Chuck Amuck Read online

  Old Cat of the Sea and uninitiated stranger

  If it had only been grapefruit, I might have missed the lesson, but I could never have overlooked another interesting facet of Johnson’s many-faceted character.

  He liked to swim in the ocean.

  I mean, all the evidence so indicated. It may have been because he was gregarious. It may have been that he didn’t want to miss out on anything that looked interesting. That last possibility, too, has stayed with me all my life and I choose to believe that was Johnson’s reason for plunging into the surf whenever we did so.

  Now, a cat swimming is not a pleasant object. No matter how high his degree of enjoyment, he still looks as if he is strangling. Eyes pop with a wild hysterical bulge; teeth grit under lips that gape back to his armpits; ears flatten back until he seems more like a hairy strangulated moray eel caught in a wringer than he does anything remotely feline. Cats also swim low in the water with just their gaping jaws and popping, evil, frightening eyes visible, leaving a slippery oily wake of gull feathers and grapefruit seeds.

  Actually, Johnson must have thought his expression to be benign and friendly, and, to be sure, he purred reassuringly as he approached a swimmer. His purr, however, was underwater and the resultant sloshing and gurgling only enhanced the picture of a strangling creature spewed up from the Great Barrier Reef.

  In those days, swimming suits for both sexes had partly covered shoulders, somewhat like a middy blouse, so when Johnson tired, his roost while at sea was the nearest shoulder—family, if available; stranger if need be. Strangers, he found, must be approached from the rear, since a frontal approach always resulted in hysteria. Johnson disliked emotional turmoil of any kind, yet he never quite learned that climbing on a stranger’s shoulder, even from the rear, was bound to have eruptive consequences.

  Johnson with sister Dorothy and brother Charles, who obstructs a clear view of Johnson’s notorious brick cat house, Balboa, California, 1918

  When people came staggering spastically out of the surf at Balboa beach, every nerve string jangling a chorus of gibbering fright, mouths sputtering in monosyllabic incoherence, we knew that Johnson had approached them.

  Occasionally Johnson, with his grapefruit helmet stuck firmly on his head, would wander drunkenly down the beach picking up tar, bits of dead sea gulls, and, on one notable occasion, bumping blindly into a picnic of YWCA girls. These young ladies did not recognize Johnson as a cat in his space helmet. They fled panic-stricken into the surf and Johnson went in after them. The YWCA did not come back to Balboa again.

  One day I had the misfortune to fall off the back porch and into the brick shelter we had built for Johnson. Three things resulted from this entirely innocent accident. My mother, horrified when she saw me holding my oddly limp right arm, called the doctor, who came over and set a broken bone. “Greenstick fracture,” the doctor said to my proud ears.

  When my father came home that night, he asked my mother what had “happened to Charles.” When he found out, he took me on a long round of his favorite saloons, filling himself with whiskey, me with sarsaparilla, and boasting to everyone in sight that, at the tender age of seven, his son had broken his arm falling in a cat house.

  The third thing that happened was that the following morning we discovered paw prints in the sand leading away from this semi-demolished cat house out over the wet sand to the sea. Perhaps that was where Johnson came from in the first place.

  Johnson was indeed a cat for all seasons and all fortunes and I was generously allowed to share one summer season with him. I like to think that if I had not fallen on his house, breaking my arm and his contemplation, he might be with me yet. Perhaps not. But I am sure that on some grapefruit ranch by some distant sea, Johnson lives on. Although he wore a cat uniform, he contemptuously disdained all forms of feline behavior—an immortal, surely; an individual absolutely.

  Strange when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.

  —MAX BEERBOHM

  A dear uncle told me once, when I was deep in despair at some injustice by some bureaucrat, scholastic or familial, “Chuck, they can kill you, but they’re not allowed to eat you.” Exactly why this statement has since stood as the cornerpost of my determination to live my life as a life and not as an apology, only Ralph Waldo Emerson could have explained. And I hadn’t read much Emerson when I was eleven.

  Uncle Lynn. The perfect uncle. The ne-plus-ultra uncle. Even his name was, and is, perfect. It never was Uncle Lynn, of course; it was Unclynn. Dogs and boys loved and trusted him. He thought like a boy, or a dog, and he was of adult size, which we were not, and could implement such thought with action. His fancies were those of a dog, or a boy, and he never questioned those impulses. If a mule-drawn dump cart passed, full high with moist red earth, he immediately engaged in comparing notes with the driver. He was always able to compare notes with anyone, human or animal. He always had something in common with every dog, cat, turtle, sea gull, child, or man. He had somehow, somewhere, someway done something they, too, had done, and from this common ground an uncommon miracle always occurred: two average small boys and one average small dog digging luxuriating toes into that same lofty loamy lovely dirt, as Uncle Lynn talked to the enchanted driver about Missouri mules, Malayan buffalo, hickory shafts, goatskin hames, and rattail files. As for the two small boys and the one small dog, they guarded the surprise and pretended that they did not know of the false bottom in the old wooden dray that would send us tumbling into the landfill when the driver pulled the long wooden release bar. And after we had scrambled clear, he would look back down with surprise. “Lost ’em,” Uncle Lynn would say. “Guess we’ll have to go back and get some more boys.” “And a dog,” the driver would add. “Load’s not complete without a dog.” That’s the effect Uncle Lynn had on some people (and on all dogs and boys, of course). They became part of the enactment of fancies that only dogs and boys and Uncle Lynn understood.

  “Scaring the Tennis Ball”—a highly technical game: TWO’S A CROWD (1950)

  I remember all of us listening with the most slavish love to Uncle Lynn’s stories. He never disappointed us, the ending was all a small boy could hope for: there was never a hint of morality, no overt heavy-handed effort to make us better children, better adults, or better at anything except learning the love of listening.

  “This friend of mine,” said Uncle Lynn, “was a swordfish strangler out of San Diego Harbor. After the marlins and broadtails were brought aboard the fishing smack The Drunken Nymph, his job was to strangle the swordfish. Dirty job, but somebody had to do it. Name of Wiltford. Only swordfish strangler I ever knew by that name,” said Uncle Lynn. We nodded our approval of the logic, we had never known a swordfish strangler named Wiltford either. “Actually,” continued Uncle Lynn, “his name was Wiltferd W. Wiltford, last name had an ‘o’ in the ‘ford’ part, first name an ‘e’ in the ‘ford’ part. Well, I don’t know whether it was working around fish or not, but he developed a severe case of liver trouble. Worst case of liver trouble he’d ever seen, said Wiltferd’s doctor, looking solemn, the way doctors always look whenever they diagnose liver trouble or a strangulated pimple or an ingrown earlobe. Couldn’t offer a cure or even an easement—too advanced, he said. Sorry and all that.

  Charles Jones chauffeuring the 1920 Rolls-Royce of tricycles, Ocean Park, California, 1920

  “I don’t know how many of you have carried around a troubled liver.” Uncle Lynn looked carefully around at us, seemed reassured by what he saw, and continued. “Well, Wiltferd had to cut down on swordfish strangling except on weekends and national holidays. He was a Sixth-Day Adventist, hadn’t quite made it to the seventh, so he didn’t have to observe religious holidays. So what he’d do, as a matter of courtesy, was to strangle half a swordfish or half strangle a whole swordfish. Takes practice, that,” said Uncle Lynn, nodding his approval at us. “Bu
t nevertheless old Wiltferd got weaker and weaker liver-wise and he got despondent, too, because by contrast everybody else in his body—spleen, lights, heart, all the valves, esophagus—were all going top speed and on all eight cylinders. He thought it would be a pity, did old Wiltferd, who was knocking eighty at the time (oldest swordfish strangler south of San Luis Obispo), it would be a pity and a shame if a two-bit liver would put all those other organs out of business. So as a kind of therapy he went up into the mountains behind San Diego and strangled a bear and two Gila monsters. But it didn’t seem to help and he’d just about given up when he met this Indian, name of Forgot-to-go-to-Meeting Smith, who was considered by many locals as an authority on livers and liver ailments. Wiltferd endeared himself to Forgot-to-go-to-Meeting Smith by strangling a tarantula that had taken up residence in Forgot-to-go-to-Meeting Smith’s pants, and had become a source of some irritation to Forgot-to-go-to-Meeting Smith, he was grateful indeed to Wiltferd.

  Ralph Phillips studying: FROM A TO Z-Z-Z-Z (1954)

  “So, to show his gratitude to Wiltferd, Forgot-to-go-to-Meeting Smith concocted this liver-leavening medicine made of wolfbane, owlbane, Indian paintbrush, cowbane, shredded wheat, poison oak, wildcat bane, and the blood of unborn acorns.

  “Well, you know,” Uncle Lynn said (obviously relieved that relief was at hand for Wiltferd Wiltford), “Wiltferd drank three gallons of that medicine, which by the way you can’t get over the counter, and immediately his liver hauled up its braces, snapped to attention, and started everybody up at 5 a.m. on double time. Talk about pushy livers, this liver ran Wiltferd’s insides like Black Jack Pershing’s first platoon. No nonsense, shape up or ship out. Oh, that liver was a taskmaster, but in all fairness, it never asked anything of any other organ that it wouldn’t do itself. However, whatever—time took its toll, and in spite of all this admirable liver’s power, strength, and will, every other organ gradually deteriorated, and one day, like the wonderful one-horse shay, the whole lot of them gave up, handed in their uniforms, and Wiltferd Wiltford died before his time at one hundred and seven. Every organ died with him, every one, that is, but that magnificent liver. After Wiltferd died, they had to take it out and kill it with a club.”

  We were all at peace with the world and ready for bed after such a wonderful, believable story with such a satisfactory ending, each of us sleepily wishing that we could have been there to help chase down that wonderful liver.

  My Father and the English Language

  “A fellow uncurbed, unfettered, uncontrolled of speech, unperiphrastic, bombastic, loquacious.”

  —MY FATHER, QUOTING ARISTOPHANES (448–385 B.C.) IN SUPPORT OF HIS DETESTATION OF WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING

  When I was still young enough to believe that you were not allowed by federal law to dislike, much less detest, the President of the United States, my father detested Warren Gamaliel Harding.

  This worried me. Having my father clapped into a federal prison for treachery or treason might just call attention to me and the crime of being his son and might send me to reform school, the Siberia of boyhood.

  Father’s reason for considering Warren Gamaliel Harding despicable (the word would show up years later in Daffy Duck’s mouth as “dethpicable”) was not because he was a crook—that was to be expected—but because of his grotesque sloppiness in his slander of the English language. If Robert Frost’s lumbermen could only judge a man by the way he handled an ax, Father would only judge the intellect of a man (or a woman) by the way he or she handled words.

  “Warren Gamaliel Harding,” he grunted angrily, “shovels words with the same lack of respect we would show in shoveling manure. As long as it sounds portentous, it doesn’t matter to him if it has meaning. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘meaning.’”

  Recently I came across an example of the kind of ostentation that so enraged my father. This from Harding’s first Inaugural speech:* “When one surveys the world about him after the great storm, noting the marks of destruction and yet rejoicing in the raggedness of the things that withstood it, if he is an American, he breathes the clarified atmosphere with a strange mixture of regret and new hope … standing in this presence, mindful of the solemnity of the occasion, feeling the emotions which no one more is a public mandate in manifest understanding.” No wonder H. L. Mencken described Harding’s prose style as a “hippopotamus struggling to free itself from a slough of molasses.”

  “Mush! Mush!” My father was on the verge of imploding. “If a man cannot manage his native language, how can he manage his native land? Who is he talking about? What is he talking about, and when is he talking about it?

  “Listen.” He snatched up a book, although he probably didn’t need it. “‘Once, on a glittering ice-field, ages and ages ago, Ung, a maker of pictures, fashioned an image of snow.’ That’s Rudyard Kipling! Everything you need to know about his subject, Cro-Magnon man: Who. What. When. Where. In poetic form! In one sentence! And later in the same poem, describing the rest of the tribe: ‘Men of the berg-battered beaches, men of the boulder-hatched hill’ … Doesn’t that sing? Doesn’t that evoke a wonderful, powerful image of what it was like in the ice age?”

  Indeed it did, and indeed it does today, those words pound like surf, and thrust aside all the mealymouthed slop of the Warren Gamaliel Hardings of the world.

  One fateful day our family moved into a rented house, furnished with a complete set of Mark Twain, and my life changed forever. What grapefruit was to Johnson the cat, Mark Twain became to me.

  For instance:

  Mark Twain used words the way the graphic artist uses line control. He was terribly afraid of what he called his “darlings.” That is: phrases of such delicious mushy grandeur and mellifluous cadence that they protruded from the clean line of his prose like a puce Christmas tree. He “murdered his darlings” without mercy, but admitting to the same agony that we all feel when we sense that what we see in our drawing is more than is there. Dorothy Parker said it more clearly after seeing a brilliantly pageanted, dull musical comedy called Jumbo. “There is less here than meets the eye,” she said. Tattoo that across your reluctant retina and you will never confuse superficial technique with the subject matter at hand.

  I first became interested in the Coyote while devouring Mark Twain’s Roughing It at the age of seven. I had heard of the coyote only in passing references from passing adults and thought of it—if I thought of it at all—as a sort of dissolute collie. As it turned out, that’s just about what a coyote is, and no one saw it more clearly than Mark Twain.

  “The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless … even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede … He does not mind going a hundred miles to breakfast, and a hundred and fifty to dinner, because he is sure to have three or four days between meals, and he can just as well be traveling and looking at the scenery as lying around doing nothing and adding to the burdens of his parents.”

  Who could resist such an enchanting creature? He and I had so much in common! Rushing to the encyclopedia, I found our measurements to be about the same, too: four feet long in our stocking feet; weight about fifty pounds stripped (fur long and coarse, grizzled buff below and sun-bleached whitish above—a minor detail). But the clincher was this: “Noted for its nightly serenades of short yaps and mournful yowls.” That was me all right, I had been assured too often by parents and siblings alike that my nocturnal serenades consisted of short yaps and mournful yowls.

  I cannot begin to express the relief I felt at finding a companion to my own unique ineptness. It was so reassuring to find someone else of my own age (another characteristic we
shared was our age: between seven and eight) who also could be a burden to his parents. I was beginning to believe that I was a failure in life, and to find a colorfully inept companion was a happy and stunning surprise.

  Heavy tipper and bullion: ALI BABA BUNNY (1957)

  I wish I had known then what I found to be true many years later: that comedy is nearly always the stuff of the ordinary, concerning itself with simple matters and simple ambitions, with ordinary pursuits and ordinary ambitions.

  Charlie Chaplin often, and the Coyote always, is simply trying to get something to eat. Daffy Duck, Jack Benny, and indeed Woody Allen are simply trying for human dignity, recognition, and, with Benny and Daffy, the added need to save or get a little money in the process. Daffy and Jack will try to explain this need to the audience. Daffy, after betraying Bugs Bunny to a huge forty-foot-high Abominable Snowman, says, “Sure, I know it’s a rotten thing to do, but better it should happen to him than to me. I’m different from other people—pain hurts me.” Or Jack Benny accused of penury by Mary Livingston. “When you had appendicitis,” she said, “you asked Rochester if he would do the operation.”

  “I did not,” Benny replied angrily. “I only asked him if he could do the operation.”

  Think of how simple and recognizable the needs are of all comedians: food, housing, love, the protection of another unfortunate, the eternal battle to find rationality within the establishment … always from the lowliest rung on the ladder.