by Greg Herren
QUIET DESPERATION
A SHORT STORY
BY GREG HERREN
Copyright © 2018 by Greg Herren
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, businesses, or incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including scanning, uploading, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
QUIET DESPERATION
The fishing camps on Lake Catherine were deserted. I’d hoped they would be. That was why I was driving my three-year-old Honda C-RV east along Chef Menteur Highway at almost three o’clock in the morning. This old highway wasn’t used much since I-10 was built less than a mile to the west. I could see the twin spins out the driver’s window, the lights of cars and trucks heading to the north shore glowing light lightning bugs in the darkness. When I was finished, I’d head north across the Rigolets bridge and catch I-10 west back into New Orleans without being seen out here.
That was the plan, at any rate.
I pulled over onto the shoulder opposite Lake Catherine just before the road curved slightly to the left. Two fishing camps about two hundred yards ahead of me sat dark and silent on their stilts on the lake. I turned off the headlights and killed the engine. Bayou de Lesaire was just on the other side of the underbrush. I didn’t know if there were alligators in Bayou de Lesaire. It would be great if there were, but it wasn’t important. It wouldn’t be optimal if someone found the body in a few hours, but even so, I figured I’d still have a day or two.
And then I would be home free.
I clicked the key fob to unlock the hatch.
“You just couldn’t leave it alone, could you?” I said to the rolled-up rug as I started pulling it out. “You couldn’t just take no for an answer.”
Would I have started all of this had I known it would end this way?
Maybe.
The whole thing had started as a joke.
And now someone was dead.
The great irony is Hunter would have enjoyed the joke most of all.
Hunter had now been dead nearly two years, found in a suite in a mid-city Manhattan hotel by the maid. Ruled an accidental overdose by the coroner, the wonder was he’d lasted as long as he had. He’d always drank too much, done too many drugs, had too much sex. He was always, as he slurred to me once over the phone at three in the morning, ‘up to his elbows in drugs and booze and boys.’
He was one of those people who came out of the womb in a glitter shower, wrapped in a rainbow, riding on the back of a unicorn. There was money on both sides, his mother the sole heiress to a fortune made from something to do with the working parts of flush toilets, his father the last of a cadet branch of a tobacco family. His parents also drank a lot—his taste for liquor was genetic. He was from Savannah, and never lost that soft drawl despite growing up in some of the most exclusive and expensive boarding schools in New England. He followed his father to Princeton, and from there to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Money was never an issue, and he’d been blessed with a talent for stringing sentences together into complicated paragraphs expressing complex thoughts. He left Iowa for New York already signed to a top agent based on one hundred pages of a novel that had everyone in the industry talking, soon signed to a contract with the publisher where I’d managed to get a low-paid job in PR after graduating from a nothing college in the middle of nowhere.
I was assigned to him when the book was being prepared for publication. Everyone thought Shadow People was going to break big. The higher-ups were talking National Book Awards, Pulitzers, and movie deals worth a high six figures. I wasn’t sure why the vice-president of publicity—a workaholic from Long Island who thought the three main food groups were nicotine, caffeine, and martinis—assigned him to me. Shadow People was a big novel set in the gay community with an openly gay writer—and the kind of advance Hunter got was rare for that combination. Gay novels were usually published by a house like ours as an attempt to show how hip and diverse we were—they’d throw some money at it, a couple of thousand copies would sell, it would get remaindered, and in a couple of years no one would remember it existed.
I was spellbound when I read the galley proofs. It was set in a world I didn’t know—one of anonymous hook-ups, and parties and drugs and being fabulous, of gyms and bathhouses and clubs and Fire Island houses in the summer and Palm Springs condos in the winter, of bored, wealthy, talented gay men who talked about art and beauty and love and life and thought Great Thoughts, who’d never give a low paid PR person the time of day.
It was a great book. Not the kind I would write, but a great book.
Of course, he insisted on meeting for the first time in a bar, rather than at the office. Given the choice, Hunter always wanted to meet somewhere alcohol was available. When he arrived, I stood up nervously from my table where I was sipping soda water and going over my notes and waved.
Hunter was almost ridiculously good looking, in that WASP-y white-bread-went -to-private-school kind of way. His white-blond bangs flopped perfectly on his forehead. It was all effortless; the flawless skin, the chin, the dimples, the icy-blue eyes, the proportioned frame…of course, he went to the gym regularly, but never watched what he ate, never cared about fat grams and carbs and everything everyone else has to worry about. I’ve always suspected some of his enormous success as an author was because he was ridiculously good-looking. His author photos were works of art. Photographers lined up to shoot him. He could have supported himself easily as a model…over the years I’ve lost track of how many features in magazines like GQ and Vanity Fair and Street Talk there were, all shot by some major photographer.
But Hunter didn’t want to talk about himself or his book or anything business-related that day. He focused those ice blue eyes on me and wanted to know about me. About my life, my past, my dreams, why I was working in such a crappy job in publishing, finally getting me to admit for the first time I dreamed of being a writer. He was actually interested…for a brief moment I thought, flattered myself, his interest was something more than what it was, but I wasn’t his type.
We became friends, and he helped me, pushed me to write, gave my books blurbs, introduced me to people who could help my career. I never would have made a living doing this were it not for Hunter. “You’re just as good, if not better, than I am,” Hunter said once when we were stoned and drunk, celebrating me landing an agent, “but you don’t have the back story, which just goes to show how bullshit this whole business really is.”
And when he died in the arms of an Eastern European hustler named Yuri, he left me everything. His copyrights, his papers, his money, his Greenwich Village apartment—everything he could legally leave to me, he did. The trusts and things from his family reverted back to the family, of course, which is how old money stays rich. His family never cared about his writing. To them it was an eccentricity, like being gay, something talked about over cocktails in a hushed voice.
I put the crates of his papers in my spare bedroom, meaning to get to them eventually. I honestly meant to. They were important, Hunter was important. I intended to find the right college to donate his papers to—they really belonged to scholars and history—but I just never could find the time to go through them.
And when I tried to make the time, I would look at the pile of boxes and give up without trying.
You see, I knew without even having to open one that there would be chaos inside. Hunter just shoved things into boxes and then wrote on them with a Sharpie, things like “first drafts” and “contracts” and “articles” and other vague things like that—sometimes more than one—so there was no telling what was where and what was even there.
I just couldn’t deal with it.
And there was a small part of me that refused to believe he was gone. If I started working on his papers, that would be it. I’d have to admit he was dead, not just off on a colossal bender somewhere to resurface and regale me with tales of his wild adventures.
I loved him, and I missed him. He was my best friend.
And then one night I had a random thought that struck me as funny. I may even have laughed. I was sitting there in my easy chair streaming some lame television show someone with little to no talent was getting a fortune for writing and yes, feeling sorry for myself. I don’t mind admitting that when you’re a writer, shitty day after shitty day can lead to drinking too much wine and smoking too much pot and wondering why you even bother and maybe it was time to just give it all up because it’s never going to happen and you’ve wasted way too many years of your life chasing this elusive dream, that after years of working hard and pushing yourself and doing everything your agent and your editor and your publisher ask you to do, no matter how humiliating, you still find yourself not making the kind of money where you won’t have to worry every month about paying your bills, taking gigs you don’t want to but you need to pay the bills.
That particular day I’d lost a ghost-writing gig. I’d written ten of the twenty or so books in a series for “tweens” about a bunch of slutty, privileged girls at a private school over the last three years and was hoping to write at least another three this year until I woke up that morning to an email from my agent telling me the publisher had decided to ‘go in another direction with the series’, whatever the hell that meant, and so they were going to hire a fresh batch of ghost writers.
Don’t worry, though, Barry, she’d closed with, I’m sure something else will turn up soon. I’ll start sending out feelers—don’t get upset! Something will turn up.
Feelers.
Something will turn up.
Great.
Adding insult to injury, about an hour later I’d gotten an email from an editor about a short story I’d been asked to write for an anthology. I’d one through two rounds of edits with the editor, making all the changes she wanted…and then, out of nowhere, I’m so sorry I’m not going to be able to use your story after all. But I might be able to use it if I get to do another volume…because yes, of course, by all means, please sit on my work for some more time without paying me for it because maybe you might use it another time.
Yeah, that and two hundred bucks will pay the power bill.
I’d stopped myself from writing the blistering, bridge-burning response I wanted to send, and just deleted her email unanswered.
I gave up on getting anything done. If it was only one o’clock, so what? I opened a bottle of Chardonnay and rolled a joint and turned on the television and spent the afternoon turning my mind into mush, trying to forget the fifty grand or so of income the loss of the series meant and wondering how I was going to keep paying the bills.
There was still money owed to me out there, and it would be spring royalty season soon. But my bank account was dwindling, more going out than coming in.
And that’s when the joke came to me.
I should dig out that old manuscript and send it to Hunter’s agent. I bet he could sell it for several hundred thousand, at least, with Hunter’s name on it.
It was funny, wasn’t it? Trying to pass off my old manuscript as one of Hunter’s?
What a great joke it would be if I could fool his agent.
Hunter had been dead less than a year that night.
Hunter. My old friend and good buddy Hunter Sloane.
Six figure book deal within a month, I thought, pouring another glass of wine. If not a bidding war.
Hunter’s agent, Lester Doheny, had been pestering me about Hunter’s papers since the day they arrived. I knew there wasn’t anything unpublished in there, no secret lost manuscript like Lester was hoping. Hunter hated writing, and never wrote anything not under contract. All those papers were just versions of novels and short stories he’d refined down and eventually published. Lester should know that better than anyone. But still, he held out hope.
People always thought I resented Hunter, his acclaim and success.
Nothing could be further than the truth. I never resented Hunter. Sure, I envied him. Everyone did. But Hunter was my friend, you know? And he wasn’t, like so many others who hit the jackpot in the game of life, a dick about it. He was a nice guy, and smart. He just made a lot of bad decisions and choices in his life, which was why he wound up dead in his mid-forties. He never gave a thought to the future, and never regretted his past. Hunter was all about the present, savoring every second.
I laughed a little bit as I reached for the pipe for another hit.
Fireflies was the name of the manuscript. My attempt at the Great American Novel. I’d written and rewritten and paid editors to give me opinions and sent it to agents and used their feedback and no one wanted it. It was the book I’d thought would get me out of the world of ghost-writing books for long-dead authors and turning audio recordings of D-list celebrities into memoirs or writing novels for them for a five-figure check while they banked seven figures and went on talk shows. Oops, signed confidentiality agreements for all of them, so let’s just pretend I never mentioned any of that. I’ve written science fiction, thrillers, cozy mysteries, you name it. Hunter once told me ‘your blessing and your curse is that you can write anything.’
The more I thought about it the funnier it became. But Hunter’s agent Lester would see through it, wouldn’t he? Lester and I could laugh about it over drinks sometime when I went up to New York to sign something for the estate. Hunter only wrote three novels. The second two didn’t sell nearly as well as his first one, but that first one sold and sold and was still selling and won enough awards and got taught at universities and always made lists of great American novels.
I do miss Hunter, you know. So much.
Our friendship endured even after I moved to New Orleans, where I could sit in my crumbling yet aristocratic garret in the lower Garden District and write. Hunter was so supportive, giving me advice, reading my stuff and critiquing it with his smart point of view. He never could understand why he was so admired and respected, while the books I published under my own name were virtually ignored by reviewers and awards committees and readers. It drove Hunter crazy I had to ghost-write.
“It’s not right,” he would always say angrily, “that you have to whore yourself like this. You are just as talented as I am.”
I just didn’t have his pedigree.
Hunter found the whole business of publishing ridiculous.
In my drunken, stoned stupor, I could hear Hunter telling me to do it.
I stumbled into my kitchen, sat down at my computer and typed out an email to Lester:
Lester:
I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I’ve found a couple of pieces of a manuscript in Hunter’s papers—I just started going through them. I will, of course, keep an eye out for the rest.
Best,
Barry
After I hit send, I had a moment of buyer’s remorse.
I could always pretend I never found the rest, couldn’t I?
I went to bed.
I woke up the next morning, not certain I’d really done it, that I’d just imagined doing it, until I saw Lester’s response:
Barry:
Terrific news! Do keep me posted. If there’s at least two-thirds of a manuscript, I can find someone to finish it. I can’t tell you how thrilled and happy I am! There’s no telling what other treasures you might find in his papers—short stories, even the memoir he
kept talking about writing! I’ll put out some feelers to see how much interest there is.
Talk soon,
Lester
I can find someone to finish it rankled.
Why would Lester ever consider asking ME to do it?
Because Hunter was the only person who ever believed in you.
That was the moment I decided that I was going to revise Fireflies in Hunter’s style and send it to Lester.
Fuck you very much, Lester.
Because even after all this time, after so many times…it still stung to be dismissed like that.
If I hadn’t lost that ghostwriting gig. If the short story hadn’t been pulled. If Lester hadn’t been such a dick in his email to me.
If, if, if.
I pulled up the old manuscript and started reading.
I spent the day reading the electronic file, making notes. Fireflies was a much better book than I remembered… some of the rejections it got it had been pretty so nasty.
And undeserved.
It would be so easy to make it look like Hunter wrote it.
I shut down my computer and went to bed, completely believing I would wake up the next morning and change my mind.
But the next morning…I shouldn’t have done it, I told myself not to do it, but I opened Lester’s email again and read those words one more time as I drank coffee and ate my morning oatmeal. There was a dull throbbing behind my eyes.
I was going to teach Lester a lesson.
I was going to teach the whole goddamned industry a lesson.
And so, I started revising the manuscript, refreshing Hunter’s writing style in my mind by thumbing through his books. It was particularly galling to realize our styles—the style I’d always wanted to use—was actually very similar to Hunter’s.
Hunter had hand-delivered Fireflies to Lester twenty years ago, and told me later that night over a joint, “I told him he could thank me later for giving him his next big star.”