The Last Chairlift

35. AT THE WHALE SHIP

At that interminable cocktail party at the Exeter Inn, both the compassionate Mr. Barlow and our constrained marine were spared further tests of their tolerance or their toughness. The exuberant singing of Uncle Johan heralded his and Uncle Martin’s arrival. “Bier, Bier—das Bier ist hier!” Johan sang. Each of my uncles’ big hands held two freshly opened beer bottles. The four of us—Molly and my mom, and the snowshoer and I—took a bottle each, which left my uncles with two beers apiece. The retired Norwegians, who’d made the trip to Exeter from up north, did their best to force a beer on our retreating marine, but I’d already noticed that the natural 190-pounder didn’t drink. Besides, in accepting their beers, Mr. Barlow had relinquished her highly esteemed hand control and my mother had given up her strong grip on the bear hug. The tall, lean heavyweight had seized the moment to slip away.

I was glad to see him go; both his hatred and his effort to contain it had been hard to bear. And what if the conversation had turned to military matters—to the long-armed guy’s life in the Marine Corps, to my uncles’ being recruited by the National Ski Patrol to train the troops in the Tenth Mountain Division? What if that conversation had led my uncles to remember Paulino, the little mountaineer? I’ll never know if my uncles knew Paul Goode was my father. Not just Molly, but also Nora and Em, had cautioned me about that. “Your dad was definitely underage, kiddo—my dad and Uncle Johan would just say your dad was lucky,” Nora told me, with Em nodding her head off.

I regret I didn’t spend more time with Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan at that cocktail party at the Exeter Inn. I didn’t know it was the next-to-last time I would see them. They were so much fun, especially after my aunts were gone, and my uncles loved Little Ray. Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan had much affection for Molly, and for the snowshoer—not only when Mr. Barlow had been a man, but also when she was a woman.

The last time I saw those two Norwegians was when they came to New York to see Nora and Em onstage at the Gallows, the first and only time they saw Two Dykes, One Who Talks—when they also saw and heard the premier performance of Damaged Don’s “No Lucky Star,” the original lyrics, the uncensored version. Not then, at the Gallows in New York, or only shortly before then—that next-to-last time, when I saw Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan in Exeter—did I detect in my uncles their desire to call it quits, to drive off the road. Not even the people you love in your own family tell you everything, and there are always the things you miss.

“Those two men never misjudged a turn,” my mother said, when Uncle Johan drove off the Kancamagus.

“I thought that’s what you said about their skiing, Ray—I thought that’s what you meant,” Molly said.

“That’s what I’m saying about their driving, Molly—that’s what I mean,” my mom said.

As for Uncle Johan and her dad misjudging a turn on the Kanc, Nora saw it the way my mom saw it—“they knew when to call it quits,” Nora always said.

In 1977, the same year Uncle Johan accelerated as he drove off the Kancamagus, Clara Swift, who played the teacher in The Kindergarten Man, gave birth to Paul Goode’s child. To be sure, they’d been an item since they made that first film (of their many films) together—when Paul Goode was forty-six, and Clara Swift was twenty years younger. But the age difference between them wasn’t what got the goat of the Hollywood press and the scandalmongers in the media. What ticked off the tabloids was how pregnant Clara Swift was when they got married—she was already showing.

THE BRIDE WORE WHITE—A WHITE MATERNITY DRESS! was one headline. FLAUNTING IT! was another one. And, of course, there was HAVE YOU NO SHAME?

Nora was six when I was born. “I remember what your mom looked like when she was pregnant, kiddo—your dad definitely married a woman who reminded him of your mom,” Nora told me. Well, okay. In 1977, there was so much gossipy media about Paul Goode and his much younger, pregnant bride, even my uncles must have made the little mountaineer connection. Nora said her dad and Uncle Johan surely would have seen the resemblance to Little Ray in the pregnant Clara Swift.

Em and I kept it to ourselves. Clara Swift was no less attractive to us when she was hugely pregnant than she was when we first saw her in The Kindergarten Man. What also appealed to Em and me about Clara Swift was that she refused to be interviewed; she would not talk to journalists, period. “You would have to be a journalist not to like that about her,” Em wrote me.

As for the former Paulino Juárez, he continued to do interviews, in which he remained calm—he kept his cool, even with the worst questions—and he always seemed to care about being clear. He was refreshingly candid about his less-than-successful efforts to find work in the movie business after the war. As a veteran of the Tenth Mountain Division, he could always get a job in Aspen—from the first, at the Hotel Jerome, later both at the hotel and on the ski mountain. With the help of the G.I. Bill, he’d enrolled in the film program at USC, but things didn’t take off for him in Hollywood until he met Lex Barker and Lana Turner at the Hotel Jerome.

Not surprisingly, my mother remained mute on the subject of the advice and assistance Lex and Lana gave my father. At the time, Lex was done making Tarzan movies for RKO Radio Pictures, but he still must have known people at RKO, and Lana would have been under Louis B. Mayer’s wing at MGM. According to Paul Goode, he couldn’t remember if it was Lex or Lana who advised him to change his name. Paulino Juárez was only half-Mexican, and no one ever said he looked Mexican, but either Lex or Lana told him that his name begged the question. The choice of “Paul” was easy. It was Lex, not Lana, who came up with the “Goode”—with the e on the end. Lana had worried about “Goode”; it looked British, not American, to her. Lex said British was better for an actor.

In his interviews, when Paul Goode talked about his stage name, he always credited Lex Barker with the “Goode,” and with telling him about the Latin origins and various meanings of “Paul.” “ ‘Paul’ means ‘small’—also ‘humble,’ ‘scarce,’ and ‘rare,’ but mainly ‘small’—like me,” Paul Goode had said. He also liked to tell the story of what Lana Turner had told him.

“You’re small and dark, small and handsome, and small and strong. But you’re mainly small,” Lana had said.

Yet even with help from Lex Barker and Lana Turner, it took a long time for Paul Goode’s career in Hollywood to take off. “I had a lot of time to write, because my life as an actor was slow to start,” Paul Goode liked to say. The Wrong Car (1956) was his first speaking part; he was already thirty, and the role of the getaway driver didn’t make him a star. He didn’t count what he called the “uncredited” characters he’d played in earlier films, those roles where he was unnamed but typecast as small—Small Man on Escalator, Small Man with Large Woman, Small Man Attacked by Big Dog.

Paulina Juárez, who, from all reports, loved being a maid at the Hotel Jerome, would not live to see her one and only Paulino become a movie star. One winter night in Aspen, in 1957, after almost no one had noticed Paul Goode in The Wrong Car, his mother slipped on the ice and fell. She hit her head on the stone stairs leading to the back door of her duplex apartment, dying of hypothermia after lying unconscious in the freezing cold. Her neighbor found her in the morning, when there were no vital signs. Paulina Juárez was only forty-eight when she left her thirty-one-year-old son behind. “My mom loved her job—when she came home from work at the Jerome, she couldn’t stop being a cleaning woman,” Paul Goode would later say in interviews. “She never went to bed at night before taking out the garbage.” When the more aggressive interviewers asked him to comment on the alcohol—cited as a factor in his mother’s hypothermia—Paul Goode kept his cool. He answered, without any edginess, “My mom liked to have a nightcap or two before her bedtime—I never saw any harm in it.”

Naturally, I remembered asking my mother about the shy, childlike hotel maid—the Mexican-looking woman among my ghosts. “Oh, I didn’t know she died—I think she was Italian,” Little Ray had said, although she later admitted she knew the boy she slept with had a mom who worked as a maid at the Jerome. “I just didn’t know which maid she was, sweetie,” my mother said.

“Whatever you think of your dad’s writing, you shouldn’t blame him for the noir—he came by his darkness naturally,” the little English teacher told me.

Em echoed this theme in her first letter to me. What we both called overkill noir or über-noir in my father’s writing wasn’t overkill or über to Paul Goode. The noir was just the way things were for the little kindergarten man and his creator. And Paul Goode had gotten better as a writer—“the way writers do, by writing,” Em wrote me. After The Wrong Car, when the acting jobs didn’t exactly pour in, Paulino Juárez came home to Aspen, where he wrote and wrote. He lived in the duplex apartment he’d grown up in with his mother; he worked at the Hotel Jerome, and on the ski mountain. The rest of the time, he did a lot of writing. When The Kindergarten Man made him famous when he was forty-seven, Paul Goode had written a lot of unmade movies—“a lot of unread screenplays, I’ll bet,” Em wrote me.

Okay, “he came by his darkness naturally,” as the snowshoer said—whatever I think of my dad’s writing, I’ll give him that.

As for Em’s writer genes, not knowing if she had any, she did what an imaginative fiction writer would do—she made up some simply awful writer genes for herself. In her inchworm way of crafting a short story, Em imagined her self-hating lesbian mother as an autobiographical novelist with no imagination at all. The writer mom’s first novel incorporated the sobbing mother’s confession to her teenage daughter—the part about the lesbian daughter who is “doomed” to have her mom’s genes, as Em had written in “A Family Comes Out.” Worse, Em’s fictional autobiographical novelist describes in soporific detail her sexual relationships with women her daughter knows—not only with several mothers of her daughter’s friends, but also with one of her daughter’s contemporaries. While Em herself had written about this, albeit briefly, in “A Couple of Latecomers Get Divorced,” there is nothing spare in the prose style of the writer mom, whose autobiographical logorrhea is fueled by her self-righteousness. If gay women, such as herself and her “doomed” daughter, do “degrading things” and are “unredeemable”—well, in the writer mom’s opinion, “homosexual men do much worse things.” Sparing no detail, the lesbian mother’s first novel describes the horrible things her “homo husband” has done with other gay men.

In Em’s third-person omniscient voice, all this happens in one short story—in which Em seems to be barely involved. Even the title sounds detached and academic. “The Problem with Autobiographical Novels” doesn’t sound like fiction, which it is. Em’s awful mother, who (by her own admission) was a worse wife, wasn’t a writer. Not yet. I read Em’s short story in manuscript. “The Problem with Autobiographical Novels” would be published in Ploughshares. Em’s awful mom—with whom, of course, Em wasn’t speaking—read Em’s short story there. So did Em’s much-worse dad.

In “A Family Comes Out,” the gay dad ineffectually beats himself with his belt in his daughter’s bedroom, while confessing his homosexuality and denouncing his wife’s lesbian affairs. In “A Couple of Latecomers Get Divorced,” the gay father tells his nonspeaking daughter that he should be castrated for the things he’s done with other men. He changes his mind rather quickly about castration—“maybe just a vasectomy,” the chickenshit dad decides.

Em had already written a new short story when the one about the writer mom was published in Ploughshares. In the new one, “Why I Hate Memoirs,” the copycat father reads the writer mom’s confessional first novel and decides he can do better. The gay dad writes a more immoderate and unwholesome memoir, which is described in the deadpan, first-person narrative voice of the nonspeaking lesbian daughter. The homo-hating gay father’s self-hatred causes him to outconfess the lesbian mother, while at the same time he contends that his wife’s incessant need to do it with other women was more damaging to their daughter than his prurient interests in other men.

Em had written me that her actual gay dad’s religion, the Church of Scotland, was “kind of Calvinist, definitely Reformed, and of course Protestant.” In her new short story—“just to be funny,” Em wrote me—she made the homo-hating gay father a self-described “Presbyterian atheist” who converts to Catholicism. In the 1970s, there was a first wave of ex-gay Christians preaching conversion therapy. Em gave the gay father in her story a crackpot conversion therapy all his own; her fictional memoirist father believes he can cure himself of his homosexual desires by adhering to Catholic teaching. But we know this guy—he hedges his bets. First he is going to be castrated, then he says he’ll have “just a vasectomy”; of course he doesn’t do either. The real reason the coward converts to Catholicism is that he likes the possibility of forgiveness provided by the Catholic Church. “You confess, you’re forgiven—that’s how Roman Catholicism works,” the self-serving memoirist tells his nonspeaking daughter. She doesn’t say a word—she just tells the story.

This one, “Why I Hate Memoirs,” was published in Antaeus. By the end of the seventies, Em and I were in the habit of writing letters to each other, and we always showed each other our new writing before it was published.

This wasn’t (I hoped) what Nora meant when she said to me I was “trying to start something with Em.” I truly believed Em and I were innocent or unaware of starting anything—just as Em, I know, never thought that her actual parents would actually become two terrible writers. Em was writing fiction. Em never intended to give her awful parents the idea of becoming writers. Who could read “The Problem with Autobiographical Novels” and ever want to write one?

“Someone with zero imagination, like my mother,” Em would later write to me, when she was beating herself up about it. And who could read “Why I Hate Memoirs” and even want to read one—not to mention write one? “Just wait—my dad will actually become a Catholic, too,” Em would write me. She wasn’t kidding.

You couldn’t write more literary (or more obscure) short fiction than Em was writing, or so I’d thought. Boy, had she managed to reach the wrong audience. Like me—but in her small, well-crafted way—Em was imagining worst-case scenarios. Sure, her stories were based on the worst things that had happened to her, but Em had purposely made them unimaginably worse; she’d exaggerated her own family’s dysfunctional behavior to the worst extremes she could imagine, short of suicide or murder.

“I’m not sure suicide or murder would have been worse,” Nora later said. The syndrome of so-called ex-gay Christians undergoing conversion therapy struck Nora as good material for her and Em to take onstage at the Gallows. Em, understandably, was feeling a little snakebit from her experience of giving her parents the idea that they could be writers. Em had thought she was being funny; she’d tried to take the self-hatred that sometimes goes with being gay or lesbian to comic extremes, but her own parents didn’t get the joke.

Even Elliot Barlow had cautioned Nora not to make fun of gay and lesbian self-doubt or self-loathing in Two Dykes, One Who Talks. “The Gallows isn’t ready for political comedy or satire on that subject,” the snowshoer said. “I’m all for putting down ex-gay Christians in conversion therapy, or satirizing ex-gay converts to Roman Catholicism, but I’ll bet the Gallows won’t go for it—it’ll look like Catholic-bashing to the Gallows,” the little English teacher told Nora and Em.

Nora, naturally, was in favor of full-scale Catholic-bashing, but Em knew what it was like to be completely misunderstood by an audience. We were all in Nora and Em’s rat’s-ass apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, over the bad restaurant that kept changing. It had once been a bad Greek place, and although the Greeks were gone, Nora still said the bad smell was probably octopus. Mr. Barlow and Nora and I were watching Em, who appeared to be performing hari-kari in slow motion on the couch. “For Christ’s sake, Em—you look like you’re trying to change a tampon with bread tongs,” Nora told her, but Em kept trying.

The snowshoer took a stab at what Em was pantomiming. “If Catholics and other Christians are sacred cows, even at the Gallows, it won’t be funny if we make fun of mothers and fathers—it’ll look like mother-and-father-bashing,” Elliot guessed. Em nodded, stopping her suicide in progress on the couch. Mr. Barlow believed the end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s was the beginning of hard times for political comedy and satire.

“We’re at the Whale Ship now,” the snowshoer inexplicably said, while we were enduring the smell that was probably octopus. We’d complained to the little English teacher about her idea of the Whale Ship. She never said what happened at the Whale Ship, once you and your perfect penis or your perfect vagina were admitted, once you were let in the door. “What could possibly be as big a deal as getting into the Whale Ship—what could ever happen inside the place that means as much as getting in?” Mr. Barlow asked us. “It’s getting harder to tell jokes about hatred,” the little English teacher told us, but she could see she’d lost us.

To begin with, Nora and Em didn’t go to the memorial service for Coach Dearborn—they’d not met “our marine,” as Elliot Barlow and I called him. And what Elliot meant about jokes and hatred went over my head, too. I was as lost as Nora and Em by what the snowshoer had said. In the years ahead, there were hard times coming for comedy of any kind. For Em and me as writers, for Nora and Em onstage at the Gallows, it was going to get harder to be funny—about anything. Just imagine trying to call yourselves Two Dykes, One Who Talks today. You can’t tell jokes about hatred today. I can tell you when today’s hatred was just beginning—at the end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s, the pushback was already there.

Did an imaginary sex club like the Whale Ship represent the sexual unknown? Would sexual differences and sexual minorities eventually be accepted? Would sexual intolerance become outdated, or just go away? If you remember, sexual hatred used to be different. Sexual hatred was always there, and it was already changing or beginning to change, but it wasn’t like it is today. I remember our marine. I would never say I miss him, or his hatred, but his hatred was restrained—at first, he tried to hold it back. He wouldn’t hold it back today. Guys like our marine are at the Whale Ship now, intent on doing damage. I know that’s what the snowshoer would say. Whatever went on at the Whale Ship, guys like our marine got in. Guys like our marine are worse now, but their hatred was always there.