Maynard and Jennica

So there is your epilogue, you—optimists. There is the epilogue to the story of the woman with the beauty spots whom I met—once—on a No. 6 train, uptown. Where was I?

I believe I was about to tell you about my visit with David Fowler, my lawyer, my pro bono lawyer, who will be advising me on the contract to sell the rights to my movie.

There has always been an air of default about my friendship with David. We are friends because—after knowing each other for three decades, what else can we be? Our fathers collaborated on this and that, and our mothers were always of a mind, when we were children, as to the merits of a particular teacher or the imbecility of a certain principal. In other words, I was always sent to the Fowlers’ to play—board games.

It was revolting and infuriating. David and his younger sister chewed on all the game pieces. We would play Monopoly, and when I finally controlled an entire run of properties and could begin the development of Pacific Avenue with those little green Monopoly houses that represent the first wave of urban renewal, the eaves of my newly erected units would not be properly aligned because David’s sister had gnawed on the roof lines. We would play Risk, and when David amassed an army of little plastic cubes to pour across the Bering Strait from his stronghold in Alaska, it was an army riddled with teething marks. The things children are expected to endure! Obviously, David always won. He knew all the rules to every game—he loved the rules—and if you ever threatened his victory, he would surprise you with some new rule that prevented you from doing what you wanted to do.

By a certain age—eleven, twelve—I anyway preferred my own company, and the piano, to anything else.

And in high school David became an enthusiast of role-playing games—of games that required you to fi ll out paperwork. The purpose of the paperwork was that, once complete, you were permitted to pretend that you were an elf in an iron bikini or a dwarf with a “plus-two ax.” David immersed himself in this, and when we were fifteen and going to Chatham, he tried to recruit me into his—coven, a coven which, it seemed, consisted of just him. He would sit in his room alone all summer, memorizing the rules but never actually playing the game. He even would draft his own proposed rules—how to battle ghosts, how to build a golem—and he would submit them to the publishers of these rulebooks, hoping that his bill would become a law and soon every elf in America would have to follow the Fowler Amendment when calculating the rate at which rust accumulated on her iron bikini. This—is my lawyer.

DAVID FOWLER does not tell a sockdolager about Gogarty (early August 2000):

Fellow I know from the City Bar works in entertainment law. Smart guy, doing very well for himself. Says, “It’s not entertainment law that’s interesting, it’s entertainment clients.” All right, Gogarty isn’t a client exactly, he’s a friend, but wait until you hear this sockdolager about him.

Manny Gogarty calls on Monday. And you know, if I have free time, which thankfully isn’t always the case, I lend him a hand, pro bono. I tell him to come by, and Tuesday morning he shows up in my reception. Comes in, covered in sweat from the subway but still looking dapper, as always, with his briefcase and his hat. And I guess he hadn’t seen my new office, which I share with a few other attorneys, other solo practitioners, because the first thing he says is, “I like this space, it suits your utilitarianism.”

I say, “It’s respectable.”

“Absolutely! Artificial ferns. Wall-to-wall carpeting, no doubt very easy to vacuum. Eight-foot ceilings with the asbestos tiles, very easy to rewire.”

I tell him, “Look, don’t scare me, those tiles aren’t asbestos. I don’t want a place that makes the clients think I’m wasting their money.”

“David,” he says, “I have never felt that you’re wasting my money.”

There is no talking to Gogarty except you feel like he’s passing judgment on you. Him telling me “I have never felt you’re wasting my money”? When he’s never even gotten me a thank-you gift? Yes, Gogarty, in fact, I do run a business, and I do have paying clients.

He says, “I think you’ve found your niche here, David. This office really goes with your look.”

“My look? What look?”

“Your shoes.”

“My shoes.”

“Black ‘leather’ tennis shoes with black stitching, black nylon laces, and thick black rubber soles.”

“What, Gogarty, you’ve got a problem with my shoes? I can wear them for anything. I can wear them running, I can wear them to court with a suit. I own one pair of shoes, they cost me forty dollars.”

“And this office space meets the same criteria. That’s what I’m saying. You are an indefatigable ascetic.”

“How’s your mother, Gogarty?”

“I am her only disappointment.”

“Your grandmother?”

“The same. Strong as a tortoise.”

Never does he ask me about my kids or my wife. You know, he’s good at heart, but he’s got such a stiff manner. Is it that he’s morbidly shy? Is it that he doesn’t want to intrude? Is it all part of his endless philosophy of dignity? Anyway, he gives me the contract. I tell him, Look, I can tell you what this says as a legal matter, but I can’t tell you whether it’s a good deal as a business matter—I know nothing about this industry. He says he just wants to understand what he’s signing away and how much money to expect. I tell him I’ll take a look. But I ask him, out of curiosity, Who’s the attorney who wrote this?

FRANNY CLEMENT, the attorney who wrote it, gives us a tour of the reception area of Herman Nathaniel LLP and tells us about her meeting with Maynard Gogarty (early August 2000):

In our reception area, along with the white leather chairs and the white marble coffee tables and the white, muggy view of Jersey City, New Jersey, is an enlarged replica of a famous Japanese bonsai. Now most bonsai are planted in earthenware trays that are as shallow as wasabi dishes, but the trough holding our bonsai is made from marble and is over two feet deep. And instead of being only a few inches high, our bonsai trees are over twelve feet high. And instead of dwarf pines, the trees in our bonsai are fully mature junipers. But otherwise our bonsai is a to-scale replica of a planting of seven trees that was given as part of a famous dowry in seventeenth-century Japan. Welcome to Herman Nathaniel LLP; our receptionists are allegedly happy to bring you a beverage while you wait.

Now, Mr. Gogarty did not exactly look at home in our lobby. He was standing on an open patch of white marble tile, as far as he could be from our bonsai and our chairs and our receptionists, with his old brown briefcase leaning against his calf as if he were afraid to set it down on any of our four white marble coffee tables. And he was ventilating himself, one hand pumping the breast of his jacket in and out to get air to his chest, the other one beating his hat up and down beside his cheek to get air down his collar. He was dressed for summer, but so was Gene Kelly in Inherit the Wind.

But let me come to the point. The reason I had invited Mr. Gogarty down to our offices was that one of my clients is ITD Records, of Long Island City, New York. ITD stands for “intent to distribute.” As in “possession of a controlled narcotic with.” Obviously, ITD is a pro bono client. And they had just signed a new performer who was so very, very prolific, but so very, very unconcerned with copyright difficulties. Puppy Jones! Now, for the most part I had been able to track down permissions for Mr. Jones, but Mr. Gogarty seemed to hold the exclusive rights to his own music, and seems to have sold Mr. Jones a CD at Sundance for five dollars, with no contact information.

Isn’t that quaint? And isn’t that the sort of thing I want to spend my time on, at one in the morning, after I am done with the work for our paying clients? And isn’t it generous of the partners in the Intellectual Property Department at Herman Nathaniel LLP to allow their sixth-year associates to take on as much pro bono work as they like, but only as long as it “does not interfere with other assignments”?

MAYNARD GOGARTY moves right along (early August 2000):

I knew from her voice on the phone that Franny would be black, but I wasn’t expecting her to be so—short. An air of seriousness about her, which I always trust and admire, but it was beaten in with sarcasm, which I sometimes distrust. She had extravagant artificial braids affixed to her scalp by one of those mysterious methods hairstylists have, involving seared knots. But her skirt was a conformist gray, and her blouse was that ditto-ink purple that people are wearing this season, and wrinkled at the elbows. So—a short, sarcastic woman carrying an accordion folder.

She took one look at me and my boater and decided to hustle me out of her office. She insisted that we—talk—over breakfast, and she led me to a deli a block and a half away, just far enough to vanquish any reservoirs of cool I had gathered in my shirt while in her lobby. May I tell you what she ate for breakfast, this woman who wants to buy the rights to my movie?

Bivouacked in the middle of the deli to which she led me was—a breakfast buffet. Many different dishes, each one isolated, like radium, in a deep aluminum pan and suspended above a steaming bath of water. One hundred dishes, one single uncanny smell. Uncanny because it is the same smell that is in every deli in Manhattan now, a mixture of dishwater and barbecue sauce. Some dishes had their own aluminum spoons or tongs; other dishes did not. So, for example, if a man wanted a late breakfast of waffles and bananas, he would have to use the tongs from the sausage links to pinch up each—sodden waffl e, and would have to use the spoon from the ranchero-style scrambled eggs to fish bananas out of the fruit cocktail. Did I mention, too, that there were chicken wings? Not a popular breakfast item, chicken wings, but, aswim in their sauce, in their oily red and fatty brown sauce, very psychedelic.

For breakfast Franny had stewed strawberries over Belgian waffles, with ketchup-coated hash browns on the side—except the hash browns were more like hash pales. When she attempted to stab one of her stewed strawberries with her plastic fork, the strawberry would slip away from her and bolt for safety toward the hash browns. But Franny would not give up. She would pursue the strawberry, with her fork, into the mire of the ketchup, where she would be able to spear it at last, and then—she would eat the ketchup-covered strawberry. This is how breakfast is taken by the woman who wants to buy the rights to my movie. Me, I drank coffee.

While Franny ate, she felt she could be casual with me. She said, “Now, shame on you, Franny, shame on you, but—I have not seen the movie.”

I told her, “It’s not too late. It’s playing on Saturday at the Pioneer Theater, the one behind that—pizzeria. You should come. It seems there is a problem with the pizzeria’s piano; otherwise I would accompany the fi lm live.”

“Like a silent movie!”

“Or, well, when I think of a silent movie, I always think that something is missing. A silent movie is a movie that is missing sound. I prefer to think of Unseemly as missing nothing. Unseemly is not so much a movie minus sound as a piano recital plus miraculous light show.”

“The proud father! But tell me what it’s about.”

That question, always that question, that question of what something is—about. So I told her what my movie is about, and I gave her the long version, including how I built the hidden camera and how I set my ambushes. Then came the awkward moment. It always comes.

She said, “It sounds like the kind of thing I’d never see on HBO.”

And I said, “Yes, well, a dignified life does, after all, involve very little television.”

And she said, “We all have our weaknesses.”

And I said, “I suppose so.”

There we were, she looking at me as though I had insulted her, and I baffled as to what I had said wrong. Something in my expression makes people believe that I am not—nice. Something in how I look at the remains of their buffet breakfasts.

Franny finishes her ketchupy strawberries, and out comes her accordion folder, and out comes her contract, and out comes the truth. Her client is not interested in buying all the rights to the movie, only the rights to the music. He is not even interested in buying all the rights to the music, only the right to use certain samples—in hip-hop. In other words, she wants me to sell Unseemly for scrap. She explains the terms to me, and I—.

Hope is the most private emotion. I won’t bore you or embarrass myself by relaying all that I had hoped. But I had hoped, without telling anyone, for so much. Despite all the backwater film festivals and despite all the debt—I had hoped for so much. And now Unseemly’s run was nearly through, and—there it was: Franny Clement represented a record label that represented a singer who wanted to sample my music. That was what my hopes had been reduced to. I told her I would look the contract over, but—I knew I was in no position to refuse. How could I refuse? My personal credit card debt from the movie being another res that I am in media of.

We said goodbye, and I slogged over to the No. 6 train with the contract in my attaché case, in order to go uptown, where David Fowler could help me assess my quadrennial half-pint of success.

PUPPY JONES recounts his trip to the Sundance Film Festival (early August 2000):

Mr. Maynard Gogarty! The man changed my philosophy.

I was living in Venice at the time, Venice Beach, California, and I had my little thing going on as Deejay Peejay. At the time. And some friends had some friends who had a condominium in Park City, Utah, and they told me they would give me five hundred dollars, plus tip, plus drinks, plus a bed, if I would spin at their Sundance party. Five hundred dollars was equal to my rent in Venice. At the time. They told me, “You can get a ride to Park City with Bez, the half-Asian bisexual.” You see what I’m saying.

I’m saying fourteen hours in a Mercedes from Venice Beach, California, to Park City, Utah, with a half-Asian bisexual actress named Bez Bekamilui. Dreadlocks, industry talk, daddy is in real estate, boyfriend is in Sydney, Australia. Complaining about being celibate because her boyfriend is in Sydney, Australia. You see what I’m saying. We left at seven in the morning. She did her yoga, she didn’t shower, she got in her car, she picked me up in Venice with the equipment I rented, and we drove to Utah. Fourteen hours, smelling her unshowered bisexual hooch-naynay yoga sweat. My feet up on the equipment I rented because there’s not enough room in her trunk. Bez talking about pornography, eating her McDonald’s french fries. Dipping the McDonald’s french fries in the Thousand Island dressing, telling me it reminds her of come. You see what I’m saying. I’m saying Jones is still smelling her hooch-naynay over the smell of the french fries.

We get to the condo in Park City, Utah, which turns out to be nowhere near Park City, Utah. It’s late at night, and they assign me to a loft bed. A loft bed in the living room. This is the bed that the families put the eight-year-old in when they rent the condo for skiing. Puppy Jones in the baby bed, Bez Bekamilui in a bedroom all by herself. No respect for the deejay. You see what I’m saying.

The next morning at nine A.M., Bez comes into the living room to do her yoga and her chanting, and she wakes Jones up. Rest of the condo sleeps through it, but Jones wakes up. Half-Asian bisexual yoga going on six feet underneath Jones? Half-Asian bisexual ass in the air, with the incense burning? Who’s Jones making coffee for? But Bez sez: “I don’t drink coffee, I brought my own yerba maté. I’m into the maté latte.”

Bez sez she’s going to see all the short films that morning after her mate latte. Who’s following behind her? Who’s following behind her like a good little puppy dog? That’s all I’m saying. All I’m saying is at twelve noon, Jones and Bez go sit in the dark together. Where they see a short film by a Mr. Maynard Gogarty.

Mr. Maynard Gogarty: director, cinematographer, pianist, destroyer of worlds. Here is a man who is doing the work! In the theater, in the dark, Bez expropriates Jones’s box of jujubes, puts it between her legs. A jumbo box of jujubes is right up in there next to the hooch-naynay, and Jones doesn’t even notice. I don’t even notice, because I am being shown Unseemly, by Mr. Maynard Gogarty. And when the movie is over, there is some Q and there is some A.

Bez wants to leave, but I tell her, “No, I want to hear the man.” So we hear some Q, we hear some A, and I sez to Bez, “The man is a genius.”

And Bez sez, “He’s just full of himself. He was insulting the other directors, and they knew it. It was rude.”

Bez did not want to hear the message. Mr. Maynard Gogarty’s movie was addressed to her soul, but her soul was not ready for the work! But Jones’s soul? Ready for the work! I’ll fi nish off the story for you about Sundance. I do my Deejay Peejay thing at the party. A little of this, little of that, home at four A.M., five hundred dollars in my pocket. Plus drinks. Plus tip. Minus the cost of the cab to take me and the equipment back to the condo, because Bez never came to the party to get me.

But next morning, nine A.M., there she is with her yoga and her chanting, burning the incense and waking me up. Who’s out of his cradle in the treetops, making coffee and maté latte?

“Sorry I didn’t see you last night, Bez. Want some maté latte?”

And she tells me, “Yeah, sorry. I wanted to come to your party, but I was tired. Also, I met this guy last night? Who needs a ride back to L.A. today? So do you think you could find another way back to Venice?”

On a normal morning, what would Jones have said? Because Jones is such a puppy dog? “Okay, Bez. I’ll find another way back to Venice. Just like I found another way back to the condo last night. I’ll just ignore that you’ve been swinging your hooch-naynay in my face for three days and that you promised to take me back to California.”

But this is not a normal morning. This is New Year’s Day. Year One, Post-Gogarty. Seeing the man’s film and listening to the man’s A when the man got a Q, it changed my philosophy. So when Bez sez, “Do you think you could find another way back to Venice,” I say, “No, Bez, no, I do not. You were supposed to take me back, you shall take me back. You shall inform the other dude of your mistake, and you shall take me back.”

Do I even need to tell you that she took me back? Do I even need to tell you that she is not being faithful to the boyfriend in Sydney, Australia?

DAVID FOWLER delivers his sockdolager (early August 2000):

The sockdolager. On his way out, after he’s given me the contract, I ask Gogarty if he’s seeing anyone these days. He draws to a halt, theatrically. Takes off his hat, which he had just put on.

“Is what I’m telling you confi dential?”

“Gogarty. It goes without saying.”

“I’ll be needing your help with a divorce in a few months’ time, David.”

“Who’s getting divorced?”

“I am.”

“You are. From who?”

“My wife.”

“Your wife. This is some sort of metaphor, Gogarty, or did I miss something? For example, the wedding? Your wedding ring is what, invisible?”

“That’s why this is confi dential.”

“Okay. I apologize. Start from the beginning.”

“Remember Ana, the German girl, the photographer, the maniac?”

“Very vaguely. She was in your life, when, mid-nineties?”

And I did remember her. She lived with him at the place in Gramercy. She was a gorgeous girl, but a bit terrifying. When she learned I was a lawyer, she said, “How can you stand all these typical days you must have?” A real charmer. But then again, maybe the bad attitude is what she and Gogarty liked about each other. Gogarty starts to tell me about this divorce he needs, and within two sentences I cut him off, because I don’t want to be disbarred. Not for some INS bullshit!

ANA KAGANOVA defies a polite question about what her typical day is like (early August 2000):

Typical days are for other people, weiß’ du? You want to see my typical day? Here, here is my typical day:

STEFAN MAYR reports on the front page of Berlin Blick (June 27, 1979, translated from the original German):

EXCLUSIVE! ONLY IN B. BLICK!

“I Came from an Ape”

EAST GERMAN BEAUTY ESCAPES COMMIES INSIDE WORLD-FAMOUS GORILLA

BERLIN, 27.6: When the 1.8-meter-tall, eighteen-year-old Venus from Karl Marx Allee walked into the police station in Wedding last Tuesday, the officers on duty could not believe their eyes. But when she told them how she escaped from the East, it was their ears they could not believe! In an exclusive interview with B. BLICK, Ana Kaganova told of her fl ight to freedom—inside a gorilla!

“I always dreamed of life in the West,” said Ana, who sat with a B. BLICK reporter this weekend and unfolded a harrowing tale of intrigue, romance, and courage! “I only needed an opportunity.”

Love gave her the opportunity in May, when her West German boyfriend, a student whom she met at a youth conference in Danzig last winter, made contact with a smuggler named Wolfi.

“Wolfi wanted six thousand marks to bring me west, which my boyfriend was able to borrow from his parents and his friends,” Ana said, enjoying an American cigarette and a French café au lait at a bar off the Ku’damm. “The next step was for Wolfi to meet me in the East. For several weekends we met for beer in Marzahn, where he traveled on a fake day pass as an Austrian diplomat. He wanted to establish a pattern, so that we would not raise suspicions on the day of the escape.

“On the fourth visit, he told me he had a plan. I was to meet him the next Saturday morning at ten o’clock, but he would tell me nothing more!

“I couldn’t tell anyone what I was doing, or thinking, and yet I had so many people to say goodbye to! How could I tell them that I might never see them again? And yet I was in love, and I had so many hopes for my new life of freedom!”

When the appointed day came at last, Wolfi arrived in a truck, accompanied by a stranger named Klaus. All three climbed into the truck’s rear cabin, and they closed the door behind them.

“At first I didn’t know what to expect. Wolfi still had not told me the plan. I thought that maybe he was going to hide me inside the wheel panels; I had heard of such escapes before. But I never could have expected what was waiting for me instead!

“Inside the truck was a stuffed gorilla!”

It was Bobby, the prize possession of the Commie Museum of Natural History. Bobby the Gorilla was born in French Africa in 1924, but in 1928 he was purchased by the Weimar authorities at the Berlin Zoo. Bobby was among the first great apes to arrive in Europe, and his gentleness and size made him the zoo’s favorite attraction and Berlin’s leading citizen. Even as the dark hour of Nazism descended on Germany, Bobby provided hope to decent Berliners, an ambassador of peace in troubled times.

When Bobby died in 1934, at the young age of ten, all the newspapers in Berlin ran obituaries commemorating his heroic life. And so, in a bald play for public sympathy, the Nazi authorities had Bobby taxidermied and put on display in the Berlin Museum of Natural History.

Ana picks up the story from there: “Wolfi had impersonated a museum curator from the West and had convinced the head of the Museum of Natural History to lend him Bobby for one week, as part of an international exhibition on the history of taxidermy in Germany. And the museum believed him!