Won't You Love Me?

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Names: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis

Year: 1950

Ages: 33 and 24

To have your hometown name a day after you, throw a whole parade in your honor, and to be able to return to those old friends and enemies triumphant and with all the world on your side would thrill anyone. Anyone, that is, except Dean Martin.

Dean wishes he were anywhere but in Steubenville. Even the name makes him sick to his stomach. As always, though, such a response doesn't lead Dean to wonder why he feels this way. And he doesn't need to because Jerry does enough wondering for the both of them.

The day goes by in a blur for Jerry, and he can hardly keep track of rugged face after rugged face of Dean's old friends that never really seemed to exist in real life until now. Although he expected to feel out of place because Steubenville isn't his home town, Jerry is pleasantly surprised by the pride that runs through him of being associated with Dean as they meet old pals of his and perform at just about every place capable of holding a couple hundred people.

Despite how thrilled he is, Jerry can't help noticing something's off about Dean. He knows Dean better than anyone else, but even he is puzzled at first by Dean's seeming hatred of this warm hometown reception. Jerry knows that if he was in Dean's shoes, he would have a ball going back to Newark in all of his glory and throwing it in the faces of those who thought he would never succeed.

But then again, Dean and Jerry are very different people. By the end of the day, Jerry feels he understands why Dean is unsettled. This whole day must have been a big, glaring sign to Dean of where he came from, and who he really was: a small, dirty nobody from a small, dirty town of steel mills and gangsters. Jerry can even understand why Dean left Betty. She was just another reminder.

As intelligent as Jerry is, he doesn't know the half of the well of hatred and scorn that lies deep, deep within Dean.

Sitting at the bar surrounded by old friends, all Dean can think about is that the lives all of them—Mindy, Ross, Jiggs, Smuggs, all of them—are spent in every waking moment searching for, clawing at, what Dean has. He's got the wife. He's got kids. He's got world fame and more money and girls than any of them would know what to do with. And that's all there is? That's the end of things? If that's so, then death isn't imminent; it's here already.

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Names: Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis

Year: 1950

Ages: 33 and 24

"Jerry? Jer? Where are you? Everyone's looking for ya!" Dean calls out, though only loud enough for Jerry to hear were he close by, being too tired to try any harder. He's about to scratch his head and turn right back around to his dressing room when he catches sight of the skinny, crouched figure on the catwalk belonging to his partner—what's that Kid doing this time?

He makes out enough words between Jerry and a somewhat annoyed-looking sound technician to guess Jerry's on a discovery crusade again. Asking how everything works around the set, and then some.

"Are the catwalks made of two-by-fours?"

"Are they built on a temporary basis?"

"How do they hang them?"

The Kid's even been buying his own cameras like food, and making these home parodies of popular movies—it's great that he's interested in these sorts of things; who is Dean to tell him what to like?

But at the same time, it always makes Dean feel a little mad. Jerry's always trying to learn more, sure, but it always seems sort of . . . forced. Like he's trying to do it just to show people he can. That the funny-looking Jew isn't a monkey; he's smart and knows everything about moviemaking.