The Fiddler in the Subway Page 4

  On the ride home, there was one image I could not get out of my head.

  The Great Zucchini’s tattered loose-leaf appointment book is filled with the names and dates of his scheduled parties, months and months into the future. He keeps no backup—no other notes, nothing on a computer disk, nothing anywhere. If he were to lose that book, he’d have no idea where he was supposed to be, or when. For months of weekends, preschool children would be waiting expectantly in homes across greater Washington, and the Great Zucchini would simply never show.

  Eric understands the importance of that book. Without it, the Great Zucchini would cease to exist, and all that would be left would be Eric Knaus. And so he carries it with him everywhere. He won’t leave it in a car, in case the car is stolen. When he goes out of his house, if he absolutely must leave the book behind, he hides it in a special place no burglar would think to look.

  The sight that I could not get out of my head was the Great Zucchini hunched over the craps table, lost in that flagrant illusion, flinging dice with his right hand, his left hand pressing that book hard to his chest, white-knuckled, like a man holding on for dear life.

  LAUREN COX, FIVE, on why she likes the Great Zucchini, whom she saw at her little brother’s third birthday party: “Because when the snake came out, and it didn’t stop coming out? And when there was nothing in that box, and then there was jelly? He’s for boys. Boys are funny and dumb, but they like trucks and trains, and I don’t, and I’m not having the Great Zucchini. I’m having a party somewhere else in Virginia that’s girly.”

  The Great Zucchini, on why he likes little kids: “Because they are totally innocent and totally nonjudgmental, but they will say whatever they think, and that’s beautiful.”

  ERIC’S MOTHER, JANE Knaus, is a small, cultured, soft-spoken woman of sixty. We met at yet another Starbucks, to discuss the enigma that is her son. I said I was trying to understand him.

  “I don’t know if I understand him,” she said, smiling. “Actually, I don’t know where he came from.”

  Literally, he came from Jane Cohen and Rodger Knaus, beat-era liberal intellectuals who met at Berkeley in 1963. They split to Sweden in disgust in 1968, with $2,000 between them, after Hubert Humphrey got nominated for president over Eugene McCarthy. There, they had their only child. They were back in the United States by Eric’s second birthday.

  Now Jane is creative services director at Montgomery College. Rodger was a Ph.D. in mathematics whose pioneering work in early software design is still celebrated. What Jane means about Eric’s dubious ancestry is that, temperamentally, from the earliest age, he fit neither parent.

  Jane was a fine artist. Rodger was a scientist. “Our work required solitude,” Jane said. They were eggheads, and loners. Eric was neither.

  “In grade school,” Jane said, “I would ask the teacher how Eric was doing in math, and the teacher would say, ‘Eric likes to show off his muscles and flirt with the girls.’ And I would ask, ‘But how is he doing in math?’ and the teacher would say, ‘Eric likes to show off his muscles and flirt with the girls.’”

  The most significant fact in Eric’s upbringing, Jane said, was when she and her husband separated. Eric was thirteen. The divorce became final two years later, and the whole thing was obviously deeply painful. At fourteen, Eric was living with his mom in an apartment with cockroaches; Eric wouldn’t let her kill them. “Cockroaches have families, too,” he would say.

  “Who still thinks like that at fourteen?” she said, smiling sadly.

  Divorce is traumatic for any child, I said. But Eric had told me the divorce wasn’t that big a deal, that he’d loved and respected his father, and stayed close to him. Was that right?

  Jane hesitated. At the end of Rodger’s life, yes, the two men were close, she said. Eric actually quit his job when his father lay dying of a brain tumor, she said, to spend his final months beside him at the hospice. At Rodger’s funeral, she said, Eric delivered an impromptu tribute so moving and heartfelt and self-deprecatory that it helped heal the wounds.

  Wounds?

  Jane took a sip of tea.

  Rodger had been born prematurely, she said, with some attendant physical difficulties. He was blind in one eye, and had a palsied leg. He was not good-looking, like Eric, or affable, like Eric, or always surrounded by friends, like Eric. He drove himself to overcome his handicaps, but at a significant emotional cost. He had an incendiary temper, particularly if his peace and quiet was threatened by Eric, a rambunctious kid. When Eric’s pals would come over, Rodger would lie and say Eric wasn’t home, and literally slam the door in the faces of flabbergasted ten-year-olds. He would storm and rant at Eric, call him names, break objects in rage.

  His violence was only to objects?

  “There was physical violence to Eric. It’s why I left Rodger. As Eric got older, and bigger, I knew he wasn’t going to take it anymore. And I feared something terrible was going to happen, that one of them was really, really going to hurt the other. It got scary. I was a mother, and I had no choice. I had to leave, to protect my cub.”

  Jane never remarried, and loved her husband—“a difficult, cantankerous, challenging, funny, impossible, brilliant man”—until the day he died.

  Jane said she has no doubts that Eric’s mistreatment at the hands of his father influenced his life, though she isn’t sure exactly how. She knows he’s never fully accepted adulthood, growing up both guileless and naïve—still in many ways a child, for better or worse.

  “Actually, he doesn’t see the bifurcation. He probably feels five-year-olds should be able to vote. He’s very, very protective of children.”

  Jane Knaus took another sip of her tea, which must have been cold. We’d been talking for well over an hour.

  “Did Eric ever mention what happened to the people across the hall?”

  No, I said.

  And then she told me what happened to the people across the hall.

  WHEN I PICKED Eric up for his court appearance on his license suspension, he was dressed in a nice pair of pants and a shirt still crisp from the package. He’d taken a cab to Filene’s just that morning to buy both of them, because he hadn’t a clean outfit in his house. He also bought a tie but wasn’t wearing it.

  Eric never learned to tie a necktie. I had to make the knot on myself, then loop it over his head.

  The court appearance proved anticlimactic. Eric’s lawyer—a dad for whom he’d done parties—negotiated a continuance.

  Afterward, Eric and I stopped for hot chocolate in Rockville. One customer recognized both of us. She seemed particularly delighted to finally meet the Great Zucchini. Then we stopped for lunch. Over tacos, I asked Eric about what happened to the people across the hall.

  “I don’t really remember it,” he said. “I told you, I don’t remember anything before fourth grade.”

  “Fourth grade is age nine. You were thirteen,” I said.

  “The thing about fourth grade is I had a tyrant of a teacher, and my dad told her to stop picking on me, and that is why my fifth-grade teacher was important to me, and I started liking school, which is why…”

  “What about the family across the hall, Eric?”

  “I just don’t remember it. I was watching a football game, maybe the Super Bowl. That’s all I remember.”

  Not the Super Bowl. The New York Giants were playing the St. Louis Cardinals on Monday night, October 24, 1983, and midway through the first quarter, there was a sound of a scuffle, and then shots from the apartment across the hall.

  Eric knew that apartment. On at least two occasions, he had babysat for the eighteen-month-old boy there, a child named Laurence. It was Eric’s first babysitting gig, in a life that would, ultimately, be all about babysitting.

  “I don’t really remember him. He was just a baby. A lot of babies have passed through this head. All babies look the same.”

  “You’ve told me you can tell, just from looking, what sort of personality a six-month-old will have.”
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  “I just don’t remember. What I remember of my childhood was running through the sewers of Bethesda with K.B., and popping up out of manholes. We used to…”

  “Eric…”

  “I know you want this to be important, but it just isn’t.”

  “I’ve never seen you upset before. Why are you getting upset?”

  “I’m not getting upset.”

  The woman who lived in the apartment across the hall was a dark-haired beauty named Paula Adams. Five years earlier, Paula Adams had been a chief lieutenant of the Reverend Jim Jones, the brilliant, messianic madman who led 900 followers to a mass suicide in the jungles of Guyana. Adams survived the holocaust in Jonestown and fled to the United States with her lover, the man whose government influence had given her safe haven. His name was Laurence Mann, and he had been the Guyanese ambassador to the United States.

  They had a child here, but their relationship—no doubt haunted by the horror—was deeply troubled. No one knows exactly what caused it, but at nine-thirty on that Monday night, Mann forced his way into the apartment, shot Paula in the head, shot the baby in the head, and then turned the gun on himself. None survived.

  “How can you not remember it, Eric?”

  “It’s easy for someone who is thirty-five to not remember someone he babysat for when he was twelve.”

  “Thirteen. Your mother says you were really attached to that little boy. She said you were devastated to realize that a child can be unsafe in his own home. She said you never really got over it. Those were her words.”

  “Look, what do you want me to say? You want me to say I remember? Okay, I remember. I’m pissed because that mom still owes me nine dollars for babysitting, okay?”

  We both laughed. Okay, Eric. Good one. No more questions.

  ONCE, WHEN ERIC was leaving a restaurant, he saw a man disciplining his two-year-old son. The kid had done something of which the father disapproved, so the father poked the boy in the face with a knuckle, so hard it left a mark. Eric says he made a scene, telling the parents he would call the cops if he ever saw anything like that again. He’s stopped parents in the street to inform them that, at three, a child is too old for a pacifier. Once, when a four-year-old at a party seemed painfully timid, Eric told the mom to stop letting the child sleep in her bed. “How did you know he does that?” the mother asked. Eric just knew.

  “At that age,” he explained, “a child can’t do much by himself. Making it through the night alone is a big accomplishment. You have to give him that victory.”

  In the two months I’d gotten to know him, I’d seen several slightly awkward encounters between Eric and a parent, but not one such moment between Eric and a child. It’s tempting to imagine him as Holden Caulfield imagined himself, protector of children’s souls, poised beside the field of rye at the edge of a cliff, catching them before they plummet to their spiritual deaths. But this man with the guardian angel on his shoulder; who forfeits love for gambling but looks to find it in a strip club; who can’t tie a tie or remember to pay a bill; who makes a tidy living but doesn’t know where the money goes; who can’t recall things that deliver him emotional pain; who solemnly prays to God in the bathroom before every performance for the strength and wisdom to make the four-year-olds giggle—this guy has not yet surrendered himself, as Holden reluctantly did, to adulthood. He may never. Maybe it’s that he’s seen the alternative and wants no part of it.

  Maybe he’s Peter Pan. He’s even got some magic dust, until he loses it.

  “If Eric ever grows up,” Jane Knaus had told me, “his career might be over.”

  WE ARE IN the Great Falls home of Melanie and Denny Sisson, where eight children and their parents are gathering for a show. A few minutes earlier, Eric had asked me to pull my car up to the side of another one, so we were hidden from the house while he finished a cigarette.

  The Sissons jokingly call their house a “bowling alley” because of the open space. It’s more than 6,000 square feet of atria, solaria, and balustrade, a beautiful home that is a testament to Denny’s successful business as a landscape architect, which is itself a testament to the opulence of Great Falls real estate. It all dovetails nicely.

  Things don’t always work out so perfectly, though, even in Great Falls. The birthday girl is the Sissons’ five-year-old, Phoebe, and her guests are mostly kids from her special-needs class. Like Phoebe, these are children with developmental disabilities of varying degrees. They’re a handful and a half.

  A former elementary school teacher, Melanie chose Eric after seeing him perform elsewhere. She concluded he is “a true artist” who could entertain a roomful of kids equally well “in Great Falls or in the Sudan.”

  Eric didn’t know these were going to be mostly kids with special needs, but it becomes apparent right away. They’re beautiful children, and seem plenty smart, but they’re all over the floor, with nanosecond attention spans. One mother with tired eyes and a wary bearing hovers at her son’s elbow the whole time.

  The show starts, and within seconds, Eric’s got them. Instinctively, he’s streamlining his act, making his gags last half as long as usual. He takes a drink of water, calling it, in a goofy, sonorous voice, “WA-WA.” For some reason, this sends the kids into hysterics, so he repeats it. Hysterics, again. He does it a third time, and now they’re doubled over, gasping for air. Eric looks out at the parents, shrugs, winks, and says, “I’ll just keep doin’ this all afternoon, okay?” The parents laugh, maybe for the first time in a while.

  For thirty-five minutes, Eric handles the crowd, improvising deftly as he goes. When one boy walks up excitedly and slugs him in the leg, he takes no notice. When another grabs a prop, Eric turns it into a joke. When he is done, he has actually worked up a sweat. Some parents applaud.

  A little girl in pink walks right up to him and extends a forefinger, straight up in the air. It’s puzzling. Eric meets her eyes. Something indefinable passes between them, something only they understand, and Eric reaches out, seizes that little finger in his big fist, and gives it a shake. The girl breaks into a grin. Then she hugs the most fabulous person she’s ever known in her whole life, the Great Zucchini.

  Postscript: Eric Knaus feared this story would end his career. It didn’t. He had underestimated the willingness of parents to forgive the personal flaws of a man who loved their children, and whom their children loved. The Great Zucchini has more business than ever.

  The First Father

  On the first few pages of My Life, his 2004 autobiography, Bill Clinton recalls his astonishment on reading this story in the Washington Post just a few months after taking office.

  I knew I had discovered an explosive and potentially humiliating fact about the president, something even he had not known. I decided to present it in as dignified a context as possible.

  Didn’t matter. Judging from letters received, half the readers (liberals) were outraged because they thought I had no business embarrassing the new president this way. The other half (conservatives) were outraged because they thought I had buried the scandalous news in an overabundance of tact.

  June 20, 1993

  THE CAR PASSED them fast, not crazy fast but fast like a stranger who did not know the local roads, with their quick turns and occasional slick patches of gravel. Roscoe Gist remembers thinking exactly that, must be a stranger, and noticing a young man’s face behind the wheel.

  Two minutes later he saw the car again. It churned his stomach. The big Buick sedan was upside down on the shoulder, its headlights pillowing out into an alfalfa field, its radio blaring corny country music into the black of night.

  It was May 17, 1946, an overcast Saturday night on Missouri’s Highway 60 halfway between Morehouse and Sikeston. Gist and his wife, Bernice, were returning from the movies. Ronald, the newborn, was asleep in the back seat.

  Gist surveyed the macabre scene. The driver was nowhere. The car doors were closed, but the window was wide open. With dread, Gist inspected the brackish drainage
ditch next to the car; the water couldn’t have been more than 3 feet deep, but an injured man could roll into that muck and drown. In the dark, Gist hunkered down, rolled up a sleeve and raked the channel with his hand, feeling uneasily for cold flesh or wet cloth. Nothing but cattails.

  By now a crowd was gathering, and someone went for the police. Roscoe took Bernice home to nurse the baby, but then he drove back, frankly curious. And so he was there an hour later when someone in uniform yelled “Hey” and dragged the drowned man from the ditch. He was belly down a full 25 yards from his car, far away from where Gist had searched—a well-dressed, sandy-haired fellow with no apparent injuries. But what Gist could not take his eyes off was the young corpse’s hand, balled into a fist, clutching a clump of dry grass and weeds.

  “It was like he had tried to pull hisself out of the water, but didn’t have the strength. You’re just kind of stopped, you see something like that.”

  It can be bewildering how quickly time passes, how you turn around and suddenly you are retired in Oklahoma, and Ronald the baby has four kids from two marriages and is living on a houseboat in San Diego, and now someone is on the telephone asking about the man in the ditch and damned if you don’t remember it like it was the day before yesterday.

  “Where’d you get my name from, anyhow?”

  From the accident report.

  “But… why?”

  He didn’t know. No reason he should know, when you think about it. And so, forty-seven years later, Roscoe Gist is told the identity of the man in the ditch. For a very long time, he says nothing at all.