Golf-Ball-Size Hail

My name is Wayne Newton, but I'm not the entertainer. Any resemblance, et cetera, et cetera.

As a matter of fact, though I was born and raised in Vegas, I've never even been to one of his shows, though the casino where he plays is just blocks from my house and I've been meaning to go. My wife, Tallulah, who isn't an actress, has been after me for years, but something always comes up. Tallulah thinks when we finally do get around to it, we ought to send him a note through the maître d' or our waiter or the cigarette girl. Tallulah thinks he'll read the note right out loud in front of the audience and say, "Wayne Newton's in the audience tonight, folks, so I'm going to do something I've never done before. I'm going to dedicate this next tune to myself." Tallulah's so certain he'll say "tune" rather than "song" she's willing to bet me. I just tell Taloo that I don't believe there's such a thing as cigarette girls in nightclubs anymore. We'll go, I assure her, but I'm not sending up any notes. Stuff like that pretty much always embarrasses me anyway. Little cakes sent to your table with candles burning on them, and the waiter singing "Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you." Like there's no quicker way of announcing that this is your night on the town, a red-letter day in the life. It's practically an admission your life sucks. You might as well take out an ad.

Tallulah doesn't see it that way, of course. In her secret heart I think Tallulah has me down for a wimp, but once burned twice sorry. The trouble with that theory is, I've never even been burned the once. If I was, I (continued on page 212)Golf-Ball-Size-Hail(continued from page 134) either forgot about it or no one ever bothered to remind me. Not my big brother, Napoleon--no, not that Napoleon: Mine was named for the pastry--or anyone else.

(It probably strains credulity, but my daddy was named Elvis. He not only wasn't that Elvis but was actually older than that Elvis. He'd even made his home in the Volunteer State before coming out to meet, court and marry Svetlana, my mother.)

The odd thing, or one odd thing, is that I have never received even one of the other Wayne Newton's misdirected letters, as though the post office knew the difference between us, as if there were a Department of Mistaken Identities, a central bureau where the mail for people like us ("not those people") gets sorted, as if there were an actual special place for also-rans, the close-but-no-cigar crowd, the miss-is-as-good-as-a-mile bunch--our peculiar, coincidental fellowship. Born and raised here, and not even one of his fans or even just some tourist has ever bothered to ring us up, as though we were written off beforehand, as though the fan or tourist had actually bothered to think about it and figured, Nah, can't be, and decided to save the quarter it would have cost him to check it out and stick it in one of the slots.

And who knows what all else? Basically, I don't want to know. Maybe it's that old devil wimp factor in my makeup that prevents me from pouring my money into the machines and keeps me away from the blackjack and poker tables, where I know it isn't just fate or fortune or chance I'd be betting against but the very downright absolute house itself. A man would have to be a fool, et cetera, et cetera.

Anyway, what brings all this up is that Woody Allen's got me so down with his recent troubles and tragic circumstances I can barely think straight anymore. Woody Allen--now there's a guy who bets against the house.

•

"Speaking of Wayne Newton, Wayne," Tallulah said. "Do you think we'll ever have an opportunity to see him perform?"

"Sure we will," I said.

"But when? Why don't we fix on a date certain now?"

"You know what it is, Taloo?"

"What what is?"

"You live in New York, you probably never go to the top of the Empire State Building or out to the Statue of Liberty. Sixty-one percent of the folks in Orlando never saw Disney World. You think people in Paris go up in the Eiffel Tower? They don't. They don't even notice it, they hardly know it's there. They bump into it and they never knew what hit them. They say, 'Oops, excuse me.'"

"Oh, you," she said. "People come from all over the world."

"Tourists."

"But he's right here in town, Wayne Newton."

"Ain't I Wayne Newton enough for you, Tallulah?"

"Don't, Wayne. Don't do that."

I thought of Woody Allen, who, in spite of his troubles, was probably bravely blowing his clarinet right then at Michael's Pub out in New York City, and knew that sooner or later I had to go public with my long-suffering wife.

"Wayne Newton is big medicine," I said. "Don't you know that?"

"Well, I know," she said. "But Tallulah's big medicine, Hildegarde is."

"Both of them are dead," I snapped.

Tallulah is pure-blood Navaho. When she left the reservation she probably had more Athapaskan than English. When Indians blush their faces don't get red like other people's. Actually, their blood shifts and they turn a little sallow. Knowing this, they become even more sallow. They're a proud people. Shame shames them. Tallulah was blushing now. (She wasn't born a Tallulah, and her sister wasn't born a Hildegarde, let alone that Hildegarde. They got their Christian names from the council of elders when they quit the reservation.) My reference to the poverty of their namesakes' medicine took the piss out of her. It wasn't only me who had this thing about the magic of names. The difference between us is that I always feel a little diminished by having a big shot's moniker without being one myself.

When she recovered her composure she started in on me again to fix upon a date certain.

"Oh, all right," I told her, "December 25th then."

"But isn't December of the 25th inst. your Christmas?" Taloo goes to secretarial school at night.

"By golly, Taloo, you're right. You pick."

"October 31. November the 25th."

"Afraid not, kiddo. My Halloween. Our Thanksgiving."

"I don't know what you're so afraid of, Wayne. The man has a cloud over his head, too."

"Now, Taloo," I said. "You watch it, Taloo."

"He does," she said, pronouncing and drawing out the word like a child's mean taunt, nasty as a tattle. "He does," she said again, "he does, too."

"That's just rumors, Tallulah. They say that stuff about everyone out here. Sinatra. The comics."

"No," said the squaw. "What they say about that lot is rumors. Ain't any of them has his name in the records of the Federal Bankruptcy Court."

"That was just bad bookkeeping. That was just unwise investments, lapses of the fiduciary. None of that redounds to the discredit of his arrangements. He still sings the hell out of Danke Schoen. He still packs them in."

"Suppose there are garnishments against his salary. He makes up into the high seven figures, a star like that. Of his magnitude. That brings the pressures and the stresses. It could affect a man's voice forever. It could knock it out of the box. What do you think such a thing would do to you or me? Wayne Newton takes it into his heart he's losing several thousand every time he opens his mouth in song it could quick give him the lockjaw, throw his best notes into disrepair. You saw Suzanne Somers."

"Suzanne Somers?"

"On TV. For the hardware."

"Oh," I said, "that Suzanne Somers." Taloo meant the former sitcom star, not my cousin.

"Well, now she's practically a regular on the Home Shopping Network with her own line of custom jewelry."

It was true. Although I could hardly bring myself to watch, I had seen her on the satellite dish hawking her wares, actually speaking in person to the home shopper and even amiably honking at the caller with Tooty. It near broke my heart. It's true what Neil Diamond says in his song--the higher the top, the farther the drop. He got that right.

Say what you will, there's something fascinating about watching the blessed, touched lives of the singled-out, their fiery, scorched tumble from zenith to the eye-level latitudes of self.

There was something in the astronomy of things. I told all this to Tallulah, the former Injun maiden who had as little English as I had Athapaskan when I met and wooed her, and who, by dint (continued on page 250)Golf-Ball-Size Hail(continued from page 212) of the tough, real instructions of secretarial school--the shorthand and the Palmer and the formal business letters and 70 to 80 and more words per minute without mistakes and without looking, the mastery, I mean, of that infinite keyboard (or, at Taloo's level, even palette) of the 100 different numerals, characters, punctuation marks, underscore keys, percentage, dollar and ampersand signs and all the uppercase, lowercase conditions--was as savvy and street-smart as someone who had never even seen a reservation. A thoroughly ignoble savage these days, wily as a wife.

"So then, I may make a reservation?"

"Sure. Go ahead."

"Wayunn."

"I said go ahead, didn't I?"

"On your birthday?"

"You drive a hard bargain, Taloo."

"Wayne, there's nothing, absolutely nothing, to fear."

"I told you," I said. "Go on, go ahead."

"There's nothing to it, honey. You'll see."

"Listen to me, Taloo. I'll see him. I'll applaud along with everyone else at exactly the right time and won't anybody there take it into his head to shame us. I'll go see him, I'll go hear him, I'll do just about everything but throw our house key wrapped in my underwear up on the stage to him. Only but don't you dare tell me there's nothing to it. That song-singing, bankrupt man up there singing for his creditors, for all his unpaid lawyers and horse veterinarians and pneumonia docs, for the S&Ls and the banks and the back payments on his mortgage, for the I, R and S people and the Douglas County property-assessor people, right on up to the unpaid balance on his American Express card, represents me. There's to it, there's to it, all right!"

"That's Engelbert Humperdinck you're thinking of."

"My grandfather?"

"The singer. He's the one the ladies throw up the keys to their rooms to."

"Don't change the subject, Taloo. And you, an Indian! You of all people! You know how I feel. Or ought to. It isn't as if you were born with a Christian name. It isn't as if you came into the world and your mommy said, 'Oh, look, it's a girl. Let's call her Elizabeth, let's call her Jane.' Am I right, Spirit of the Maize?"

"Please, Wayne, stop it. Stop it, Wayne!"

"Big medicine. Big. Immense heaping spoonfuls!"

"Please," said sad Taloo, "please?"

I hate it when a grown woman cries. All you can do is try to jolly her out of it.

"Oh, come on, Taloo," I said, "I didn't mean it. Hush. Hush, now. Big red Indian girls don't cry. You're supposed to be all stoic and stuff. Goldarnit, Taloo, dagnabit, gal, give us a smile, why not? Grin us a grin here. Dadgum, pretty lady, why you got to go all mourney-face on me? What you got to look that way for?"

I'd slipped into my prospector routine for her, my all-purpose scout, surveyor, dowser, salty-old-hermit mode--my high-plains-drifter one. But she wasn't buying.

I waited till she was calmer and then, tentatively, called her birth name again, only tenderly this time, as a brave of her tribe might have done. Murmuring, "Spirit of the Maize?"

"What?" she asked in the sort of sexy, pouty, crazy, wide-eyed, headbanded, fringed and mini-buckskinned way she put on sometimes, more like an Indian maiden from vaudeville and imagination and the picture on the pound carton of Land O Lakes butter than any real Indian woman. "Whatum great white daddy wantum? Great white dad wantum fetchum reservations for Wayne Newton show on him's birthday?"

It was as inevitable as a syllogism. All men are vulnerable. Woody Allen is a man. Woody Allen is vulnerable.

Taloo made reservations. Getting me to agree had been like pulling teeth, she said. She had thought it would never happen, she said. It was a real occasion when it did. One real occasion deserved another. That's why she insisted it fall on my birthday. I had thought she'd been kidding, or was at least being hyperbolic, merely indulging some vestigial war whoop of the heart.

•

I mean, if I were called Woody Allen, or Lee Harvey Oswald or Hitler, or the name of any of a dozen thousand fate humbled guys, tragically flawed, or maybe with a gene turned up missing in the character, that'd be something else, a different story, a horse of another color. But here I was, only Wayne Newton, misfortune's merest aftershock, a teensy blip in the history of disgrace. What's the big deal? You're dealt a hand like that, you live with it. You don't just pick up, quit Corinth and light out for the territories. As Kenny Rogers (the singer, not my brother-in-law) says, you gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em.

So looked at this way, viewed philosophically, I offered no resistance when Tallulah told me she'd made reservations. Indeed, once it was done and we'd fixed on that famous date certain Taloo so loved throwing around, it was actually me who got anxious and started to make preparations for the evening. I made an appointment to get my hair cut. I shopped for a shirt, a new suit, the first I'd bought in years. Las Vegas ain't Paris, France. It's no fashion capital. The dress here is casual. Very few bother with suits and ties, and if most of the men wear jackets it's because of the air-conditioning. The only people you ever see in a tux are the stars and the waiters and the guys who work the gaming tables. Even the high rollers look like folks got up to go to the ball game. I didn't care. If I were to err it would be on the side of more rather than less, feast rather than famine.

And Taloo, too. I gave her money to have her hair done. I plunked down $175 for a dress, new shoes. I considered a corsage but decided against it. Too prom night.

Well, it was all too prom night, but hey, I'd already lost or at least surrendered that argument. So, gritting my teeth, on the appointed hour of the appointed day I put on my top hat, my white tie and my tails, and me and Taloo sallied forth toward the Strip. It was a nice evening, clear, peculiarly mild for Vegas, balmy, possibly even a little on the cool side. As I say, Newton performs only a few blocks from where we live. We decided to walk.

It's strange. Everyone's seen pictures of Vegas' neon storm, its 2 trillion bulbs like galaxies in some squeezed electronic universe. So intense, so bright is the light here that it seems to give off its own climate. Las Vegas is desert country, of course. You couldn't fill a soup can with its mean average rainfall. And on the Strip, even after one of our rare downpours, the streets are dry not ten minutes after the rain has stopped. On TV, on the local news, we don't have meteorologists. The anchor gives the high and low for the day, and the numbers for Philadelphia, Chicago, Nashville, Detroit--whatever the hometowns happen to be for the tourist contingents in town. And always, snidely with relish, the lows in Atlantic City, the snowfall in inches, small-craft advisories, the golf-ball-size hail that elsewhere has fallen.

So there we were, me and Taloo, not hand in hand but got up in our Sunday-go-to-meeting, almost, out there in the spit and polish of that umbrella of light, practically strutting, looking for all the world either as if we were slumming or fresh from one of the town's joke wedding chapels, like newlyweds.

We passed the Aladdin with its minarets and its great, fat doormen got up as eunuchs and genies. One smiled at me, stepped away from his door and, out of the blue, apropos of absolutely nothing, nothing at all, told me, "Wayne Newton once tried to buy this place but he couldn't, I don't know, come up with the dough--something. Now we never even see him. Somebody's name is mud."

Well. Why was he telling me this stuff? Me, of all people? I tell you, I felt this frisson, this sudden chill. As if there'd been some topsy-turvying in the ozone layer, some climatic breakthrough--new, cool meteorologies under the sequenced lamps on the marquee of the Aladdin Hotel. "Hey," he said, holding Taloo's elbow, "want me to open the door for you anyway?"

"Get away," I said. "Don't touch the Indian."

"He didn't mean anything, Wayne," Tallulah said when we were again on our way. "He's either crazy or drunk. It's nothing. Don't use this as an excuse to ruin our evening."

And I wouldn't have, I had no intention. In for a penny, in for a pound, as we say here in Vegas. Then, there, up ahead, outside the Las Vegas Hilton, plain as the nose, was his sign, the big bold black letters crying out his name--our name--like a headline. I'd seen that sign hundreds of times, but mostly in daylight when it wasn't lit up, and never when the name stood by itself without at least the warm-up act accompanying it. This was like the defiance of a tradition. It was more. It was hubris. A sharp, solid slap in the puss of show business itself.

"Look," I told Taloo, pointing to the sign, "it's a sign."

"Oh, Wayne," she said, "it isn't a sign, it's a sign."

But she'd gathered my meaning, she'd caught my drift. You can take the Indian off the reservation, but you can't take the reservation off the Indian. Something like that. And, beneath the balminess of the pleasant, almost-room-temperature evening, I felt this second frisson. One frisson can generally be explained away, but two in ten minutes? That's definitely new conditions in the world.

The doormen at the Hilton are dressed less exotically than the fellows at the Aladdin. In their tall, stiff hats, long jackets, waistcoats and trousers that tuck into their boots, they look almost like gents in a gothic romance. They're less threatening than genies, traditional, almost conventional. One stepped out to greet us. He touched his forefinger to the brim of his hat. "Good evening, madam," he said, "good evening, sir."

The dollar bill was already folded in my hand.

"This is for you," I said, "here."

"Danke schoen," he said, pronouncing the name of the signature song.

"Wayne Newton is in excellent voice tonight," he said as we started through the door he held open for us. "You'd think he hadn't a care in the world."

"What do you mean?" I demanded.

"Wayne!" Taloo said, pulling me away.

"Whose side are you on, Taloo? You heard him! You heard what he said."

"He's just being polite," Taloo whispered. "They train them to say that. He's just plugging the show."

"I am!" said the doorman. "But you wouldn't, not a care in the world, madam. Woody Allen should have that kind of guts. It would be a better world all around. I say step up to the plate. Instead of moaning in your beer, sir, or giving out interviews and cover stories to every Tom, Dick and Harry, or calling press conferences, do your duty, step up to the plate, get on with it!"

I turned to the doorman 15 feet behind us. "Woody Allen hasn't missed his gig at Michael's Pub since this first started."

"His gig," he laughed, "his gig?"

I took Taloo's arm and moved off through the bright maze of polished slots and green-felt gaming tables, all the clink and clatter of loose change and chips.

We were close to the Showroom, where Tallulah had made reservations.

"I don't know about this, Tallulah," I said. "He heard what you said and you were whispering."

"Some people's hearing is more acute than other people's. On the reservation, when I was a girl, my hearing was very acute."

"Yes?" said the maitre d'.

I looked at my wife. She looked right back at me. I gulped. Literally. I gulped.

"Table for two at 7:30 for Mr. and Mrs. Wayne Newton," I said. The five singles were already folded in my hand.

The guy didn't turn a hair. He didn't. Then he took only three of my singles. They got me, I was thinking. The sons of bitches. They got me again!

"You and madam can have something at the bar while you're waiting. I'll let you know when your table is ready."

The place was practically empty. All they had were tables. Our reservations were for the dinner show; we were almost the only ones there. At the few tables that were occupied, two or three people in casual street clothes were counting chips, laying the blue, red and green chips out in piles like runs in rummy. I would have left right then and right there, but Taloo was holding tight to the sleeve of my suit coat. She still had acute hearing. She could hear a lizard step on a stick, or hear it cross a leaf a hundred yards off. She could hear the human heart.

"Oh, what a good idea," my wife told the guy. "I'd just love some champers, wouldn't you, Wayne?"

"You're playing right into their hands, you know that, don't you?" I said when she held out her champagne glass for me to clink. 'Jesus, Taloo, you saw the dust on the bottle when he opened it. They don't sell four glasses of this shit from one New Year's to the next."

"Oooh. The bubbles tickle my nose."

From where I was sitting I could see the Showroom fill up.

"You look so nice in your suit, Wayne."

"Yeah, well, the suit was a mistake. I'm the only one even wearing a tie in here."

"It's a nice tie."

"You think? It doesn't have any writing on it like their T-shirts."

"Your table is ready, Mr. Newton. If you'll just follow me."

He'd put us up near the front. We were practically ringside. Although we rarely hit the hot spots, I'd have to say they were probably some of the best seats in the house. I should have seen what was coming.

•

I have to admit, the food and drink they serve in these places are terrific bargains. Well, it's not hard to figure. They're setting you up is what. These places, even swell places like the Hilton, make their big dough on the gambling. The heaping portions they give you, the opulent guest rooms and suites, are loss leaders. All that firestorm of electric and neon is. So I should have seen what was coming, I should. And, in a way, maybe I did. Sure I did. Or what was that dread all about? The sense I'd had not only all evening and not even only since she'd started nagging me about it but even before the Sunday-go-to-slaughter of my shirt and my suit, her hairdo and dress. Maybe ever since Wayne Newton out of Svetlana by Elvis came to consciousness out of, by, with and through all the other thoroughbred prepositionals of my and Tallulah's star-crossed fates. This was the date certain, I was certain.

Taking no solace, not letting up even after a trio of humming waiters brought out, shining brightly in the light-dimmed room, a blazing birthday cake, the waiters' voices amplified by the black battery packs hidden on their hips and the dark collar mikes pinned to their tuxedos as they ostentatiously weaved in and out, past and through the tables in the packed, sold-out Showroom, coming toward ours, close, closer, closer, until, at the last minute, they suddenly swerved away from our own and set the cake down a few tables over, where they broke out of their hum and into "Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you." Relieved at first, of course, but taking no solace, toying with the good food, picking at the delicious appetizer, picking at the splendid salad, nursing the grand soup, stalling, understand, trying to ward off for a little while, postpone the moment, a moment when they would be at our table, singing for $5 or $10 or $15 or however many dollars Tallulah had given them to sing my birthday so that me and everyone else in the room, too, could know the measly bottom lines of my saved-up, new-suit, shined-shoe life.

So that was at least part of the dread. I was letting all this great chow get cold and warming the chill off my lettuce, and. ...

It's not that I'm shy. I'm not shy. Otherwise I could have changed my name, Taloo says, I always had that option. Although I've told her at least a thousand times that I couldn't have.

"You could," she tells me, "you could change your name."

"Let him change his."

"You could. Why couldn't you?"

"I am what I am."

All that's part of the dread, too. It's all part of the dread. Meanwhile the busboys are trying to clear the dishes from the tables. I'm not finished, I tell them, I'm still eating my lamb chop, I'm still sipping my wine. But the show, they say, it's almost time for the show.

"Damn it, not yet. I paid good money for this stuff. I have no intention of wolfing it down."

"You can take my dishes away," Taloo says, looking at them desperately and trying, I even think so at the time, to send some frantic signal, almost the way somebody kidnapped, say, and held at gunpoint by her captors might make the squeezed, gnarled semaphore of her urgency to the attendant wiping her windows or filling her tank, or push the international body English for personal emergency at the cop who stops her for speeding.

It was done in an instant. I saw it all. There wasn't a thing I could do about it. Busboy number one hands off to busboy number two. Busboy number two high-signs our waiter. Our waiter makes some prearranged pass at the other hummer-singers in the outfit, pulls a lighter from one pocket of his tux and a cake candle from the other, plants the blunt end of the candle into the dwindled summit of my mashed potatoes, ignites the business end with the cigarette lighter, gives the two other guys the pitch, and the three of them render the official Las Vegas battery-pack-amplified, mike-augmented version of Happy Birthday to You to me, to Tallulah, to the people around us, to the whole damn still-lit-up room.

It goes:

"Happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday, Wayne Newton,

Happy birth-day to yooo!"

Everyone in the room joins in.

Then the room goes dark. Then this disembodied voice, come up out of the bowels of the universe could be, the burning bush, proclaims, "Ladies and gentlemen, the management of the magnificent showroom in the fabulously beautiful Las Vegas hilton takes pride and great pleasure in introducing the star of our show: The one, the only--Mr.!--Wayne!--Newton!"

And two spotlights go zigging and zagging around the room, are joined by a third, punching limelight holes in the darkness and filling them in again the second they pass. How they manage to avoid colliding is a mystery.

I can't help it. Involuntarily, I am thrilled. The hairs stand up. Whatever it is about show business, drumrolls and fanfares, awe, wonder, something ever-so-faintly religious, the sprung, suddenly unbanked fires of some brassy human patriotism come spritzing up out of the wellsprings and I'm a goner, like someone cheering at a parade, as into it as any fan in the room who has all his albums, the serenade of waiters forgiven, forgotten, when suddenly, almost like a sour note, somebody says something and the music of the band unravels, collapses.

•

It takes me a moment to reconstruct it, to hear what I have already heard, to realize that it's Wayne Newton himself who has spoken, none other. The three spotlights have found him, converging on him like a special effect in movies, the trebled light focusing him so clearly, so sharply, he is almost difficult to look at. I have the impression that were I to touch him in that light I would cut myself on him.

He stands forth in the limelight in a tuxedo so carefully fit to his body it seems--the jacket and trousers--as if it's been cut from a single, continuous sheet of fabric. For a cummerbund he wears an enormous strap and buckle of silk and diamonds that looks for all the world like the belt a championship wrestler would wear. "But it's not my birthday," he says cheerfully, "it's not. It's not my birthday. My birthday isn't for another five months yet. Who put you up to this, audience? Steve and Eydie put you up to this? Buddy? Frank? Bobby Goulet?"

Although I can't make out who it is in the absolute darkness that embraces but does not pierce Wayne Newton's customized limelight, someone must be there because the entertainer inclines his head in an attitude of attention toward the right edge of his spot, losing, it seems, an ear, a piece of his head.

"What's that?" he says. "Say what?" He leans even farther into the darkness, taking off half his face. "Really?" he says. "Really, no kidding? How do you like that, what d'ya know?

"Bring up the houselights. Houselights, please."

All the lights in the Showroom come on.

"Where?" Wayne Newton says. "Show me."

Busboy number two points right in my direction. He's still holding one of our dinner plates in his hand.

"Hey," Wayne says, "are you really Wayne Newton? Are you?"

I can't speak, I'd choke if I tried. My mouth feels as if it holds three tongues. All I can do is nod.

"Let's give him a great big Las Vegas Hilton Showroom round of applause. Wayne Newton, ladies and gentlemen!

"Come on up here, Wayne! Wayne Newton, come on up!"

Inexplicably, the houselights go down and the spotlight pins me to my chair, its beam so narrow and focused that not even Taloo is illuminated.

"Come on, I won't bite you, come on up. Really," he coaxes, "come on. Folks, I think Mr. Newton needs a little encouragement." And starts this rhythmic applause like they do. Clap clap. Clap clap clap. Everyone in the room takes it up. Clap clap. Clap clap clap.

"Go on up, Wayne," Tallulah tells me, "be a sport."

But I'm frozen in place. I couldn't have moved if I'd wanted to. It's my worst dreams come true. Worse than my worst dreams.

"You did this, Taloo," I snarl at her. "This is all on your head."

Then they did something I couldn't have expected. Using a device they brought in from the wings, a couple of stagehands lowered this sort of ramp from the stage to the dance floor, and Wayne Newton started down off the stage toward me. For some reason I couldn't let that happen, and I forced myself to stand, rising through and pushing against layers of heavy limelight like someone drowning might have kicked, flailed and pulled toward air.

And something I'd never have expected: The dread was gone. As absent from my ambience and atmosphere as enemy bombers from the sky after the all-clear has sounded. I wasn't angry or embarrassed, or wondering what was going to happen to me once I was up on that stage. I was thinking, My goodness, they have a ramp for this sort of thing, correcting myself even while it occurred to me, the perception clean, bright and burning as the light that led me. No, not for this sort of thing at all--for the showgirls to come down into the audience, the path the chanteuse uses when she approaches the fat, balding guy to sit in his lap. Amazed not only by the infinite number of tools available to us but by the various improvisational uses to which they could be put in an emergency. And, My, I'm thinking, mankind is such hot stuff. Me too, I'm thinking.

And then, all of a sudden, guided, emboldened by the guy in the light booth expertly manipulating the spots, I was strutting toward my fate. They were still clapping, louder than before even. I don't even need the ramp, I was thinking, I could get up on that stage using nothing but the damn limelight itself. But checking myself, thinking as soon as I thought it, Uh-oh, ain't this just what they mean by hubris? Checking myself, trying to take it back but knowing it was already too late, that a miss is as good as a mile, that all errors are fatal errors, that the great Manitou doesn't hear apologies.

Knowing one's sin, calling it by its name, means nothing, nothing at all. Hubris had done in much better guys than me. So what that the spotlight didn't quit at just burning my skin but went right on through my fancy new clothes? So what that it may actually have raised my temperature a few degrees? So what that I choked on the limelight now, that it oppressed my lungs like fog, damp air, that I coughed on its queer, electric stink? So what that I spit out my hubris the instant I recognized that that's what it was? I kept on coming, didn't I?

Like Woody made no apologies, offered hardly any justifications, or even explanations, for what he did. Poor Woody, poor Woody Allen. You can't quarrel with the heart, he said, or with glands. Something like that. And me, I just kept on coming, and kept on coming.

•

Until I was up there with the man himself, and we were two discrete beams of limelight now in the otherwise darkened house.

Wayne Newton stuck his hand out for me to shake. We must have looked, in our spots, like the two interlocking circles on a Master Card.

"Well, pardner," he said, "never thought I'd meet you!"

He put his hand mike up to my mouth.

"Never thought I'd meet you!" I said.

He chuckled. "Hey," Wayne Newton said, "how do I know this isn't some six-degrees-of-separation thing or something? Have you got any identification?"

He held out his microphone again.

"I am what I am," I murmured. Unaccustomed to using one of those things, I actually jumped when my voice sounded out like a thunderclap. The audience thought it was some kind of fright-take. They laughed and applauded.

"No, but really," Wayne Newton said, "have you? I ask for a reason."

"Identification?"

"Yeah. A driver's license, your Social Security. Even a credit card."

I took my Nevada driver's license out of my wallet and passed it through our twin circles of light.

He examined it like a cop. I reached across for his mike.

"You fixing to give me a ticket?" I asked, and everyone in the Showroom laughed. A man could get used to this, I thought. Try to remember this, I told myself. It's never going to happen again, ever. Ever. Unhappiness covered over the dread and the euphoria and even the thought of my hubris and I was this empty vessel of expectation, like a guy on a table waiting for his massage.

But he wasn't listening to me or, when he finally spoke, speaking to me, either. He was addressing the audience, and if I were still part of the show, it was because I had turned into a prop--or no, not a prop, exhibit number one. It was that Nevada driver's license that was the prop.

"I knew there was some mistake. I knew there was!" Wayne Newton said. The man in the booth covered him in still another spotlight, splashing him in a corona of light. "Hey," he said, "a man in my position, a man in my position runs through attorneys, business managers, accountants. Books get scrambled, so futzed up it'd take the head librarian at the Library of Congress to straighten them out. Honest mistakes, some lakeside property here, a piece of pasture for a few horses there, a chunk of investment capital somewhere else, getting, spending and the press of business, and before one can say Jack Robinson one's creditors are all over one. You're a singer and recording artist, you don't read half the things you put your hand to. Before you know it you're filing for bankruptcy on the advice of counsel."

Slowly, deliberately as someone turning toward danger, Wayne Newton, pulling his with him, joined me inside my circle of light.

We were, we were candescent! He's an old trouper and, as for me, not only was all this new to me but, as I say, I could have lived another hundred years and it would never have happened to me again.

What can I tell you? I was blinded by the terrific light. I stumbled in light--the wine and champagne, the applause, the attention, the height of the stage--floundering there in the Vegas desert like a fish introduced.

Wayne Newton in my circle of light, up in my face. Newton and Newton. The Wayne Newton boys. The real Wayne Newton is talking. Only talking to me now, the mike still there in his hand, though you could tell from the angle by which he held it he wasn't conscious of it anymore. And me, blind in the bright I could feel like a heat wave, knowing as a blind man knows things, by the ricochet of presence, the modification of voice.

"So I knew there had to be a mistake. Well, but what the hell. They show you a water bill, they tell you you owe on a place with an address you don't even recognize except it must be in some part of town you're sure you ain't ever been unless maybe to pass through in your limo when the Strip is crowded and the chauffeur drives you to the club the roundabout way.

"I mean it never even occurred to me. Really. It never did. Except in some idly probing, vaguely speculative sense on the drifting borders of sleep, say, some only mildly interesting daydream any even only-heads-up resident of a place like this might entertain once in a while. Like, oh, well, Vegas ain't exactly any shining city on a hill or something, never mind the bright lights, its cutesy wedding chapels, its resort-endowed churches, synamagogues and all its whatnots. What, it ain't connected, it ain't? It don't draw--no matter how all its excellent, highly skilled PR people, world-class security and advanced top-drawer, top-gun sheriffs and blue-ribbon gaming commissions squeaky-clean its image--a certain (no disrespect) element? Pshaw and fiddle-dee-dee, it draws its element. Never mind the girls are inspected and the chicken ranches on the outskirts of town have this reputation that the Johns go there as much to take the waters as to get themselves laid. I mean, let's not kid ourselves, folks, this town is about money. So of course it draws a certain element, of course it does.

"When they show me a water bill, or want to collect on garbage, on sewage or some piddling fee for a hunting or fishing license I know I don't owe, I figure, what the hell, what's a guy to do? It's just your simple nickel-and-dime vigorish on some ordinary human scale. It's actually a little touching, if you want to know. Because greed is no respecter of the numbers, of the dollars and cents. It takes whatever it can get from whomever it can get it from.

"I don't make a stink, I don't put up a fuss. It just never even occurs to me I'm hauling water for some other poor Wayne Newton son of a gun. I just step up to the plate, pay the two dollars and get on with it.

"I don't worry my pretty little head.

"I don't even think about it.

"Until----

"Until----

"Well, until happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday Wayne Newton, happy birthday to you. Which I overhear while I'm still in the wings waiting to be called on, waiting to run out and hit my mark when the house goes to black and the spotlight finds me."

I don't even remember when he ceased to look at me, when he stepped out of his spotlight and took it back with him like this wide lariat of light. I don't even know that, left on my own, I am actually a few degrees cooler, maybe even a bit chilly. All I can be sure of is that Mr. Newton's mood has changed, that, though I don't understand his reasons, he may actually be a little sore at me, as if, well, as if he'd been willing to write off abstract vigorish and platonic greed but was incapable of dealing with them when they came embodied in an actual true-to-life, full-blooded, full-scale human being.

And before I knew what was happening he had me involved in this sort of zany catechism, this, well, minstrel interlocutory. (I don't recall how it happened, how I came by it or who gave it to me, but somehow there was a microphone of my own in my hands.)

The real Wayne Newton was speaking.

"Your name is Wayne Newton?"

"Yes, sir."

The audience in the Showroom howled with laughter.

Wayne Newton said, "Were you at any time billed for services or did there ever come a time when you believed or suspected that you were being improperly charged for items and obligations that you knew you had not yourself properly incurred, even though you may have recognized that the name on the invoice was apparently the same name as your own?"

"No, sir."

They were wheezing, slapping their thighs, they were banging their tables.

"Not so much as a phone bill?"

"No, sir."

"Flowers? Opening-night bouquets for a fellow performer?"

"No, sir. I got no call to send flowers to fellow performers."

"Congratulatory telegrams? Break a Leg? Have a Hernia? Catch Flu? Get Mumps and Die?"

I just looked at him.

It seemed that they couldn't get enough of me. Maybe it was my timing, I was thinking.

"So no phone bills? No roses and telegrams? No complimentary gift certificates for casino chips in $1000, $3000 or $5000 amounts?" Wayne Newton said.

"Absolutely not. No, sir! Certainly not!" I waited for the laugh. Nothing happened. "I'm just an ordinary working man, sir," I put in. "I don't even have that kind of money." It was my best delivery, the best reading I knew how to give the line. They sat on their hands. Dummy, I thought angrily, miserably, what do you expect with such lousy material?

And, just as quickly as I had entered whatever delusion it was that had permitted me to believe I was anything but a kind of window of opportunity for this guy, I snapped out of it and was only another Wayne Newton again. I'm not exaggerating when I say I sensed that the mood of the audience had shifted, that it had become restless. I sensed even Tallulah's restlessness.

"Well," Wayne Newton said, "that's about that then, kiddo. Even though I only found out about you by accident this evening, I want you to know that I'm sick and tired of carrying you. How do I know you ain't the straw that broke the camel's back? Once I built a tower to the sun," he said, "my, how that tower could climb. Yeah, yeah," Wayne Newton said, "once I built a tower, now it's done. Sure," he said, "six bits here, a dollar and a half somewhere else, $17.39 down between the sofa cushions, and all of a sudden I'm a known human bankrupt."

As I've tried on occasion to tell my wife, Tallulah, there's a pattern in show-business, something between ritual and timing. You can't explain it, whatever it is--"mood" is as good a word as any--that controls this stuff, but somehow I knew Wayne Newton was through with me, that even if I'd tried to express dismay or answer his charges, it was out of my hands, that they'd probably turned off my mike.

At the same time that I understood that they never let you go away empty-handed!

Prizes, there'd be prizes. He'd tell me he'd only been kidding. He'd tell me what a good sport I'd been.

"Franco," Wayne Newton said, "put this gentleman's bill on my tab. If, as a bankrupt, I still have a tab. He's a good sport," he told one and all. "Let's give him a great big Las Vegas Hilton Showroom round of applause. Wayne Newton, ladies and gentlemen!"

My chest cramped. Sharp pains shot up and down my left arm. Even though I was being led down the ramp, conducted toward gravity by some big gorgeous showgirl suddenly materialized beside me, I felt this dizziness, this horrible shortness of breath.

"Oh, and happy birthday," the real Wayne Newton called after me, "many happy returns."

I didn't acknowledge his good wishes. I couldn't.

"Oh, yeah," he said, "many happy returns."

•

Maybe because I stumbled. Maybe because the guy working the spot in the light booth saw I was in trouble. Maybe because every trade makes its preparations for contingency. Or maybe just because it's one thing for them to find your table with the houselights full up and another for them to find it again in the dark. Or maybe, maybe really, because the journey forth is always simpler than the journey back, the spotlight had been extinguished and the Showroom was lighted up again like any ordinary restaurant.

Here and there throughout the room people were still applauding. When we reached the dance floor the showgirl guiding me squeezed my arm and gave me a sisterly kiss on the cheek before handing me off to someone else, probably Franco, who waited at the bottom of the ramp to escort me back to the table. First, though, he held out the bill for the show, for our drinks and our dinner, in his hand. Automatically, I move to accept it, and at just that moment he ripped it in half, tore the two halves in four pieces, the four into eight, building this confetti of forgiven obligation.

The son of a bitch balled it up and lobbed it at me. It settled about my head, in my hair, along the shoulders of my new suit like freak weather, like snow, dangerous ice, and I felt this chill.

Wayne Newton, behind me, rendered Happy Birthday and For He's a Jolly Good Fellow--you know, the Good Sport medley--a cappella.

The applause was louder than ever.

The people a few tables down who had earlier that evening received the blazing birthday cake and been the subject of the waiters' initial serenade (while I sat squirming) gave it up for me. They waved their forearms in a furious circular motion. They went "whoo whoo whoo whoo whoo."

Tallulah, risen at our table, gave me a standing ovation. I hardly saw her for my tears.

"Come on, pal," Franco said, "I'll take you to her."

I removed his hand from my arm and, when he turned toward where Taloo still stood, I just kept on going toward the exit.

"No, Wayne," Taloo cried, "over here. Over here."

Franco, thinking maybe I was lost, doubled back for me. I shook him off. I still felt tiny shards of the bill he'd torn up stinging my scalp. They lay along my new duds like chips off a cold humiliation. It was the evening's fourth or fifth frisson. Thick and fast now, a blizzard of frissons, frissons like a stalled front.

"Wayne," Taloo called, "Wayne? Wayne?" Then, taking it to a higher court, she appealed, "Where's he going, Mr. Newton?" I didn't even have to look. Her voice, her voice was blushing. Our time together and city ways had leached all stoicism from her. Business college had, dictation, those 80-plus words per minute she typed, the time she spent in front of her computer terminal. Even the twice-vitiate magic of her assumed name. Where's he going, Mr. Newton, where's he going? Pathetic. The whole goddamn room was lit up! I was heading for the exit sign, a visible, moving target, for Christ's sake! Where were the vaunted skills of her people? This was one neutralized, nullified Navaho.

Still, she couldn't let it go.

"Stop him, Mr. Newton," she called. "Oh, please stop him!" as fish-out-of-water as the time we were both caught napping and didn't stand for the Hallelujah Chorus, or clapping her head off before the symphony was finished, or in the museum gift shop one time when she asked the lady behind the counter if they stocked reproductions of those cute poker-playing dogs. Out of place in this venue, too, a Las Vegas casino, classless as a filling station. I don't know who I felt more embarrassed for--Tallulah, myself or Wayne Newton.

"Come back, Wayne. Please, Wayne," Taloo cried out, "we haven't seen the show yet!"

If only he hadn't responded. If only he hadn't complied. If only he'd remembered just where he was and that at this casino alone there must have been two or three people a night who'd gotten in over their heads and went belly-up and would have to make arrangements just to handle their hotel bill. Maybe he was thinking of his own sad story. Let's give him the benefit. Let's say he was thinking of his own sad story. His unpaid bills, all those songs he had yet to sing before he even began making a dent in what he still owed to his creditors, all those doctors and lawyers and IRS folks and now maybe even me and Taloo for our drinks and our dinners. Maybe he was thinking of everyone with their hands down his throat. Maybe he didn't mean what he said. Maybe he didn't even know what he was saying. Oh, if only he didn't know what he was saying!

"Hey," he shouted, "you! You know what you are? You know? You're not even fit to be in the same room as Woody Allen!"

•

If I ain't actually sobbing, there's salt in my mouth. I'm gagging on the vulnerable phlegms and secretions. How is it practically all anyone in this town has to do is just look at me or chat me up for a few minutes to recognize my troubled bottom lines? From the humblest doormen to the biggest stars. One look and my name's down in flames next to the Woodman's. How is this? What is it with us? Do flawed, fate-humbled guys like us wear our schmutzig genes on our sleeves, or what?

I'm thinking these things. You can do this. Taloo is standing at our table acting out, carrying on, Wayne Newton is still up there on the stage, and me, I'm passing right by the cashier, heading straight for the exit, already within earshot of the first crisp slap of the cards, all the metallic noise of the gambling, the shrill din of the literal bells, whistles, clacks and whirs of all that money machinery and, choking on my wet foreboding and grief, posing ultimate, eschatological questions.

I don't take it in that I'm in the hotel lobby making a spectacle, I don't take it in that I'm in the foyer, I don't take it in that Taloo is right there behind me. I don't take in the doorman who snaps to attention to open the big door for us, or that this ain't the same doorman I did business with before, the one with the acute hearing who urged me to step up to the plate and get on with it and then laughed to break the bank in Monte Carlo when I said "gig" and mentioned Michael's Pub in passing.

I didn't even take it in when the new man (but still dressed in the same Heath-cliff suit--which I also thought I hadn't taken in--as the first one was wearing) held an open umbrella over our heads, mine and Taloo's (who I now noticed for the first time), and asked if he could get us a cab.

He had to repeat the question.

"What, a cab? No, no cabs."

"But, sir," he said, "it's pouring rain, sir. You'll catch your deaths."

"The fresh air," I muttered. "Too stuffy in there."

"But, sir," he said.

"All right," I said, "they cleaned me out! Are you satisfied? I'm as bankrupt as what's his name."

Didn't even take in the rain. Which, as it happens, was not appreciable at that moment. And it was true what I'd said, it had been stuffy in the hotel. Despite the air-conditioning. Although only now, in the cool air--which I hardly noticed--did I notice retroactively.

"Brr," said Taloo.

"What? What?"

"It's so chilly."

"You think?"

"Don't you?"

"As a matter of fact."

"This isn't Las Vegas weather."

"Is that your considered, Indian opinion?"

"Wayne!" Taloo said.

"Don't call me that."

"It's raining too hard. It's coming down cats and dogs."

Sometimes in the desert you get these freak bouts of weather. We were walking under a cloudburst.

"Let's get a taxi," Taloo said. "Please, Wayne? I am soaked to the skin. It's so cold."

"Sure," I said. I'd noticed how cold it was, but I'd been having those frissons all evening. Maybe I was used to them. "All right," I told Tallulah, "I'll flag one down." But there wasn't a cab to be had.

In this weather they were all taken. It was a traffic jam of occupied taxis.

"There's lightning and thunder," said Tallulah. "Let's get in out of this."

"We're both soaked to the skin. We'd catch pneumonia if we went into air-conditioning now."

"Please," she said.

"We're almost there," I told her. "We're better off if we just make a dash for it. That way we could get out of these wet clothes."

"It's ruined my perm. My perm is all ruined."

"Come on," I said. "Run for it!"

"Oh," my wife squealed, "my poor dress."

"I think we turn at the corner. Isn't that our corner? Isn't that where we turn?"

"I don't--I don't--" Taloo said, out of breath. "I can't see a thing."

It was true. The terrific deluge had obscured everything but itself. The Strip was practically extinguished, its fantastic neon flares, all its primary pyrotechnics muffled as the blunt, exhausted tones of late-autumn foliage, indirect lighting. You couldn't hear traffic, ambulances.

At the corner--maybe it was our corner--I turned. I pulled Taloo after me. Huffing and puffing, she pulled up short, stooped, placed a hand on each thigh. If anything, it was raining harder than ever.

"Taloo, please," I begged. "It's only a little farther. I promise you. On my life, Taloo. We can't stop now, for God's sake, we'll goddamn drown. All right, rest a minute, catch your breath. That's right. Are you rested? All right, let's please beat it out of here."

I tugged on her arm, but she stumbled. I think she said she couldn't take another step.

"We don't have to run," I said. "We'll walk. Come on now, Taloo. Taloo, listen to me, you don't have to run. We'll just stroll."

I felt her resist, pull against me.

Then I felt a sting across my face. My first thought was that Tallulah was slapping me. Then I felt other blows, across my throat, in my own ruined hair, on my face, on my hands wherever I threw them up to protect myself. They were sharp, they pricked me, they bit, they cut into my flesh. I had to be bleeding. My skin felt whetted, honed, stripped, filed down to bone. I couldn't think why she was doing this to me.

Though she hadn't touched me, of course.

She was collapsed at my feet.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the cloudburst was over, the quirky, arbitrary sky avalanche. Although this time the streets would not be dry ten minutes later. There were flash floods in the roads and gutters but the stars were as distinct and bright as I'd ever seen them. They twinkled like stars in a nursery rhyme.

Tallulah lay collapsed at my feet. I knew she was dead. The queerest, oddest thing. What I noticed first was that she was still wearing her high heels. High heels, I thought. You'd think, if she was going to have to run like that, she'd take them off. She should have worn moccasins. Or at least gone barefoot. Typical, I thought. I thought, pathetic. This seemed stranger to me than that her head was on a pillow of huge diamonds. That immense diamonds covered part of her face. Well, I thought with some satisfaction, diamonds. Diamonds were a step up from beads and trinkets, from hand mirrors and shiny coins. But still, I thought, it's betraying one's birthright.

Although, of course, they weren't really diamonds. Diamonds weren't nearly that big. That I'd ever thought they were diamonds was part of the same illusion as Taloo's sharp, stinging blows.

It was hail. It was golf-ball-size hail. And on closer inspection I saw that even that was hyperbole. Golf-ball-size hail. It's what you hear all the time. But I bet that in the whole history of climate there hasn't been enough golf-ball-size hail fallen to supply one lousy driving range. Yet that's all you hear. "Golf-ball-size hail. Golf-ball-size hail."

I tell you, it's a sin to be called out of your name, a kind of swearing, a sort of cursing.

I'm Wayne Newton, but not that Wayne Newton. As Tallulah was never that Tallulah, or ever any Tallulah, really. It's a sin, it's a sin and it's tragic, too. Never to have your own good name, or to have it taken away from you.

So I feel for the Woodman. As I grieve for myself. As I mourn for Tallulah, nee Spirit of the Maize. Whose whole crop of hope was wiped out on the night of the golf-ball-size hail.

"It's true what Neil Diamond says in his song--the higher the top, the farther the drop."

"'I'll go see Wayne Newton. I'll do everything but throw him our house key wrapped in my underwear.'"