"Everybody onstage for the Hawaiian number, please."

Jason Robards, Jr. as Murray Burns and Barbara Harris as Sandra Markowitz (who never made it to Queens on the Leadbellies case) in the 1965 film of "A Thousand Clowns."
If you’re a writer you can trace your particular passion to a handful of other writers who twisted you during your formative years. They gave you an idea of the shapes you wanted to fill and how to bend the words to fill those spaces. Now you stand on their shoulders and in repayment spread your adopted DNA through the gene pool for other writers.

Herb Gardner was sixty-eight-years-old when he, as the papers like to put it, “lost his long fight” with lung cancer in September, 2003. He’d written five produced plays and one produced original screenplay. But if he’d only written that first play he would have done enough to achieve immortality. Forty-five years ago, Herb Gardner wrote A Thousand Clowns. If you do not know A Thousand Clowns, your life is a sad and incomplete thing and I pity you more than I have contempt for your woeful ignorance. Tomorrow rent the 1965 movie version, then we can talk.

For those of you familiar with the piece I need say nothing more than “Everybody on stage for the Hawaiian number!” to evoke the character of Murray Burns, an unemployed television writer who lived in a New York walkup apartment with his eleven-year-old nephew who was named Nick, most of the time.

Murray Burns, who never answered letters from large organizations, who threw open windows to complain to his neighbors about the poor quality of their trash requesting they throw out more champagne bottles and empty caviar tins, who was so witty and so charming women adored him at first encounter, this Murray Burns was my generation’s Peter Pan, Walter Mitty and Don Quixote, only with better material and a stronger sex drive.

In college you took every girl you dated to see A Thousand Clowns as early in the relationship as possible. This was done first to make sure she had a sense of humor, second so that she’d recognize that you were Murray Burns. You were the acerbic ladies man, the connoisseur of ukulele music and old movies, the lover of life who, when asked to return to reality responds, “I’ll only go as a tourist.”

The language in a Herb Gardner play is dense, passionate and funny. It caroms like a table full of billiard balls hit with a lot of English. It’s a place where people talk about looking for work “in downtown Oz.” Where a man notices his father addresses the middle of his chest because that’s where his head was when he was twelve-years-old. It is a place where old vaudeville lyrics are treated with the respect afforded Shakespeare sonnets; where an a capella rendition of Painting the Clouds with Sunshine can crack your heart and a single chorus of Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby can stop a beautiful woman’s tears and woo her into bed within half an hour of meeting her. Where people say things like: “The time, Mister...it’s not a thief like they say; it’s something much sneakier...an embezzler; up nights, juggling the books so you don’t notice anything’s missing.” Where a man remembers his first love with the words: “Ruthie Tresh. Pretty, pretty Ruthie Tresh. Red hair and lime-green sweaters. A candy store of a girl.” Where freedom is a beautiful, dangerous thing that often must be exchanged for something more valuable: Love.

It’s not language that always works dramatically, sometimes it sounds like Groucho Marx reading Ferlingetti, or Chekov performed by the gang from Your Show of Shows. But even when the dramatic context fails to convince you, you can still recognize the it’s the best dialogue you’ve ever heard. You listen to it and you read it and you reverse engineer it to try to learn its secrets.

One of the things you learn is that all Herb Gardner’s characters are battling time, either trying to hang on to a perfect moment or struggling against the tide, fighting to get back or rebuild the place when and where they were happy and things had beauty and color and food still tasted like something when you bit into it. They try to change the game so no one gets lost, no one is alone and no one grows old. It’s impossible. It’s hopeless. It’s tragic. And it’s danced by Ernie Kovacs in a gorilla suit on a stage scattered with banana peels. All of it dedicated to teaching us the lessons Murray wishes to teach Nick: “I want to be sure he knows when he’s chickening out on himself. I want him to get to know exactly the special thing he is or else he won’t notice it when it starts to go. I want him to stay awake and know who the phonies are, I want him to know how to holler and put up an argument, I want a little guts to show before I let him go. I want to be sure he sees all the wild possibilities. I want him to know it’s worth the trouble just to give the world a little goosing when you get the chance. And I want him to know the subtle, sneaky, important reason why he was born a human being and not a chair.”

I stole that last bit about not being a chair and gave it to Daryl Hannah in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

Gardner touches my dialogue more than any other writer, including Serling and Sturges. Dialogue is not human speech. It’s something much more potent, more concentrated, that’s been crafted to resemble human speech. We hear it, we copy it and then it becomes the sounds spoken around us on high days and fair days. I learned pace and rhythm from Gardner. And I learned about the poetry of the common place, the beauty of what appears disposable.

I don’t know if I wouldn’t have a career without Herb Gardner, but I know my stuff wouldn’t sound the way it does without him.

Here’s one speech from the third act of A Thousand Clowns. It’s not a funny speech, but it’s one of my favorites. Murray is talking to his brother Arnie who is also his agent and is trying to convince Murray to go back to his old job writing on The Chuckles The Chipmunk Show:

“Oh, Arnie, you don’t understand any more. You got that wide stare people stick in their eyes so nobody’ll know their head’s asleep. You got to be a shuffler, a moaner. You want me to come and sit and eat fruit with you and watch the clock run out. You start to drag and stumble with the rotten weight of all the people who should have been told off, all the things you should have said, all the specifications that aren’t yours. The only thing you got left to reject is your food in a restaurant if they do it wrong and you can send it back and make a big fuss with the waiter. Arnold, five months ago I forgot what day it was. I’m on the subway on my way to work and I didn’t know what day it was and it scared the hell out of me. I was sitting in the express looking out the window same as every morning watching the local stops go by in the dark with an empty head and my arms folded, not feeling great and not feeling rotten, just not feeling, and for a minute I couldn’t remember, I didn’t know, unless I really concentrated, whether it was a Tuesday or a Thursday...or a...for a minute it could have been any day, Arnie...sitting in the train going through any day...in the dark through any year...Arnie, it scared the hell out of me. You got to know what day it is. You got to know what’s the name of the game and what the rules are with nobody else telling you. You have to own your days and name them, each one of them, every one of them, or else the years go right by and none of them belong to you. And that ain’t just for weekends, kiddo.”

So many of the writers who made me a writer are dead now. This makes the act of writing, which is always a solitary pursuit for me, a little lonelier. But sometimes in that loneliness a line comes to me unbidden, like a mantra sent to help me. “Ruthie Tresh,” it whispers. “Pretty, pretty, Ruthie Tresh. Red hair and lime-green sweaters. A candy store of a girl.”

And then I write some more.

Herb Gardner
December 28, 1934 - September 23, 2003

Murray Burns and his nephew, Chubby, Rover, King, Big Sam, Little Max, Snoopy, Chip, Rock, Rex, Mike, Marty, Lamont, Chevrolet, Wyatt, Yancy, Fred, Phil, Woodrow, Lefty, The Phantom, Raphael Sabatini, Dr. Morris Fishbein, Nick Burns.

The ghost of television past

I get a little woozy at the thought, but 2007 marks the twentieth anniversary of thirtysomething premiering on ABC. While the series has yet to appear on DVD, you can sneak a look at a couple of episodes uploaded to YouTube by devoted fans of the show...Including an entire episode I wrote for season three. Below is a clip from a show I wrote in season one.

The Dog

Often we read in bed. I walk Oso around ten and when we return, Beverly and I start closing up the house for the night. We so rarely go out after midnight these days.

Beverly settles under the covers and starts cursing at the newspapers and I work on my required reading or chip away at the stack of pleasure reading that sits on the night table.

And lately, Oso joins us. Bribed by the promise of additional cookies he jumps up on the bed and settles between us as we read. But with the arrival of the dog, I usually stop reading and look at him. Dogs live in a constant state of present tense. The book will always be there, but the dog must me looked at now.

His brown eyes, which know nothing of blue and red states, must be looked into. His sigh when he rests his head on my chest, must be acknowledged now. It is a sigh free of agenda and frustration, signifying nothing other than a sense of satisfaction at the completion of another day of squirrel chasing, cat taunting, looking for possums and an impressive schedule of high-powered napping. My work, he sighs, is done. God is neigh.

Looking at a dog resting on your chest at the end of the day, scratching his ear till his eyes close in casual ecstasy, is like spining a canine prayer wheel. It directly reduces your time in purgatory.

Time does not exist for dogs. When they get old they don’t understand why they can’t run like puppies anymore, but I don’t think they associate this with the passage of years. It’s just something they can’t do right now.

Dogs are timeless creatures, four-legged bundles of now. One of the things they do for us is remind us how there is only this particular moment and as good as the book may be, it will not do the karmic good of looking at a dog willing to look at you.

In as loving a way as possible, Oso looks at me to remind me that I will die with books unread and I might as well put that dog treat on my nose and accomplish something meaningful with this brief span I’ve been allotted.

So, I put the lemon wedge gourmet dog treat on my nose. Oso leans down, his face filling my vision. I see his teeth, the texture of his nose, the segments that make up the roof of his mouth, and feel a puff of not unpleasant dog breath. A brush of wet nose, then loud crunching.

Between cookies he dives his face against my side and lets me scratch behind his left ear, something I did within seconds of meeting him for the first time more than three years ago.

And time does not so much stop as it seems to catch its breath.

Stars spin slower outside the bedroom window and the world with all its challenges and terrors contracts to the very manageable size of a bed containing two people and a dog. A dog who knows the next cookie will be as sweet as the previous cookie. What more can you ask of a universe?

(December 2004)

He changed his mind...

He changed his mind about what he wanted to read in bed and went back into the living room looking for a particular short story. He turned on a single light and went to the corner of the bookcase where he thought he’d find what he was looking for.

He pulled the first book he thought contained the story he wanted and opened it to the index. The one light made it safe to move about the room, but you couldn’t read by it. He pulled the open book close to his face, looking at the table of contents. This close, his glasses were no good to him so he took them off, folded them closed and rested them on the top of a book on another shelf. Then he went back to the table of contents. The story he wanted wasn’t there. He put the book back and took out the collection next to it. Not there either. A third book, the least likely one. Not there.

He held onto the third book which would have to do, turned and left the room, turning off the single lamp as he went.

He was almost to the bedroom when he realized he wasn’t wearing his glasses. He remembered leaving them on the top of the book on the bookshelf, went back to the living room and reclaimed them.

Back in the bedroom he got under the covers. Down the short hall to the bathroom his wife was engaged in what she called her “evening ablutions.” There was the sound of water in the sink.

He opened the book, but could not concentrate. He wanted to re-read that one particular story and now he had to find a substitute and his heart wasn’t into the search. Not his heart. His mind. He wasn’t focused on the book. He was focused on the idea of forgetting his glasses on top of that other book.

He was lucky he remembered the glasses on the way back to the bedroom. Otherwise he would have gone to sleep, forgetting all about them. In the morning there would have been a search and an ascendancy of frustration, anger and profanity. He would have looked in all of the normal, usual places, but the glasses wouldn’t have been there. The likelihood that he would actually remember where the glasses were was remote. He’d find them eventually, or, cursing his fading memory, pull out an older, weaker prescription that would keep him in the sighted world until he could get a new pair made.

Then, who knows, years from now, he would go looking for something in that section of the bookcase and find the misplaced glasses.

Lying in bed, the open paperback in front of him but ignored, he conjured another version of the story.

Suppose, after reading the replacement story and setting aside the book, after kissing his wife goodnight and tossing the last treats of the day to the dog curled at the foot of the bed, after turning off the light and rolling over to spoon against his wife’s soft back, suppose after falling asleep with nothing more profound on his mind than the thought of tomorrow’s bill paying and the automatic sounds of the lawn sprinklers beyond the window, suppose then, in his sleep, he died.

That sort of thing happens all the time, and to younger men. Suppose this was the night he was destined to move on to oblivion.

In the morning, the last thing his wife would think about would be his glasses. She would be busy calling the police and then calling friends and co-workers and family. The question of where his glasses were would probably never come up. They would remain in the corner of the bookcase, resting on the upper edge of a seldom examined volume documenting the Bikini atoll atomic tests in the late 1940s.

If his widow chose to remain in the house, it was unlikely that she would suddenly develop an interest in post-World War II geopolitics and go looking for this particular book.

The glasses would be found eventually during cleaning or perhaps in the inevitable packing up of the contents of the house, either when his widow moved or when she died.

He was concerned by the distress the glasses might cause his wife if she were to find them some years from now, long after he’d settled into her memory. The idea of her suddenly coming across this item, the things through which he once gazed at her, might be very upsetting. Their discovery could leave her suddenly overwhelmed by a returning grief. The healing of years could be erased in a startled instant.

He would be long beyond caring at that point, but it still troubled him. Another loose end. Part of the pedestrian mess he expected to leave behind: Credit card bills and unbalanced bank statements, where the lightbulbs were kept and how to adjust the timer on those sprinklers he heard outside the window.

He could hear the dog licking his hind leg. The animal had aged into a skin sensitivity, an allergy they had been unable to pinpoint in four months of vet visits.

The dog was getting older, offering his master an accelerated preview of what was ahead for him. The slowing, the aches and pains, the doctor bills, the diminishment. More and more he was aware of how much of his world was coming to an end, unmarked and unmourned except, it seemed, by him.

He heard the hollow rustling of coffins out in the woods when the names of actors he’d grown up watching in the movies started to appear in the obituary pages. There vivacious, ripe and rapturous women who burned into his adolescent mind became great grandmothers who “succumbed after a long illness” and the bold heroes he copied in childhood backyards were overthrown and replaced with brittle stick figures who, “after sustaining a fall,” were undone by pneumonia and blood clots.

He felt memorials multiplying all around him like dandelions.

He closed the book and after putting it on the night-table on top of the clock radio, next to the glass of orange-juice, turned off the light on his side of the bed and stretched out under the covers on his back. He closed his eyes, put his arms along his bare sides and tried to hear the sound of his own heart. At first there was nothing, then with concentration, he felt a movement in his chest; a faint, moist rhythm. He put his left hand on his jaw and felt his pulse, a thin trip-hammer tapping away against his fingertips, keeping him alive. The only thing keeping him alive.

He wished for a real clock at his bedside, not the digital box next to him. He vowed to buy a real clock the next day. Something that ticked. Something that would produce a constant external rhythm that would remind his heart to keep beating when he was asleep.

At his feet, below the foot of the bed, his dog released a lengthy sigh. He listened as the dog began to snore. Soft, weary, growls on the exhale, then the inhale, then another rumbling growl.

He fell asleep trying to match his breathing to that of his dog and did not hear his wife climb into bed with him.