Read Online The Best Revenge by Sol Stein - Free Book Online Page B

production, how’s that? We have a deal. It’s nice to do business with you, Ben. Call me Nick from now on.” I stood up so we could shake hands on it.
    Riller stood up, too, but the color in his face was high red.
    His lawyer says to him, “What’s up, Ben?”
    Riller says, “Mr. Manucci, you’ve had a lot of experience in business.”
    “You bet.”
    “Then you must have learned that a deal is good only if it’s good for both sides.”
    “Oh, sure, I agree with you,” I say. “This deal gets you off the hook with your play and puts me on the hook for a lot of dough. We’re even steven.”
    “Like hell we are. You aren’t risking a penny. If the play doesn’t work, you’ve got everything I own as security. That isn’t business.”
    “It’s the price of money.”
    “It’s extortion.”
    I turned to his mouthpiece and said, “Mr. Hochman, I get an earache from a word like extortion. You are guests in my office. If Mr. Riller is uncomfortable with the terms, take him and his play shit somewhere else.”
    “Now just a minute,” Hochman says. “I’m sure we can—”
    Riller’s hand on his arm stopped him. “Enough.”
    This king of Broadway, this low-grade nothing, wasting my time. Who the hell does he think he is? “Fuck you, Riller. Go and don’t come back. And take your goddamn lawyer with you.”

BOOK II

7
    Louie Riller
    They all say the only person Ben listens to is his father. He hears me, but does he listen? He didn’t listen when I was alive, why should now be different? These days, who listens to a father anyhow?
    When Ben needs seed money for a production he finds a rich man with temporary insanity. He hurries home to tell Jane he’s found a savior. What he’s found is a stalking horse to bring other investors in. He forgets that when he was a pisher of twelve I took him over to the mirror in the bathroom and said, “Ben, look, there is your savior. Are you listening to me?”
    “Pop,” he said, “lend me your razor.”
    A twelve-year-old boy doesn’t listen. You’re driving, you see a stop sign, you stop. Life is full of signs that Ben ignores. Except once.
    When Ben was sixteen, I came into his room and saw him with a whole bunch of pages.
    “That’s a long letter you’re writing,” I said.
    “It’s not a letter, Pop.”
    “Oh?” I said.
    “It’s, uh, a play,” he said.
    “Like on Broadway?”
    “Just one act, Pop.”
    I moved closer so I could see the pages on the desk.
    “In poetry?” I asked.
    “In verse.”
    “I shouldn’t have disturbed you.”
    “It’s okay, Pop,” he said. “I was just about finished for tonight.”
    At the door I stopped to look back at him. My voice came out hoarse. “I’m so proud,” I said.
    *
    I let too much time go by before I asked him, “How’s the play coming?”
    “It’s coming,” he lied.
    “Who have you shown it to?”
    “Ezra.”
    “And what did he say?”
    “He said, ‘It ain’t Shakespeare.’”
    “Not everything has to be Shakespeare. Did he say it was good?”
    Ben turned to face me. “He said you can always show it to Louie, he’ll think it’s good.”
    “Why didn’t you?”
    “Didn’t what?”
    “Show it to me.”
    “Because Ezra thinks he’s a born critic. I told him to tell me the faults and I’ll rewrite it. You know what he said, Pop? He said, ‘You’ve got the mind of a salesman, Benny boy. Why don’t you write something commercial?’”
    “Boys are mean.”
    “That’s right.”
    “You should have been deaf better than to listen. Ezra has too much influence over you.”
    “You always say he’s terrific this, terrific that.”
    “Doesn’t matter. For you he shouldn’t be a stop sign.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Pop.”
    “Yes, you do.”
    To my dying day Ben never showed me what he wrote. Instead he became a producer of other people’s plays.
    *
    One Saturday night, before going out on a date, Ben said, “Pop, how about you and me going for a