All My Colors

by David Quantick

  “Oh. Does that mean—”

  “I know, it’s obviously a mistake. For a start, the book didn’t exist a year ago so how could the rights be sold? And there’s some problem with the name.”

  “The name?”

  “The name of the writer. Todd,” said Nora slowly. “Did you—have you ever come across another book of the same name as All My Colors?”

  Todd sat up. He turned the light on.

  “Todd?”

  “No,” he said slowly. “If I had, I wouldn’t have called it that.”

  “That’s what I said. But the lawyers are saying the only explanation is that someone already wrote a book called All My Colors.”

  “Did they say,” Todd asked carefully, “did they say who the other person was? The other writer?”

  “They did,” said Nora. “But the name slipped my mind. I can find out for you. Maybe it’ll help jog your memory.”

  “Is this a problem?” Todd asked. By now he was fully back in the room.

  “It shouldn’t be,” said Nora. “Lots of books have the same name as other books. It’s only a problem if what’s inside is the same.” She laughed. “But I guess we’re okay there, right?”

  “Right,” said Todd.

  * * *

  Todd sat down and thought. It had to be a mistake. Nobody else knew that there was more than one All My Colors. Because there wasn’t more than one All My Colors. The only book of that name was written by yours truly, Todd Milstead. Accept no substitute, thought Todd.

  It’s a mistake, he thought, turned the light off again, and waited for the shapes to form.

  * * *

  More time passed. The shapes came and went. Sometimes they whispered to Todd—odd phrases, names, and even entire paragraphs. Todd tried to catch what they whispered to him, but it was like trying to catch water. Still, he did what he could, and he wrote, and he listened, and he wrote.

  Later there was a knock on the door.

  “Go away,” Todd said.

  “Milstead?” It was Behm’s voice.

  Todd turned the light on and went to the door.

  “Jesus, Milstead, you look like shit on two legs.”

  “Come in.”

  If Behm found the state of the room unusual, he didn’t say anything. He just pushed a heap of paper off Todd’s favorite chair and sat down without being asked. Rude, thought Todd.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch,” Behm said, although he didn’t look sorry at all.

  “That’s okay,” said Todd. “I’ve been busy myself.”

  “Yeah, I can see that,” said Behm.

  He settled a large canvas bag at his feet.

  “At first I thought you’d sent me on a wild goose chase,” he said. “I mean, all I had to go on was a name and a town.”

  “Pontiac,” said Todd. “Jake Turner.”

  “That’s right,” Behm said. “Glad you remembered. I’d hate to think I went to all this trouble and you forgot about me.”

  “I’m very busy,” said Todd. “Can we—”

  “Sorry,” Behm said. “You’re going to have to set aside a few minutes in your packed schedule. I got a lot to tell you.”

  “I’ll get the whiskey,” said Todd.

  Behm took the smeared glass Todd offered him, drained its contents and said, “So first of all, I did the usual offices. I got the phone books, I got the street directories. I went to the library. I went to the newspaper library. And nothing. Nobody in Pontiac, Michigan was ever called Jake Turner. Which you’d think wouldn’t be the case. Even if it wasn’t our guy, there’s got to be at least one Jake Turner in town.”

  “I guess,” said Todd.

  “Then I got in the car, and I went to Pontiac,” said Behm. “It’s not one of the great towns, believe me. Detroit up the road and there’s nothing happening there anymore. And I asked around. I called up Turners in the phone book and told them I was a friend of Jake’s and had they seen him lately. I asked in bars. I spoke to librarians. That kind of thing.

  “Then I had an idea. I thought instead of looking for the guy, I’d look for the book.”

  Todd tensed. “The book?” he said.

  “Yeah. You told me he was a writer. That was the third piece of information I had, and I almost forgot about it. So I went into a secondhand bookstore and I asked the guy behind the counter if he’d heard of Jake Turner.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said no, but I was welcome to take a look on the shelves. Said it was a big place and there could be anything back there. So I went and took a look. It was a mess. The guy had no respect for the alphabet. There were Hemingways mixed up with Chandlers, Thackerays stacked up next to Graham Greene… a mess.

  “I stayed there half the morning. Guy even made me a coffee and brought me a sandwich. I went through those shelves like an auditor. I counted every single book. You okay?”

  Todd looked at Behm. Behm nodded downward at Todd’s hands. Todd was knitting and unknitting his fingers in a perpetual cat’s cradle.

  “I’m fine,” said Todd. “Did you find it? The book?”

  “No,” said Behm, and Todd’s heart almost burst with relief. Then Behm reached for the bag. He tipped it out onto the floor. There must have been ten or eleven books there. Paperbacks and hardbacks. Mint condition books and books fit only for the fire. Some were copies of All My Colors and some weren’t, but they all had one thing in common. They were all by Jake Turner.

  “I found the books. Plural,” said Behm.

  Todd got down on his knees among the books.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Well, if you don’t, nobody does,” Behm said. “You asked me to find Jake Turner, and I guess,” he indicated the small heap of books, “I came pretty close.”

  “But I never heard of these books,” said Todd, picking one up. The Green Road, it was called. Now he had it in his hand, it seemed somehow familiar.

  “The store guy hadn’t, either,” said Behm. “He guessed they must have been a job lot left by the previous owner. But you know the weird part?”

  Why is there always a weird part? thought Todd. Just for once, why can’t there be a normal part?

  “No,” he said. “What’s the weird part?”

  Behm looked at Todd, as if wondering what Todd really knew.

  “The guy starts off saying, gee, I never saw these books before, and, gee, who is this guy, and all that. He’s really insistent,” he said. “But then he stops, and he says, gee, wait a minute, I’m remembering something. Jake Turner, Jake Turner… And he starts tapping his teeth with a pencil like it’s gonna wake up his memory. Then all of a sudden he opens this drawer, and—”

  “And what?” Todd said.

  “I had to give him twenty dollars for it,” said Behm. “He was reluctant to sell it, he said, but you could tell he hadn’t looked at the fucking thing in ten years—”

  “What?” repeated Todd.

  Behm sighed. “Now we’re eager,” he said. He reached into the bag again, and pulled out a folder. Todd grabbed the folder off him. Inside it was a small yellowing bundle of typescript.

  “I’ll be charging that twenty dollars to your account,” said Behm as Todd carefully unfolded the paper. There were five or six closely typed pages.

  “What is this?” asked Todd.

  “Guy told me he found it inside one of the books,” Behm said. “Read it. I’ll get some more whiskey.”

  Todd unfolded the first page.

  THE CONFESSION OF JAKE TURNER, it said.

  “Is it a story?” he asked.

  “You’re the writer,” said Behm, returning with the whiskey. “You tell me.”

  Todd sat back and began to read.

  THE CONFESSION OF JAKE TURNER

  I, Jake Turner, writer and bum, do hereby confirm that this here is my true confession. Read it and weep, gentle reader, and excuse the clichés, because I don’t have the time or the money to hire an editor.

&nbs
p; I was born where I’ll die, in Michigan, the son of a truck driver and a housewife, and I was educated in the school of hard knocks and the university of life. My ma and pa provided the hard knocks and the world showed me life. By the time I was fifteen, I’d been with a woman, I’d drunk a bottle of whiskey unaided and lived to tell the tale, and I’d punched a man so hard he lost an eye.

  You could say I was born to be a writer.

  I was born too late to ride the railroads. My uncle did that during the Depression, but all he ever got from it was a drinking problem and a sore butt. And I was born too early for rock’n’roll. It sounds crazy to say it, but man, I would have been the best rock’n’roller. I could play the guitar a little, I was good-looking and mean, and I knew how to keep a crowd in the palm of my hand. I was just a kid in a leather jacket, but I could stop a fight and snare a woman, sometimes in the same moment. So I was too old for Elvis, but I was just the right age for Brando. And Dean. And Jack.

  I don’t know when I first came across the Beats, but when I did, it changed my life. Because it was my life. Sitting around listening to jazz and smoking tea—marijuana—and talking. God, I could talk. Sometimes I even talked women out of going to bed with me, I talked so much.

  Anyway, I read On the Road and I read Ginsberg and I listened to Lenny Bruce and I was hooked. And one day, I was pushing my motorcycle past a pawnshop and there it was in the window. A Smith Corona typewriter, black as hell. All I had with me was the motorcycle. Yeah, you guessed it.

  I pawned the helmet and got the typewriter. (What, you think I pawned the bike? Are you crazy?)

  After that, I was a writer. First I wrote rip-offs of Kerouac, and then I found a voice. It wasn’t much of a voice at first, but it was the only voice I had, and over time it got louder. It was hard to work out what to do with that voice at first, though. I wrote some science fiction stories and someone printed them. I wrote some horror stories and someone printed them, too. I was just about to try my hand at true romance when the voice said, “Jake, what is this? You have to figure out who you are before you write anything else.”

  So I got on the bike and I went—you guessed it—on the road. I rode from Detroit to New York. I went to smoky clubs and I saw the kids who were kicking out jazz and replacing it with protest. They were protesting about nuclear war, which seemed kind of pointless when there was so much else to protest about. I went out west and saw the Pacific. Nobody was protesting in Los Angeles, but I did meet Ginsberg in San Francisco. He told me to “keep writing.” I told him he was too fat for me.

  And then I came home. My pa was dead and my ma was drunk. I sold the motorbike and married a local girl and worked nights at the steel factory to support us. During the day she worked in a movie theater and I wrote. I had a plan. I was going to write The Great American Novel. It was a simple plan, and it didn’t work out. First of all I wrote The Worst American Novel, then The Shortest American Novel, and finally I wrote The Okay American Novel, and someone printed it.

  After that, it was easier. The voice and me were getting on okay. The voice told me what to write, and I wrote it. The books got better, even if they didn’t sell. Then one day, the publisher phoned me and said I needed to give them a hit or they were going to drop me. I said I’d see what I could do.

  What I could do, it turned out, was nothing. The voice was no good. It was too quiet, too ordinary. It was like someone you were close to when you were a kid, fun to hang out with and kind of provocative, but when you’re a man, when you need men around you, it’s no use. I needed a different voice.

  Then one night, after I’d finished my shift at the steel factory, I went to a bar, just to relax before I got home and had to listen to the wife telling me all about her day, which was always the same day, except they showed different movies. They changed the movies but she never changed her day.

  The bar was quiet, and there was nobody else there. Then the jukebox came on, as if by itself. It was an old jazz tune, “Bad Penny Blues.” I turned around to see who was there, and there she was. She was dancing by herself—no, she was dancing with herself—and singing, even though there were no words to the tune, just ba-ba and yeah-yeah, softly.

  I couldn’t see her face, but I knew it would be beautiful.

  Her name was Helen.

  Todd started at that.

  “Something wrong?” said Behm.

  Todd ignored him and went back to reading. His knuckles were white against the paper.

  Her name was Helen. She told me she lived a couple of blocks away, in a cold water apartment.

  “Is that why you’re here?” I asked her. “For the hot water in the bathroom?”

  She shrugged. “Know how big my apartment is?” she said.

  “I’ll bite,” I said.

  “I can lie on the bed and put my hands out of both windows at the same time,” she said.

  For a moment I had an image of her as a modern-day Alice, trapped in the doll’s house. Then her face cracked into a smile. It was a great smile.

  “Sucker,” she said.

  “Seriously,” I said, when she’d finished laughing, “how big is your apartment?”

  “You wanna see?” she said.

  There was a moment.

  “Sure,” I said.

  We did everything that night. Everything, that is, but screw. You recall I said I liked to talk? Turns out I was a rank amateur. Helen talked, and talked, through the night. I know that sounds like a putdown, but this wasn’t ordinary woman’s talk. Helen was a poem. She had no idea how wonderful she was to listen to. Her talk wasn’t like a man’s talk—it wasn’t full of opinions and facts and lists and boasts. Helen liked all kind of things, but she didn’t think she was a better person for liking them, or that the things she liked were more important than the things other people liked. She just liked. And sometimes she loved. She loved jazz, she loved books, she loved to dance.

  And later, she loved me, and I loved her.

  I got home in time for breakfast and bad temper. My wife wanted to know where I’d been all night. I told her. She walked out that morning.

  Later that day, I put a note through Helen’s door. I HAVE HOT WATER, it said. An hour later, Helen appeared on my doorstep with a cardboard valise.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Invite me in,” she said.

  It was a weird thing to say.

  “Come in, beautiful,” I said, and she stepped over the threshold.

  We didn’t talk much that day. Nor the day after. Then, one morning when we could scarcely move for aching, she came back from the bathroom with a book in her hand.

  “What’s this?” she said. It was The Green Road.

  “Oh, that old thing,” I said. “The Free Press said it had promise, but never got around to saying what that promise was.”

  “You never told me you were a writer,” she said, sitting down on the bed.

  “Nobody ever told me I was a writer, either,” I said. I must have sounded a little prickly, because she kissed me then and said, “I think it’s pretty good. Not bad, anyway.”

  Then she looked at me in a strange way. Like she’d found something to distrust.

  “I want you to know,” she said, “I won’t be used.”

  “Baby,” I said, and I meant it, “I would never use you.”

  “I mean it,” she said. “I’m not on earth to be anyone’s inspiration.”

  I didn’t really know what she meant, so I just kissed her. “Relax,” I said. “I got my own voice.”

  As it happened, though, my own voice wasn’t doing much for me. Everything I wrote turned clean sheets of white paper into great balls of crap. I just couldn’t get an idea worth anything or a sentence worth typing. But it didn’t seem to matter. I had Helen. What we had was what the philosophers talked about. Live for today. Live in the moment. Be here now. That was us. We just lived a life together. If the words weren’t coming for me, that was okay. I had my job, I had Helen. We were happy.

 
Then I started to hear stories at the factory. They were laying men off, men who’d been there for years. Men with families. And one day the supervisor called me into his office, and gave me a check, and said he was sorry.

  Helen said she’d work, but with the factory laying off, every wife and girlfriend and mother and daughter in the area was looking for work. Pretty soon, we had nothing.

  My wife called. She wanted a divorce and she wanted her share of the house. The house was sold, and with my share of the money—minus her alimony—Helen and I moved into a new apartment. It had hot water, but apart from that it was no palace.

  Still, during that time we became even closer. We started to tell each other everything we knew about ourselves. Filling in the gaps, Helen called it. I told her about my pa and his fists, and my ma and her drinking. She told me about her childhood on a farm, way out in the middle of nowhere. I told her about riding across America, and she told me about going to farm college and one day, halfway through a lecture about the importance of manure, realizing that anything would be better than farming.

  We told each other everything. We were like two people assembling jigsaws of ourselves. Then one day, after I’d cooked a meal (I could do that now), Helen said, “Do you know what today is?” I thought about saying something flip and then thought about not saying it. “Today is my tenth wedding anniversary,” she said.

  I nearly dropped the pan I was holding. I thought we knew everything about each other.

  “You were married?” I asked as casually as I could.

  “Still am, I guess,” she said. “I never got around to signing a piece of paper. Not that it matters. I’m never going to see the bastard again.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked. I don’t think I’d ever cared about a woman enough to ask her if she wanted to talk about it before.

  “No,” she said. “Yes.”

  We sat down. I got us two beers, and she told me everything. It was a hell of a story.

  Of course, if you’re reading this, and you know who I am, you know the story, so I’ll confine myself to the basics. The woman, who was young and naïve, a country girl in the big city who didn’t want to go back to the farm. The man, who was a bastard, and drank, and was violent. And the day she walked out on him, went straight to the hardware store and told the clerk that she wanted to buy a hacksaw to cut off her ring finger.