After the Workshop, page 8
Gordon Grimes was responsible for awarding me the much-coveted teaching-writing fellowship—the TWIF—given to only four fiction writers each year, and he was the one who had sent my short story, “The Self-Adhesive Postage Stamp,” to an editor at The New Yorker. The story appeared in the magazine three months later, which, as I later gathered, was practically unheard of. He also guest-edited the volume of Best American Short Stories in which my story was reprinted. In other words, Gordon Grimes was single-handedly responsible for my meteoric rise. When he finally succumbed to cirrhosis, his wife Jenna, whom I had met but didn’t really know, called to ask if I could say a few words at his wake, and though I agreed, I went to the Foxhead instead and drank until I could barely walk and then got arrested for public intoxication after calling a cop “a little pinheaded Nazi,” all of which, I believed at the time, was what Gordon would have preferred. I later apologized to the cop, but I couldn’t ever bring myself to call Jenna Grimes. What kind of man stands up his mentor’s widow, abandoning her at the funeral home? A shit-heel. That’s what kind.
Why all of this was swirling through my head the morning I awoke after the disappearance of Vanessa Roberts, I didn’t know. Gordon Grimes had been dead for over two years. My days in the Workshop were a lifetime ago: a rapidly receding memory.
S. S. Pitzer was sitting on my couch, holding my manuscript box in his lap. Half the manuscript’s pages were face-down on the coffee table.
“No, no,” I said. “You don’t want to do that.”
S. S. looked up. “This,” he said, looking down at what he was holding and then back up at me, “is a masterpiece.”
“Please, no,” I begged. “I really wish you wouldn’t.”
“I can’t stop now, for God’s sake!” he yelled. “But I have to ask you. Where’s the rest of it?” He held up the box, as if to prove how light it was.
“I never finished it.”
“You what?”
“I got stuck. And then I finally gave up.” I considered telling him that he was responsible for me giving up, but as soon as the words formed in my head, they seemed too preposterous to say aloud. A lie.
“That can’t be,” he said, physically wilting, as though I had just told him about the death of a mutual friend.
I shrugged. I made a face to show that these things happen.
“Did you start writing another one?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“Short stories?” he asked. “Poems?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh-oh, I know,” he said. “Creative nonfiction. A memoir! Those are hot now, aren’t they? Or perhaps their time has already come and gone.”
“Nothing,” I said. And then to end the conversation, I added, “I gave up. Now if you’ll excuse me.” I could see that S. S. had wanted to pursue the subject, but before he could say another word, I pressed the playback button on my answering machine.
The first dozen messages were, as I had guessed, from Lauren Castle. In each message, Lauren berated me, calling me “irresponsible” and “childish.” In a few of the messages, she claimed that my behavior bordered on criminal intent. What followed were a few desperate messages from M. Cat begging me to make Lauren stop calling him, that he was going out of his mind. “Dude,” he said in one message, “this is, like, your problem? Not mine?”
All of these were left before I had dispatched M. Cat to find Vanessa, so I busied myself making coffee and brushing my teeth while more rebukes came in from Lauren. In one, she said, “Do you have any idea of the damage I could do to you, you shithead? I’m the head of publicity for a major New York publisher! That may not mean much to you out there in Ohio or Iowa or whatever the hell cowpoke state you live in, but it means something where I live, goddamn it. It means something in New York fucking City!” In her next message, she started pleading with me. “Please,” she began. “Please call me back. Vanessa Roberts’s book is poised to be number one on The New York Times best-seller list. We just went into a second six-digit print-run. If she stops touring, she’ll lose all this momentum. Bookstores will start sending back all those copies. I don’t even want to think about that. Have you ever seen a warehouse full of a book that tanked? I have, and it’s not pretty. I started out working in a warehouse—yeah, that’s right: me, in a warehouse!—when sales for Jay McInerney’s Story of My Life went south. We must have gotten a hundred thousand of those books back. Maybe two hundred thousand. Do you know what a hundred thousand books look like? Picture it, would you? You can’t, can you? Well, then, can you imagine the psychological effect that that many returns has on—” The answering machine cut her off. The next message began, “Fuck it. What do you care? You’re just a writer wannabe, right? You’re just a slacker hanging out in a college town at his local coffee shop, wearing a beret—Am I right? Are you wearing a beret right now?—writing the Great American Novel on legal pads. Is this a bull’s-eye or what? You probably smoke clove cigarettes and drink Jameson’s but don’t eat meat. You know what? You’re pathetic. You’re a living, walking cliché, and I bet deep down you know it too. Don’t you?”
S. S. had wandered over to where I stood by the coffeemaker.
“Want a cup?” I asked.
“Who is this awful woman?” he asked.
“Oh, her? She’s just a publicist,” I said. “But I don’t take it personally. They’re all like that.”
“Really? They don’t treat me that way,” he said.
“Of course they wouldn’t. But media escorts? We’re at the bottom of the food chain. Oh, wait: Here comes another one,” I said, tipping my head toward the answering machine.
“I’m booking a flight there even as I speak,” she said. “Travelocity, baby. Travel-fucking-ocity.”
The answering machine gave one final, long beep—the equivalent of an electronic sigh. There were no more messages.
“Did she just say she was coming here?” I asked.
“She did indeed,” S. S. said. “But have you peeked outside yet?”
I walked to the living room’s bay window, pulled back the curtain, and peered out into the blinding whiteness. A man wearing a snowsuit was using a shovel to dig his car out. Two kids on plastic sleds slid down East Burlington, where, on a normal day, they would have been run over by a Heartland Express semi. Even the tops of stoplights were piled high with snow, like frosting on a cupcake. Each time I breathed, steam covered the window, and I finally had to reach up and wipe it away with my forearm, just to see out.
“She won’t make it,” S. S. said. “Not today.” He sighed and said, “Oh well.”
“Shit,” I said and, coffee cup in hand, left my apartment and walked across the hall, pounding on M. Cat’s door. I pounded several times, but there was still no answer. Back inside my own apartment, I explained the situation to S. S.—the disappearance of Vanessa, followed by my foolhardy decision to ask M. Cat to go looking for her—but in the midst of my story, I remembered that I was talking to a man who had himself effectively disappeared not for a day or a week or a month but for several years.
When I finished talking, S. S. shrugged and said, “She’ll turn up. I wouldn’t worry.”
16
S. S. HAD TAUGHT in the University of California system for twenty years before his novel Winter’s Ghosts hit the Times best-seller list, and then, like that, he simply disappeared. Sometimes I wondered if it was the teaching, rather than success, that had driven him into hiding. During my two years in the Workshop, I taught introductory fiction writing courses and entertained the idea, after reading a stack of my students’ stories, of shooting myself in front of my class. If ever there was a course designed to drive a person away from teaching, it was short story workshop. My students, by and large, took the course to scratch a creative itch, but few of them had read anything other than what they’d been assigned in school, and most of them had resented the little they’d been made to read. If they had read anything on their own, it was usually a novel featuring vampires, or it was John Grisham’s latest, or maybe it was a novelization of Star Trek. The worst were the J. R. R. Tolkien fans who saw themselves as the “serious readers” of the class.
In the stories that were turned in for the workshop I taught, main characters often died at the end, or else they revealed to the reader long-held secrets on which the entire plot of the story pivoted. Punctuation was random; students were unable to remain inside only one character’s head; correct spelling eluded them. Despite their inability to master the basics, my students felt compelled to argue the most elementary points with me.
“I don’t like concrete details. If something has too many concrete details, it doesn’t leave enough for the reader’s imagination,” one girl pronounced. Or, “I like it when we don’t know the narrator’s name. It makes him seem more, I don’t know, universal.” Or, “I don’t know why all stories have to have a conflict. It makes the story seem formulaic.” Or, “What’s wrong with clichés? I mean, we all know what the clichés mean, so why not use them?” Or, “I don’t see why we can’t use stereotypes. Like, stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. People like that really do exist!”
The semester was flush with dead grandmother stories (“When I saw her powdered face in the casket, a single tear rolled down my cheek. ‘Grandma!’ I yelled. ‘Don’t leave us!’”), stories about the big football game (“It was the fourth quarter, fourth down with twenty yards to go and only thirty seconds on the clock—it was now or never, baby!”), or stories that ended with the narrator’s death (“The last thing I saw, as I stood on the tracks, was the front of the speeding locomotive with the maniacally laughing conductor inside . . . and then everything went BLACK . . . ”).
Unstapled when I had asked otherwise, often missing pages, sometimes unfinished, the stories arrived week after week for those two years, and I dutifully read them, made comments in the margins, typed up critiques, and assigned grades. I had decided, midway through my first semester, that I would have preferred shoveling shit at a zoo or being a rodeo clown to reading short stories written by college undergraduates, and although I never had to make that choice, I saw several lean months after graduation and before landing the media escort job, and on more than one occasion, while doing data entry for a temp agency or taking typing-speed tests at the university, I’d had to sell my own plasma to make ends meet. The whole process of selling plasma took about an hour. There was always a movie playing (John Candy movies were particularly popular at the Plasma Center), so I would kick back in the heavy-duty recliner and watch Uncle Buck or Spaceballs as blood pumped out of my body. The blood would go into a spinning device that separated the plasma from the rest of the blood, and although the rest of the blood eventually got pumped back into me, the plasma container would continue to fill up. My container of plasma, after it had filled all the way up, looked curiously like a pitcher of Michelob. That first time, when the nurse came to unhook me, I motioned toward the container and said, “Cheers!” but all she did was pull the needle from my arm, make me hold a piece of cotton over the point of entry, and then place a Bugs Bunny Band-Aid over the cotton. Not once during my first plasma donating procedure, for which I was paid thirty dollars cash, did I regret that I hadn’t pursued a career teaching creative writing, nor did I regret it during my subsequent visits to the center, visits so frequent that, many years later, I still had a white scar on the crook of my left arm.
S. S. Pitzer and I tromped down the stairs to the foyer, where four mailboxes hung on a wall, and then we walked outside together, but only after I’d leaned my shoulder into the door to push the snow on the front porch out of the way. The light was so blinding, I had to shut my eyes and then slowly open them again. I shaded my eyes with my palm, turned to S. S., and asked, “How did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Teach creative writing for twenty years,” I said.
“Oh,” S. S. said. “Yes, well. That,” he said. “The thing is, I quit reading their stories after five years.”
“Really?”
We tromped down the porch steps, through the snow. I put on my ski mask.
“I always let the students talk about each other’s stories—they always had plenty to say, of course—and I occasionally quoted Twain or Steinbeck or Flannery O’Connor when it seemed appropriate, but then I’d hand back each story with a giant ‘A’ at the end of it. Sometimes I wrote ‘Well done!’ above the grade.”
“No one ever said anything?”
“Fifteen years without a complaint,” he said. “It never crossed anyone’s mind that I wasn’t reading the stories. In fact, the year before I left town, I won the university’s Gold Medal Teaching Award, given only to their very best. Sir!” he called out to the man still excavating his car with a snow shovel. “Care for a hand?”
The man, pinch-faced from the wind, paused what he was doing and said, “Thank you, but I think I’ve got ’er!”
S. S. saluted him, and the two of us walked on.
“And where are we heading?” S. S. asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Back downtown? I need to look around for Vanessa, I guess.”
“You think she’s in a snowdrift, perhaps?” S. S. asked. He smiled and raised his eyebrows at me, amused by my lack of a plan.
“And my neighbor,” I said. “M. Cat. He’s missing, too.”
“Everyone’s fine,” he said. “Trust me. The number of people who honestly disappear—and by ‘disappear,’ I mean people who have no choice in the matter—is statistically insignificant. Everyone said that I had disappeared. I didn’t, you know. I simply drove away. I always knew where I was at.” He stopped walking to look at me, and although he couldn’t possibly have read my expressions through the ski mask, he said, “You worry too much. Look at this,” he said, waving his arm at the snow, the kind of grand gesture an old-time actor would make by way of introducing his audience to the play they’re about to see. “Isn’t this wonderful? Doesn’t it remind you of childhood?”
Across the street, at one of the unofficial frat houses, a guy wearing only too-short sweatpants stepped barefoot onto the snow-covered porch, walked over to the railing, and spewed a gallon of vomit. He remained bent over, forearms resting on the rail, panting, as steam rose from a snow-draped shrub.
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t really remind me of childhood.”
“Too bad,” S. S. said.
The college boy saw us, wiped his mouth onto his shoulder, then walked back to the front door gingerly on the balls of his feet, as though crossing a bed of hot coals. The letters across the ass of his sweatpants spelled juicy.
“Ah, youth,” S. S. said. “Let’s get some coffee. And a danish.”
“Sure,” I said. “Should we drive?”
“No, no. Let’s walk.” S. S. periodically swooped down, shoveled up a palmful of snow, packed it into a ball, and winged it at a stop sign. The first three times, he missed, but on the fourth time, he hit it head-on, causing it to clang while the snow that had been perched delicately atop the sign’s narrow width came fluttering down. S. S. raised both arms into the air and said, “Yes!”
I couldn’t help imagining how this street must have looked fifty years ago. Faculty used to live in these Victorians, their children playing together in the front yards, and on a morning such as this one, there probably would have been several snowmen in various stages of construction. This, of course, was long before those same children, now grown up and living in a new subdivision, partitioned their old childhood homes into multifamily apartments and then divvied them up again, a dozen years later, into even smaller apartments; before the houses were sold off, one by one, to property management companies; before students saw going away to college as solely an opportunity to party for four or five or six straight years; before the original porch railings had rotted away and new ones were hammered into place out of untreated two-by-fours, but only after the city had issued several citations for housing code violations. I used to imagine what Iowa City had been like back when Flannery O’Connor was a student in the Workshop, or when the Workshop’s classrooms were held in army-issue Quonset huts, but at some point I quit superimposing the past over the present and began seeing the present for the way things were now.
S. S. reached up and slapped the stop-sign he’d pegged with the snowball. When he lowered his arm, he examined his hand and said, “Hm.”
“What?” I asked.
“I believe I’ve sliced open my hand. Is there a hospital around here, by chance?”
“By the Foxhead,” I said.
“Would it be faster to walk or drive?” he asked calmly as blood poured freely from his palm.
“Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”
“Let’s walk then,” he said. “It’s such a nice day.”
17
S. S. BLED ALL the way to Mercy Hospital, leaving a convenient trail for hound dogs and crime scene investigators.
“You doing okay there?” I asked.
“Fine, perfectly fine,” S. S. said. “The Ancient Greeks used to think that veins were filled with air until the physician Galen discovered that it was blood that filled them. After that, he started performing bloodlettings. He calculated how much blood should be removed based on how old the patient was, their constitution, what season it was, the weather, and where they were. Do you know the origin of the word plethora? It originally meant excess blood. Symptoms were thought to be headache, fever, and apoplexy.” He looked over at me and smiled. “Perhaps I’ll tell the doctor I’m suffering from plethora and foolishly took matters into my own hands.”
“They’ll lock you up,” I said.
“You’re right,” he said and laughed. “They would, wouldn’t they?”
