' wives and frustrated screenwriters. We sat there awhile not saying anything. At that moment my problem seemed increasingly mundane, almost dumb. I had come to a psychiatrist for career guidance? At ninety-five bucks an hour, that was pretty stiff, considering you could get much the same thing from one of the brighter clerks in the back cubicles of the unemployment office.

  "You seem depressed." He spoke as if this were simply a fact. Nothing more.

  "I guess I am," I answered, looking away uncomfortably past his wall of books to a cactus outside his window.

  "How do you experience it?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "How do you feel it . . . in your body?"

  "Well, uh, it's a kind of ache . . . in my stomach . . . near the groin."

  "Describe it to me more precisely."

  And that was the last I heard of my career problems for a while. I spent the next few weeks playing Gestalt games—rolling around on the floor, going from chair to chair inventing crazy conversations with my parents and children, yelling at old girl friends and my ex-wife, jumping up and down like an Indian in a shamanistic trance and generally acting like some kind of lunatic on a drug-free acid trip.

  "So what does this all have to do with why I can't get it together as a detective?" I finally asked him after another session of standing on a desk proclaiming like Cicero in front of the Roman Forum.

  "What do you think?"

  "What do I think? What do you mean, what do I think?" I got angry whenever he got conventionally shrink-like on me, refusing to answer my questions directly.

  "Look," I said. "It's my dime here. I'm the client and we're on a fee-for-service basis. If you think you know, tell me."

  "Okay, you want a clinical diagnosis? You're suffering from a dysthymic depression caused by acute diminution of self-worth probably stemming from trauma during the oral phase of child development. Now, does that help you?"

  "Not a whole hell of a lot."

  "I didn't think it would."

  "How about I'm feeling lousy because I had a high-powered job and I'm back to being a gumshoe again?"

  "That makes sense."

  "So what does that mean, Dr. Shrink? Every time I have some kind of reversal I'm going to plunge into depression?"

  "Until you learn how to do something about it for yourself."

  "How do I do that?"

  "Find out why you don't. Find out what you get out of failing."

/>   "Find out what I get out of failing? An empty bank account—that's what I get out of failing. If it hadn't been for my fancy computer job, I couldn't even be here paying you."

  But that, obviously, wasn't all of it. I got a hell of a lot more than that out of failing, and in the weeks to come, I found out more about it than I wanted to know.

  "So your initial sense of failure came from your father . . ." Nathanson prodded me slightly one afternoon further along in the therapy.

  A sudden sadness came over me as I remembered my father, who had died several months before. He had been a successful corporate lawyer with a powerful Wall Street firm who often disapproved of what I did, although he didn't say it. I had strong feelings of loss now that he was gone, but also a nagging discontent, as if there were something unfinished between us. Maybe it was because I never completed law school.

  Nathanson must have noticed this, because he said, "You know, Moses, it's not just grief. Most patients seeking psychotherapy suffer from disturbances of self-esteem like yours feelings of inner emptiness, lack of initiative social or sexual maladjustments of various kinds .. . usually stemming from some problem in their relationships with their parents. But"—he stared directly at me—"I have confidence that with time you're going to work yours out."

  At that particular point in time, I didn't share his confidence. I had gone back to my private investigative practice in Los Angeles with all the enthusiasm of a clerk at the Motor Vehicles Bureau. Process serving, missing persons, insurance claims—I moved from one to the next like an automaton. Even an ecology-oriented case involving a massive toxic waste suit in the Valley scarcely interested me. My social life was, as that kid wrote, less than zero. And with the AIDS scare, like everybody else with half a brain, I was watching my random contacts, even though they were heterosexual. Even my fantasy life wasn't much. My only concessions to personal pleasure were the turbo-charged BMW I had left over from my high-paying job at Tulip Computers and the overpriced, undersized moderne apartment I rented on Kings Road in West Hollywood with a panoramic view of the city and a useless wet bar.

  My visits to Nathanson had become the true focus of my life. Three times a week I would troop into his office. Meanwhile, I would spend sleepless nights, dousing myself with Dalmane and sinsemilla to get two hours of fitful rest before I had to meet another depressive dawn.

  During that insomnia, I was prey to vicious night thoughts. My children were growing up and leaving me. All my relationships with women ended in disaster or absurdity. My friends were deserting me—or were bored with me. I was a fraud in work, a second-rate gumshoe who had never finished law school. I had nothing to look forward to but forty more years of repetitive depression. The truth was obvious: from here on in, I was on a straight-line path to Skid Row.

  "It usually gets worse before it gets better," said Nathanson, one session after he returned from a brief vacation in Maui.

  "Thanks. It gets any worse and you might as well put me on intravenous morphine."

  "An interesting case might help you."

  "I thought an interesting case was merely a temporary distraction from my problems . . that I had to find tranquillity in myself."

  Nathanson smiled. "You really are hard on yourself, aren't you?"

  "Brutal."

  "Did you ever think maybe you expect more of life than most people?"

  "That's not a very shrinklike thing to say. I thought I was paying you so I could have it all."

  This time Nathanson didn't smile. He pressed his servo to right himself the way he did at the end of a session and stared directly at me. I was aware once again of his thick eyebrows, his dark, almost black eyes that were at once penetrating and menacing.

  "Moses, this is one of the more unprofessional things I've ever done—perhaps it's even a first—but a client of mine is in great need of help. Your kind of help."

  Immediately I felt a strange discomfort. Under normal circumstances I would have been perfectly delighted to get new work, especially work that promised to be interesting. But here? This was my safe haven from the world's distresses—untouched by women, work, parents, children. Even my own loneliness. Everything could be safely "reexperienced" and "integrated." I could become whole again. But . . . at the expense of a job?

  "I see you're concerned about something, Moses. What is it?"

  "I don't want anything interrupting the work here."

  "Do you think it would'?"

  "I don't think I'm finished."

  "Yes, I agree with that. You're making some progress, but—"

  "Some progress?"

  "Yes. Some. You have had certain therapeutic resistances, like any patient. Look—" He spun his wheelchair toward me about half a foot. I always marveled at his dexterity. "I promise to redouble my efforts on your behalf. I owe you at least that much if you do this for me. I'd be very grateful, Moses, and so would my client. And feel free to charge her any fee you feel would be fair. She can afford it."

  "Who is she?"

  "Emily Ptak."

  "Emily Ptak . . . not Mike Ptak's wife?"

  "You know her?"

  "No, but I certainly know who he is—or was. Otis King's straight man."

  I didn't have to elaborate. It was clear that I knew what everybody else in L.A. did. And half the rest of the country as well. One week before, Mike Ptak, a former late-night TV comedy star, had taken a fifteen-story dive off the penthouse of the Albergo Picasso hotel on the Sunset Strip. He had landed in the valet parking area of the Fun Zone—America's best-known comedy club—the same club where, it seemed like onlyyesterday, Ptak had gotten his start playing hip Dean Martin to Otis King's funky, jive-talking Jerry Lewis. Or was it white Aykroyd to black Belushi?

  I stared at Nathanson, my desire for a safe haven slowly succumbing to the intense, sometimes almost voyeuristic curiosity that had drawn me to my chosen field in the first place. There was not likely to have been a more interesting case in Los Angeles at the moment. And who was to know how it would really affect my therapy? Besides, I had to admit, there was something oddly appealing about having my shrink in my debt.

  "Sure," I said. "I'll do it."

  "Good," said Nathanson. "I'll have Emily call you. See you next time."

  2

  "So you think someone killed your husband."

  "I don't think. I ..." Emily Ptak half gasped and gestured futilely through my living room window, the checkerboard pastels of West Hollywood spread out behind it. Emily had insisted we meet at my office/apartment because she wanted anonymity and someplace she could bring her four-year-old daughter, Genevieve. So I stashed Genevieve in my bedroom with the cable TV and found a cup of herb tea for Emily, but she still wasn't really able to articulate. Standing up, she drank a couple of swallows of tea, then placed it on the coffee table and started pacing back and forth between my microfilm reader and the sofa while clenching and unclenching her hands.

  "Why don't you sit down a minute?"

  "No!"

  But she sat, almost primly, on the edge of the sofa. I glanced up from her pink hightops and slightly ill-fitting gray kimono skirt to her dirty blond hair cut short in a punk style that did little to mask her coarse, almost bovine features. Although Emily Ptak had been married to a hip comic, wore trendy Japanese clothes, and was only about twenty-seven, she already had a matronly quality. There was something oddly endearing about that—as if, beneath it all, she desperately wished to dissociate herself from a sophisticated life she didn't want or ask for. But there was also something tight and conservative about it.

  "Gene speaks very highly of you."

  "gene?" For a split second I didn't realize whom she was talking about. "You mean Dr. Nathanson?"

  "Yes, I've, uh, been seeing him for over two years now."

  Emily blushed and fidgeted with a pair of Carrera sunglasses she nervously removed from her purse.

  "What do you do besides that?"

  "You mean for work? I'm an M.S.W., but right now
I'm just volunteering a couple of days a week with Cosmic Aid, Eddy Sandollar's foundation in Ojai. He's doing really original work with famine relief. I'd like to do more but ..." She nodded toward the bedroom.

  "I understand. And how can I help you?" I asked, sounding more like a parish priest than a detective. Or maybe like Nathanson. Through the window directly behind her a large billboard dominated the Strip, urging SAFE SEX. It showed about a half-dozen muscular, shirtless gay guys grouped around a tiny, smiling Jewish bubba. L.A. LOVES YOU LIKE A MOTHER, it read, giving the number of the AIDS hot line. Beyond that another billboard showed a starving African child and said HELP HIM SURVIVE, giving the number of something called the California Hunger Project. This was West Hollywood in the eighties—the Plague Years.

  Emily continued to fidget with her Carrera glasses, holding them far away from her body as she folded and unfolded them.

  "Mike didn't do it," she said. "He wasn't the suicide type."

  "What's the suicide type?"

  "He was never depressed, for one thing."

  "Rea1ly?"

  "Really. I know it sounds weird, but he just never let anything get to him. He wasn't particularly good at what he did and that didn't even bother him. He was happy being a straight man." She glanced over at her daughter who was visible through a crack in the bedroom door, staring at the TV with a sad, mechanical expression. "Not like me. I'm a typical endogenous depressive. I'm almost as bad as Gene."

  "He's depressed?"

  "Shrinks are the most depressed people in the world. Who do you think has the highest suicide rate?"

  "Yeah, I know," I said. That was all I needed—a depressed shrink. With my luck, it was a communicable disease. "So," I continued, "do you have anything specific about Mike—or is this all based on character analysis?"

  She stood and looked away, lost in thought a moment. Then she took out a cigarette and lit it, staring painfully at her matchbook as if it were a symbol of decadence of some kind. It was from the Plaza Athenée in Paris. "Do you know a lot of people in show business?" she asked.