Niagara Falls All Over Again Read Online Free PDF

refuted all her research.”
    There are books that talk about Rocky, but they’re filled with the stories he liked to tell just to hear them. How he boxed as a kid. (He told me himself this wasn’t true. “I like to scare reporters,” he said, “except girl reporters, but they never send me girl reporters.”) How he’d briefly been a cook in the navy, a story I believed until we filmed
Gobs Away!
and he proved himself to be completely ignorant of anything shipside; the writers incorporated some of his more boneheaded misunderstandings into the script: “The waddyacallit, top floor, penthouse,
deck
.” He had a tattoo he said was from his service days, a so-called anchor that looked more like a fishhook. I don’t know where he really got it.
    When I first met him, I loved his lies. Mental exercise, I thought, warming up for the stage: he’d lie to see how far he could get. He’d tell a pretty girl he’d gone to the Cordon Bleu, and then inform her how you got the butter on the inside of chicken Kiev—you took a live chicken, see, and fed it cream, and then you picked up the chicken and shook and shook. . . . He liked best the moment some tender soul frowned and said, “That’s not true. Is it?” Oh yes, of course, completely true. He could cite facts for hours by making them up on the spot, but he knew some things for sure. He could read both Latin and Italian: I saw him do it. I might have thought he was snowing me (I read English, that’s all) until we made a European tour in the forties. In London, he translated the Latin off the tombs in Saint Paul’s with such passion and cleverness that even the tour guides shut up and sidled over. During our week in Barcelona, he caught Spanish like some tourists catch colds. He was talking up shopgirls and bawling out cabdrivers by the end of the week. From the look on their faces, he must have been saying
something
.
    In Paris—where he spoke a burbling fast-paced French—I asked him: where did he learn his languages? He shrugged, and slapped me on the back, and said, “Didn’t I ever tell you I was a child prodigy?”
    We were in a basement jazz club that looked like a catacomb, and sat at a bar tended by a thin man who looked like a corpse taking advantage of the short commute. Rocky was ordering various drinks for us, happy I had no idea what was in them. The guy put a pink concoction in front of me. “Drink up,” said Rock.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    He menaced my drink with a lit match. “Le Sterneau.”
    â€œNo, really,” I said. The drink tasted of peaches and peppers. “Like, French. When did you have time to learn French?”
    â€œWould I lie to you?” he asked. “I was a failed child prodigy.” Which led to this version of his childhood:
    â€œI’m still not sure my parents know where babies come from—they’d married late, they’d been clumsy about romance all their lives—runs in the family, Professor—and I doubt they believed that the outcome of sex would be for them what it was for other people. They probably thought babies came from flirting, and they never flirted. So there I am, a baby, completely bored by childhood, and so’s my old man bored, and he figures, Ah! something in common. Why not make himself a child prodigy? It was all the rage among his colleagues. Now you know, Professor, that real-life professors make the best straight men: they just can’t see that cream pie coming. So my father the straight man says to me, the comic baby,
Look here. You will learn Latin
, and he drills me through noun declensions. I declined until I was old enough to decline, if you know what I mean. When I turned five, my father gave up. ‘Bright kid,’ the neighbors told him. Ha! He’d taught me so much in my first five years it took me until I was eleven to forget it all. Every day I forgot a little