20

TELEGRAM:

Ziggy Spicehandler’s second coming called for preparations both intricate and varied. Fifteen minutes after Ziggy’s telegram arrived, Mortimer set to rearranging his books haphazardly on the shelves. He didn’t want Ziggy, his grin taunting, to say yet again, “So that’s the kind of cat you’ve become? All the French novels on one shelf and the Americana in a special bookcase. How tidy!” Then Mortimer went through his books one by one, erasing his name from any volume he had written it into. Settling back weary but happy, at 2 A.M., to consider his labors, he lit a cigarette and, wincing inwardly, practiced flicking ashes on the carpet. Oh well, he thought, at least it’s going to be worse for Joyce. Liberated Joyce, hygienic Joyce, who would be outraged by each and every one of Ziggy’s personal habits. Beer and belches for breakfast, cigarettes squashed into the uncongealed bacon fat on his plate. Coca-Cola tins opened with a spurt and then abandoned anywhere, making rims on the dining room table, leaving sticky spots on the sideboard. Old friends, sometimes strange girls, brought home unannounced for lunch. Afternoon naps, Spicehandler’s daily ziz, on the living room sofa. Ziggy flapping barefoot through the house, picking his toes as he watched television. Migod, Mortimer thought, exhilarated by the effect this was bound to have on Joyce, Ziggy drinking or smoking pot in bed, a fire hazard, would be sufficient to make her grind her teeth.

The magazines!

Mortimer caught a glimpse of The New Yorker on the hassock. Must remember to drop it and Time, he thought, and in their place order Playboy and Evergreen. Mortimer, rising to conceal his back file of Which, cursed himself for having so recently put his small garden in bourgeois, suburban order. This coming Sunday he would have to undo a month’s systematic labor; strewing junk (a slap in the face to his neat conformist neighbors) about the garden. Doug’s pissy old mattress heaved on the grass would be a nice touch. The car needs washing, Mortimer thought. Good. The dented boot was especially lucky; it would surely demonstrate to Ziggy a healthy indifference to possessions.

Ziggy, good old Ziggy, there would be so much to talk about. He would tell him about his troubles with that lunatic Shalinsky, who thought he was Jewish, and how Rachel Coleman, not to brag, had the hots for him. They would speculate about the legendary, undying Star Maker, Dino Tomasso, and the altogether baffling Polly Morgan. To Ziggy, a bottle of brandy between them, Mortimer might even confess his anxieties about the size of his cock.

Ah, Ziggy.

Ziggy Spicehandler, née Gerald Spencer, was six years younger than Mortimer. His grandfather, Meir Spicehandler, had emigrated to Leeds from Odessa, and opened a tailor shop in the Leylands. His father, Cyril, had changed the family name to Spencer, married a Yorkshire shiksa, and over the years developed the basement tailor shop into an immensely successful clothing factory. Ziggy had not immediately reverted to the old family name. He was known as Gerald Spencer at Rugby and Oxford. Oxford, where Ziggy was sent down in his second year, for systematically picking up homosexuals and extracting love letters from them for the purpose of blackmail. Ziggy’s profits, though not inconsiderable, were hardly the point. In a brilliantly argued defense, later published as a broadside, Ziggy explained that he had acted as he had to demonstrate that if God were dead, everything was indeed lawful. In Paris, a year later, Ziggy published his first novel, a pornographic tour de force. The lechers and harlots in Ziggy’s fiction, the perverts and whoremasters, went by the names of his mother, his aunts and uncles, his baba, his zeyda, and Jewish community leaders in Leeds. It was in fact rather more than just another novel of rebellion against Jewish middle-class values. “I acted out the family’s fantasies for them,” Ziggy was still fond of saying. But Ziggy’s father, to whom the novel was dedicated, never got to read the book. He got no further than the dedication, which read:

Even at RADA, a few years later, Ziggy still went by the name of Gerald Spencer. However, coming out of RADA in 1954, Gerald, as he still was, discovered that his Anglicized name, his expensive middle-class education, his knowledge of stage classics, Latin, Greek, his unexcelled elocution, had all contrived to make him singularly ill-equipped for life in modern England. Ziggy, making the rounds of the agents, soon found out he was only fit for comic relief parts in the new school of the kitchen sink. In 1954, all the real people were working-class.

So Ziggy went to Paris, where he fell in with the Americans in St. Germain des Prés; from there, logically, he drifted to Greenwich Village by way of Ibiza and Mexico, and then even as far north as Canada, where he flourished briefly, impregnating French Canadian girls, raising babies to the age of three months, and then selling them to childless couples in Manhattan. Settled in New York again, he soon overcame the handicap of his upper-crust British accent sufficiently to return to London, a hipster, knowledgeable about jazz talk, Yiddish slang and drugs. He was reborn Ziggy Spicehandler, a self-confessed Renaissance Man, poet, film maker, actor and painter.