Volume 8
An Online Literary Magazine
December 16, 2013

 

Gigolo Days and Nights

Nonfiction

Willard Manus

 


The trade papers were reporting that our irreverent take on politics, sports, business, and religion was finding favor with readers. They loved our new, brash voice, our cheekiness.

 

I
t wasn't an ideal way to start the week—to arrive on a Monday morning and find you'd been locked out of the office.

 

We stood there, Mike Valenti and I, staring at the sheriff's notice on the front door, the knotted chain and padlock. "I don't get it," Mike said finally. "I thought we were doing so well. How could Jaromir have failed to pay the rent?"

 

"Too busy screwing, I guess."

 

When the other members of the staff arrived—the writers Ralph Hamblin and Tom McGinn, the cartoonist Bob G. We all repaired to the nearby Palomino Bar to talk things over. A phone call was made to Rolfe Passer, our publisher's assistant, who begged us not to worry, the rent problem would be solved immediately.

 

"It vass all a terrible mistake, ze fault of ze accountant," Rolfe insisted.

 

Clear as it was that the bells were tolling for the imminent demise of Bounty magazine, nobody wanted to heed them. We loved what we were doing so much that all good sense deserted us. We agreed to report back to work in twenty-four hours' time.

 

The sheriff's notice was gone by then, the chain and padlock as well. And Rolfe was there to greet us. Even on the best of days, Rolfe was a nervous wreck, his sallow, sagging features bedeviled by twitches and grimaces. Today brought even more bizarre muscular contractions; it was as if he were having his toenails yanked out by one of the hooded monks of the Spanish Inquisition.

 

Rolfe was no stranger to torture. He had spent time in Communist Czechoslovakia's gulag; in fact, that was where he had met Jaromir Tobias, our erstwhile employer. Both of them had run afoul of the Party bosses and had been jailed for "anti-social" behavior. To teach them a lesson, their jailors had kicked them around in time-honored Stalinist fashion.

 

How they had escaped the gulag and made it to the USA was unclear. No doubt, it was Jaromir who had found the right angle to play, the secret levers to pull. Jaromir was the smartest, the most cunning of the two Czechs; he was also tall and handsome, flamboyantly attractive to women.

 

It was Jaromir who had come up with the idea of starting a monthly satirical magazine, one that was patterned on the European model: topical humor that poked fun at everything and everyone in the public sphere—especially the big shots, the politicians, and the captains of industry.

 

There had been humor magazines in the USA before, but none had come close to what we had accomplished in the first issue of Bounty, which was now on sale in newsstands across the country. The trade papers were reporting that our irreverent take on politics, sports, business, and religion was finding favor with readers. They loved our new, brash voice, our cheekiness.

 

But, if we were doing so well, if we were the magazine hotshots of the 1950s, how come we had been locked out by the sheriff, treated like the sleazy operators of a boiler-room scam?

 

Rolfe deferred to his Czech compatriot when the promised meeting finally took place. Jaromir, who had blond, wavy hair and a ruddy complexion, was dressed in a camel hair overcoat, handmade suit and shirt, a thickly-knotted silk necktie. In the words of Mike Valenti, he looked like a "central-casting gigolo."

 

Which is exactly what he was. Or at least that's what the entire Bounty staff believed him to be, owing to the various tips and inferences gleaned from Rolfe Passer. It was something we wanted to believe, if only because it made a nifty story to tell at parties: that we were working for an honest-to-god gigolo, a man who not only supported himself but also a national magazine by bedding down wealthy and horny widows.

 

It was all so wicked and decadent, so fucking European!

 

Not that Jaromir copped to the fact. He played a different role when he was with us: that of a solidly successful entrepreneur, a man of wealth and taste. For proof, he ordered a bottle of champagne—expensive French bubbly, too, not the usual American crap.

 

His demeanor was confident, even ebullient as he addressed the problem of the lockout. In only lightly-accented English, he apologized for the embarrassment and attributed it to miscommunication with his accountant, a check that had gone astray. It was all an unfortunate mistake; our finances were good, sales were mounting, the magazine's future was assured.

 

"Let's drink to our success," he shouted, raising his glass. "Prosit!"

 

"Prosit, prosit," we shouted back at him. In his best European fashion, learned from Warner Brothers movies of the 1930s and 40s, Mike Valenti flung his glass at the fireplace. Trouble was, the glass was made of plastic and it bounced right back at him, slicing open his cheek.

 

 

A
nd so we continued working on the second issue of Bounty; the five of us met at the office at ten every morning to schmooze, check out Bob G.'s latest cartoons, suggest possible stories. Then, clutching our cardboard coffee cups, we'd trudge off to our respective cubicles to tap away on our Underwoods, laboring to produce witty and scintillating sketches that would make the world forget about the likes of S.J. Perelman, James Thurber, and Robert Benchley.

 

I did very little writing myself, mostly because I was responsible for copy editing, layout and production. I also had to deal with the magazine's printer, a bad-tempered Orthodox Jew whose plant was located across the East River in Queens (a few stops away on the E train).

 

It was Shmuel who asked an unexpected and unsettling question one day: "What's with you crazy, stupid people over there at the magazine?"

 

"What's your problem, Shmuel?"

 

"The problem is yours, not mine. Why would you suddenly want to switch distributors?"

 

"I don't know what you're talking about."

 

"You're the managing editor and yet you don't know from shit!"

 

"My publisher must've got a better deal, obviously."

 

"Better deal!" Shmuel sneered. "What kind of a fucking putz are you?"

 

It took some weeks for me to understand the reasons behind Shmuel's contemptuous remarks. Enlightenment came when I was trying to help our newly hired business manager make a presentation at a large Madison Avenue ad agency. Needing some back copies of issue number two, I called the distributor with my request.

 

"Sorry," he said. "We don't have any back copies on hand."

 

"Wait a minute. What are you telling me? That every single copy was sold?"

 

"Hell, no. Just that we haven't kept any unsold copies."

 

"What about the covers? Surely you have those?"

 

Standard operating procedure in the magazine industry was for the retailer, the newsstand guy, to return all unsold copies to the distributor, who then either kept them or the magazine's covers on hand. That way, the publisher, the Jaromir Tobiases of the world, could verify just how many copies of the magazine had been sold.

 

"Covers?" came the reply. "No, we ain't got no covers, pal."

 

"But you're obliged to…."

 

"We ain't obliged to do nuthin! Read your contract, man."

 

When I conveyed the news to the staff, Bob G. exploded in a paroxysm of fury. "This can't be! By signing a deal like that, he's wrecked the magazine! The distributor will keep all the money Bounty earns! The magazine is fucked. All our hard work has gone down the drain!"

 

In the tumult that followed, the shouts and curses, the flinging of cups and pens, Rolfe Passer desperately tried to keep order. But even he was in a state of anguish and despair when Jaromir Tobias finally arrived, having been roused out of the bed he was sharing with one of his wealthy girlfriends.

 

"Why did I sign such a deal with this distributor?" Jaromir asked rhetorically. "Because he gave me a big fat bonus, a good piece of change!"

 

"He conned you," Bob shouted. "He got you to sign your life away!"

 

"Our lives," added Ralph.

 

"You're an amateur," snapped Tom McGinn. "You have no business trying to publish a magazine!"

 

"I published five magazines in Czechoslovakia," Jaromir bellowed, his face turning the color of borscht.

 

"And each of them probably failed," shot back Tom, his Irish blood up as well.

 

Rolfe, still trying to make nice, said to Jaromir, "You vill cancel ze contract, right? You vill go back to our first distributor or find anozzer one. Is zat not so?"

 

Jaromir clenched his teeth and said nothing. It was clear that he knew he had made a horrible mistake, one which had put the future of the magazine at risk. He had printed two hundred thousand copies of issue number two, which meant that there'd be a big printing bill to be paid—out of questionable profits.

 

Jaromir did his best to save the magazine. He found a lawyer to help him try to break the contract with the distributor. He also promised to raise more investor—read, divorcée—money to keep us afloat.

 

"Jaromir vill come through for us," Rolfe promised. "He alvays does. Ze man is a magician, a wunderkind." He begged us not to give up hope.

 

But when Friday came and there were no pay packets for us, Bob G. cleaned out his desk and bade us all farewell. "It's been fun," he said. "But I'm jumping ship before it sinks."

 

He announced that he was finished working for other people. "I'm going to start my own magazine," he said. No, not a satirical magazine, but something a lot more commercial: a men's magazine, but not a tame, genteel one like Esquire.

 

"This one's gonna be sexy as hell—lots of pictures of naked women, with raunchy cartoons and hard-hitting journalism and fiction. Think of it as a literary magazine with tits. Big tits!"

 

With Bob gone, it fell to me to find us another cartoonist. It took some doing, but I finally sussed one out, a young, talented guy named Jules Feiffer. But in the end, I decided not to interview him. How could I possibly offer him a job, knowing he might not get paid?

 

Those of us who were left on staff went another two weeks without compensation. We tried to keep our spirits up and do some work, but mostly we sat around discussing what we would do if Bounty self-destructed. Ralph thought he might rent a Madison Avenue store window and sit there doing portraits of people—not visual but written portraits. "A hundred words for ten bucks, that kind of thing."

 

Mike Valenti thought he might go back to school on the G.I. Bill and get a degree in library science. "The quiet, unpressured life looks very good to me right now."

 

Jim McGinn thought he'd try to land a job writing for TV. "I've had it with print," he said. "Maybe I can sell a sitcom about five guys working on a satirical magazine published by a notorious gigolo."

 

"It won't sell," I said. "Nobody'd believe it."

 

Then, suddenly, in the midst of all this dark gallows humor, a finger of sunlight poked through.

 

"Jaromir has met a new voman," Rolfe announced at a hastily-called meeting. "Her name is Doris and she is vun of ze richest women in ze world! She loves Bounty and is villing to give Jaromir all ze money he needs to keep it going. Zat is, if zere first night together is successful."

 

"They haven't had sex yet?"

 

"Tonight's ze night!"

 

All of us went to the Palomino after work and, like political junkies on election night, waited long hours for the results of Jaromir's efforts in bed.

 

They had enjoyed an early supper and had gone to her place, a penthouse on East End Avenue, Rolfe reported by phone. We ate burgers and drank pitchers of beer until ten p.m., surely enough time for Jaromir to pleasure Doris and win her heart—and pocketbook.

 

Rolfe never did call us again that night. Nor did we ever hear anything from Jaromir Tobias.

 

We didn't go to the office the next day, or any other day, for that matter. What was the point?

 

Rolfe did explain things in a phone call a few weeks later. "Jaromir did his best," he said. "He put ze voman on her back. But zen somezing happened. For ze first time in his life, he could not get an erection. He did his best—she did her best—but nozzing worked. And zat’s ze immoral of ze story.”

 

Willard Manus is a novelist, playwright and journalist who lives in Los Angeles. His best-known book is Mott the Hoople, the novel from which the 70s rock band took its name. Other novels include The Fixers, The Fighting Men, Connubial Bliss and the Pigskin Rabbi.

 

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