When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot (Part 3)

(Continued from Part 2)

 

Roger read in a newspaper that Hoffman was going to shoot a film somewhere in the Midwest and that he’d be on location for two weeks.

“Why didn’t you push my head up?” she said, showing me the article.

Even though I’d known all along that such a development was inevitable, I was nonetheless shaken by this news. It took no small effort to collect myself sufficiently to say: “I was going to tell you, but I thought I’d wait until the last minute because I wasn’t sure the part would work out and because I knew how painful a separation now will be for us. I didn’t want to make you sad before I had to.”

But she was happy. Clapping her hands she said, “I’m so glad to know you lastly clambered over your jaded salanjastiker hippodrome.”

“Well,” I said, “ let’s not get ahead of ourselves, it could be just a fleeting thing.”

Needing a place to get lost for two weeks, and with nowhere else to go, it was left for me to seek accommodations at the car wash. And the night before I departed Roger helped me pack my things. When we were done she went to the kitchen and brought back a bottle of cheap champagne she’d concealed in the back of the refrigerator.

“This is a time for jubilating,” she said, pulling the cork herself. Then, touching my glass with hers, she said, “Breakfast with eggs, Duster!”

As you can imagine, the following days were either bad or worse than bad. Sleeping in various vehicles in a lot adjoining the wash, I showered and did my laundry standing behind cars on the conveyor belt. And missing her terribly, the fact that I couldn’t call the apartment because I’d never been able to afford a phone was torture for me. I could only hope that she was okay.

Finally, mercifully, the two weeks were up and I went home.

Hearing my key in the lock, Roger came to the door with one of my “birds” perched on top of her head and holding another newspaper. Without a word, she shoved the paper at me before I’d even crossed the threshold. It was open to a story about Hoffman. Some kind of budget issue had arisen and production on his film had been suspended. During the hiatus Hoffman was staying in New York. The paper had been printed on the date he arrived.

He’d been here for a week!

Putting the paper down I met her eyes and saw that they were red and swollen.

“Where were you?” she said. ” A whole plus seven — and twenty-four as well.”

When I had no quick answer she said, “You’re doing an exquisite triathlon, isn’t it?”

You will appreciate that, as heart wrenching as her question was, my principle emotion at that moment was relief.

“Darling, Darling,” I said, “No way. There’s no way I would ever betray you like that. No, I’m not having an illicit liaison. How could you think such a thing? I’m playing an unhappy man and to stay in character I deprived myself of your company — for as long as I could bear it anyway. It’s just a coincidence that it was exactly one week.

Roger stepped toward me and buried her face in my abdomen.

“I was frightful,” she said

She was trembling and so was I. We stood holding each other for a very long time.

Determined from then on to be more careful, I made a special effort to monitor what she might read, see or hear. But I couldn’t cover everything. Just a few days later we were awakened by the radio alarm clock and immediately heard on a newscast that the budget problem had been resolved and that Hoffman was back on location. Fleeing to the kitchen to find something to kill myself with, I could feel Roger right behind me. I expected flying dishes. What I got was a juicy kiss.

“You didn’t have to submit a misleader about being Dustin Hoffman,” she said. “Why did you think you had to be duplicacious with me?”

I was stunned. Had my wildest dreams come true? Was it possible that Roger had come to love me for myself after all? I couldn’t believe it. Nor could I believe the sex that was
to follow.

I always knew Roger was hot when (it was her signal to me) she lay down on the bed on her stomach, raised her skirt and floated an air biscuit. But that morning’s air biscuit resonates for me to this day. Indeed, it will be forever etched in my memory, not only for its remarkable housekeeping application (it worked to clear the apartment of all vermin for almost a month), but because it served to set the stage for the most incredible orgasm I’ve ever had.

I’ve never been able to faithfully describe that orgasm. If I report that before it I’d had no idea how much sheer joy there was to feel in sex, that never in my life have I known so pure an ecstasy, I don’t begin to do it justice or to convey how, in the throes of it, I felt myself transported to a place beyond time and that, floating free as something like total spirit, I was privy for an instant to the deepest secrets and most puzzling mysteries of creation. (In that apocalyptic moment I actually understood, for example, why Chuck Norris was on the planet.)

And I can say this notwithstanding the fact that the orgasm was somewhat premature — I was still standing over the bed and fully clothed when it happened.

Anyway, when it was done and I lay down next to her, happily exhausted, basking in the afterglow, I was ready to drop my guard and reveal my true self to her in all its emptiness. Brushing away her hair to find her face, which took a awhile, I was about to speak when she said:

“You’ll never assume the crush I had with you.”

“?”

“I saw ‘Our Picnics in Needles Park’ six times and ‘Bobby Dearest’ eleven times. God, Alfredo, how I wanted to sit on your head!”

If, only minutes earlier, I’d discovered what it must feel like to win the lottery, now I knew the depths of despair. Even to think about commencing a new deception was beyond my strength.

I didn’t know what to do.

Just a few days later, and too weary at this point to bother checking the TV listings, the matter was taken from my hands. Pacino suddenly turned up on a live talk show we were watching. When he came on, Roger looked at me, then back at the screen and then at me again.

“How are you doing that?” she said.

When I had no response she bolted from the room and was gone for twenty minutes. She must have lapsed into her semiconscious thing because I could hear that strange clucking sound (which was a lot louder than usual). When she returned she stood directly in front of me with her arms akimbo. (I could tell her arms were akimbo because her elbows were sticking out of her hair at the same 45-degree angle.)

This time there was no mistaking it, she was pissed.

“You haven’t been Al Pacino either,” she said.

“No, Honey, I haven’t.”

Where once Roger had contemplated me with an unabashed reverence, as though an aureole surrounded my face, now she looked at me as though I was the lowest form of nature’s creepy crawly creations.

“I’ve known it,” she said. “You’re a pathoprecocious person. You’re a hypothetical liar. Well, don’t bother to make up something improved because it’ll be too little and without much else.”

“Sweetheart…”

“I mean it,” she said. “I’m cognisacious of the person you really are now. I’ve been expecting it for days.”

Yes, I was ready to say ruefully, I’m Fred the Fraud. I’m Sid the Shit. I’m Deforest the Deceiver.

“You’re Emilio Estevez,” she said. “You’re Emilio Estevez and you’re ashamed of yourself. Why? Why, Emilio? I know you aren’t a word that people keep inside the house, but yesterday when my suspicionings aroused me and I said to myself, ‘Roger, you’re a chimp, this can’t be broccoli you’re smelling’, I went to a laberarium and found you in a book. It said you were a ‘thirdly ratinated thesspassian who sometimes didn’t stink up the place’. Wouldn’t I co-habituate with Emilio Estevez? Am I so stuffed-up, or what the fuck is this?”

“Rog…”

“If only you’d had the retegritude to level yourself for me. But now…. Oh Emilio, I could never stay with a man who has so weenie an esteement for his aural fibers. Nor I myself.”

I pleaded with her not to go. I had no way to pull it off, of course, but I promised to take her backstage to meet the cast of “Cats.” I know she agonized over the proposal, but this lady was not without principles. Indeed, she looked at me then as though it was a few years after Watergate and I was Richard Nixon wondering aloud to Republican Party officials if they might, you know, consider nominating me again.

A few months later Roger took up with a guy she’s been with ever since. I think she thinks he’s Danny DeVito and I’ve often wondered, since they have a phone, how he handles it when Jack Nicholson and Michael Douglas never call.

And while I’m on a sour note anyway I might as well tell you of a period in which the celebrity connection women make for me actually worked to my detriment. It was when Pacino’s “Revolution” was released — and on its heels the video. Amounting to a devastating left jab, right cross combination, these unfortunate events threatened to end my career as well as Pacino’s. In fact, it got so bad for a while that even women who thought I was Gabriel Byrne would suddenly back off and decide to take a pass. It really wasn’t until “Sea of Love” revived Pacino’s popularity that I got hot again.

When I look back, however, it’s clear to me that even during that difficult interval I was better off than I would otherwise have been and I know that I have nothing to complain about. Although I may not have put up Wilt Chamberlain numbers, neither has my life been bereft of carnal experiences.

Moreover, I got a woman to actually live with me and though it was very brief, that union produced a son. (Unbeknownst to us at the time, Roger was pregnant when she left me.) I haven’t mentioned my son because frankly he embarrasses even me. To say it as gently as I can, most people, when they’ve seen him or tried to engage him in conversation, take for granted that his parents were first cousins. But Eileen (Roger wanted a girl and she wouldn’t take no for an answer) is almost a teenager now and I’ve noticed lately, when he comes to visit and we’re out on the street, that he’s begun to turn the head of more than an occasional young lady.

Here’s wishing whoever they want him to be a very long run.