Millroy the Magician by Paul Theroux
‘Did you ever come here with Dada?’
‘All the time.’
A sad soulless place, Millroy would have said, staring with blazing eyes at the people gnawing bones, but I just felt far from home.
‘How’s Gaga?’
‘Just about the same,’ Vera said, chewing the flesh and skin from a wing finger.
‘Does she ever mention me?’
‘Being as I never see her,’ Vera said, ‘I wouldn’t know.’
She sounded huffy saying this but I knew she was hurt because Gaga did not like her. Nothing to do with being a Wampanoag, but Vera had a black grandfather, Hickmott, who still lived in Oak Bluffs on the Vineyard. The distant blackness had turned Vera’s complexion golden and given her beautiful features.
‘But didn’t Gaga come to the funeral?’
‘There wasn’t a funeral as such,’ Vera said. ‘Just a kind of burial over at the Mills. Some of my people were there. Ever meet Malvine? Ever meet Jewel and Cory? There were a few Farinas there, from New Bedford. Cheryl his ex came. She wanted to play something but there was nowhere to plug her guitar in. And them guys from off the boats, from when Ray was a tuna-spotter.’
Now she was picking at the red hots and there was a fleck of vanilla frappé on her cheek.
‘And plus it rained,’ she said.
I was pretending to drink from the straw of my lime rickey, making serious-sounding sucks. There was nothing at Reddy’s that I could eat – a whole restaurant of uneatable food. It was not a problem. I would ask Vera to stop at a supermarket on the way back to Mashpee, where I could buy beans, fish, nuts, flour and fruit, to make some Day One meals for myself.
‘I’m real glad you came home.’
‘Me too.’ But the word made me think, Is this home?
‘It gave me an excuse to eat, I guess.’
That made me feel terrible, seeing the chewed wing fingers, the red hots smeared with glops of ketchup, the dried froth like sea scum of the vanilla frappé on the tall plastic cup.
I was trying to think of what to do about Gaga (would she lock me up and beat me? would she kick me out and call the police?), when Vera hitched herself higher in her seat and looked out of the booth and said something that took my breath away.
‘Hey, Jilly, do you think that guy Millroy is righteous?’
What? Apart from the fact that she got both our names into one sentence, I had been thinking of Millroy ever since we had come into the restaurant. Magic.
‘How do you know him, Vera?’
She looked at me with froggy eyes as though I was the odd one.
‘Everyone knows him,’ she said, and blinked, and smiled. She was looking in the direction of the counter behind my head. ‘Millroy’s on Sunday TV after that aerobic show.’
‘Body Shaping.’
‘That’s it. And afterwards there’s that guy with the glasses and the blue gown.’
‘The Hour of Power Prayer Line.’
‘But I hate that Pat Robertson,’ Vera said. ‘He got a dog jaw and doggy eyes, and he’s wicked right-wing.’
I turned around and saw Millroy’s face – a photograph like the one I had seen in the newspaper on the bus, and it was filling the TV screen.
‘That’s him,’ I said, and again I had the sense that something was wrong.
‘That’s what got me thinkun about him.’
‘Is this his show?’
‘No. Like I said, it’s on Sundays. And there’s only the Friday repeat of Day One after Copwatch.’
She even knew the name of the show!
The sound of the TV in Reddy’s was turned down, yet the men were staring at the screen, and a moment later an announcer replaced Millroy’s face. There were bursts of basketball, then a weather map of New England, with temperature numbers and then the news.
‘What was that all about?’
Vera shrugged. ‘They call it the nutty religion.’
‘It’s not a religion.’
‘Because they eat nuts.’
‘They eat a lot of different stuff.’
‘Crazy stuff.’
‘Food,’ I said.
‘They pray in toilets.’
‘Who said?’
‘Everyone knows,’ Vera said, and laughed at me for not knowing. ‘Where you been, kiddo?’
At first I had the spooky feeling that Millroy had bewitched her with hypnotism, as he had when he’d gotten her to stop smoking – that this was his way of getting at me for running away from the diner. But, no, Vera was just talking because she had seen Millroy’s face on the TV at Reddy’s, and she had seen the show.
‘He thinks he’s better than other people,’ Vera said.
Then she called for the waitress in the red dress and asked for a doggy bag – donkey bag, she called it – for the left-over wing fingers and red hots.
‘You could maybe have it as a snack later on,’ she said.
I did not say anything on the way back. Instead of driving straight from here to Mashpee, Vera detoured through Falmouth and up MacArthur Boulevard to the Bourne Bridge, to Flagler’s in Buzzards Bay, to buy some discount dog biscuits for Muttrix. I remember Millroy telling me that dog biscuits, full of roughage, were better than most human food.
We passed Pilgrim Pines Trailer Park (Hook-Ups Available) and the pay phone beside the way where Millroy had made his first call to Paradise Park, with Mister Phyllis, and the little Portuguese store in Buzzards Bay itself where Millroy bought chickpeas and flour and melons. It was all history now.
That night in Dada’s trailer I thought of Vera giving up smoking, and thought, He is here, too.
And he was, his full face all over the TV screen in a flickery late-night re-broadcast of Day One from one of the Providence stations – Millroy talking about controlling bodily functions and showing how he had taken charge.
I have taken command of my bowels – and he peered out of the TV, his head bulging into the little trailer room – can you say that?
Looking at me.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Lying in my lumpy bed, with the smell of this trailer in my nose, I felt far from home. I remembered Millroy’s face in the article in the Herald that I had seen on the bus. I had not wanted to read it because I was running away. Now I felt lost and stupid. I needed to know what was in the article, and I got out of bed the next morning determined to find a copy of yesterday’s paper.
‘Can I fix you breakfast, Jilly?’
‘What have we got?’
‘Anything you like.’
‘I usually have millet bread, melon and honey,’ I said, without thinking. ‘Or fish. Or figs.’
Vera just stared at me, holding a box of Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes and a sticky hunk of Danish pastry.
‘Is my bike still around back?’
Vera nodded at me, looking spaced-out, as she sometimes did with sleep in her eyes.
The bike lay in the long grass and was rusty, the handlebars were loose, the seat was too low, the front wheel rubbed against the fork. But I wheeled it to Gas and Go where I pumped the tires, and then rode to the Trading Post. Shorty told me he had sent yesterday’s paper back. The Seven-Eleven on Pine Street didn’t have it, nor the Riverway Motel.
What happens to yesterday’s newspaper? Millroy had said on a Day One Program. One day everyone’s reading it and worrying. The next day you’re wrapping garbage in it. Cut out the middle man! Don’t bother to read it – just use it for garbage.
My search for the paper had taken me to the main road, Route 28, and seeing the Marston’s Mills turn-off, which was downhill, I kept going on my wobbly bike, past Pizza Plus and Capeway Roofing and the meadow beyond the pond where Dada was in the graveyard. I walked the bike through the gate and easily found the Farina stone, because I had spent so much time there tending it for Mumma. I had always knelt and prayed when Mumma ha
I pedaled past the old grassy airport, to Gaga’s. Nothing had changed since my last visit, when I had come with Millroy. The house looked weatherbeaten and silent, the roof slightly crushed and sloping, the window shades pulled down, the tall orangey daylilies and some deep blue irises at the corner of the porch brightening it, and clusters of heavy mumbling bees clinging to the pink blossoms of the hollyhocks and making the stalks sway.
Hiding the bike behind the hedge I sneaked around back, wondering what I would say if Gaga saw me. I got to the kitchen door, and listened. The talking was not Gaga. It was the TV, a talk show, in the front parlor. There was no motion in the house, but when I looked closely I saw her, at the far end of all the open doors in the house, in her chair, with her fingers pressing against her face.
She was like a creature in a cage, like Yowie, like her own canary Blossom here by the window, all of them harmless and blinking, just waiting. She looked trapped and sad, and although she faced me she was not thinking of me, and so she could not see me.
I slid myself closer to the wall to look deeper into the house, and that was when I saw Millroy’s face again.
It was in the rectangle of folded newspaper at the bottom of the canary’s cage. But part of it was torn, and all I saw was the dome of his head, his mustache, the words Day One and denies. The rest of it was spattered with Blossom’s green droppings.
33
‘Aw, I knew it was a crock,’ Vera said at breakfast the next morning. She had microwaved the left-over Red Hots and was holding the ketchup bottle over them and slapping the bottom with the flat of her hand.
She was talking about Millroy and The Day One Program. I kept thinking: If Vera knows about it, everybody must.
‘It’s not a crock,’ I said.
She listened to me because she knew I never lied.
Vera had discovered The Day One Program when Dada was in Falmouth Hospital, on a respirator. Someone, maybe Cory or Jewel or Malvine, had told her to watch, that Millroy might have the answer: if Dada ate the right food he would recover. It was the simplified popular misunderstood version of the program – Day One as a miracle cure for illness and aging. At the time, Dada was being fed intravenously, so it had not been possible for him to eat any Day One food.
‘You think it would have worked?’
‘No,’ I said.
This seemed to relieve her. She slapped the bottle again and it glopped all over the plate.
‘Like I say’ – she ate one of the reheated red hots and gagged – ‘it’s a crock.’
Then she shook out some Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes into a bowl and poured milk on them.
‘It’s not just the food. It’s a spiritual thing, too. Dada would have been wrong for it.’
‘So who’s right for it?’
‘You might be.’
She was just young enough – maybe thirty-five, innocent enough, good-hearted, and her diet was terrible. As soon as she became an eater and switched to Day One she would sleep better, feel healthier, and her bowels would sing. Most of all she would stop grieving over Dada. People like her showed the fastest rate of change, Millroy said – that was the reason the fattest, sickest people were the easiest to convince. The first month of Day One for them brought about dramatic results, rapid weight loss, more energy, regularity.
They phoned him up and cried out, I am producing two pounds of waste for you!
I knew that because I took the calls.
I told Vera some of this. I said, ‘Millroy is a magician.’
‘Them people are all the same,’ she said.
She meant preachers, like the one talking on TV at the moment, the Reverend Oral Roberts. Vera was not watching The Oral Roberts Show – she never sat down and watched TV. It was simply a light flickering at the far corner of the trailer, like all the other TV shows, the screen like a hole you looked into to see the rest of the world, or else you heard the world going yakkety-yak in the next room, or explosions, or the rat-tat-tat of a far-off war, or crying, or canned laughter, or talking heads.
Plant a seed to God, Oral Roberts said.
‘A seed – that’s money,’ I said.
‘That’s what I mean,’ Vera said.
God spoke to me. He called me and said, ‘I want the name Oral Roberts to stand for healing.’
‘Hear that old man?’
‘Sure. God talks to all of them.’
‘He doesn’t talk to Millroy. He doesn’t talk, period. God reveals his truth in other ways.’
‘You know all about it,’ Vera said. She was smiling. She began to spoon Sugar Frosted Flakes into her mouth, and looked at me, chewing and gulping.
‘In the way we live. In the way we die. God was watching Dada in the hospital. He wanted us to watch him, too, and learn a lesson.’
‘You been goun to church?’ Vera said.
‘No,’ I said.
But if I am your healer I need to be near you, and my mission needs to be on the air. Don’t you want to be healed of your pain?
‘How can that old man heal anyone by prayer alone?’ I realized I was quoting Millroy but Vera didn’t know it. ‘You have to do the work yourself. Eat healthy. Switch to Day One food. Get menus from the Book. Stop smoking. Stop eating french fries. All that.’
‘I have to give up these red hots and these Frosted Flakes?’
‘No one eats that stuff in the Bible, Vera.’
‘Well, they don’t do a lot of things in the Bible, Jilly,’ she said. ‘Like there’s no cheeseburgers and fried clams and prime rib and no candy bars either!’
She hooted at this, believing she had stumped me, but I said, ‘Exactly,’ and she made a face.
‘Are you turnun into one of these Seventh-day Adventists?’
‘Of course not. They’re all-American, Millroy says, but they’re not strict enough. They eat nut cutlets and leenies and Veggie-Burgers. They believe Jesus is going to come to earth again, the Second Coming.’
Vera was staring at me from behind the box of Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes. That reminded me.
‘The Adventists did one major thing in America,’ I said.
While she was munching her cereal Vera said something, made a noise that sounded like a question.
I said, ‘They relocated in Battle Creek, Michigan. Get it?’
‘No,’ Vera said.
‘Because they got their vegetarianism out of the Bible, they decided to invent cornflakes,’ and I shifted the box around so that she could read Battle Creek, MI on the side, ‘so that they wouldn’t have to eat bacon and sausages. They invented peanut butter, too.’
‘Who told you that?’
Millroy, who told me everything.
‘I read it.’
‘You should go on Jeopardy,’ Vera said. ‘If they invented cornflakes and peanut butter I guess they’re not so bad!’
‘Most peanut butter is carcinogenic. That and the Sugar Frosted Flakes prove they’re a wicked bad menace, Millroy says,’ I said. ‘And maybe they invented the American breakfast, but Millroy invented a whole new American diet.’
The key to deliverance is instant obedience. Ask the Lord how much you should send, and then do it immediately. Keep our mission on the air –
‘They demand ten percent tithes, and this old guy is begging for money, but Millroy never asks.’
‘But they say he’s as rich as all get-out.’ Vera was still munching the Frosted Flakes, as though to defy me.
‘Who says?’
I kicked back on my chair and looked at her, and marveled at the way we were talking. Millroy was the shaven-headed man who smelled of freshly-baked br
Now here was Dada’s Wampanoag woman, Vera Turtle, in a house trailer in Mashpee talking about Millroy as though he was someone she knew fairly well. I felt as I had on the P and B bus when I had seen his picture – as I had felt each time I saw him on television, and even the glimpse of him at the bottom of the bird cage. He is mine, I am his.
‘Everyone says,’ Vera said, as though Millroy belonged to the world.
Later in the day I thought it might be a trick or a trap – that Vera knew where I had been, that she was saying these things to provoke me, so that I would admit that I had run off with Millroy.
To test her, I said, ‘Vera, do you know what I do in Boston?’
‘You said somethun about a job.’
‘In a diner. Wait-person.’
‘Yeah.’
She did not want to know more. She accepted that, she was not interested, she trusted me.
‘Listen, Millroy is different from all the rest of them.’
She smiled at me. They’re all the same, she was thinking. For her, Millroy was big and famous, and people talked about him, making him even bigger. He had no connection with our world. He was rich and far-off, someone half real, half imaginary, a star.
It had amazed me that she knew his name, but she knew more than that – she had a grasp of some of the elements of the Day One program, she knew that Millroy had started other diners in various American cities, that he had cured some people of serious illnesses, that the program had been recommended by doctors as effective against bowel cancer, diverticulitis, obesity, wrinkles, heart disease, aging, constipation.