Brokenhearted in Bakersfield

 

38 - FANNY GETS IT OFF HER CHEST

I’ve always been told it is more blessed to give than receive.  With my lucky $20 secure in my pocket, I hightailed it away from the storefront chapel before the old man could realize my donation had been re-donated.  I returned to La Casa Grande in order to reassure my Aunt Fanny that I, her only available relative, would always be there to attend to her every want and need (every need except those attended to by Lars).  Most important, I wanted to make sure the hired help wasn’t muscling his way into my territory.

I entered the kitchen the same way I left, slamming the door behind me.  Lars jumped.  He had been screwing the cap on a bottle of Springtime Fresh Bleach, and I couldn’t help thinking he was being sneaky and try’n to hide something.

“Listen up!” I shouted.  It was time for me to stake my claim.  “I’m the boy of the house, you’re just the houseboy.  You stick to the enemas, and I’m in charge of everything else.  Got it?”

His bronze eyes welled with tears.  “I dun unnerstan what jou are saying.”

“Oh, cut the crap,” I stepped back as he reached out to embrace me.  “And cut out all the familiar crap, too.”

I didn’t care how long Lars was employed or how intimate his job description was, I wasn’t going to let him compete for my Aunt Fanny’s affections.  With a full head of steam I strode straight to her boudoir to begin my job as devoted nephew.  Entering the darkened room I was directly assaulted by a mixture of natural gas, scented candles and pungent old lady fragrances.  She was just laying there sound asleep on top of her satin sheets, so I tiptoed up beside her and gently leaned down.  I took her by her brittle shoulders and shook her awake.

Aunt Fanny’s head lolled from side to side, a silvery thread of spit collected on her pillow.  She kept mumbling over and over “…my sisters…my daughters…my sisters…my daughters….”

Finally, one filmy eye peeped open and she spoke, “Boy.  You’re back.  Oy, what year is it?”

“Don’t worry about that, dear Auntie,” I bolstered her with gentle pats.  “I just want you to know that I’m going to be the best damn nephew you could ever hope to deserve.  And I mean it.”

“That’s a nice thought, boy,” her wrinkled face shifted, “but don’t get too concerned.  That’s what Lars is paid for.  There’s something more important you should know.”

“You mean the story why my Momma never came back?”

“No, no, no.  There’s more to the story than that.  There always is.  You see, the truth is, you’re not really my nephew.”

“What?  What are you talking about?”  My gut churned at the thought of losing a birthright I hadn’t had a chance to spend.  “What do you mean I’m not your nephew?”

“I meant what I said,” her head jerked.  “Now shut up or I’ll put a hatpin through your eye.”

“As I was saying,” the shriveled thing rearranged herself on more pillows, “even though you’ve always called me your Auntie, the truth is, I’m not.”

“Huh?”  I was dumbfounded if not completely speechless.

“What I’m saying is, I’m not your mother’s sister.  Listen, this is important.  Your Aunt Toots and your Aunt Tovah weren’t really my sisters either, as we pretended all those years.  They were really my daughters.  I told everyone they were my sisters so people would think the twins were old enough to get dancing jobs to support themselves.”  She looked at me sternly, “I always said it was important for a woman to be able to take care of herself.”

My demented Auntie’s knotted fingers pawed at mine.

She continued, “You should know your mother wasn’t really my sister either.  She belonged to Toots.  Or was it Tovah?  I’m not sure.  Neither one would own up to it.  But either way, your mother was really my granddaughter.”  Now Auntie looked me straight in the eye, “And since you’re your Momma’s boy, that makes you….”

“A Momma’s boy?”

“No, you idiot.”  She leaned forward encouragingly.  “You’re myyy…?”

As hard as I thought, I wasn’t exactly sure who I was.  I’ve always had problems figuring out family relationships.  I struggled to understand what the old monkey was trying to say, when it suddenly hit me like a sack of manure.  “That means you’re not really my Auntie,” I gasped.

“Bingo!”  She finally seemed pleased.  “I’m really your Great-Granny Fanny.  Just as I’m your sister’s Great-Granny, too.  Although the whole truth is a much longer story.”

“The truth usually is,” I mumbled.

Aunt Fanny bent my fingers backwards.  “Shut up, dammit.  I’m trying to tell my story here, and I’m running short on time.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Life was a lot more complicated in my day.  Did you know there was a time when you couldn’t get your hands on a legal bottle of beer, but you could pick up a tin of reefer tea from the corner drugstore for menstrual cramps?  Ha, at one point I was on the rag for three years running.

“But I digress.  Where was I?  Oh yeah, I was dancing in a house in Aberdeen when this traveling rag salesman and part-time talent scout named Bernie Bardoff hits town.  After he caught my performance one night he knew he’d spotted real talent, so he offered me bright lights and three hots.  What could I say?  It was too good to resist.  So the next morning a young girl was on her way to California to pursue a fairytale career in films.

“I know, you look at me today and see the ageless and elegant sophistication of a legendary movie star, and to look at me you wouldn’t guess I’m almost ninety, but back in the day I was considered one hot tomato.

“Anyhow, we’d barely pulled into this quiet little orange grove that was Hollywood before I landed a small part at Mammoth Studios.  It was a quickie flick.  They made a lot of one-reelers in those days.  Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy leaves girl, girl gets another boy…you get the idea.  We made a couple hundred bucks.

“Later, when I was a really big star in art house features, I bought back all the negatives from the early days.  Gawd, I’ll never forgot my indie hit ‘Fanny’s First Big Job.’  Ha, for a long time it was my only job.

“Once the money ran out, Bernie and I started hitting the popular speakeasies, and going to the hottest parties in town trying to get noticed.  We rubbed up against all the big shots we could.  With Bernie it was always work, work, work, work, and more work.  He never missed an opportunity to peddle my talents.  And there was a lot of heavy action going on at some of those Tinsel Town watering holes.  Unfortunately, other than a little cash-under-the-table opportunities, my film career was bupkis.

“Then Bernie got this gigantic brainstorm.  He said he wanted me to do a nightclub act, and so he teamed me with a young colored girl named Daisy Schemmerhorn.  Oh, I’ll never forget Daisy.  We billed ourselves as ‘Crazy Daisy Schemmerhorn & Feisty Fanny Kartone,’ and we had so much fun together.  We did the French-Maid-Cleans-The-Carpet routine several nights a week.  That would be considered a specialty act in Aberdeen.  We were a smash.  Everyone who was anyone came just to watch me have a go at Daisy’s little carpet.

“One night, after the show, I was socializing with some producers when I felt a strange tugging at my leg.  Boy, I got really annoyed.  So I climbed out from under the booth when who should I see but this little fancy boy smiling in my face.

“‘I’m Harry Othkarlic,’ he introduced himself, ‘and I jutht want to thay I think you’re thuper.’

“I rolled my eyes in the direction of the big wheels in the booth and told him I was occupied.  But Harry just smiled and pulled out his little ukulele, which I then thought was the cutest instrument I’d ever seen, and he started plucking away and lisping the song ‘Your Father Made The Same Mistake Fifty Years Ago.’

“I was more than intrigued.  It just seemed natural for me to give him a hand, so I began to hum along and do a little dance.  Everybody in the room stopped to watch us as we performed our respective arts together in perfect harmony, and the house broke into a thunderous ovation.

“Bernie rushed in and wanted to know if the man with the ukulele had an agent.  Next thing you know, Fanny Kartone and Harry Oskarlic were a team.  Society was abuzz about our dazzling new act as the word got around, thanks to one of the producers I’d been entertaining in the booth.  Eventually Bernie had no problem getting Harry and myself signed by Red Stallion Studios.  Unfortunately, this ended my nightclub act with Daisy, and I had no choice but to dump her for the good of my career.  But that’s showbiz.

“Harry and I made at least 50 movies over the next few years, and every one of them was a smash hit.  We were on the cover of fan magazines and billboards from Kennebunkport to Cucamonga, me flashing my big smile and him flashing his little ukulele.

“As we reached the pinnacle of our success, cruel fate stepped in.  Our agent, Bernie, was anonymously fingered on a morals charge for having sex with underage talent.  It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, testifying against my old mentor and business partner.  Poor Bernie was put away for 10 to 15.

“Meanwhile, for all our fans, Harry and I were featured by the studio as two star-struck kids in love.  In fact, I was dating Valentino’s chauffeur at the time, while Harry was heels-over-head in love with the Satin Sheik’s pool boy.

“Still, I got to admit, Harry was a good sport.  He offered to marry me when the twins, Toots and Tovah, came along.  But I decided to keep my reputation intact.  I convinced an out-of-work Daisy to take my kids and pass them off as her own.  The twins thought Daisy was their birth mother, too, right up until the talkies ruined everything.

“For years Harry and I reigned as a top box-office draw, and I thought we’d be pumping out movies forever.  But after fans heard Harry in our first talkie, we were fucked.  It was over.  I was broke.  I was never any good with money, and I never managed to save a shekel.  Now I was in arrears paying for Daisy’s services.  You could have knocked me over with a feather when she showed up at my doorstep with two little girls.  I guess all that talk about Tovah and Toots being like her own was just a lot of talk.  Thank goodness the twins had enough rhythm and had picked up enough dance steps from Daisy that they were soon able to take off on their own. I kept an eye on them, of course, even acknowledging the girls as my two younger sisters.

“In the meantime, to support myself I became a ticket-taker at a local theater.  Thanks to a lot of old friends in the industry I occasionally scored some live entertainment gigs, usually around the holidays.  But Harry, as the world knows, was notoriously cheap, as he was tight.  Which meant he could afford to leave town and start up a business making those damn ukuleles of his.  So the years slipped by when, out of the blue, who should I get a call from?  Harry.  He told me he was very depressed, and for old time’s sake could I come out and visit and cheer him up.

“What the hell, I thought, everyone’s caught my act in Hollywood, and it seemed I was spending more and more time between paying jobs.  So, why not?

“Boy, I arrived at this very house to find the co-star of my youth a beaten man.  As a matter of fact, he was bound, gagged and beaten, and this was long before Montgomery Clift made it fashionable.

“Once I arrived, Harry fixed me a pitcher of gin martinis.  He fixed one for himself.  Next thing I knew he was going on and on crying about how the ukulele factory was in chaos, crying about the workers were going to go on strike, crying about how the government was after him for back taxes and running a monopoly, crying about how the Satin Sheik’s pool boy had dumped him for Ramon Navarro’s gardener, and crying about how I was his only friend in the world.  As proof of his undying friendship, he showed me his will.  I was his only beneficiary.

“We talked for hours before I realized that, as desperate and boozed-up as he was, Harry might try something really stupid.  So I instructed his valet at the time, Lars, to drain the pool so my dear friend wouldn’t drown himself.

“After draining that dangerous deathtrap of a swimming pool, Lars and I turned in for the night.  Funny, huh?  How could we know we were going to wake up and find Harry splattered like a damn piss-lizard all over the bottom of the swimming pool?  We told the police Harry picked an unlucky night for a moonlight dip.

“While I sipped my breakfast and watched the coroner boys scrape Harry off the tiles, I got the good news of a huge discovery of natural gas under the ukulele factory.  I almost broke down in tears.  Lars had to carry me to this very room, and I haven’t wandered very far since.

“Eventually, we put Harry back in the pool and filled it in.  He’s over there right now, about where the Webber is; that’s Harry’s final resting place.  May he rest in peace.

“Now you know the truth,” Great-Granny Fanny grabbed my hand.  “Go get Lars.”

Before I could get up from the chair to go call for him, Lars came sailing into Great-Granny’s searing hot bedroom.  He swung an enema bag with attitude, as an aroma of Springtime Fresh Bleach and gin blossomed in the air.

Say what you will, I gotta admit, Lars runs a very clean household.