Read Online Things as They Are by Guy Vanderhaeghe - Free Book Online Page B

many guys can do what he can do? One in a hundred million? I doubt it. Maybe, just maybe – outside chance – one in two hundred million. The guy ought to be on Ed Sullivan.”
    And me, Bernie Beman, who was I? In the movies Norman admired I would have been the brain gone bad, the one the criminals nicknamed The Professor. Just possibly I was Donald Pleasance in
The Great Escape
, bird-watcher,egghead, forger. However, Norman was always a little bit uncertain of my dependability, my loyalty to the regime. He never forgot, or forgave me putting
Lawrence of Arabia
on my All Time Greatest Movies list.
    “What!” he had cried, in open-mouthed disbelief. “A seven-hour movie about a bunch of camel-fucking Arabs?”
    “Yes,” I said, aware of Dooey, Murph, Deke, Hop Jump, all the other geeks, snorting their derision, already feeling the chill of exclusion.
    “The only reason they had an intermission in that show was to go around and wake up everybody from the first half so’s they didn’t get bedsores. There something the matter with you, Beman?”
    I didn’t say. What was the matter with me was that I found it easier to identify myself with a tormented Peter O’Toole than a chiselled, brass-balled Charles Bronson or Clint Walker.
    I pointed out
Lawrence of Arabia
had won a lot of Oscars.
    “You ever think that those rug-riders didn’t rig the Oscars?” said Norman. “Use your head. Those fucking Arabs are so rich their Lincoln, their Cadillac gets a full ashtray they walk away from it, buy a new one. I read that somewhere. They shit quarters and wipe their asses with ten-dollar bills. You think they couldn’t buy themselves as many Oscars as they want? Even for such a loser as that?”
    “There’s no point in even talking to you, Hiller.”
    “No point in talking to me? No point in talking to you, Beman. No point in talking to
you
.” Which is what happened. Norman put the word out and nobody did talk to me. I was shunned, given the silent treatment for a month and a half before I managed to weasel my way back into Norman’s good graces.
    I was as susceptible to Hiller’s manipulations as any of the others. When he was feeling magnanimous towards me, he made flattering predictions about my future as a lawyer (his choice of profession for me), extolled the notorious Bemanvocabulary. With me as a lawyer, Hiller’s clan would be untouchable, beyond the reach of the law. “How’d you like to be a lawyer and come up against a gunfighter like Beman there? Slinging those high words of his at you, words you hadn’t even heard of? Fuck, the English teachers don’t even know what Beman is talking about half the time when he starts firing off those yard-long words full of syllables. No shit, Beman reads the dictionary for fun. Don’t you, Beman?”
    “Yes.” I couldn’t help myself, I relished basking in the glare of Hiller’s temporary spotlight, too. Just like Dooey or Hop Jump.
    “Say one of your high words, Bernardo, my man.”
    “What?”
    “Say one of those words no normal human being knows what they mean.”
    “Like what?”
    “Come on, come on. A word, Beman. Give us one of those words of yours.”
    “Bastinado.”
    Hiller looking challengingly from Dooey to Murph to Hop Jump. “What’s it mean? That word?”
    Shrugs and sheepish grins.
    “What’d I say? How you going to beat that man in court? How you going to argue against a guy when you don’t even know what the fuck he’s saying? Impossible.”
    Whatever I withheld from Hiller, whatever would have been unspeakable in the company of the others (like an affection for
Lawrence of Arabia
) was confided to Kurt Meinecke. Kurt and I had been friends since elementary school. What he listened to were secret, laughable ambitions. To be a journalist and report a war. To be drunk and cynical in a great city. To speak foreign languages like a native. With a patient, bewildered look on his face he heard me out nights as we tramped the dull, empty