by James Greer
Turns out Gail’s nuts. Our agent: insane. Had we done any asking around (but who do you ask about these things?), we would have discovered that Gail was, in addition to obese and one-eyed, a notorious heroin addict. Her addiction was related to both her obesity (because smack rendered her immobile and non-metabolic and yet somehow, in contradistinction to the vast majority of opium-eaters, did not affect her appetite) and her cyclopticism (a bad case of cotton fever, left untreated, which in the first place had derived from a needle Gail had dropped in a plate of spaghetti and neglected to clean before using), and that moreover in the book publishing world she was regarded with great suspicion as a result of such junkrelated exploits as pissing on an editor’s desk in a fit of pique (which begs the question of how did she climb up on his desk in the first place, encumbered triply by heroin/gross bodyweight/no depth perception) and setting fire to a ficus tree in the lobby of Simon &Schuster (to say nothing of the drug problem itself, which no one exactly smiled upon). These are petty exploits, but heroin addiction is a petty thing, indulged in mostly by cowards and rock musicians.
We didn’t know about Gail’s predilection for hard drugs, but then again we didn’t know anything about her morbid obesity or her creepy one-eyed face either, until she started mailing us semi-nude photos, but we’re getting ahead. When she first started calling with rabid regularity, we assumed it was because she was worried about the extremely inchoate condition of the book we were purportedly working on. Our assumption took on further form and heft when we discovered that we were Gail’s only current client, and that her share of our advance had been almost immediately spent on a massive shipment of Malaysian tar that explains why for three weeks our phone didn’t ring. Meaning, however, that Gail would not get paid again until we turned in our manuscript, because the way advances work is slightly misnomerical in that you only get half of the advance in advance, and the other half when you complete the work and it’s accepted by the publisher, which is a time-honored incentive program, and works just as well with writers as with hit men.
We discovered, though, after a few months of enduring these any-time-at-all phone calls about usually nothing, that Gail could not care less whether we were writing or not, or how much progress we had or hadn’t made, or whether what we had managed to eke out was any good or not or even readable. Her inquiries on these subjects were perfunctory, dutiful. Nor did she seem to care about the money. We discovered, after trying unsuccessfully on a rare trip to New York to track her down at the office address she gave us, which turned out to be the address of a methadone clinic on Bowery, that Gail had a somewhat peripatetic lifestyle. To put it bluntly, she was homeless. Our agent was a homeless drug addict, which on the plus side left her with a lot of free time, and cut way down on her overhead.
We’re pretty sure she was only recently homeless, because at some point she must have been a legit agent with at least a grubby meatpacking district office (before the meatpacking district became chic and ungrubby), or else how could she even get our proposal through the door at Enormous Publishing House, or any of the satellite houses that sparked the bidding war. Nevertheless, the proof we assembled during our brief visit—going so far as to call our editor and undergo the conversational equivalent of a rectal exam in order to discover, after five highly uncomfortable minutes, only that he hadn’t spoken to Gail in three weeks and had the same methadone clinic address we had for her—proved, at length, conclusive. Our search was hampered both by our complete lack of information about her physical makeup (this was before the pictures) and by our not caring all that much and by our need to spend most of our time in the horseshoe-shaped bar on the corner of 7th Street and Avenue B, which is our favorite bar in New York, or was when Avenue B was an adventurous and unwise part of town to visit. Eventually, by talking to the orderly at the methadone clinic who was nice enough to hold Gail’s mail for her, we discovered that as far as he (Leo, a chain-smoker with a weirdly high-pitched voice) knew, she was homeless, or at least looked to be—unwashed, clothes in tatters, bad smell of urine. Leo neglected to inform us of her astounding girth or the gaping hole where her left eye used to be, but in all fairness we didn’t ask.
So Gail was homeless, and yet seemingly happy that way, at least in the sense that she did not seem perturbed by our continuing failure to deliver material in a “timely manner” (quoting from our book contract) to Enormous Publishing House. You’d think, standing in her worn-through shoes, squatting in her trash heap, she’d be on the phone to us three, four, twenty times a day, whatever it took, screaming, cajoling, pleading with us to write something, anything, and send it to our editor so she stood a chance of getting paid again. And she was on the phone three, four, twenty times a day, but she wasn’t calling to beg us to write. At first this confused us.
Gail was calling, it at length became evident, because she had developed somewhere in her overweight, smack-addled brain the notion that our relationship was something more than professional. At first her less-than-pro inquiries into our personal life, extending to casual sex-life banter of the sort that probably now could get you sued for sexual harassment but back then, in the carefree early ’90s, still passed for harmless, did not bother us. We enjoyed our conversations, more so when we were somewhat drunk than when we were sober, but we’re hard-pressed to come up with any conversation that wouldn’t be true for, and it wasn’t until a few of these conversations took an especially intense turn that ended up with Gail in tears and us mumbling excuses to get off the phone that we noticed anything wrong. We weren’t sure why she’d started crying, exactly, the first couple of times, but we thought it might be related to some hormonal mood swing.
To apprehend rock you have to speak around it, if you will, to come at it in terms of metaphor and indirect experience of the thing. So that the more appropriate question is perhaps not What is it? but What does it look/sound like? Or what is it most like that we in our direct experience may relate it to? Which is why writers so often resort to similes/comparisons as a method of describing both its nature and its effects. The two are distinct and yet closely related— nature and the effect of nature upon human sensibility.
—Shorbuck, op. cit.
After enduring without complaint months more of this long-distance stalking, we cracked. We were down at the Hive, somewhere near closing time, and we were already uneasy because our friend Magnetic Tom had thrown an ashtray through the TV set hanging from the ceiling in the back, and even though the TV hadn’t worked in years and was purely decorative, Billy the bartender threw Magnetic Tom out and threatened to throw everyone else out who even laughed at the imploded TV skeleton, since Billy was the one who had to clean up the shards of screen littering the linoleum floor sticky with beer, and of course we were one of the ones laughing hardest, and may even have been the one who dared Magnetic Tom to throw the ashtray, knowing full well that he would do absolutely anything at the slightest provocation. Right then the phone rang, and it was of course Gail, and Billy handed us the phone with a weary shake of his fed-up head, and despite our attempt at not-listening, we clearly heard Gail’s nasally but not-unpleasant voice asking us how things were going and she hoped it wasn’t a bad time to call, she just wanted us to know she’d been thinking about us and wishing all very good things for us and did we happen to get the last thing she sent us, some semiimportant legal papers relating to (fictitious) paperback rights in Scandinavia which she was this close to closing the deal for, also the set of prints of her posing with her shirt off in what looked to be a dressing room in Bloomingdale’s, also the eighteen-page letter declaring us her best friend for life and the only one who truly understood her; we hung up the phone without saying a word. We walked back to our booth and buried our head in our hands and then looked up, tossed back the remains of our whiskey drink, and announced that we “have to write this goddamn book,” though of course the booth was by now empty so we were making this announcement to the framed picture of ourself and some of the guys from ou
r band and Kurt C—and Michael Goodlife and some other guys from maybe some other band, which had been placed on the wall over the booth as a token both of our local celebrity and of our outstanding patronage. We would have preferred more free drinks, but the framed picture was a nice gesture. We came to think of that booth as our booth, because it had our picture above it, even after the elements constituting that picture, captured at that mostly happy moment in time, no longer existed and never would again exist and consequently that picture became both impossible and a lie.
But we think things that are both impossible and a lie are the basis of most worthwhile human effort. So we began to consider that while the impossible lie of our book proposal was clearly beyond reach of both our abilities and ambition as a writer, we might attempt something that in general shape would not look entirely dissimilar to the outline that had won us the big-bucks advance. The irony of us sitting in a booth underneath a picture of everything we had lost or given up was not wasted on our wasted brain. We spent our hours now in a torpid fog through which we regarded every angle, every mistake of our failures in life. Which is why we have decided to get through this. Okay: excise the scar tissue and expose the wound to the healing breeze of memory’s fresh breath.
So we have two reasons, then, to get on with Exit Flagging. The first is purely prosaic, and hardly worth re-mentioning: to save our life. The second is rather more difficult, and infinitely more valuable: to get Gail to stop calling us. In order to accomplish this latter task, and in so doing to release from thralldom whatever demons have possessed her, we have to write Exit Flagging. We hope these demons do not then turn around and inhabit someone else, because we would feel bad and partly responsible, but instead return to the nether regions of universal consciousness whence they originally crawled (the happy ending to our life’s horror movie). We think that the demons inflicting Gail, that bade her believe she’s in love with us or that something in us is necessary for her bare-bones survival, as if we were bread or water or whiskey or heroin, we think these demons have something to do with our quitting Whiskey Ships, and Kurt’s suicide, and Michael Goodlife’s death by misadventure, and the disappearance of both Amanda Early and Fiat Lux, and maybe with the larger phenomenon of the death of rock music in any meaningful form. We think these demons are somehow contained in this book, in the words themselves, the actual writing, and the only way to exorcise them is to spell their names, i.e., write the book. So we will write the book, and we will be rid of the demons and so will Gail, and then we will be rid of Gail.
We’ll say this much for her, though: She believed in us. She believed when no one else would have, especially not ourself. That measure of belief is rare in an agent, rare in a human being, these days, sadly. We may be writing this book, finally, mostly, in an effort to get her off our back, but when that sad day inevitably arrives, we will miss the hell out of sweet Gail.
Notebook Seven
Albion stands south of downtown on a small hill, approximately 275 feet higher than sea level, which gives, from the second floor or the roof, “sweeping views” of most of the city to the north. I put sweeping views in quotes because I don’t know what that phrase signifies but it’s in most of the real estate listings I used to browse on Sundays, pretending I’d ever have enough money to buy a house. You can buy one here for cheap—I know a bartender at the Snafu Hive who bought a split-level in East Dayton (the redneck section) recently for about twenty grand. According to the listings, the asking price for Albion was around $180,000 reduced over the past five or so years from an originally absurd $350,000. You might consider that’s not much money for a place the size of a high school, but two things militated in favor of cheapness: 1) as the purpose-built home of Orville Wright, cofounder of flight, Albion held an insurmountably High Historical Value, meaning that despite that Wright had designed its working parts in a way befitting an eccentric inventor—none of Albion’s systems of lighting, heating, or plumbing worked the way standard such systems worked—you could not touch or replace or do anything but restore these systems. Which for the most part did not work. And 2) no one had lived there for over ten years and the property was a mess. You would have had to put at least another hundred thousand in renovations into the house in order to render it habitable, never mind the cost of heating and lighting and merely maintaining the place.
In back of the deserted manse there grew a tangle of untamed shrubbery (wisteria, lilac, azalea), weeds, wildflowers (snapdragon, tickseed, beebalm, aster, hollyhock, heliotrope, cornflower), and, unexpectedly, roses, among which, according to season, bloomed a Black Jade miniature rose and several rogue Hybrid Teas (Crimson Glory, Double Delight, Fragrant Cloud, Mr. Lincoln) and a cream-white single bloom Sombreauil Tea (all this according to the Rose Scholar. To me, a rose by any other name looks as complexly creepy). The Rose Scholar claimed that the Cox Arboretum over on Springfield Pike was a desert of thorns next to Albion’s accidental rosaceae. I’ll take her word for it—she once journeyed to the Toledo Botanical Gardens in search of a rare Damask in the petalled flesh. She had of course seen pictures in books. I’d checked out many of those books for her.
The property had been held in trust for an absentee owner who was in no apparent hurry to sell. After Wright’s death in 1948, Albion had been purchased by the National Cash Register corporation to use as a guest house for corporate clients, but that didn’t last very long—the expense of maintaining a National Historic Residence didn’t justify the benefit to its clients, especially as the company’s resources shrank over time—the cash register, its notable proprietary invention, gradually superseded by computerdriven devices that NCR failed to take seriously. Its last resident—Oscar Siebenthaler, an old-growth Daytonian (I researched Albion’s history in an off-hour at the library)—had been an amateur horticulturist, which explained the proliferation of flora, but in the ten years since his occupation (ended, as with many things, by death), his carefully organized garden had exploded, migrating willy-nilly over the two acres of partially wooded property. In areas thickly shaded by trees, flowers that flourished in shade grew. In sunny spots grew heliophilic things. Where conditions were right (neither too much nor too little sun, for instance up near the house itself), a scumble of colors occurred in spring, attracting swarms of bees and butterflies—among these: Silver-spotted Skippers (Epargyreus clarus clarus) and American Coppers (Lycaena phlaes americana)—in abundance. Sadly, we did not have much chance to enjoy our skippers or our coppers or our ad hoc apiary, as by that time things had changed.
After Kurt C—purchased the house, he exhibited no interest in clearing away the dead brush from the backyard or mowing the front or back—as a result wild grasses flourished, which proved a boon to insects and to the birds who fed on them (Acadian Flycatcher, Barn Swallow, Horned Lark, Red-Eyed Vireo, Cedar Waxwing, as well as the usual sparrow, house wren, and starling crowd). The unkempt grounds and the general disrepair of Albion’s façade (paint cracked and flaking, gutters askew, unhinged shingles, broken flagstones on the path leading up to the front porch, which featured a porch swing as rotted and tenuous as the gazebo across from the Belle) kept neighbors tut-tutting and most strangers at bay. The place was thus ideal for late-night convocations, once Kurt started to invite us to Albion for after-hours. The only real drawback was that he never figured out or bothered to try more accurately to figure out the electricity situation, so there was none. For light we used many candles, placed in multiples on octopus-armed wrought-iron stands, and the effulgent fire.
Now it is more noble to sit like Jove than to fly like Mercury—let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honeybeelike, buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be arrived at: but let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive
—Keats in letter
diligent indolence
—Ibid.
NEGATIVE CAPABILITY, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irri
table reaching after fact & reason.
—Keats, in different letter; famous description, referring to Shakespeare
Inside, the house was sparse and falling apart. Most of the place was uninhabitable, so we spent the greater part of our drinking time in a decrepit main room the size of a gymnasium, with no furniture except two mildewed, sagging armchairs arranged on thick, worn carpets around an enormous stone fireplace at the farthest end of the room from the double-doored entrance. A pendulous chandelier hung from the center of the peeling ceiling; its cut glass facets chimed airily whenever anyone opened the double doors or when a gust of winter wind came through the chimney flue, which we always kept open, so that when the fire was dead the wind blew up a twister of ashes. If you fell asleep in front of the fire, as I often did in the weeks when Albion became more my home than my own apartment, you would wake with a fine silt of ash covering your clothes and skin. On top of the hill where Albion sat the wind was often strong.