Fools die

Chapter 49

Shortly after the picture came out I was at Carnegie Hall attending the Women’s National Liberation Conference with Osano and Charlie Brown. It featured Osano as the only male speaker.

Earlier we all had dinner at Pearl’s, where Charlie Brown astonished the waiters by eating a Peking duck, a plate of crabs stuffed with pork, oysters in black bean sauce, a huge fish and then polished off what Osano and me had left on our plates without even smearing her lipstick.

When we got out of the cab in front of Carnegie Hall, I tried to talk Osano into going on ahead and letting me follow with Charlie Brown on my arm so that the women would think she was with me. She looked so much like the legendary harlot she would enrage the left-wingers of the convention. But Osano, as usual, was stubborn. He wanted them all to know that Charlie Brown was his woman. So when we walked down the aisle to the front, I walked behind them. As I did so, I studied the women in the hall. The only thing odd about them was that they were all women and I realized that many times in the Army, in the orphan asylum, at ball games I was used to seeing either all men or mostly men. Seeing all women this time was a shock, as if I were in an alien country.

Osano was being greeted by a group of women and led up to the platform. Charlie Brown and I sat down in the first row. I was wishing we were in the back, so I could get the hell out fast. I was so worried I hardly heard the opening speeches, and then suddenly Osano was being led to the lectern and being introduced. Osano stood for a moment waiting for the applause which did not come.

Many of the women there had been offended by his male chauvinistic essays in the male magazines years ago. Some were offended because he was one of their generation’s most important writers and they were jealous of his achievement. And then there were some of his admirers who applauded very faintly just in case Osano’s speech met with disfavor from the convention.

Osano stood at the lectern, a vast hulk of a man. He waited a long moment; then he leaned against the lectern arrogantly and said slowly, enunciating every word, “I’ll fight you or fuck you.”

The hall reverberated with boos, catcalls and hisses. Osano tried to go on. I knew he had used that phrase just to catch their attention. His speech would be in favor of Women’s Liberation, but he never got a chance to make it. The boos and hisses got louder and louder, and every time Osano tried to speak they started again until Osano made an elaborate bow and marched down off the stage. We followed him up the aisle and out the doors of Carnegie Hall. The boos and hisses turned to cheers and applause, to tell Osano that he was doing what they wanted him to do. Leave them.

Osano didn’t want me to go home with him that night. He wanted to be alone with Charlie Brown. But the next morning I got a call from him. He wanted me to do him a favor.

“Listen,” Osano said. “I’m going down to Duke University in North Carolina to their rice diet clinic. It’s supposed to be the best fat farm in the United States and they also get you healthy. I have to lose weight and the doctor seems to think that maybe my arteries are clogged and that’s what the rice diet cures. There’s only one thing wrong. Charlie wants to come down with me. Can you imagine that poor girl eating rice for two months? So I told her she can’t come. But I have to bring my car down and I’d like you to drive it for me. We could both bring it down and hang around together for a few days and maybe have some laughs.”

I thought it over for a minute and then I said, “Sure.” We made a date for the following week. I told Valerie I would be gone for only three or four days. That I would drive Osano’s car down with him, just spend a few days with Osano until he got set, then fly back.

“But why can’t he drive the car himself?” Valerie said.

“He really doesn’t look good,” I said. “I don’t think he’s in shape to make that kind of drive. It’s at least eight hours.”

That seemed to satisfy Valerie, but there was one thing that was still bothering me. Why didn’t Osano want to use Charlie as his driver? He could have shipped her out as soon as they got down there, so the excuse he gave me about not wanting her to eat rice was a phony one. Then I thought maybe he was tired of Charlie and this was his way of getting rid of her. I didn’t worry too much about her. She had plenty of friends who would take care of her.

So I drove Osano down to the Duke University clinic in his four-year-old Cadillac, and Osano was in great form. He even looked a little better physically. “I love this part of the country,” Osano said when we were in the Southern states. “I love the way they run the Jesus Christ business down here, it’s almost like every small town has its Jesus Christ store, they have Mom-and-Pop Jesus Christ stores and they make a good living and a lot of friends. One of the greatest rackets in the world. When I think about my life, I think only if I had been a religious leader instead of a writer. What a better time I would have had.”

I didn’t say anything. I just listened. We both knew that Osano could not have been anything but a writer and that he was just following a private flight of fantasy.

“Yeah,” Osano said. “I would have got together a great hillbilly band and I would have called them Shit Kickers for Jesus. I love the way they’re humble in their religion and so fierce and proud in their everyday life. They’re like monkeys in a training den. They haven’t correlated the action to its consequence, but I guess you could say that about all religions. How about those fucking Hebes in Israel? They won’t let the buses and trains run on holy days and here they are fighting the Arabs. And then those fucking Ginzos in Italy with their fucking Pope. I sure wish I was running the Vatican. I’d put a logo, ‘Every priest is a thief.’ That would be our motto. That would be our goal. The trouble with the Catholic Church is that there are a few honest priests left and they fuck everything up.”

He went on about religion for the next fifty miles. Then he switched to literature, then he took on the politicians and finally, near the end of our journey, he talked about Women’s Liberation.

“You know,” he said, “the funny thing is that I’m really all for them. I’ve always thought women got a shitty deal, even when I was the one handing it out to them, and yet those cunts, they didn’t even let me finish my speech. That’s the trouble with women. They have absolutely no sense of humor. Didn’t they know I was making a joke, that I would turn it around for them afterward?”

I said to him, “Why don’t you publish the speech and that way they will know? Esquire magazine would take it, wouldn’t they?”

“Sure,” Osano said. “Maybe when I’m staying down the fat farm I’ll work it over so it will look good in print.”

I wound up spending a full week with Osano at the Duke University clinic. In that week I saw more fat people, and I’m talking about your two-hundred-fifty– to three-hundred-fifty-pounders, then I have ever seen in my whole life together. Since that week I have never trusted a girl who wore a cape because every fat girl who is over two hundred pounds thinks she can hide it by draping some sort of Mexican blanket over her or a French gendarme’s cloak. What it really made them look like was this huge, threatening mass coming down the street, some hideously engorged Superman or Zorro.

The Duke Medical Center was by no means a cosmetic-oriented reducing operation. It was a serious endeavor to repair the damage done to the human body by long periods of overweight. Every new client was put through days of all kinds of blood tests and X-rays. So I stayed with Osano and made sure he went to restaurants that served the rice diet.

For the first time I realized how lucky I was. That no matter how much I ate I never put on a pound. The first week was something I’ll never forget. I saw three three-hundred-pound girls bouncing on a trampoline. Then a guy who was over five hundred pounds being taken down to the railroad station and getting weighed on the freight-weighing machine. There was something genuinely sad about that huge form shambling into the dusk like some elephant wandering toward the graveyard where he knew he had to die.

Osano had a suite of rooms at the Holiday Inn close by the Duke Medical Center building. Many of the patients stayed there and got together for walks or card games or just sat together trying to start an affair. There was a lot of gossip. A two-hundred-fifty-pound boy had taken his three-hundredfifty-pound girl to New Orleans for a shack-up date for the weekend. Unfortunately the restaurants in New Orleans were so great they spent the two days eating and came back ten pounds heavier. What struck me as funny is that the gaining of the ten pounds was treated as a greater sin than their supposed immorality.

Then one evening Osano and I, at four o’clock in the morning, were startled by the screams of a man in mortal agony. Stretched on the lawn outside our bedroom windows was one of the male patients who had finally gotten himself down to two hundred pounds. He was obviously dying or sounded like it. People were rushing to him and a clinic doctor was already there. He was taken away in an ambulance. The next day we found out what had happened. The patient had emptied all the chocolate bar machines in the hotel. They counted the wrappers on the lawn, there were a hundred and sixteen. Nobody seemed to think this was peculiar, and the guy recovered and continued on the program.

“You’re going to have a great time here”, I told Osano. “Plenty of material.”

“Naw,” Osano said. “You can write a tragedy about skinny people, but you can never write a tragedy about fat people. Remember how popular TB was? You could cry over Camille, but how could you cry over a bag encased in three hundred pounds of fat? It’s tragic, but it wouldn’t look right. There’s only so much that art can do.”

The next day was the final day of Osano’s tests and I planned to fly back that night. Osano had behaved very well. He had stayed strictly on the rice diet and he was feeling good because I had kept him company. When Osano went over to the Medical Center for the results of his tests, I packed my bags while waiting for him to come back to the hotel.

Osano didn’t show until four hours later. His face was alive with excitement. His green eyes were dancing and had their old sparkle and color.

“Everything came out OK?” I said.

“You bet your ass,” Osano said.

For just a second I didn’t trust him. He looked too good, too happy.

“Everything is perfect, couldn’t be better. You can fly home tonight and I have to say you are a real buddy. No one would do what you did, eating that rice day after day, and worse still, watching those three-hundred-pound broads go by shaking their asses. Whatever sins you have committed against me I forgive you.” And for a moment his eyes were kind, very serious. There was a gentle expression on his face. “I forgive you,” he said. “Remember that, you’re such a guilty fuck I want you to know that.”

And then for one of the few times since we knew each other he gave me a hug. I knew he hated to be touched except by women and I knew he hated being sentimental. I was surprised, but I didn’t wonder about what he meant by forgiving me because Osano was so sharp. He was really so much smarter than anyone else I had ever known that in some way he knew the reason why I had not gotten him the job on the Tri-Culture-Jeff Wagon script. He had forgiven me and that was fine, that was like Osano. He was really a great man. The only trouble was I had not yet forgiven myself.

I left Duke University that night and flew to New York. A week later I got a call from Charlie Brown. It was the first time I had ever spoken to her over the phone. She had a soft, sweet voice, innocent, childlike, and she said, “Merlyn, you have to help me.”

And I said, “What’s wrong?”

And she said, “Osano is dying, he’s in the hospital. Please, please come.”