After the Workshop, page 19
I took S. S. by the crook of his arm and walked him up to my parked car.
“I am a little drunk,” he said, simultaneously laughing and sniffling. “You know what they say about novelists, don’t you?”
“No, what?”
“Why, they’re nothing more than failed poets,” he said.
“Do you believe that?”
“Sadly,” S. S. said, nodding.
We said nothing else on the drive to the liquor store. I took us past the new Workshop building—a restored Victorian, complete with a brand-new library, and surrounded by a few acres of land. I suspected that once things got good, no one looked back on the crappier days with envy, so I seriously doubted any current students longed for the days (my days) when the Workshop was housed in the English Philosophy Building, let alone Army barracks.
Tate Rinehart was most likely inside right now, sitting before Gordon Grimes’s replacement, a poet named Barbara Weatherby. Weatherby, a graduate of Radcliffe and Iowa (and one of my classmates), was a Yale Younger Poets winner and a finalist for the National Book Award. To the dismay of book critics, she wrote an inordinate number of free verse poems about lighthouses and squirrels. I should pause here to note that the professional worlds of fiction and poetry are light-years apart. Poets have it infinitely worse off than prose writers. No one wants to publish a poet’s book, and if someone does, no one wants to read it; no one wants to give them a job; no one is going to option one of their poems for the movies; no one’s going to choose their book for a national book club. It was a life full of grim prospects. According to a famous study that surveyed students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop over a fifteen-year period, poets had significantly higher rates of depression, schizophrenia, suicide attempts, and actual suicides than fiction writers. A successful poet, whose parents were wheat farmers, once told me that the only thing that would have been more devastating for his mother and father to hear was if he’d decided to become a professional mime. The fact was that poets had to do whatever was necessary to get a leg up. Normally, I wasn’t surprised to hear about poets schmoozing their way into magazines and anthologies. This was part and parcel of a life dedicated to sestinas and iambic pentameter. But sometimes the stories were born of jealousy, and this was what I suspected when I began hearing how Barbara Weatherby had slept her way to the top—seducing her undergraduate creative writing professors; shacking up with one visiting writer after another while at Iowa; sitting on the lap of a decrepit, liver-spotted magazine editor at the hotel bar during the annual Associated Writing Programs conference. Over time, the stories grew stranger and more slanderous: poetry editors getting blown underneath tables at the Foxhead, a hand job given to a Nobel Laureate in the back of a limo while he was on his way to a reading at the 92nd Street Y. We were classmates, Barbara and I, and we had gone out on a few awkward dates those early weeks after we had arrived in town, but once the semester had begun in earnest, we gravitated toward people working in our respective genres. But even after we had parted ways, I still watched her from afar. She had green eyes and wide hips—a redhead whose freckles were more pronounced at the beginning of each school year after a summer spent in the sun. Her looks were those of a movie star, but they were distinctly more mid-century than contemporary. She could have been a young Rita Hayworth or even a Marilyn Monroe back when Marilyn, only a few years removed from foster homes and orphanages, was still a redhead named Norma Jeane. Students in the Workshop viewed success (any success) with suspicion and cynicism, but when that success was achieved by someone who was particularly attractive, the suspicion and cynicism increased exponentially. At Iowa conspiracy theories spread faster than chlamydia, and by the time Barbara Weatherby had been named Gordon Grimes’s replacement as director, the theories had become a full-blown epidemic. There was no way—no way!—she could have landed that position on her own merits . . . or so the covetous convinced themselves.
“The Workshop,” I said, pointing.
“Beautiful,” S. S. replied, barely looking. “An institution, that place.”
“Still thirsty?” I asked.
“A little parched, yes.”
Playing Raymond Carver to S. S.’s Cheever, I pulled up in front of John’s Grocery and let him out of the car so that I could search for a parking space. While backing into my old spot in front of Paul Revere’s Pizza, I saw a familiar figure across the street. He was down on his knees in front of the Dutch Boy paint store but leaning ever so slightly forward, as if praying. When he opened his mouth, a stream of vomit came rushing out.
I rolled down the passenger-side window, considered yelling out, “Vince! Buddy!” but decided to lay on the horn instead. Down on all fours now, Vince glanced over at me, his expression that of a wet, lost dog with its tail slung low. I didn’t let up on the horn. I wasn’t exactly sure what had gotten into me, but I wanted to inflict more pain on the man.
A knock at my window caused me to jump. It was a manager from Paul Revere’s Pizza.
“What the hell are you doing, man?” he asked. He was wearing a sauce-stained shirt with a name tag that said Mike.
I let up off the horn and rolled my window down.
Mike said, “Are you drunk?”
“Drunk?” I asked. “What time is it?” I laughed.
“Do you want me to call the police?” he said. “Is that it?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I’m fine.”
Mike looked over the hood of my car at Vince. “That your friend?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t know him.”
The workers inside Paul Revere’s had walked up to the plate-glass window to watch us. They were an army of pizza makers, and I was speaking to their general.
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “I’ll be leaving shortly.”
Mike nodded, but I could tell he was skeptical. He walked back to his store but turned one last time to take in the scene.
Years ago, during my first year in the Workshop, I was arrested for public intoxication. It had been a weekday, and after drinking three pitchers of beer, I decided it was time to stumble home. My mistake was turning down an alley instead of walking the side streets. There, two cops sat in a squad car, waiting like spiders. Until then, I’d had no idea that such a law existed, or that someone who was walking home instead of driving could get arrested for having had too much to drink, and yet, there I sat in the backseat of the squad car after I’d been put through a battery of tests. My baseball cap was askew and driving me mad, but I was cuffed and couldn’t move. I’d just finished reading Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary, in which a character named Popeye calls over the sheriff moments before he’s about to get hung for his crimes. “Psssst,” he says. “Fix my hair, Jack.” “Sure,” the sheriff says, “I’ll fix it for you.” But then he springs the trap door, hanging Popeye.
I leaned forward and said, “Psssst. Fix my hat, Jack.”
The cop in the passenger seat pivoted to regard me. I smiled at him. He reached out to fix my hat until the other cop, the one who was driving, said, “What the hell are you doing? Just leave him like that.”
At the police station, the officer in charge of inventorying my belongings asked, “So, what do you do?” When I told him that I was in the Writers’ Workshop, he nodded. “Uh-huh,” he said. “We get a lot of those in here.”
Now, sitting in my car in front of Paul Revere’s Pizza, I realized how much trouble I could get into, and given that I needed my driver’s license to earn my living, I concluded that I had caused enough trouble for one day.
I killed the engine. I walked over to John’s. When I opened the door, a cowbell jingled. I checked the liquor section first, but S. S. wasn’t there, so I walked up and down the aisles. No luck.
“Excuse me,” I said to the cashier. I described S. S. in great detail, along with what he might have purchased. “Has he been in here?”
“He left five minutes ago,” she said. She pointed to the back exit. “He went that way.”
I ambled out the back exit, which opened onto their parking lot, but S. S. wasn’t there. I circled John’s twice but couldn’t see him.
I’d hoped to find him back at the Corolla—perhaps, like actors in a vaudeville skit, we’d simply missed each other?—but he wasn’t there, either. Vince, however, hadn’t moved except to shut his eyes and curl up into a tight ball. It was possible, though I couldn’t tell for sure, that he was sucking his thumb.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said. I hated myself for what I was about to do, but I couldn’t simply leave him sleeping there in the snow. “Son of a bitch,” I said, trudging across the street, stopping when my boots reached his head. “Hey, Vince!” I said. “Yo, Vince!” I tapped his cheek with the tip of my boot, and he moaned. His thumb was indeed in his mouth. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get up. You can’t sleep out here.” I crouched down and gently slapped his face. “Wake up, Sunshine!” When that didn’t work, I started piling snow onto his head.
“What the fuck?” he mumbled. When his head was almost covered, he reached up and slapped the snow away, opening his eyes. “Jack?” he asked. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” I said, already regretting that I had decided to help him.
“Who the hell was honking?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “A crazy person, probably.”
“I’ll bust his head,” he said and made a soft fist while drool trickled out of his mouth.
“Yeah-yeah,” I said. “But listen: You can’t sleep out here, buddy. The police will come and haul you away.”
“Police? Who called the police?”
“No one,” I said. “Not that I know of. But they’ll come by eventually and see you lying here, and they’ll lock you up. So, why don’t you come with me?”
“Where are we going?”
“You can rest up at my place, okay?”
Vince, looking as though he might barf again, nodded. Paul Revere’s soldiers watched from their various pizza-making stations as I helped Vince across the street and then loaded him into my car. On a telephone pole hung a flyer:NAROPA READING AT THE MILL,
COME HEAR REAL WRITERS—
FOR A CHANGE.
The writing program at Naropa University was as maligned as, if not more than, Iowa’s program but for a host of completely different reasons. Founded by Allen Ginsberg, the program was seen as flaky and silly, admitting groupies and wannabe hippies who paid little or no attention to craft. Instead of rigorous discussions on the sestina or point of view, they sat on dirty floors and banged tambourines—or so I’d heard. The reading was tonight at 8:00.
I tore the flier off the pole, folded it, and stuffed it into my back pocket.
“Roll down your window,” I said after I had settled in. “If you feel the urge to throw up, don’t do it in my car. Okay? Are we clear on that?”
Vince nodded. He rolled down the window with his eyes closed. As I pulled out of the parking space, I saw in the rearview mirror Paul Revere’s manager step outside to write down my license plate number.
“Too much partying with the students last night?” I asked.
Vince said, “One of them slipped me a roofie.”
“A roofie?” I said. “Are you sure? Do you know who?”
“I think it was this chick named Daphne. But maybe it was this dude named Grant.”
At a stop sign, I turned to face Vince and said, “Did they do anything to you?”
“Do?” he asked.
“Did they do anything sexual to you against your will?”
“No, no,” he said. “It wasn’t like that. Daphne and Grant are engaged or some shit, and I was hitting on Daphne big-time. Have you seen her? Jesus Christ, I couldn’t help myself. It was like I was possessed. So one of them—or maybe both of them, for all I know—slipped me a roofie. The next thing I knew, I was asleep in front of the paint store.”
As I drove, I looked around for S. S., hoping to see him down a side street. “So, let me get this straight,” I said. “This couple, Daphne and Grant, are engaged, but they keep a supply of roofies on hand.”
“No, no,” Vince said, opening his eyes. “The roofies were mine. They must have found them when they took my coat.”
“Vince,” I said. “What the fuck are you doing with roofies?”
Vince, blinking, straightened up now, clenching and unclenching his fists. “Look here,” he said. “I’ve never used them on anyone, okay? I’m a writer. Someone gave me a bottle of them once, so . . . fuck, I don’t know what I was ever going to do with them. Nothing, probably. But I’m a writer, so I kept them. That’s what writers do. Real writers at least. Published writers. They chalk what they do up to experience. Everything they do.” He turned to face me. “I mean, who the fuck are you, anyway? You want to tell me you’re a saint, is that it? You want to cast judgment on me?”
I stopped next to the city park.
“Get out,” I said.
“What?”
“Get the fuck out of my car.”
Vince said, “If I didn’t feel like absolute shit right now, I’d offer to kick your ass.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s keep that offer open.”
“What offer?”
“The offer to kick my ass. I invite you to try,” I said. “Now, get out of my car.”
Vince swung open the door and, like someone fresh out of surgery, eased himself out of the car. Grimacing, he leaned down and said, “The only reason your story was in The New Yorker and Best American was because Gordon Grimes owed you money. Everyone knows that. No one thinks otherwise.” He smiled and said, “Except maybe you.” With the car door gaping open, Vince Belecheck walked slowly away, leaving behind him a trail of ghostly boot prints across a park of virgin snow.
28
I LEARNED TO TYPE on an old manual typewriter, a machine that was as heavy as an engine block. It had belonged to my mother, who’d dreamed of becoming a journalist. Her marriage to my father and then her pregnancy with me pretty much put an end to those and a host of other dreams. When I showed an interest in writing early on in grade school, my mother unearthed the cast-iron beast from the back of a closet, dusted it off, and bought a dozen new ribbons for me. I typed on it for nine years, until my high school graduation when my parents gave me a brand-new electric typewriter, this despite typewriters being only a few short years from being put on the endangered species list, joining record players and, a few years later, VCRs in landfills across the country.
These days, everyone writes on razor-thin laptops. (Hell, teenage girls in Japan text message entire novels.) Only the oldest of writers I escorted still faxed their editors from the hotel. The younger writers—and even some not so young—maintained lengthy blogs about their writing lives. If a writer didn’t have a blog, he or she was being blogged about, often viciously, usually by wannabe writers who wielded their blogs like swords. Part of the appeal of being a writer was the anonymity, but the Internet had pretty much ruined that. Almost always when I read blogs by young fiction writers whose work I admired, I ended up feeling embarrassed for the writer. Frequently, they revealed too much personal information, or they felt compelled to share all their opinions. There appeared to be no filter between what popped into their heads and what showed up on their blogs, and I wanted to beg them to reconsider being so public, but instead of dropping emails to them, I simply never read their books again.
A year ago, after a late night at the Foxhead, I made the mistake of pulling up a blog dedicated solely to rejections from literary magazines. The site was called “Rejections Are My Heartbreak and Misery,” and each entry was about rigged contests or impersonal notes from agents who’d turned down the blogger’s novel or the cruel wording of submission guidelines. One blog entry that I had drunkenly stumbled onto happened to be about MFA programs, a subject that brought the loons out of their closets by the dozens. Finally, they could rationalize their own lack of success by accusing publishers and writers of being part of a secret cabal, like Yale’s Skull and Bones, that refused to let in anyone who didn’t know the secret MFA handshake. The comments on the blog came pouring in, one after the other, the sentiment being that MFA’ers were coddled, that they didn’t know the real world, that they were handed book contracts and cushy teaching appointments upon graduation, that they came from privileged backgrounds. The words “Ivory Tower” appeared again and again. Although I couldn’t argue that my own publications weren’t born of dubious circumstances, I foolishly decided to weigh in, letting everyone know that I had an MFA, from Iowa no less, and although most of my colleagues had come from backgrounds with money, I certainly hadn’t. Furthermore, only a few of my classmates had received cushy teaching appointments after earning their diplomas; the vast majority pieced together work any way they could. Lastly, only a modest percentage of my classmates had published books after graduation, and of those who did, only two had managed to achieve the kind of reputation where someone, somewhere, might actually have heard of him or her.
“You’re all so paranoid,” I wrote. And then, for lack of a better closing, I wrote, “Good grief!”
I entered my comment, waited a few minutes, and refreshed the page. A man whose nom de blog was “Oscar Wilde and Crazy” responded to my comment with one word: “Bullshit.”
I wrote back, “Bullshit?”
“I should kick your ass,” Oscar Wilde and Crazy wrote. “You have an MFA from Iowa and you dare come here and chastise us? You’re an asshole. Furthermore, I don’t believe most of what you’ve written.”
The anonymous blogger, who was known only as RAMHAM (the acronym for the blog’s name), moderated the comments with such speed that it was only natural to assume that this person had nothing of import going on in his or her life.
“Now, now,” RAMHAM wrote. “No name calling. Keep it civil.”
“Are you kidding me?” I wrote back to Oscar. “Why the hell would I be making any of this up? Who the fuck are you?”
