How could I resist? I bought a copy, got myself a latte at the Starbucks next door, and settled down at a table in the far corner.
I read for almost two hours. It had been years since I’d looked at the book, but once I got into it, it all came flooding back. There weren’t any big words in it at all. It amazed me, how simply written it was.
More amazing was that even though Hartley and his buddy Jones were private school kids and me and Barry had been nothing but young toughs, we’d all gotten in trouble for almost exactly the same stuff—jumping turnstiles, throwing rocks at the traffic on the West Side Highway, smoking dope at Grant’s tomb, swiping apples from the Korean fruit stand at 110th. How could I have forgotten all this? I swear that the guy who made Hartley egg creams at the Mill Luncheonette, the one with the numbers stenciled on his arm, was a guy I knew.
It was like reading my own life. This went way past a couple of happy coincidences. This was starting to feel like fucking destiny. My headache had mysteriously disappeared. The two lattes may have had something to do with it, but it was more than that.
Not only did I look like Mohle, I now knew I could sound like him. Some of the things Hartley had thought were exactly the kinds of things I had thought at that age. I had never been on a spiritual quest and Prince Myshkin and Hans Castorp could have been spacemen for all I knew, but I knew I could tell these young writers stories about Korean fruit stands and Grant’s Tomb and run-ins with the transit police. Could I last a whole semester without someone seeing through me? It didn’t seem likely, but for seventy-five grand, I could at least give it a try.
Chapter Four
When I walked into the Fiction Institute around one o’clock, you would have thought I was a returning war hero. Mildred rushed to get me lemonade and Wayne offered to take me on a tour of campus; they’d even talked to a computer guy about coming over that afternoon for some free instruction. I begged off all of it, as graciously as I could. I said I might just go home, take a nap, do a little reading. This Texas heat, I said, took some getting used to.
For the next week I lay low. I had my meals delivered from a Chinese restaurant and Wayne came over every afternoon for a couple of hours, which gave me a chance to pump him for information.
The first thing I wanted to know was just who this Rex was who was willing to let bygones be bygones. When he told me it was Rex Schoeninger, my jaw nearly hit the floor. I may not have known many writers, but you’d have to have been living in a cave not to know who Rex Schoeninger was. The man was big time. According to Wayne, he’d written more than sixty books (compared with Mohle’s measly one) and they were all huge motherfuckers too, thousand-pagers, thick enough to stop a speeding bullet. My ex-mother-in-law had had the complete set in her living room—The Sands of Vanuatu, The Roman Empire, Byzantium, New Spain, Continental Divide. She was always telling me that there wasn’t a place in the world he hadn’t written about.
I’d read an article about him once in Parade magazine. If I remembered right, he’d made a shitload of money. Schoeninger was out there, having his junk turned into musicals and movies and TV miniseries, as opposed to V. S. Mohle, who, according to what I’d read on the computer, would hide in his closet to avoid running into his meter man.
“And, as you know, Rex is the source of all these monster fellowships we’re giving these kids,” Wayne said.
“Of course,” I said.
We were sitting in my breakfast nook, sipping lemonade. Wayne had a big round face and was sensitive as a girl; everything showed.
“I know the two of you have had your differences . . . But maybe you’d rather not talk about this.”
“No, no, I’m fine. Seriously.”
“It takes a big man to come down here and bury the hatchet like this. It’s been a long time.”
Frowning, I rattled the ice in my glass. Schoeninger and Mohle were old enemies? I was totally fucked.
“I hope I’m not upsetting you.”
“No, I’m cool,” I said.
“I’m sure it must have been very wounding. For both of you.”
“Wounding?” I said. It wasn’t a word I used much.
“You know. Just very painful to think about.”
“Well, maybe so,” I said. “The hell of it is, once you let the genie out of the bottle, it can be kind of hard to get him back in again.” One of the great skills you learn making your living on the streets of New York is how to keep talking even when you don’t know what in blue blazes you’re talking about.
“Isn’t that the truth,” Wayne said. “But the point is that you came. It was a brave thing to do.”
“I don’t know how brave it was. I really had no other choice.”
“Well, you say that,” Wayne said. He hunched forward, smiling, soft-spoken as a school nurse. “You two haven’t seen one another in an awfully long time.”
“I guess so,” I said. “So how long has it been?”
“Rex and I were just talking about that. He says it’s been over twenty-five years. According to him, the only time you actually ever met was on the Cavett show.”
“I guess we all know how that turned out, don’t we?” I said.
“I can’t imagine. It sounds like a complete nightmare.”
“You got that right.”
He leaned across and patted me on the arm. “And that’s why what you’re doing is so great. It’s going to be fine, I promise. He’s anxious to see you.”
Wayne lined me up with something called an RA. That’s short for research assistant, and it’s a pretty cushy deal for the old professors. According to Wayne, they use these students to run errands, pick up their laundry, babysit their kids, you name it. For me, it ended up being a lifesaver.
The RA’s name was Chester, and Wayne brought him over on Wednesday afternoon. He was a tall, likable kid with a Harpo Marx hairdo and a big grin. His full name was Chester Arthur Fillmore, his great-great-grandfather was Millard Fillmore, and he seemed to be a total stoner.
I sent him off to the library with a list of books I needed, and by seven that evening he was back with a half dozen Mohle biographies. If it struck him as odd that a man would need to read that many biographies of himself, he was kind enough not to say anything, though the boy was so high, I doubt that there was much that struck him as odd.
I spent a couple of days reading about old Mohle. It turned out that the articles I’d read on the computer had barely scratched the surface. There was juicy stuff here, and juiciest of all was the story about his famous pissing contest with Rex Schoeninger.
It all started when they were both nominated for the Pulitzer Prize—Mohle for Eat Your Wheaties and Schoeninger for Continental Divide. All the literary muckety-mucks figured Mohle was a shoo-in, but in the end, the committee gave the prize to Schoeninger. When Mohle was asked if he was surprised, he said not really. “The Pulitzer Prize is essentially a journalism award and that’s pretty much what Schoeninger’s book is. The writing is largely cut-and-past sludge, but it is not as naïve as you’d think. Schoeninger may try to pass himself off as the Grandma Moses of American literature, but behind all that there is something profoundly calculating.”
Schoeninger didn’t waste any time shooting back at him. His response appeared in the New York Times the next day. “It saddens me deeply that Mr. Mohle would be hurt by this. He is obviously a sensitive man, as we know from his work. I have great respect for his writing. At one hundred and forty pages, I don’t think anyone is going to mistake Eat Your Wheaties for War and Peace, but it has been a great balm to the troubled youth of our nation. For that we can only thank him.”
Things got worse three months later when the two of them appeared on The Dick Cavett Show. If the idea was for the two of them to shake hands and apologize, it didn’t work out that way. The descriptions in the books of what happened were bad enough, but what was really hair-raising was a five-minute video clip Chester had found at the A/V library.
On the tape you could see h
ow uncomfortable the two of them were with one another. Mohle looked drunk. Cavett tried to make nice, but wasn’t getting anywhere with it. You had to give Rex credit. He at least made a halfhearted attempt at an apology.
“If what I said about Mr. Mohle came across as disparaging, I regret it,” he said. “He is an immensely talented writer and deserves our respect.” On the video, Rex looked to be in his late fifties, beefy and athletic-looking, the kind of guy you’d want on your city-league softball team. “But I also have to say that I deeply resent the suggestion that there is something dishonest about my work.”
Cavett leaned forward in his chair, fiddling with his pencil. “So, Mr. Mohle, what do you have to say to that? I know that all of us sometimes say things in the heat of the moment that we don’t quite mean, that might come across as a little harsh . . .”
Slumped down in his chair, Mohle scrutinized his fingernails for several seconds, then finally pulled himself up. “Was I too harsh? It’s hard to judge. I’m sorry if I hurt Rex’s feelings. The man is clearly a good guy. Look at him. It’s just that I don’t see the point of all those big books. It’s obvious that readers love them, and apparently the Pulitzer critics do too. But what do they really tell us about our souls? They tell us how scrapple is made, how much rainfall it takes to grow a sugar beet, how to tan a buffalo hide. And I guess they tell us exactly what we want to hear about ourselves—that we are noble, hardworking, and ingenious, brave in battle and magnanimous in peacetime. My problem is that I don’t think that Rex really believes any of it. I think he’s too smart for that. I think it’s all a lie.”
Cavett nearly leapt out of his chair, waving for Mohle to stop. Rex sat ramrod-straight, mouth as tight as a drill sergeant’s.
“Oh, come, now, Mr. Mohle,” Cavett said, “don’t be preposterous.”
“May I say something?” Rex said.
“Of course,” Cavett said.
“So what kind of honesty are you looking for, Mr. Mohle?” Rex said. “The kind of thing teenage girls write in their diaries? I have no interest in books where people do nothing but air their dirty laundry.”
“Knowing you,” Mohle said, “I’m sure you don’t have any dirty laundry.”
“Would you just shut up for a second?” Rex said. Cavett gnawed hard on the eraser of his pencil. “I have been to war, Mr. Mohle. I have seen good men die. I believe there is such a thing as honor. I believe there is such a thing as heroism. And maybe these things don’t matter anymore, or at least as much as a pair of schoolboys playing hooky for a couple of weeks . . .”
There was applause from the audience. Mohle scooted his chair forward. “Rex, Rex, please, there’s no reason to take all this so personally. You won the prize, I didn’t. Hell, you publish so much, you’ll probably win them all, though God knows how you churn those books out so fast, unless you’ve got a team of catamites down in your cellar typing away twenty-four hours a day.”
Now the audience was booing, making garbled shouts. Rex grimaced and pulled at his nose. He raised a finger and shook it at Mohle for three or four seconds before the words came.
“You want me to come over there and smash you in the face? Because if you say one more word, I’ll do it. And if I do it, you’re hitting the floor and you’re not getting up, I swear.”
Mohle seemed quite amused by this. He leaned forward and picked up his water glass. “Well, that pretty much ends the conversation, doesn’t it? But why don’t we see what this will do?”
Mohle threw the glass of water in Rex’s face and Rex retaliated by lunging across Cavett’s lap and grabbing Mohle by the throat. All three of them went tumbling on the floor. It was a sight to see and was only ended by a stagehand rushing out, waving his arms to shut off the cameras.
As big a mess as that was, it only got worse. Two weeks later, Mohle published a long article in the Village Voice giving his version of what had happened, and six months after that Rex responded with a piece in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Getting on the Bad Side of V. S. Mohle.”
The damn thing wouldn’t die. All the literary hotshots were choosing sides and some famous journalist with a pipe published an open letter to both of them telling them to chill out.
There was no way that was going to happen. Rex ended up filing a four-and-a-half-million dollar lawsuit against Mohle for slander. One of the biographies claimed Rex was out to bankrupt Mohle, and it made some sense. Rex had already made a fortune on his Broadway musical, and while Mohle was earning decent money from royalties, he had just been taken to the cleaner’s in a bad divorce.
They finally settled out of court and Mohle disappeared into the woods of Maine. He never showed his face in public again. It sounded rough. At least when they let you out of prison, they give you gate money. By the time Mohle left New York, Rex had pretty much taken him for his last dime.
The place where I was living was almost too quiet. Any sound made me jump—the gardener pushing his wheelbarrow across the lawn, a recycling truck moaning to the curb.
In the evenings, around ten-thirty or eleven, when the temperature dropped into the mid-nineties, I’d go out for a walk to the end of the block and back. After being cooped up all day, it felt good. I could look in the windows of my neighbors, see the old folks laughing in front of their TVs watching the Late Show, see some tubby guy working on his teeth, stopping his sawing every now and then to inspect his dental floss.
I worked Wayne for everything I could. I’d gotten him to hire a security guard to check everybody coming into the institute, and he promised to speak to his wife about loaning me her ten-year-old Volvo.
I think it must have been the second week I was there when I woke up, my heart pounding, without quite knowing why. I lay still for a good while, trying to calm down, before I heard a faint rustling from the far corner of the room. A few seconds later, there was a low chuckle and then that rustling sound again.
I sat bolt upright in bed. Barry was hunched over in a chair next to the window, reading Eat Your Wheaties.
“Jesus, Barry . . .”
He looked up. Blood streaked his cheeks and forehead. “Pretty funny.”
“What’s funny?”
“This.” He waved the book at me. He was wearing a baggy New Jersey Nets T-shirt and brand-new running shoes. “And you think people are really going to believe you wrote this?”
“Who knows?” The ceiling fan made soft whapping sounds in the darkness.
“When I met you, you could barely write your fucking name.” As Barry rose to his feet, I saw a huge wet stain glistening in the middle of his chest. His face shone with sweat. “It’s hot in here, isn’t it?” He tossed the book on the bed. “I don’t know how you stand it.”
“What did we do, Barry?”
“What do you mean, what did we do?” He picked up the Houston Astros cap and put it on, tugging at the brim.
“What did we do that they had to kill you?”
“Same old stuff. Same old stuff that we’ve been doing for years.” He went to the window and peered through the slats of the blinds. “You’re never going to get away with this, you know that. You think these students are going to be able to keep their mouths shut? No way. It’s too good a secret.”
“It doesn’t need to be for long.”
“So how long?”
“Just a month. I pick up a nice check and I’m out of here.”
He gave a hearty laugh. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s really good.” Taking the bottom of the T-shirt by his fingertips, he pulled it gingerly away from his belly, making a bloody sagging apron of it, and lifted his face to the breezes of the ceiling fan.
That was enough to wake me up for real, whimpering and clutching my pillow. I got out of bed and checked the locks on the doors and turned on most of the lights in the house. I was up until nearly three, flipping from one bad movie to the next, trying to calm my nerves.
Wayne came over on Saturday morning in his wife’s Volvo and we took it out for a test dr
ive. It was a clunker—loose clutch, mushy brakes, and whenever it was faced with anything faintly resembling a hill it would start to cough and sputter. It was hard to imagine making a getaway in this lemon.
We drove through some of the neighborhoods and then headed onto the highway. There were not a whole lot of cars out on a weekend morning, but those that were zipped past us. I had the pedal pretty much to the metal and the speedometer never broke fifty. Some of the upholstery on the ceiling had come unglued and sagged down, tickling the tops of our heads.
“It’s kind of embarrassing,” Wayne said, “giving you a car like this. But it should be able to get you to work and back.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I didn’t figure you’d be giving me the keys to your Ferrari.” A sign at the side of the road read waco 102.
“Ramona called me this morning.”
“Ramona?”
“Schoeninger’s assistant. She wanted to see if we could find a date for your dinner with Rex.”
“Uh-huh.” My heart filled with dread. After reading about all the insanity that had gone on between Schoeninger and Mohle, a dinner with the old guy was the last thing I needed. Wayne sat with one hand raised, keeping the drooping fabric from swallowing his head. “So this Ramona, what does she do for him?”
“Pretty much everything. She’s the gatekeeper.”
“What do you mean?”
“How to put this . . . Rex, as you know, is a major philanthropist. I think he’s given away something like a hundred and fifty million dollars. But he still has another twenty million to give away before he dies, and now that it seems as if time may be running short, everybody and their brother has been coming out of the woodwork.”
“Did you say twenty million dollars?”
“Yes.”
“Wow.”
It’s amazing the difference a few zeros can make. You could make a case that I would have been a fool to risk my life for twenty grand. But twenty million? That was enough to really get a man’s blood going.
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