Artificial Light

by James Greer

  A minute later, the feeling passes and you want to hit someone. If you’re not the physical type, you will, like us, lash out in brutal/cowardly passive-aggressive ways at whomever happens to be nearest. The cruelest thing about fighting with your friends in a bar is not the public display of your worst character traits but the way those traits always seem, upon reflection, to be the truest expression of your always-shifting notion of selfhood.

  That’s the obverse of the drinking paradigm; the skin of self-disgust that covers your life, that colors every word or action you attempt whether sober or drunk. Feeling hopeless, you drink, which makes you feel transiently hopeful. The removal of that fleeting certitude—by ineluctable sobriety—destroys you. Pulls you down farther than you can imagine crawling back, which feeling has charms of its own. That’s the thing with drunks: We don’t drink to feel better, we drink to feel.

  Somewhere between the time of great drinking and the present moment—not long, but long enough—we were engaged to write a book about our life in rock. The book was not meant to be about us, you understand, but about the things we had done and witnessed that involved book-worthy people or events. The idea was not our idea, and would never have occurred to us independently, but was handed down from above, or up from below, choose your poison. We were minding our own business, which consisted at that time of not much: desultory research and writing for our Orville Wright biography (about which, more soon), and a lot of sitting around rethinking our decision to quit playing in the rock band that had provided us with the material to write a book about our life in rock—shall we call that irony? (Will have to consult our editor about shadings in the irony area; on second thought, will not call editor because we are, for reasons [again] soon to be revealed, avoiding our editor)—when we suddenly acquired a literary agent. We acquired an agent by mistake—that’s to say, not accidentally, but by making a mistake we rarely made: We answered the phone. And while at first we thought it would be funny—telling people we had an agent, saying we would have to check with our agent before going to buy a round of drinks, complaining that our agent won’t leave us alone—the joke, as with all good jokes, turned out to be on us.

  Because, as it turns out, our agent won’t leave us alone. We think she’s in love with us, which is fine, even sweet, but she’s a 250-pound Jewish girl from Long Island with one eye and we are a superficial Midwestern prick with four. It would never work. Our one-eyed agent called us up almost exactly a year ago, about two months after we officially quit Whiskey Ships, which is the name of the band we used to play guitar in, not lead guitar but lead rhythm, if there is such a thing. We were a very good, even great band, but we weren’t very good musicians. We quit, and then one day around 3:00 in the afternoon Gail called.

  “Is this Trip?” asked Gail, who has a not-unpleasant, flat, nasally voice, almost motherly sounding.

  “Yes.”

  “Trip Ryvvers, from Whiskey Ships?”

  “Uh, uh-huh.” We were starting to tense up. We’d been receiving a number of bill collector calls, and the collectors had begun resorting to just this sort of fake-chummy tactic, doing just enough research on us to put us off guard, make us think there was no way a bill collector could have heard of Whiskey Ships, who only barely sold a hundred thousand copies of any one record, and hardly ever appeared on TV or got played on the radio, and even if by some miracle they had heard of us, the odds of their knowing the names of even one band member, especially a fairly anonymous guitarist who didn’t write songs except for on one EP and a couple of cowrites for which we still hadn’t received a dime of publishing money, were extremely slim. It was the very unlikelihood of any bill collector having access to this kind of information that made us think we might be dealing with one.

  “Oh my God, this is so great!” squealed Gail, who turned out not to be a bill collector, but a literary agent from New York City, who not only knew of our band but claimed to have met us.

  “You probably don’t remember. It was backstage at the New York festival, the one out at Randall’s Island, where you guys were playing, and Rooftop Kings, and Frail. That one. It was back by your trailer. You were talking to the guy from Five Angry Jews. Ring a bell?”

  Because we have no way of knowing at what future time you may be reading these words, and because we assume that the words “Rooftop Kings” will mean nothing as a cultural signifier, because the band was not very good and will not be remembered for very long, we will explain that any and all references to bands or persons with which readers are unfamiliar may be passed over without worry. They are tokens, merely, and mean nothing, or maybe a little something, but usually that something will be a joke the humor of which is so ephemeral it needn’t trouble you if you miss it. So don’t worry. Half the band names we have made up anyway because we couldn’t remember the real band name and the imperfectly remembered name seemed more appropriate. This goes double for people’s names, too, some of which may be ciphers (even when historical names are used) for actual people, some of which may not exist, and some of which, like Gail, for instance, may just be ordinary real human beings who happen to figure into the story in question.

  “No, uh … no,” we replied to Gail’s question about whether we remembered meeting her. We didn’t remember for one of two reasons: 1) We were drunk. 2) She was lying.

  Number two’s the most likely explanation, believe it or not. First of all, we have a near-eidetic memory for names which only increases when drunk, so the odds of our not remembering Gail’s name had we actually met her backstage at a rock festival in the mid-’90s were slim. In addition, the details she used to lend her story verisimilitude, while plausible enough, had a generalized, too-obvious quality. They had the aura of specificity but lacked true detail, and the circumstances she sketched out could have occurred at pretty much any large festival-type show in any geographic location over a three- or four-year span.

  So she lied, as many people do when they want something from someone but don’t want to seem like they want something. She lied to make the transition easier from saying hello to pitching her idea, which was for us to write a book based on our “experiences.” The idea, especially since we could practically see her making quotation marks with her fingers, naturally repelled us at first, and then, as with all things that we find repellent at first, sprouted claws, attached itself to the inside of our throat, grew irresistible. We became, within a very short time, insanely attracted to the idea of writing a book about our “experiences.” We were not sure at that point what those experiences were or how we would go about organizing them into a coherent format, but these were not things with which in general we concerned ourself in those days anyway. We may as well confess that we became insanely attracted to the idea of writing a book as soon as Gail uttered the word “advance.”

  “Advance” is a word musicians are very familiar with, usually to their eventual dismay, as in the music business it’s a synonym for “devious way the record company gets you in their debt so you feel guilty about not working as hard as you possibly can every single day of your foreshortened life to pay back the absurd amount of money the company spent helping you make and promote your record.” We knew that, but we also knew that we had not worked in six months and had currently neither prospects for work nor desire to work. (In addition, certain rumblings in our personal life were rapidly nearing the eruptive stage, so we were maybe in the mood for distraction.) We had done some writing, off and on (more off than on), for a few general interest magazines both before and during our tenure in Whiskey Ships, which was how Gail came to the somewhat hasty conclusion that we might be able to parse the complexities of book writing. What she did not know is that we have since the age of twenty-three been working on a biography of Orville Wright, the coinventor of flight and native Daytonian, and that we’re now up to Chapter 14. It’s got all kinds of new revelations, based on material we unearthed at the Wright State Library while we were still a T.A. there, in our first year of post-gra
d work in the history department. (We quit before our second year out of what we like to call boredom.) We managed to borrow a milk crate’s worth of notebooks which turned out to be Orville’s secret written-in-code diary, which had lain undisturbed for years, misidentified as his schoolboy Greek and Latin exercises.

  Our point is that we know how to write a book, which is a thing Gail did not know when she offered her services to shop around the proposal for a book about our “experiences” (we’ll drop the quotation marks soon, we promise.) There’s also the not entirely ancillary point that in mulling over Gail’s phone call, her notion that our as-yet-barely-lived life might have value, not just in an abstract sense but actual monetary value, provided us with a fillip of pride. We were not worthless, despite what our soon-to-be ex-girlfriend had recently told us, if someone would pay money for the story of at least a part of our life. As you can imagine, the more we thought about it, the more depressed we got, and as a result found it necessary to get even drunker than usual, which meant having to sell off another small piece of our record collection, which was basically a weekly or twice-weekly occurrence at that point. And then after we got even drunker than usual, we ended up trying to make out with Mary Valentine again. We may have done more than just try to kiss her, there may have been confessional words spoken—in the clear light of sobriety we’re almost sure there must have been—shameful, dishonest words about undying love and the skin-cleansing properties of certain love-related fluids. We may also have used the line, “Like all poets, I am an inarticulate man,” which we read somewhere was a line Joyce had used on Nora, early on. We’re fairly confident that pronouncing the word “inarticulate” after fifteen or twenty strong whiskey drinks is the definition of inarticulate, as well as of several other less complimentary words.

  After sobering up, which is as deceptively easy a prepositional phrase as we will ever write (the world of hurt contained within the one word “sobering” deserves a book of its own, a book we may well one day write), we reconsidered. It now seemed to us, or rather began to seem as the throbbing in our temples receded under the influence of a dozen ibuprofen, that a book about our life might serve as proof that our life had not been entirely wasted. After all, look, here’s a book! This thought enabled us to get up for the first time that day, which was a mistake, as we almost immediately felt nauseated, and had to lurch back to our one piece of decent furniture, the bed.

  As we lay in bed thinking about our bed, the phone rang, forcing us to get out of bed and grab the phone and get back into bed. We almost missed the call. It was Gail (we knew it would be Gail), and we said yes, we would like her to shop the proposal for a book about our experiences to various publishers. What we neglected to consider when answering Gail’s phone call was that this book proposal would not, however much we might wish otherwise, write itself, which meant that before we could receive an advance we would have to actually come up with what Gail now terrifyingly described to us as “nothing major, a sample chapter and an outline, maybe twenty-five pages.” The prospect of writing twenty-five pages about anything except the concept of wing-warping by which Orville and Wilbur Wright solved—without the benefit of government funding or even college education—the problem of heavier-than-air flight seemed not just painfully difficult but absurd. We didn’t understand why Gail couldn’t just call up one of these publishers and promise them that we were going to write a very entertaining book about our experiences. Based on our agent’s verbal assurances, said publisher would then forward us a check that would fund our drinking for as much as a year, which is the longest stretch of time we were capable at that time of imagining.

  When it became clear that this was not going to happen, we set about in that section of the day we came to think of as our “sober window,” a not-inconsiderable slice of daylight extending from somewhere around noon, which is when we would generally wake up, until 9 or 10 at night, when we would go to the bar, working on what became quickly known among our group of friends as “Trip’s book proposal.” Our friends were not notable for their imaginative powers. It’s not what they were good at. What they were good at, drinking, was why they were our friends.

  All rock is artifice—artifice is the basis of at least the kind of art that anyone wants to see, hear, feel; to the extent that this artifice succeeds in creating an alternate “reality” convincing and/or illuminating enough to sustain the attention of the listener, it can be said to have succeeded. Success in rock is therefore measurable by the depth and duration of the enchantment it creates. So maybe it’s more accurate to say that rock is magic. —

  Shorbuck, op. cit.

  We figured that if we were going to write a book proposal, we might as well write a book proposal designed to produce the largest possible advance. In order to do that, we would have to promise, in the proposal, to deliver things—revelations, exposés, scintillations of gossip, bouquets of innuendo—concerning the demi-celebrities with which we had been associated over the years. Because we have no soul, we went ahead and promised to deliver these things, despite the fact that we had no intention of fulfilling delivery, and despite the further fact that even if we had intended to deliver the promised material, we couldn’t. There were no revelations, exposés, any of that stuff, nothing. Or if there were, they happened outside our purview, or while we were passed out. We did not let this inconvenient truth stop us from adumbrating the fantastic stories of debauchery and heartbreak that would fill the pages of a book we had no intention of writing, however. On the contrary: We got carried away, and started promising disclosures about people we did not know and had never met. We ended up, after a twoweek period during which we did little else but drink, wake up, invent more spurious details, and drink, with a proposal for a great book, a book we would certainly be interested in reading, called Exit Flagging, after a song by Whiskey Ships. We promised an inside look at Kurt C—’s house the day after he died, for instance. We promised to explain who killed him and why. We promised that the mystery of several prominent rock stars’ rumored drug addictions would be thoroughly plumbed. We promised that we would tell who was gay, and who only wanted to be gay. The actual ages of several people who would be found to be lying about their ages. This one guy who knew this other guy who heard from the tour bus driver that someone who ought to know better had had sex with a number of underage girls and one underage boy. We made so many promises that we began to think that instead of writing the book, we wanted to sleep with the book. We would say anything to get this book into bed, and we did, and in the end, because if you try hard enough most books will eventually surrender, we succeeded, and of course almost immediately regretted everything.

  Two problems arose as a direct result of our unwise burst of energy and ambition. Neither seemed, at first, to be problems. One was that our proposal received a certain amount of interest from some of the larger publishing houses in Manhattan (it had been our understanding that, as is the case with record companies, there’s only one enormous publishing house, which operates, by a sophisticated system of barely legal tax dodgery, a network of subsidiaries who go around pretending to compete with each other, the whole thing a sophisticated twenty-first-century parodic masque of capitalism’s cuter but no longer viable aspects; but we’ve been told that that’s wrong.), so that by the time Gail was done playing them off against each other, we received an advance the size of which, when it became common knowledge (as anything that happens to a heavy drinker soon becomes common knowledge, because he cannot keep his fool mouth shut), caused entire neighborhoods in the part of East Dayton where we lived to riot. This, as we say, did not at first seem to be a problem so much as a cause for celebration, but there arose complications. Firstly, our friends somehow formed from the premise of our enormous advance the syllogism that they would never again have to pay for a drink. We were not quick to disabuse them, because we’re a guy who likes to be liked, even if he has to pay for the honor. Secondly, it soon became clear that the Enormous Publishing Hous
e who had sent us the generous advance check, a portion of whose proceeds were indirectly paying for the new pool table in the Hive, expected in return timely delivery of a book more or less like the one we had breathlessly outlined mere months ago. Furthermore, since the subject matter of said book could be fairly described as time-sensitive, as is the case with all pop-cultural material, the market for which is at the best of times a dicey prospect to predict, the sooner the better.

  It is convenient from time to time to make the world go away. If someone or something was bothering us (for instance bill collectors), we simply turned the ringer off, and the answering machine, and the world went away. So the occasional nervous phone calls from our editor at Enormous Publishing House were easy to avoid, especially since we could predict them: They would occur a day or two after the date we had last given as the likely day when our editor could “expect to see something,” as he very politely and never-less-than-professionally put it. That’s where we had him. He was a professional, and we could always rely on his professionalism, whereas he could not rely on us in any capacity, and despite the fact that we think fairly early on he realized this (we’re not the only unproductive author, real or fake, so it’s not like we crushed his ideals about writers), we don’t think he ever quite realized the lengths to which we were prepared not to go.

  Gail, on the other hand, pursued us with monocular singularity of focus, somehow transforming herself by force of will into an Argus-eyed tracker of tremendous patience and perseverance, two qualities we find irritating in the extreme in other people because of their irritatingly total absence in our character. Gail called at all hours of the day and night. We might unplug the phone in mid-ring, knowing it was her, and wait five or more hours before reconnecting the phone, at which point it would resume ringing as if time had suddenly accordioned shut at the two ends of that similar action. It was creepy, and we took to drinking even more than usual in an effort to stay away from the house, and the phone, which helped a little until Gail—doing the bare minimum of detective work, it wasn’t like we were actually in hiding—tracked us down at the bar and kept calling us there, which didn’t piss us off as much as it did the bartenders who had to answer the phone and pretend we weren’t there. The threat of being banned from the Snafu Hive—which would have meant walking about thirty or forty feet to the next bar, but that’s not the point, your choice in bars is like your choice in anything else, it defines you, and if you lose the ability to define yourself you’ve lost everything, plus we had put in a lot of effort cultivating occasional free drinks from the bartenders at the Hive before they got pissed at us—finally drove us to pick up the phone and talk to Gail, which was a big mistake.