Where the Truth Lies (22 page)

It was strange to stand there and watch Lanny’s lips mouthing words in advance of his own voice, which was blaring live over the stadium’s P.A., as if he were the leading man of a Godzilla movie. As he reached the last stanza, a roar began to build within the crowd, not so much in response to Lanny’s rendition (which was a surprisingly smooth-voiced interpretation, neither operatic nor croony) but because our national anthem was almost over and our national pastime was about to begin.

But in this instance there was an added catalytic force. A man in his early thirties with oily brown hair and an oily brown raincoat had vaulted over the right-field wall and onto the playing field. He quickly discarded his coat, beneath which he was stark naked. Lately, this had become a thing. Lanny was the last person in the stadium who could see what was happening, and as the noise of the spectators increased, he started to extend his arms to receive the seeming adulation of the crowd. The streaker dashed in front of the microphone and yelled into it, “Nixon is a warmonger! Kissinger is being used as a—” Lanny grabbed the microphone away from the streaker and the stadium was assaulted by the massively amplified sound of that grab, a veritable cannonade favoring the frequencies below 150 cycles. Someone in the press box had enough wit about them to close down the mike as Lanny began to wrestle for control of it. Lanny suddenly realized that he was struggling with a naked man, whose puny physique and not very awesome genitalia were evoking little of the Greco-Roman spirit. Wisely, he trotted away from the man, laughing and shaking his head to the crowd as if to position himself above this sorry spectacle, as the Mets players raced out of the dugout and began to punch and kick their naked victim. The Shea Stadium security force eventually got the players to calm down; the man’s raincoat was fetched from right field, and he was ushered to the locker room to a frightening wave of catcalls, most of which linked the streaker to Communists, peace advocates, civil rights activists, and people who copulated with their matriarch.

“You believe that bastard?” Lanny said to me after the game, when he could talk without being overheard. We were walking back to the limousine, which was parked in the fenced-in lot reserved for the players. “All I need is for one person in that crowd to have taken a decent snapshot of me wrestling with that guy and they’ll sell it to the tabloids.‘That ugly rumor about Lanny Morris being caught in a clinch with a naked man is in the right ballpark—and we have the pictures to prove it!’ ”

“No one on earth is going to believe anything like that,” I assured him, as I spotted Michael Dougherty standing by his limousine. He was getting an autograph from Tug McGraw, who didn’t look too pleased about it.

“Oh, I’m not worried about people believing that. It’s just that there’s a zoning regulation in show business that you can publicly look stupid three times, and after that, guess what, people figure you’re stupid.”

I had expected us to get onto the same ugly highway that had led us from JFK to Manhattan the previous evening. But only a minute or two after we stole our way out of Shea Stadium, the limousine began ambling through some pleasant residential streets, small houses each with a tree on the front lawn. Then Michael Dougherty cut a sharp turn and we were back on another access road with large cracks in its pale, dirty concrete. We veered onto what looked like some sort of abandoned boulevard and now we were passing by the Unisphere, a steel-ribbed globe that had been the symbol of the 1964–65 World’s Fair. Shea Stadium was at our back and before us was a structure that looked like a one-story building that had been lifted from a corporate park and pointlessly placed upon four tall turrets no less than ten stories in height. The building bore the wordsTOP OF THE FAIR . (Even though, obviously, there was no longer a fair for it to top.)

Michael Dougherty stopped the limo and dashed around to my door. I looked at Lanny, puzzled.

“We’re dining?”

“Leaving.”

He strolled me onto the cement esplanade, which was totally deserted, and through doors markedPORT OF AUTHORITY NEW YORK . Beyond them was a small lectern manned by a middle-aged fellow in a business suit. He referred to a clipboard. “Hello, Mr. Morris. All set for you. If you’ll sign here.”

Lanny scribbled a signature. “Who’s driving?”

“Cubby.”

Lanny nodded approval and stepped to the already open doors of a narrow elevator, gesturing for me to enter. Once we were in, he pushed the only button other than G for Ground. It was discreetly labeled H.

“What’s ‘H’?” I asked as we ascended very quickly.

“Hroof garden.” The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and a stiff breeze hit us. Correction. Many stiff, measured breezes hit us. “And heliport,” he added in what I’m sure was intended to sound like an offhand comment.

We were standing on the roof of the building, and slapping its five rotary forearms against the air with its trademark chopping sound was a commercial helicopter. Lanny nodded toward it. “Our ride home.”

I happened to know that the helicopter was a Sikorsky S-61L. I knew that its cruising speed was 115 nautical miles an hour. I also knew that I was supposed to be impressed. I was, but enough already, I thought. Lanny was putting on an admirable floor show, no doubt designed to sweep me off my feet and him against my labia, but it was calculated for what he believed was a starry-eyed schoolmarm named Bonnie Trout. Meet the celeb at his Plaza suite, have an incredibly low-profile lunch at a delicious dive on Doyers Street where the yellow press won’t discover or publicize “Lanny’s New Lady.” Then on to watch Lanny be the darling of fifty-five thousand at Shea Stadium. After all, let’s give the devil his due: how many people can, on two hours’ notice, arrange to sing for a gathered multitude and be cheered despite performing only one musical selection, and ana cappella one at that? Then into a private whirlybird, where Lanny is taking his new bird for a little whirl—how to respond to all this?

Fuck. I’m Bonnie Trout.

“Wow,” I said.

“Oh, you like?” replied Lanny as if he’d hardly noticed the Sikorsky that was slashing at the air around us and requiring him to raise his voice about twenty decibels. “Yeah, it’s all ours. Hey, Cubby!”

He walked us toward the helicopter, thoughtfully putting his hand on the back of my head and gently pressuring it downward to ensure that it was well below the overhead blades. It was the first time a man had pushed my head down that way where I didn’t snap,“Don’t ever do that again!” in a voice that invariably reduced his erection by a good two inches.

“You ever been on a helicopter?” he asked me as Cubby, a nice-looking guy in his twenties, helped me up some steps. The interior looked as if it could easily seat a dozen or more (I’d been on commuter airplanes that had smaller cabins than this), but we were the only passengers.

“No, never,” I replied truthfully. Not that I hadn’t had the opportunity once or twice, but I’d always managed to find a reason to decline the invitation. And now here I was on an S-61L. Oh good.

I’m by no means knowledgeable about aviation, but my journalism thesis had been a piece I’d written (which actually ran inThe Christian Science Monitor ) about the estimable Sikorsky S-61L and its two accidents in California, causing the deaths of all on board. Passengers and crew. Both times. No survivors. In 1968, the S-61L had been a commercial shuttle from LAX to Anaheim. I called it the Disneyland Death Train. Within six months, the S-61L had twice decided to drop out of the sky en route. Metal fatigue was cited as a possible cause. Gee, don’t you just hate it when metal gets tired?

“So where are we taking this?”

“Just back to Manhattan. You should sit on the left side.” He indicated a window seat. Cubby stepped into a kind of pilot’s cabin separated from the passengers’ seats. “No copilot?” I asked.

Lanny laughed. “The whole flight takes less than ten minutes.” I was about to comment that, in the event of metal fatigue or pilot stroke, it would probably not take us all of ten minutes to plummet to where the ground would provide all the stopping power we’d ever need. But as if to illustrate the brevity of our trip, the copter immediately buoyed itself into the air. We scooted off the rooftop as carelessly as Peter Pan and were already passing by Shea Stadium, at an altitude not much higher than its cheapest seats. Ah, that incredibly attenuated island toward the west, the one with all those ridiculously tall buildings—would that be the fabled Manhattan now? The hot orange sun was currently playing peekaboo with us, popping out from behind the cover of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings.

I assumed we’d be landing at the Heliport on the East River, which we were already closing in on. I pointed in its general direction, below a phalanx of polka-dot-painted cement trucks that were huddled a little north of Ninety-sixth. “We landing down there?” I asked.

Lanny shook his head. “Not down. Up.”

As if on cue, the trustworthy S-61L seemed to take off again and trampolined us into the thick of New York’s tallest spires. We were above them, but only just slightly, and it felt as if we were dodging the buildings rather than scraping by above them. Then it seemed as if we had stopped (we had, more or less), and I saw to my horror that we were poised above midtown Manhattan at an elevation equivalent to, say, the ninety-ninth floor of a building, except that said building had ceased to exist and we were now in its lone remaining office, supported by nothing.

When I look down from a terrace mounted to a high apartment building, where I can see the laws of perspective in action, the side of the building dropping away beneath me and my feet … this is the kind of vertigo from which I suffer. To suddenly be a hundred feet above the top of the Pan Am Building, which was now yawing up at me, its facade like a ninety-degree ski slope of glass terminating in the grid between Lexington and Vanderbilt avenues …

“You okay?” asked Lanny. I closed my eyes for a second, swallowed. There was a very strong bump as we dropped onto our tiny perch, and I correctly assumed we’d landed. Instantly there was a change in the volume of the motors. All confidence now, I chattily commented, “I thought the Pan Am heliport had been closed down.”

“They closed it in sixty-eight because there just wasn’t enough business. But there’s a new group wants to reopen it. In a year or two. I’m a stockholder. Meantime, you can get clearance to land four hours in advance if you know who to ask and you don’t mind paying for the privilege.”

Cubby had already opened the door and slid some steps up to it, and Lanny walked me out. Again he placed his hand above my hand and pressed gently down until we cleared the rotors. It was something like the hands-on blessing the priest would give you as a child in lieu of Christ’s blood and body. I had always found it very comforting.

I was currently feeling quite weak, grateful to be alive, and tough as runny Camembert. A private elevator dove us down to the street, the same fall I’d been afraid the helicopter might make. Context is everything. The ugly lobby of the Pan Am Building was easy to leave, and Lanny quickly nabbed us a cab on Vanderbilt.

“Fifty-ninth and Fifth,” he told the driver, keeping his head down so as not to be recognized. That was the Plaza. Would we eat there? Would we eat at all?

We got out of the cab, however, by the General Motors Building, on the other side of the Grand Army Plaza from Lanny’s hotel. Lanny handed the driver a more than handsome tip, the driver said, “Hey …” in the first dawning of recognition, but Lanny smiled and scooted us away.

Lanny took my hand, which was all right I suppose, and trotted us down a long flight of white steps that verged onto an open-air café one floor below street level. It was already quieter on this level beneath the traffic, and it got better as Lanny walked us over to a revolving door directly underneath the General Motors showroom and we entered the Autopub.

In Manhattan, theme restaurants were blooming like plastic flowers in winter. I confess to enjoying such places: Trader Vic’s, which made me feel like I was in the Enchanted Tiki Room in Disneyland; Chateau Henri IV, where you crossed a bridge over an indoor stream to reach your table by a stained-glass window; the Monk’s Inn on Sixty-fourth, where the waiters were dressed in cowled robes and your Emmenthaler fondue and dusty bottle of red wine were accompanied by a Gregorian chant, or A Quiet Little Table in the Corner, where every booth was as the name implied, each hidden behind a beaded curtain, to which you summoned your waitress by pulling a cord that illuminated a red lightbulb. The Cattleman had set the stage, or rather the stagecoach, for such funhouse eateries, supposedly patterned after a Kansas City steer palace, as was also (surprise) the Steer Palace. The ubiquitous Steak and Brew chain’s mock–British publican atmosphere offered you all the beer you could drink and all the lettuce you could assemble. Enrico E Paglieri offered the same deal but with all the sangria you could drink (“red wine and 7UP,” translated the waitress) and all the antipasto you could eat (Oscar Mayer cold cuts and health salad). Some lunatic soul opened a similar restaurant named Chicago with the astounding offer of All the Booze You Could Drink, but apparently in its third month one frat party from Princeton buried the place for good.

The Autopub’s theme was cars. Get it? General Motors Building? When you walked in, you were directed (by a gossamer young thing—my, how they get around) to one of several dining areas within the long, low-ceilinged, windowless facility. There was the Pit Stop, a brightly lit white Formica area with orange banquettes, delineated by trendy globular white lights. Very Euro. Behind the wide bar, with its decorative racing helmets, were the more-coveted booths, where four people could dine inside replications of a Model T or vintage Oldsmobile. Some of the cars were hardtops, meaning that you dined under their roofs and within their rolled-up windows, making it the coziest, most claustrophobic sit-down dinner in Manhattan.

“Merwin,” murmured Lanny to the hostess, who was clearly expecting him.

“Oh yes, Mr.Mer -win,” she delivered like a stripper enlisted into a burlesque routine. “Your table is waiting.”