Niagara Falls All Over Again Read Online Free PDF Page B

until I was stupid enough to make my way in the world.”
    â€œYou remember the languages,” I said.
    â€œThat’s about it,” he said. “I’d give them up if I could.” He gestured silently to our ghoulish barkeep. Apparently he could do even that in French, because two poison green drinks arrived. Then Rock laughed. “I learned one other thing, one very useful thing that I call upon often in my comedy career. How to take a punch.”
    Now I ask you, is this true? A child prodigy? But he could speak those languages, and he could take a punch.
Hit me harder
, he told me during our earliest years onstage.
I can’t
, I said, and he said,
Learn. Don’t you want it to be funny? Learn, kiddo
.
    You’re Not Dancing
    I believed, as I said, that vaudeville was Hattie’s clever invention, my birthday gift. She explained to me the hundreds of theaters across the country, the thousands of performers inside, and the trains that brought them to the theaters. Every Saturday we went to the matinee, then we came home to practice. Our sister Rose sat on the back stairs or on the grass, and watched. (Our little audience: we tolerated her presence, because she regularly gave us standing ovations.) Hattie could do anything: backflips and backbends and one-handed cartwheels. She could hold still as a mannequin until I begged her to move, to blink her glassy unfamiliar eyes. We were vaudeville stars, and then movie stars, and then movie stars touring vaudeville houses. I always pretended to be a particular person—Harold Lloyd, for instance—but Hattie played Hattie, except famous. She despised Harold Lloyd; she hated everything in a thrilling way, except Buster Keaton. Rose had a crush on Charley Chase, which made Hattie crazy. “Charley Chase isn’t even funny,” said Hattie, and six-year-old Rose swoonily said, “But he’s handsome.”
    â€œA comedian doesn’t need to be handsome,” said Hattie. “It’s better if he’s not.”
    (Years later I’d argue with Rocky over who was funny and who wasn’t. He loved Charley Chase, as it happened, though he loved anyone who came to a bad end, and Charley Chase had drunk himself to death. His doctor told him he’d die if he didn’t lay off the stuff, and Chase declared he’d rather be dead than sober, and soon enough while on a bender he got his wish.)
    So we threw each other around the backyard, and slunk through the alleys of downtown Valley Junction looking up to the windows of pool halls so we could hear accents to imitate. We hooked our knees over tree branches to see how long we could bear our own blood beating away in our faces, the bark biting at the backs of our knees. Hattie’s idea: she was crazy for tests of stamina. She could last longer, always. All my life I have partnered up with people funnier than me, smarter, better. Hattie was only the first.
What’s the secret of your success?
Live off the glory of others. They won’t mind as long as you admire them.
    We did not tell our father of our true ambitions. Let him think we wanted what he wanted for us: good grades at school, the admiration of the neighbors, marriage, children. Hattie would find a nice husband. I would find a nice wife. Eventually I would become Sharp, of Sharp and Son’s, and my own son would assume my old role, and so it would pass on for centuries.
    By the time I was eleven I was sent to the front of the store after school one afternoon a week to apprentice with Ed Dubuque, my father’s right-hand man. Ed insisted that his name was real, that his father had been French-Canadian, but there was a rumor around town that he’d been brought up a ward of the state, in an orphanage that named its charges after the duller-sounding Iowa towns—Davenport, Bettendorf, Solon—names that made the orphans sound like solid citizens or gamblers. (Oh, to be named Oskaloosa, or What