CHAPTER TWELVE
THE NEXT DAY, BINGO CALLED FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO commiserate with Ma and Pop about the events the night before, which were being played out in the New York gossip columns, and to announce that he was staying on for a few more days.
While Pop had no memory of the party, or pretended not to, anyway, Ma was as triumphant as if she had single-handedly brought down the Bastille, spending so many hours on the phone being celebrated by her activist cohorts that she developed situational laryngitis.
“Your brother wants to speak to you,” she whispered in deadly fashion, handing off the phone as I smiled weakly and thanked her—she’d been giving me the long stare ever since we got home. I felt as if my neck were being measured for the guillotine.
“Poor Pop,” Bingo said.
“Well, I don’t know about that. Poor Pop put on quite a public performance last night. It was pretty humiliating,” I said.
“I wish I’d been there,” he said, voice full of longing.
“Yeah, I wish you’d been there, too,” I responded, though my tone wasn’t quite so winsome. “When are you coming home? Ma’s looking at me as if she wants to sacrifice the fatted calf.”
“I promised Pop I’d get him Karl Malden’s autograph. I wanted to cheer him up. It may take me a few days.”
“How can you make such a stupid promise?” I asked Bingo. “You’re not going to meet him.”
“Yes, I am. Why are you always so negative?”
“Being negative has nothing to do with it. Would the outcome be any different if I was acting like a cheerleader? San Francisco is a big city with tons of people. You might as well say you’re going to meet the queen because you’re in London.”
“Collie, you’re not going to change my mind, so you might as well quit trying. I’m gonna meet Karl Malden and get his autograph for Pop. Why else do you think I’m staying on?”
“You’re crazy. I give up,” I said. But I didn’t give up, the whole situation induced a kind of temporary madness in me. I kept calling and arguing with him about it.
“You’re not going to meet him,” I said, gripping the phone as if I were hanging from the ledge of a cliff.
“Yeah, I am,” he said.
Pop loved the movies, fancied himself a bit of an authority and a discerning critic. His favorite actor was Karl Malden, which meant that Karl Malden assumed a disproportionately large role in our lives— between Ma and Pop and their mutual obsessions, we might as well have hung separate Christmas stockings for him and for Rupert Brooke.
Pop would argue his merits to anyone, always concluding his carefully prepared defense of Malden’s performances by insisting that his looks were underrated, at which point you could always depend on Uncle Tom to say, “What you see in that thin-lipped proboscis on legs, I’ll never know.”
“If I hear the name Karl Malden one more time, I’ll go mad,” Ma would chime in right on cue.
“I still say he was cheated out of the Oscar for On the Waterfront,” Bingo would say, clever enough to know the events he was setting in motion.
“Don’t get me started . . . ,” Pop would say, nicely getting started.
Bingo and Pop never missed an episode of The Streets of San Francisco, starring Malden.
“Hey, Pop, our show’s on!” Bingo used to alert everyone five minutes before the starting credits.
“I’ll spontaneously combust if I see that man’s face staring back at me from the TV screen one more time,” Ma would say, using her fingers to make tiny revolving circles at her temples.
“It’s insane to think that Bing is going to get you an autograph—you can’t will these things to happen,” I said to Pop, who looked at me with pity as he prepared a place of honor on the mantelpiece in the living room.
“You most certainly can,” Uncle Tom interjected, sticking his nose in, emerging from the kitchen in an apron and carrying a dishrag. “And by the way, I take umbrage to your tone,” he continued, his hands red from water so hot that it would practically peel flesh. He took pride in his ability to withstand scalding temperatures. He turned around to face me where I was sitting straddled over Mambo sleeping on the floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Pop hastily slip away—he didn’t have much tolerance for Uncle Tom’s digressive pronouncements.
“Conventional expectation has no sway over me,” Uncle Tom said, pausing for a moment as he sat on the sofa across from me, squeezing aside Bachelor, waiting out the cutlery, still too hot to handle even for him.
“When I was fifteen years old, I was struck by lightning. They found me in a field still smoking hours later. It turned me into a kind of good-luck charm and a talisman to boot. Some say my powers are even greater than those attributed to the Miraculous Medal of Mary.”
He pointed his finger at me—his certainty poking me hard in the chest.
“Who are you to challenge life’s great mysteries with your dourness? All I know is that I can cure a toothache if I put my mind to it.”
Two days later and Bingo arrived back home, rushing from the cab and in through the back door, hollering for Pop from the kitchen, Ma actually tripping over her trailing housecoat as she rushed from the study to greet him. Something deep inside me recalibrated as I watched Pop proudly hang a framed sheet of lined paper torn from a spiral notebook that said “To Fantastic Charlie Flanagan, with warmest wishes from Karl Malden, June 2, 1983,” dated the last day of Bingo’s trip.
“Oh, my God, you’re a marvel. Isn’t he the most amazing boy!” Ma was exclaiming all over the place. “And you said he couldn’t do it,” she said to me, watching with evident scorn as I approached the fireplace to have a better look.
“How’d you do it?” I asked Bing, who was busy fending off the worship of the mob.
“What’s the collective for killjoys?” Uncle Tom asked me as he spit into a cloth and wiped a smudge on the glass of the frame that contained Pop’s greatest treasure.
“I don’t know, but I’m sure you’ll tell me,” I said.
“A Collie of killjoys,” he responded with exaggerated blandness.
Bingo launched into an elaborate explanation for how he got the autograph, Ma and Pop standing arm in arm, looking as if they were on board a moonlight cruise swaying to the smooth musical styling of Bing Flanagan.
“I tried everything. I went to every hot-spot restaurant and hotel in the city. I checked out nightclubs, made some calls, even conjured up the evil specter of the Falcon to try to find Malden, but nothing was working. I had some tough moments, believe me,” he said, laying it on thick but careful to wear the mantle of his greatness lightly as I shook my head through the whole protracted tale of his triumph.
“I was almost ready to give up. It was the last night and I figured that I’d failed, but I couldn’t understand it because I was so sure it would happen. I could see the outcome in my head, so why wasn’t it happening? I couldn’t believe that I’d been so wrong. It didn’t make any sense. I had to catch an early plane, so I was certain it was over. I left the hotel room to go to this little store on the corner—it sells that drink I like, you know the orange one?”
Pop and Ma are nodding—you couldn’t move in the mudroom for the boxes of Bingo’s favorite orange drink.
“Anyway, I’m on the elevator feeling depressed and defeated—now I know what it feels like to be you, Collie,” he said in an unamusing aside, though Ma let out a howl of appreciation that caused Lenin to leap up from his spot in the dining room and attack poor Bachelor.
“The elevator stops on the eighth floor, and I’m so dejected my head is hanging, but I summon up the interest to look as this guy with great shoes steps aboard, and it was him. I couldn’t believe it!”
“It was Karl Malden?” Pop said, as stunned as if he’d been visited by God in his sleep. “What are the chances?”
“Slim to none,” I said.
“He was a wonderful guy, Pop, a real powerful presence, just the way you imagined he’d be. . . .”
“What did I tell you?” Pop said.
“Charlie, let him finish,” Ma said, exasperated.
“When he heard the whole story, he was as excited as I was, and when we reached the lobby he stopped some high school kid walking by and asked for a piece of paper from his notebook and signed it. He said I made his day.”
“I’m sure he’s still talking about it,” Pop said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s made the rounds in Hollywood and Kirk Douglas is entertaining his friends with it.”
“It’s a miracle, someone should notify the pope,” I said.
Pop never questioned the authenticity of the autograph or the veracity of Bing’s story. He believed in Bingo’s ability to conjure up Karl Malden like a rabbit from a hat—as far as Pop was concerned, life was a series of magic tricks.
I didn’t know what to think. I still don’t know what to think, though my thoughts about it have evolved a little over the years. Eventually the autograph just seemed to disappear, got lost as treasures sometimes do.
I wonder where it is. It would be nice to know.