Some Can Whistle by Larry McMurtry Page B

he also convinced the country that mowing the lawn in the middle of the night was a normal American thing, a right among other classic American rights. Many polls were taken—even the
Washington Post
took one—and in all of them Al gained at least a 90 percent approval rate. True, the American Lawn Care Association, fearing a grass-roots revolt of some sort, issued a statement deploring the after-hours use of power mowers, but nobody paid any attention to them.
    The confusing thing about
that
uproar was that Al Stoppard was not supposed to be the eccentric on the show. The eccentric was a neighbor named Jenny, three houses down from Al and Sal. Jenny was a bird freak, with more than one hundred birdhouses on her property. Jenny plus Al made for a noisy neighborhood; by day the block was filled with the chirping of hundreds of birds, by night it resonated with Al’s mowing. Jenny was one of Al’s bitterest foes, too, claiming that his mowing caused her birds to suffer from sleep deprivation.
    “One of my pigeons got so sleepy while flying it fell to its death,” a grieving Jenny told Al in one memorable confrontation.
    “Who’s gonna miss one pigeon?” Al responded, a bit defensively—secretly he was a little sweet on Jenny.
    “Me, that’s who, you pigeon murderer!” Jenny screamed, swatting him with a bag of birdseed.
    The episode had national repercussions, pitting as it did the pigeon lovers against the lawn fanatics; I issued several statements in an attempt to calm the waters, meanwhile laughing all the way to my broker’s office.
    As the years passed, Al stayed normal but for his one little eccentricity, whereas poor Jenny got crazier; her lover, Joe, a TV repairman much respected in the neighborhood, got in his TV truck one day and drove away.
    “I love you, Jenny, but I can’t take any more birds,” Joe said, tears in his eyes.
    His departure broke America’s heart; Joe was a popular character. Actually, his contract was up and he was angling for a series of his own, otherwise I would have seen to it that he hung in there with Jenny a few more seasons. Joe, in real life a horrible little actor named Leland, who spent his spare time parked across from North Hollywood High trying to pick up high school girls, was not one of my favorite people, and I was delighted when the series he secured for himself failed well before mid-season.
    Jenny, however, kind of went to pieces once Joe left. She took to cruising the freeways at all hours of the night and day, trying to rescue wounded birds; soon her backyard was full of bedraggled hawks with broken wings. The neighborhood, previously tolerant of Jenny, began to have its doubts. Several housewives who had been sweet on Joe soon turned against her. Even Sal, a generous woman, turned against her.
    “Joe was the best thing that ever happened to Jenny,” Sal declared. “So look what she did. She drove him off for a hundred million birds.”
    “Please don’t exaggerate,” Al pleaded. Sal’s
modus operandi
was exaggeration, and Al hated it. “She doesn’t have a hundred million birds,” he said. “I doubt if she’s even got twenty million.”
    “Do you want a divorce so you can move in with her, is that what this conversation’s all about?” Sal asked, her eyes blazing.
    One of my personal misfortunes is that I can still remember every scene and every line of dialogue in all one hundred and ninety-eight episodes of “Al and Sal.” Wake me from a sound sleep—if you can ever catch me in a sound sleep—and ask me what Al said to Sal in a particular episode and I’ll mumble it at once. For a decade that show was my life—my only life; if I live to be a hundred I doubt I’ll ever forget a single one of Sal’s many stinging retorts.
    Al didn’t move in with Jenny, but he was, to the end, her most loyal supporter. The end was not pretty, either. One day Jenny brought home a young buzzard that had not risen from its meal of road kill quite fast