A Stranger in the Mirror

chapter 4
Vaudeville had flourished in America from 1881 until its final demise when the Palace Theatre closed its doors in 1932. Vaudeville had been the training ground for all the aspiring young comics, the battlefield where they sharpened their wits against hostile, jeering audiences. However, the comics who won out went on to fame and fortune. Eddie Cantor and W. C. Fields, Jolson and Benny, Abbott and Costello, and Jessel and Burns and the Marx Brothers, and dozens more. Vaudeville was a haven, a steady paycheck, but with vaudeville dead, comics had to turn to other fields. The big names were booked for radio shows and personal appearances, and they also played the important nightclubs around the country. For the struggling young comics like Toby, however, it was another story. They played nightclubs, too, but it was a different world. It was called the Toilet Circuit, and the name was a euphemism. It consisted of dirty saloons all over the country where the great unwashed public gathered to guzzle beer and belch at the strippers and destroy the comics for sport. The dressing rooms were stinking toilets, smelling of stale food and spilled drinks and urine and cheap perfume and, overlaying it all, the rancid odor of fear: flop sweat. The toilets were so filthy that the female performers squatted over the dressing room sinks to urinate. Payment varied from an indigestible meal to five, ten or sometimes as much as fifteen dollars a night, depending on the audience reaction.

Toby Temple played them all, and they became his school. The names of the towns were different, but the places were all the same, and the smells were the same, and the hostile audiences were the same. If they did not like a performer, they threw beer bottles at him and heckled him throughout his performance and whistled him off. It was a tough school, but it was a good one, because it taught Toby all the tricks of survival. He learned to deal with drunken tourists and sober hoodlums, and never to confuse the two. He learned how to spot a potential heckler and quiet him by asking him for a sip of his drink or borrowing his napkin to mop his brow.

Toby talked himself into jobs at places with names like Lake Kiamesha and Shawanga Lodge and the Avon. He played Wildwood, New Jersey, and the B'nai B'rith and the Sons of Italy and Moose halls.

And he kept learning.

Toby's act consisted of parodies of popular songs, imitations of Gable and Grant and Bogart and Cagney, and material stolen from the big-name comics who could afford expensive writers. All the struggling comics stole their material, and they bragged about it. "I'm doing Jerry Lester" - meaning they were using his material - "and I'm twice as good as he is." "I'm doing Milton Berle." "You should see my Red Skelton."

Because material was the key, they stole only from the best.

Toby would try anything. He would fix the indifferent, hard-faced audience with his wistful blue eyes and say, "Did you ever see an Eskimo pee?" He would put his two hands in front of his fly, and ice cubes would dribble out.

He would put on a turban and wrap himself in a sheet. "Abdul, the snake charmer," he would intone. He would play a flute, and out of a wicker basket a cobra began to appear, moving rhythmically to the music as Toby pulled wires. The snake's body was a douche bag, and its head was the nozzle. There was always someone in the audience who thought it was funny.

He did the standards and the stockies and the platters, where you laid the jokes in their laps.

He had dozens of shticks. He had to be ready to switch from one bit to another, before the beer bottles started flying.

And no matter where he played, there was always the sound of a flushing toilet during his act.

Toby traveled across the country by bus. When he arrived at a new town he would check into the cheapest hotel or boardinghouse and size up the nightclubs and bars and horse parlors. He stuffed cardboard in the soles of his shoes and whitened his shirt collars with chalk to save on laundry. The towns were all dreary, and the food was always bad; but it was the loneliness that ate into him. He had no one. There was not a single person in the vast universe who cared whether he lived or died. He wrote to his father from time to time, but it was out of a sense of duty rather than love. Toby desperately needed someone to talk to, someone who would understand him, share his dreams with him.

He watched the successful entertainers leave the big clubs with their entourages and their beautiful, classy girls and drive off in shiny limousines, and Toby envied them. Someday...

The worst moments were when he flopped, when he was booed in the middle of his act, thrown out before he had a chance to get started. At those times Toby hated the people in the audience; he wanted to kill them. It wasn't only that he had failed, it was that he had failed at the bottom. He could go down no further; he was there. He hid in his hotel room and cried and begged God to leave him alone, to take away his desire to stand in front of an audience and entertain them. God, he prayed, let me want to be a shoe salesman or a butcher. Anything but this. His mother had been wrong. God had not singled him out. He was never going to be famous. Tomorrow, he would find some other line of work. He would apply for a nine-to-five job in an office and live like a normal human being.

And the next night Toby would be on stage again, doing his imitations, telling jokes, trying to win over the people before they turned on him and attacked.

He would smile at them innocently and say, "This man was in love with his duck, and he took it to a movie with him one night. The cashier said, 'You can't bring that duck in here,' so the man went around the corner and stuffed the duck down the front of his trousers, bought a ticket and went inside. The duck started getting restless, so the man opened his fly and let the duck's head out. Well, next to the man was a lady and her husband. She turned to her husband and said, 'Ralph, the man next to me has his penis out.' So Ralph said, 'Is he bothering you?' 'No,' she said. 'Okay. Then forget it and enjoy the movie.' A few minutes later the wife nudged her husband again. 'Ralph - his penis - ' And her husband said, 'I told you to ignore it.' And she said, 'I can't - it's eating my popcorn!'"

He made one-night appearances at the Three Six Five in San Francisco, Rudy's Rail in New York and Kin Wa Low's in Toledo. He played plumbers conventions and bar mitzvahs and bowling banquets.

And he learned.

He did four and five shows a day at small theaters named the Gem and the Odeon and the Empire and the Star.

And he learned.

And, finally, one of the things that Toby Temple learned was that he could spend the rest of his life playing the Toilet Circuit, unknown and undiscovered. But an event occurred that made the whole matter academic.

On a cold Sunday afternoon in early December in 1941, Toby was playing a five-a-day act at the Dewey Theatre on Fourteenth Street in New York. There were eight acts on the bill, and part of Toby's job was to introduce them. The first show went well. During the second show, when Toby introduced the Flying Kanazawas, a family of Japanese acrobats, the audience began to hiss them. Toby retreated backstage. "What the hell's the matter with them out there?" he asked.

"Jesus, haven't you heard? The Japs attacked Pearl Harbor a few hours ago," the stage manager told him.

"So what?" Toby asked. "Look at those guys - they're great."

The next show, when it was the turn of the Japanese troupe, Toby went out on stage and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, it's a great privilege to present to you, fresh from their triumph in Manila - the Flying Filipinos!" The moment the audience saw the Japanese troupe, they began to hiss. During the rest of the day Toby turned them into the Happy Hawaiians, the Mad Mongolians and, finally, the Eskimo Flyers. But he was unable to save them. Nor, as it turned out, himself. When he telephoned his father that evening, Toby learned that there was a letter waiting for him at home. It began, "Greetings," and was signed by the President. Six weeks later, Toby was sworn into the United States Army. The day he was inducted, his head was pounding so hard that he was barely able to take the oath.

The headaches came often, and when they happened, little Josephine felt as though two giant hands were sqeezing her temples. She tried not to cry, because it upset her mother. Mrs. Czinski had discovered religion. She had always secretly felt that in some way she and her baby were responsible for the death of her husband. She had wandered into a revival meeting one afternoon, and the minister had thundered, "You are all soaked in sin and wickedness. The God that holds you over the pit of Hell like a loathsome insect over a fire abhors you. You hang by a slender thread, every damned one of you, and flames of His wrath will consume you unless you repent!" Mrs. Czinski instantly felt better, for she knew that she was hearing the word of the Lord.

"It's a punishment from God because we killed your father," her mother would tell Josephine, and while she was too young to understand what the words meant, she knew that she had done something bad, and she wished she knew what it was, so that she could tell her mother that she was sorry.