The King and I

by Mike McCue
Illustration by Tom Powers

It only took two or three minutes for the room to begin to spin. Why I accepted those last two shots of Hennessey was beyond me. My best guess was that it was three o’clock in the morning, but my eyes were so weary that the LED read-out on my clock was reduced to a messy red blur. I was hot, I was cold. It would indeed be the troubled sleep.

My still-shod foot groped for the floor in hopes of applying the brakes to the tilt-a-whirl my bed had become. An hour before, I would have given my right arm to crawl into bed. Now, I would have given it to have both the energy and the coordination to rise to my feet. Upon finding the floor, the spinning came to a halt. Now I awaited the impending unconsciousness.

This was a whole hell of a lot worse than usual. I used what little was left of my powers of supposition to review my evening and look for irregularities. I ate at some point, so that removed the usual suspect. I mixed liquors, but only to the extent that I would have a bad hangover the next day, not the nausea I suffered from the moment I got home. I smelled my sleeves and my memory was jarred. There it was. I had smoked, and had smoked a lot. Almost half a pack of my friend’s cigarettes. More than enough to make this `when sober’ non-smoker sick.

BANG! BANG! BANG! resonated off my closed bedroom door. I endured a flashback from my youth of my parents bursting into my room after I’d dragged myself in at some obscene hour. However, I lived alone in a little apartment in the city, and had done so for several years now. No one should be here. Unless… Oh no, it’s him.

The door flew open, a dull thud echoed as the doorknob buried itself into the wall. Unable to lift my head, I simply rolled it to one side to view my late night visitor. He hovered in the doorway, the light from behind silhouetting him. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the contrasts, I could make out the red satin shirt, the exaggerated puffed-out pants, the slipper-like, elfish shoes curved upward at the toe. The glare caught and reflected off his totally bald head. His voice now boomed.

“And what have we been doing this evening Mr. McCue?!,” he demanded in a mystic Russian accent. There in my doorway, dressed in his Oscar-winning role as the King of Siam, was Yul Brynner.

Correction, the ghost of Yul Brynner. Brynner died over ten years before of emphysema. Such was the result of a life of chain-smoking Russian cigarettes, a delicious mixture of low grade tobacco and tree bark marinated in carbolic acid. He filmed a PSA just before he died, seemingly about five minutes before, bemoaning the use of tobacco. It was a simple head shot, Brynner propped up on his deathbed speaking to the camera. The obligatory oxygen line dangled beneath his nose and some monitors flashing in the background, charting his demise. Brynner didn’t need any makeup to look the part. Cheeks sallow, neck withered and eyes sunken in, it was easy to believe that the Angel of Death was a member of the off-camera crew.

It was a powerful scene, the once-debonair gypsy with that je ne sais quoi, a staple of Saturday and Sunday afternoon television fare, now looked like a rotting prune with eyes. The fact that the spot was so disturbing, coupled with the power of the tobacco lobby of the time, saw that it only showed in the wee hours. I’m not even sure that it showed more than once as that was all I saw it. But once was enough. It was a haunting image which I occasionally revisited, such as I did now.

“Well!?” He now hovered over me, his face the emaciated replica of the visage worn by the man in the anti-smoking spot. I closed my eyes to the apparition, but to no avail. I could still see everything.

“Haunt me no more, specter!” I cried.

“Wrong movie. I was never in a production of A Christmas Carol.” Brynner began to slowly circle, his hands on his hips. “Will you confess? Or must I force it out of you?!”

“I didn’t smoke! Not even a puff!” A feeble lie which I should have known the omnipotent Brynner would see right through.

Brynner scowled. “Yes, yes. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera! Lies! I will broker no lies!”

With a rush I was pulled from my bed and sent spinning around in space.

“Shall we dance?” the phantom cackled. The odious melody of the Rodgers and Hammerstein tune filled my head. My stomach inched tighter and tighter with every revolution. I was on the verge of screaming out when my foot suddenly found the floor and the spinning stopped. I had never left the bed.

“Ah ha. Smarter than you look,” said Brynner. With this utterance his appearance changed slightly. His garb was now distinctively ancient Egyptian and a long braid swung from behind his head. Oh, God. He was Rameses from The Ten Commandments.

“Perhaps a little wandering in the desert will loosen your lying tongue!” With a wave of his hand the temperature in the room was suddenly oppressive, stifling even. I realized I was drenched in sweat and I clawed at my shirt, attempting to negotiate the buttons.

“Ha ha ha!” Brynner tossed his head back as he belted out a belly laugh.

I rolled out of bed and began crawling towards the door. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the thermostat. I slid up the wall to it and read the temperature. It was set on 90 degrees! It must have been jarred by my elbow when I stumbled past and into bed. I set it to 50 and staggered over to the window. I raised it, welcoming in the fresh air. Then I collapsed into bed again.

“So, once again you assuage your suffering. But I shall not be so easily beaten!” Again Brynner’s outfit changed. Now he wore a black suit of clothes and a black Stetson adorned his hairless skull. A Smith and Wesson dangled from each hand. I couldn’t decide which Western this role was from, so for matters of simplicity I went with The Magnificent Seven.

“Wouldn’t it be so much easier to confess?” Brynner asked, raising his pistols toward me.

“I’ve nothing to confess! Leave me alone!”

“Didn’t my ad teach you anything? Why must I continue to drag myself down here to punish you thus?”

With that, his guns fired in rapid succession. Each discharge resulted in a blinding flash of light and a pulsating pain in my head. Bright red flash, popping stab in my head. Over and over. I flailed about, my arms swinging in an attempt to shield my head from the salvos. A wild swing caught something solid and it crashed to the floor. I had upended my alarm clock. The time still flashed in alarm mode, but I had pushed the audible alarm to mute. In the darkened room the flashing display pierced the shadows, tormenting me in the guise of Brynner’s guns. I threw the clock against the wall.

“I see that I need to take a step I didn’t wish to use.” Brynner now removed his hat and flung it in the corner. “When I was a struggling actor in the late ’40s I made some films which no one knows about. Back then they called them `stag’ films…”

“OH NO!!” I cried. “This has gone far enough! Look, I did have a few cigarettes, more than a few. But I wasn’t thinking. I wouldn’t have done it if I was sober,” I explained.

“A feeble excuse. Remember what became of me. Isn’t that enough to scare you?” To emphasize his point he closed in to a distance of a few feet away so that I could take in the gruesome countenance of his final days.

“Yes, God, yes!!” I wailed. He backed off a little, now dressed in a business suit. His face changed too, now full and healthy.

“Fine then, I’ve plenty of other stops tonight. John Huston hasn’t proved as effective as we hoped. Now I have to fill in. He was never very healthy looking to begin with.” He sighed and adjusted a fedora which had appeared on his head. “I’m hoping someone else handsome and vibrant goes soon.” He turned to me as he reached the doorway. “Does George Clooney smoke?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Hum… how about Robert Downey, Jr.?”

“He’s got other problems. I think he smokes something, but I don’t think it’s tobacco.”

“One can only hope. Jimmy Stewart was such a waste. All that clean living. He could have made such an impression…” and with that, Yul Brynner faded from my view.

I certainly can’t guarantee that I will never smoke again. I know I’ll soon drink enough to create the proper conducive situation. However, I think next time my bald Russian friend comes a-callin’ I’ll be up front – admit my error and tell him to get the hell out of my room so I can sleep. After all, isn’t a death befitting the King of Siam good enough for me