I just stare at Walt for a long time, waiting for him to wipe his hand on his robe and catch his breath.
I wish he were healthier, but it’s hard to imagine him without a cigarette in his hand. Like I bet even in his high school yearbook pictures he was smoking. That’s just who he is. Like Bogart too.
Man, I’m going to miss Walt so much. Watching old smoky Bogart movies with him is one of the few things I’ll truly miss. It was always the highlight of my week.
Walt says, “You okay, Leonard? You don’t look well.”
I shake off the weirdness, wipe my eyes with my sleeve, and say, “Yeah, I’m fine.”
He says, “You got all your hair tucked up into that fedora along with the tops of your ears?”15
I nod.
I don’t want to tell him I cut off all my hair, for some reason, maybe because Walt’s one of my best friends—he really cares about me, I swear to god—and he’d know something was wrong if he saw my fucked-up haircut. He’d get upset, and I want to exit on a good note—I want this to be a happy good-bye, something he can remember and actually feel good about after I’m gone.
“Bought you a present,” I say, and then pull the turtle-looking wrap job from the top of my backpack.
He says, “It’s not my birthday, you know.”
I hope he guesses that it’s mine—or that he might figure it out, deduce it, so I wait a second as he fingers the present and tries to mentally guess what the hell it might be.
He looks so happy to get a present.
I kind of promise myself that I won’t kill Asher Beal, nor will I off myself, if only Walt just says “happy birthday” to me one time, as silly and trivial as that seems.
He doesn’t, and that makes me sad, even though I probably never even told him when my birthday was and I know he would definitely say “happy birthday” if I had.
But I really want him to say “happy birthday” to me without any prompting, and when he doesn’t, I get to feeling hollow as a dry-docked boat or something.
“Why do I get pink paper? Do you think I’m a faggot?” he says, and then starts laughing really hard and coughing again.
I say, “It’s the twenty-first century. Don’t be such a homophobe,” but I’m not really mad at him.
Walt’s so old that you can’t hold his bigotry against him, because for almost all his life it was okay for him to say “faggot” among friends, and then suddenly it wasn’t.
He also says things like nigger and kike and Polack and chink and light in the loafers and sand nigger and slant and spade and spook and camel jockey and smokes and porch monkey and just about a trillion other awful slurs.
I hate bigotry, but I also love Walt.
It’s like Herr Silverman teaches us about the Nazis. Maybe Walt was just unlucky being born at a time when everyone was prejudiced against homosexuals and minorities, and that’s just the way it was for his generation. I don’t know.
I’m starting to get sad about all that, so I change the subject by pointing at his present and saying, “Well, aren’t you going to open it?”
He nods once like a little kid and then tears into the pink paper with his yellow shaky fingers. Halfway in he says, “I think I know what this is!”
When he has the Bogart hat unwrapped, he says, “Hot digitty dog!” all corny and nestles the hat down on his white hair.
It’s a perfect fit, just like I knew it would be, because I measured his head once when he was passed out, drunk.
He composes his face, gets all black-and-white-movie-star-looking, and says, “I’ve got a job to do too. Where I’m going you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. Leonard, I’m no good at being noble but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that.”
I smile because he switched my name in for Ilsa’s. He does that sometimes when doing lines from Casablanca.16
He smiles back real nice and says, “Wow. My very own Bogart hat. I love it!”
And then I just start lying and can’t stop myself no matter how hard I try.
I don’t know why I do it.
Maybe to keep myself from crying, because I can feel the tears coming on strong—like there’s a thunderstorm in my skull that’s about to break.
So I tell him I got the hat off the Internet on a site that auctions old movie props. All proceeds go toward curing smoker’s cough and throat cancer, which killed good old unkillable Humphrey Bogart. I say the hat Walt’s wearing right at this very moment was the same hat Humphrey Bogart wore while playing Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.
His eyes open really wide, and then Walt gets this sad look on his face, like he knows I’m lying when I don’t have to—like he loves the hat even if it’s not a movie prop, even if I found it on the street or something, and I know that too, that I don’t have to make shit up because what we have as friends is real and true already—but I just keep telling mistruths and he doesn’t want to call me on it; he doesn’t want to make me feel shameful and fuck up the good moment that is happening.
That sad look on his face just makes me say things like “really” and “I swear to god” like I do sometimes when I am lying.
I say, “It’s really really Bogart’s hat, I swear to god. Really. Just don’t tell my mom about this because I had to spend some serious money—like upwards of twenty-five grand I debited from her Visa card, which all goes to cancer research, all of it—and I had to get the hat just so that we might have a little piece of Bogie history, just so we might at least have that forever. Right?”
I feel so awful, because the truth is that I bought the hat at the thrift store for four dollars and fifty cents.
Walt’s eyes look all glazey and distant, like I shot him with the P-38.
“So do you like it?” I ask. “Do you like owning Bogie’s hat? Does wearing it make you feel tough and capable of saving the day?”
Walt smiles real sad, makes his Bogie face, and says, “What have you ever given me besides money? You ever given me any of your confidence, any of the truth? Haven’t you tried to buy my loyalty with money and nothing else?”
I recognize the quote. It’s from The Maltese Falcon. So I finish it by saying, “What else is there I can buy you with?”
We look at each other in our Bogart hats and it’s like we’re communicating, even though we’re completely silent.
I’m trying to let him know what I’m about to do.
I’m hoping he can save me, even though I realize he can’t.
His Bogie hat is gray with a black band and really looks like Sam Spade’s. It was a lucky thrift store find. It really was. Like Walt was destined to have this very hat.
I remember this other weirdly appropriate quote from The Maltese Falcon and so I say, “I haven’t lived a good life. I’ve been bad. Worse than you could know.”
But Walt doesn’t play along this time. He gets real twitchy and nervous and then he starts asking me why I gave him the hat at this particular juncture—“Why today?”—and—“Why do you look so sad all of a sudden?”—and—“What’s wrong?”
Then he starts asking me to take off my hat, asking if I cut my hair, and when I don’t answer he asks me if I’ve talked to my mother today—if she’s been around lately.
I say, “I really have to go to school now. You’re a fantastic neighbor, Walt. Really. Almost like a father to me. No need to worry.”
I’m fighting the big-time tears again, so I turn my back on him and walk out through the smoky hallway, under the crystal chandelier, out of Walt’s life forever.
The whole time he yells, “Leonard. Leonard, wait! Let’s talk. I’m really worried about you. What’s going on? Why don’t you stay awhile? Please. Take a day off. We can watch a Bogie movie. Things will seem better. Bogart always—”
I open the front door and pause long enough to hear him coughing and hacking as he tries to chase me, using his sad drugstore tennis-ball walker.
He could die today, I think, he really could.
And then I just stride out of his house knowing that it was the perfect way to say good-bye to Walt. My storming out right at that very moment was like the emotional climax of an old-school Bogart film. In my mind, I could even hear the stringed instruments building to a dramatic crescendo.
“Good-bye, Walt,” I say as I stride toward my high school.