The Dangerous Animals Club Read online

  Occasionally there were dramatic events on our trips. Once I bought a partial set of an encyclopedia for ten dollars. Once Beth and I got married in a field during a thunderstorm, by ourselves, of course, nothing legal or binding. The forces of chaos would never approve of that.

  And sometimes the universe would throw us a curveball. On the way home from Mount Vernon, Texas, the Greyhound bus broke down about two and a half hours from Dallas. The driver told us that another bus would have to come to take us home. We could plan on being out for at least another six hours. That was way too much of a commitment to standing still. Beth suggested we leave the bus and hitchhike home.

  I had never hitchhiked before, but I said nothing. We walked away from the downed bus and held out our thumbs. There was not much traffic. I realized if no one picked us up, we were heading on a course of action that could end up being unimaginably disastrous. The odds were against us. I felt like we just jumped off of an ocean liner hoping to catch a ride to Italy on a dolphin.

  Just as I began to suggest we head back to the safety of the Greyhound, a beat-up red van pulled off onto the shoulder of the highway right in front of us. The side door slid open. Beth and I jumped inside the van and slammed the door shut. The van was full of black people. A man and woman were in the front seat. We were in the back with an old woman and two small children.

  I said, “Hey.” There was no response. I continued, “I hope you’re heading for Dallas. That’s where we were heading. Thanks for stopping.” The man driving didn’t say a word. He just looked at me in the rearview mirror. He started the engine.

  I repeated, “You are going to Dallas, aren’t you?” He just looked at me again in the rearview, put the car into gear, and off we went. I watched the bus get smaller and smaller out the back window and I thought how clever we were. I started talking to the people in the back of the van. The old woman put her hand on one of the children to quiet any urge to speak. Silence. No one looked at Beth or me. It was tense. Now I wondered how this ride would end.

  Around sundown, the van pulled off the road in the outskirts of Dallas. The man driving said, “We’re not going any farther. You have to get out here.” I nodded and opened the van door.

  “Hey, thanks for the lift,” I said. “I was afraid no one would pick up hitchhikers anymore.”

  “What? You were hitchhiking? We never even saw you. We had just pulled over to change drivers. You jumped into the car and said, ‘Drive us to Dallas.’ We thought you were kidnappers.”

  Identity confusion can be a dangerous side effect of the chaos-centered life.

  FOR PEOPLE WHO never made plans, it was odd that Beth and I forged a relationship that always involved travel. We decided to go to Boulder, Colorado, because Beth liked the name. That fell through. Then we changed gears and thought a trip to London and Paris sounded like a good idea. We bought plane tickets and Eurail passes. As for details like hotels, theater tickets, ground transportation—we left those matters up to the universe.

  We had no idea what to take. So we took everything. We needed Sherpas to get to the plane. Beth’s green suitcase must have weighed four hundred pounds. She couldn’t carry it. The sensible thing would have been to tell her straight out: “You pack what you can carry.” But I learned everything I knew about life from The Andy Griffith Show so I asked myself, “What would Andy do for Miss Helen?”

  I ended up carrying Beth’s suitcase and my equally huge bag for the entire trip. I developed a new posture for slogging around the luggage. With bent knees and straight arms I could have been mistaken for an orangutan.

  Beth and I arrived in London. We had no idea where to go, so we took a subway to the Paddington stop where a friend of ours told us he had found a hotel. We got out and walked up and down the streets, Beth holding her pillow from home and me grunting behind her with the two suitcases. We came to rest at a hotel aptly named the Nomad.

  The hotel was far from elegant. It was something in between a youth hostel and a building tagged for demolition. The manager wanted to be paid in advance. As I was shelling out the pounds, he told me that there was one bathroom at the end of each floor. I stopped. I assumed being in England we were still in the “civilized world.” We would need a private toilet, I told him.

  He sneered and said, “That’s not romantic.”

  “Regardless of the romance, we want our own potty.”

  He told me that costs extra. I expected as much from the Nomad.

  We paid the money and ended up with a single room that connected to something in the corner that resembled a ride at the fair. You walked up three steps to a tiny cubicle, shut the door. To flush, you pulled a piece of bicycle chain connected to a tank that somehow diverted the River Thames into the potty for eight seconds. The floor shook. The roar deafened. I could have used a seat belt.

  Traditional science based a lot of principles on the assumption that objects and forces seek equilibrium, keeping everything in balance. New scientific thinking has chucked that and embraces nonlinear systems called the “science of Becoming.” The focus of these experiments is not balance at all, but spontaneous ordering and the emergence of novelty. That was us. We were the New Scientists.

  If there was an opportunity in London to go to the theater, we took it. We saw ten plays that week that happened to star the great Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Frank Finlay, Paul Scofield, John Gielgud, Tom Courtenay, as well as a young Michael Crawford and Michael Gambon. All by chance. All by walking up and getting cancellations or whatever happened to be available.

  Every place in London became an opportunity. If the doors opened, we walked in.

  We saw pictures of T. E. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw at the National Portrait Gallery.

  We ate something called “American pancakes” at a British breakfast house. “It” was to “food” like “nightmare” is to “dream.” It was a stack of flapjacks covered by a steak (a small rib eye) covered by potatoes and brown gravy. I asked our waitress if I could have just the pancakes with butter and syrup. She was horrified.

  We went to the Tate Gallery and saw the haunting painting of Hope. It portrays a blindfolded woman sitting alone atop a desolate world plucking the string of a harp. Beth stared at the picture for a long time. She murmured, “It’s beautiful.” I found the painting terrifying. From completely different vantage points we were ambushed by its power.

  One afternoon we had thirty free minutes, so we ran into the British Museum. By chance, before us was the Rosetta Stone: a fitting artifact for two people trying to understand a common meaning in the indecipherable.

  Just as the Chaos Theory giveth, it also taketh away.

  A few days later we used our Eurail passes to go to Paris. We arrived not knowing we already had two strikes against us: one, we were in France where they didn’t speak English, and two, we were in France.

  When we got into the train station in Paris, we were directed to go to a window called “Passport Authority.” It was just like in the movies where they had men with guns who checked your papers. A policeman looked at us with the fish eye and asked in English with a French accent, “Where are you staying while you’re in Paris?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I figured we’d walk around until we found a place with a bathroom.” That was not the right answer. As ambassadors of the chaos-centered life, we were instructed to take our two gigantic suitcases and stand in an enormous line and be assigned a room.

  We waited in line for over two hours. When we got to the front, several disgusted French civil servants assigned us a place to stay. They gave us an official slip of paper with an address and directions. We gave the slip of paper to a cab driver who didn’t understand English. I didn’t speak French. He said, “Ich spreche nur Deutsch.” He was German! I noticed he had a new black leather jacket on so it enabled me to use one of the two sentences I knew in German, “Ich müss mir eine neue Jacke kaufen!!” (“I must buy a new jacket.”) He looked at me in the rearview with a certain
amount of confusion and continued on to our destination.

  We got out. I grabbed the two suitcases and started slogging my way down the block to the hotel. I noticed I was receiving many fetching looks from all the single women walking around our neighborhood. At first, I thought maybe it was the suitcases. My strength indicated virility. Perhaps it was my Russian good looks. Then it dawned on me that we were in the middle of the red-light district. The women were prostitutes and our “hotel” was a brothel. My first conversation with the madame was to explain that Beth was not one of her new girls. We weren’t renting the room by the hour. I showed her the official government slip of paper ordering us to stay there. She disliked us at first glance. That was as good as our relationship ever got.

  We didn’t spend much time in the room. We were out on the town. We went to the Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa. We went to the Paris Opera. I sprang for the expensive seats to see The Marriage of Figaro. I could have saved the francs. It was an experimental production that staged all of act two in the dark. We went to Shakespeare and Company bookstore. We rode on the Batobus up and down the Seine.

  One night we went to the Moulin Rouge, the famous nightclub where they featured a variety of dance routines with topless women interspersed with jugglers and dog acts like the ones on The Ed Sullivan Show. To get in you had to buy one of three ticket packages. Beth and I got the cheapest one. Our ticket included the show and a bottle of inexpensive champagne.

  We sat at a table with two other Americans, George and Marion, a middle-aged married couple from Maine. Marion was elegant. She had short black hair and wore a flowing flower-print dress and dangling earrings. George had a sort of professorial look complete with a handsome tweed jacket and tortoise shell glasses. He explained they had been here before and just loved the show. They had ordered the most expensive package that included a full seven-course dinner, referred to as the “French Feast.”

  Beth and I sipped on our champagne as they ate their soup. Marion felt guilty for eating in front of us to the point of offering us a taste. We told them not to worry. Enjoy. That’s when George muttered, “Oh no.” And a torrent of blood blasted out of his nose into his soup. He politely noted that he was afraid this might happen. He excused himself from the table. He ran for the men’s room with a handkerchief pressed up against his nose. Marion continued calmly, “George has a problem with his nose.” Beth and I looked at each other.

  The waiter removed George’s soup and replaced it with his salad. Marion asked what we were doing in Paris. Beth told her a bit about our travels. Marion was inspired by how romantic it all sounded, taking off on a whim, with no job, no money, no preparations. Marion mentioned that the world would be better if people were a little more impulsive and not so calculating. The waiters removed George’s untouched salad and brought his fish plate. George returned from the men’s room with wads of toilet paper jammed up his nostrils.

  He smiled and apologized, saying that he was hoping for a quiet evening with his nose. He chuckled and added that he guessed that wasn’t in the cards. He picked up his knife and fork. He started cutting his fish when he gave out another little groan and a sort of hard sneeze, blasting the toilet paper wads into my lap and spraying the filet of sole and the table in a shower of blood.

  George gritted his teeth and grinned. “Oops, here we go again.” I started mopping up my side of the table with a nonchalant, “No problem, no problem at all.” George ran back to the men’s room.

  Marion didn’t bat an eyelash and continued, “So what do you two study in college?”

  “Theater.” The dance orchestra started up with an Edith Piaf tango. Marion asked Beth if it would be all right if she borrowed me for a dance. Beth found this enormously entertaining because she knew I couldn’t dance. She said it was perfectly fine as long as she could watch.

  I got up and faked it as George came back from the men’s room. He saw his wife and me dancing a sort of fox-trot cha-cha to the tango music. He offered his hand to Beth. I found this delightful because I knew that Beth couldn’t dance, either, plus there was the added suspense of dancing with George. We all danced together at the Moulin Rouge. Beth shot a look to me and then a look at the wads of tissue up George’s nose.

  The song ended. We got back to the table just in time for the meat course and George’s next hemorrhage. He ran from the table, never to have touched a bite of his seven-course French Feast and never to be seen again.

  We returned that evening to find our luggage in the hallway. The madame in charge of the hotel explained that we were being thrown out of our room because I punched the toilet with my fist and smashed it. I don’t know how many times you have felt the need to punch a toilet. I never have. My French was not sufficient to answer such a charge except with the five reporter questions: how, when, what, where, and why? The madame assured me that my punching of the toilet was witnessed by the maid, which led me to my own conclusions.

  We were out on the street. One of the advantages of the Chaos Theory is that it doesn’t look at events like these as negatives. They just provide more chaos for the engine to operate. We jumped on a train and headed for Versailles, where we spent a couple of lovely days before we decided to head back to England.

  The plan was that we would take a train from Paris to the port town of Calais, then a ferry across the English Channel, and then take a train to London. Believe it or not, there was no longer room in our massive bags for my two Pierre Cardin suits to fit without getting crushed. I thought they would travel better if I wore them—both.

  Wearing two suits and slogging along with both suitcases, we boarded our train to Calais. As holders of a Eurail pass you get first-class travel anywhere in Europe. Unless you lose the Eurail pass. Then whoever finds your pass gets free first-class travel anywhere in Europe.

  We had settled into our first-class seats when Beth whispered to me that she had lost her pass. She had no idea where it was. I saw the conductor coming down the aisle. I told her to go back to the bathroom. I would show the conductor my pass and tell him that she had the same. That didn’t work. The conductor said he would wait for Beth to come back to her seat. I excused myself saying I would go get her.

  I got her out of the bathroom and we moved to the second-class cabin. That worked for about five minutes. I saw the conductor headed our way. We got up and strolled back to the third-class cabin. Third class was jammed with humanity. There were no seats. It was sweltering. In my two Pierre Cardin suits, I was starting to sweat.

  We walked back into the club car and ordered lunch. We ate our french fries and ham sandwiches as slowly as we could. The waiter eventually told us we would have to leave to let others come and eat. We started to head back into the train when I saw the conductor making his way to the club car. Beth and I turned and kept walking toward the back of the train. We walked through the kitchen and out the back door. Now we were sitting outside the train on the iron couplings that held the passenger section to the baggage cars.

  Just when I was starting to feel sorry for myself, possessing a first-class ticket but having to ride outside the dining car of a speeding train in two Pierre Cardin suits, a busboy opened the back door, muttered a curse in French, and threw a bucket of food scraps on me. I was in shock. And just when I started to feel sorry for myself riding outside a dining car of a fast-moving train wearing two Pierre Cardin suits covered with food scraps, it started to rain.

  The wet wool mixed with partially eaten potatoes au gratin made me snap. I yelled at Beth. We had to get out of the rain. The only way was back into the baggage compartment.

  Riding in the baggage compartment of a rapidly moving train is a lot like riding on the freeway in the back of a pickup truck with a lawn mower and a pit bull. Besides being tossed from one end of a metal car to another, you also have heavy bags being thrown at you, on you, with you, under you, around you, and all the time you know that you have a first-class ticket in your pocket.

  We arrived at the port of Calais.
I stumbled out of the baggage car looking like a tossed Cobb salad. We made it to the ferry to take us across the English Channel. That was where we met Michael. I’ll never forget him. He had dark hair and dark eyes. He bathed infrequently. He said he was a young German art student who was on his way to New York to see the art galleries to learn from the masters. That’s what he told me right before he got seasick and threw up on me.

  I have encountered genuine disgust in my life. I know the look in the eyes: the look from my anti-Semitic classmates in seventh grade when they found out I was Jewish, the look of kindergarten teachers when I unknowingly tossed off sexually explicit comments in Spanish to a group of children. The look of an East German border guard pushing me up against a wall with his machine gun as I tried to cross into Berlin in 1970. But nothing tops the looks I got that day getting off the boat wearing two wet wool suits, covered with food and vomit, shuffling down the gangplank, groaning under the weight of the two gigantic suitcases.

  There are two ways of viewing existence. One is that we live in a world of cause and effect. The other is that we live in a world of probability. I had discovered a third. Living with Beth you could also live in a world of possibility where there were no rules at all—except gravity. And we were working on that one.

  14.

  THE SOUND OF SURPRISE

  THERE ARE TWO ways of going through life: you can be a master or a student. Being a master is more difficult. The expectations are higher and the wardrobe is more expensive. I have always chosen to be a student. It’s fun to learn. When I got out of school and started acting professionally, the first thing I learned was that I had no idea what I was doing. I had to start learning all over again. Working on a film or television was different than doing class scenes.

  What was the difference? It’s one of those questions whose answer seems apparent. Theater is live. Movies and television aren’t. In movies, theoretically, you have unlimited attempts at getting a scene right. In theater you have one shot every night and twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays.