Shortly after the fellas revived me at Swish’s apartment, I fell in regularly with the gang and soon enough I found out Miles was a writer, too. I should’ve known all along because everyone who was young and hip and living in New York at that time all wanted to do the same thing and that was to try and become a writer. Years later they would want to become folk musicians or else potters who threw odd-shaped clay vases but in ’58 everyone still wanted to be a writer and in particular they wanted to write something truer and purer than everything that had come before.
There were a lot of different opinions as to what it took to make yourself a good writer. The people in the city were always looking to get out and go West and the people out West were always looking to get into the city. Everybody felt like they were on the outside looking in all the time when really it was just that the hipster scene tended to turn everything inside out and the whole idea was that we were all outsiders together.
I had always scribbled here and there but I didn’t try to write in earnest until I left Columbia and got cut off and moved to the Village and this was maybe a little ironic because My Old Man was an editor at a big publishing house. He had wanted to be a writer himself but had gone a different way with that and had become an editor instead, although he never said it that way to people who came for dinner. When people came over for dinner he mostly just told jokes about writers. It turns out there are lots of jokes you can tell about writers.
I had a lot of funny feelings about My Old Man. On the one hand, there was some pretty lousy business he’d gotten into in Brooklyn that he didn’t think I knew about. But on the other hand he was one of those larger-than-life types you can’t help but look up to in spite of yourself. He had a magnetic personality. Back in those days My Old Man was king of what they called the three-martini lunch. This meant that in dimly lit steak houses all over Manhattan my father made bold, impetuous deals over gin and oysters. That was how it was done. Publishing was a place for men with ferocity and an appetite for life. Sure, the shy, tweedy types survived in the business all right but it was the garrulous bon vivants who really thrived and left their mark on the world. Lunches were long, expense accounts were generous, and the martinis often fueled tremendous quantities of flattery and praise. Of course all that booze fueled injuries, too, and the workday wasn’t really over until someone had been insulted by Norman Mailer or pulled out the old boxing gloves in one way or another.
I was passionate about being a writer and My Old Man was passionate about being an editor and you would think between the two of us this would make for a bang-up combination, but my big problem was that My Old Man and I had our issues and I hadn’t exactly told him about my latest ambitions. He’d always expressed disappointment over my lackluster performance in school and now that I’d dropped out and was spending all my time in the Village, he thought I was a jazz-crazed drunkard. His idea of good jazz was Glenn Miller and it was his personal belief that if you listened to any other kind you were a dope fiend of some sort.
But whether or not My Old Man ever helped me out, I was determined to make it as a writer. In fact, sometimes it was more satisfying to think about becoming a writer without My Old Man even knowing. I’d written a couple of short stories that, in my eyes, were very good and it was only logical that in time I would write a novel and that would be good, too. I thought a lot about what it would be like once I made it, the swell reviews I would get in the Times and the Herald Tribune about my novel, the awards I’d probably win, and how all the newspaper men would want to interview me over martinis at the “21” Club. But the problem with this is sometimes I got so caught up in my head writing imaginary drafts of the good reviews I was bound to receive, it made it difficult to write the actual novel.
On days when I was having trouble punching the typewriter, I began to find little errands to run in the evenings that usually involved going down to the cafés in order to tell Swish and Bobby and Pal something important I had discovered that day about writing and being and existence. After I had delivered this message of course it was necessary to stay and enjoy a beer together and toast the fact we had been born to be philosophers and therefore understood what it was to really be. Sometimes Miles was there and sometimes he was not and I didn’t always notice the difference because he was so reserved and only hung around our group in a peripheral way.
But Miles was there one afternoon when I went to a café to write. I had decided my crummy studio apartment was partly to blame for my writer’s block and that I ought to try writing in a café. After all, Hemingway had written in cafés when he was just starting out in Paris and if that method had worked for Hemingway then I supposed it was good enough for me. The café I happened to choose was very crowded that day and the tables were all taken when I got there but I spied Miles at a cozy little table in the far corner of the room and just as I spotted him he looked up and saw me, too.
“Miserable day outside,” I said, referring to the rain.
“Yes.”
Miles and I had never spent time together on our own and naturally now that we were alone there was an awkwardness between us and it dawned on both of us how little we truly knew each other. I squinted at the items on the table in an attempt to surmise what he had been up to before I had come in.
“Are you writing something, too?” I asked, seeing the notebook and the telltale ink stain on his thumb and forefinger.
“I’m only fooling around,” Miles answered, but I could tell this was a lie because peeking out of his notebook were a few typewritten pages, which meant whatever Miles was working on he cared about enough to take the trouble to type it up.
“I see you own a typewriter,” I said, pointing to the pages.
“The library does,” he said, looking embarrassed. I couldn’t tell whether the embarrassment was due to the fact that he was too poor to own a typewriter or because it was obvious he took his writing more seriously than he’d wanted to let on.
“They charge you for that?” I asked, trying to make conversation.
He nodded. “Ten cents a half hour. It’s not too bad. I’ve taught myself to type at a fairly good speed now.”
“That’s swell,” I said. “Say, do you mind if I settle in here and do a little scribbling of my own?” I asked, finally getting to my point.
“Of course not,” Miles said, pushing a coffee mug and some papers out of the way on the table. He had a very polite, formal way about him and it was difficult to tell whether he truly minded. But whether he minded or not didn’t matter because after all he’d said yes and I needed to write and there really weren’t any other tables and I wasn’t going to go look for another café because by then it was really coming down cats and dogs outside. I pulled out my composition book and fountain pen and set to work staring at the thin blue lines that ran across the white paper. About ten or so minutes passed and I had made a very good study of the blank page. Then my nose started to itch and my knee began to bounce under the table. I looked up at Miles and watched him scrawling frantically in his notebook. I was curious what it was that had gotten him worked up in a torrent like that. He was so absorbed in his writing he didn’t notice me staring at him. Finally, I asked him what he was working on. The first time I asked he did not hear me so I cleared my throat and asked again, more loudly. He jumped as if I’d woken him out of a trance and blinked at me.
“It’s a short story, I suppose . . .” he said. This was news to me because, like I said, nobody had bothered to tell me Miles wrote anything at all, let alone fiction. Between his attending Columbia and writing, I was beginning to feel a little unsettled by all the things we had in common. Something about Miles was making me itchy around the collar.
“I don’t know if it’s any good,” he said.
“Say, why don’t you let me have a look at it?” I replied, catching him off guard and reaching for the notebook before he could put up a fight. “I know good fiction. My O
ld Man is an editor at Bonwright.” His eyes widened at this and I knew it had temporarily shut him up. I flipped the notebook open and moved my eyes over the tidy cursive on the page.
It wasn’t terrible. Miles was a decent enough writer, all right—save for the fact that he wrote in a careful, old-fashioned voice, and that was probably on account of him being an educated Negro. All the educated Negroes I’d ever known were always a little stiff and took their educations a little too seriously in my opinion. But all and all, I could see he had a way with words and it wasn’t half-bad. I had to admit I liked the story okay. It was about two boys on the war front who discover they’re half-brothers but they’ve always been competitors and don’t like each other. When they get into a real bad scrape one has the option to let the other die and be off the hook for the death, but he hesitates.
“How are you going to end it?” I said, coming to the place where the cursive trailed off. Miles shrugged.
“Maybe just like that,” he said. “It was the hesitation that interested me.”
I shook my head. “He should hesitate all right,” I said. “And decide against his better sense to save his brother. But then when he does, the other fellow shoots him with the dead German’s gun, like the sucker he is.” Miles looked at me with raised eyebrows. I could see my suggestion was unexpected.
“I suppose that would . . . make quite a statement.”
“Exactly,” I said, feeling magnanimous for loaning out my superior creativity. “It’s not worth writing if it doesn’t make a statement.” Miles looked at me and I could already see he wasn’t going to write it the way I suggested, which was a mistake. It was a good twist and I had made a nice gift out of it for him and it was awfully annoying that he wasn’t going to take the wonderful gift I had just bestowed upon him.
“Well, anyway,” I said, “suit yourself with the ending.”
I handed the journal back to him and attempted to get back to work. Miles sat there a moment looking at me with a wary expression on his face. Then he turned back to his own work. We were silent together and all at once the words started coming and I found I could write and for several minutes the only sound you could hear at our table came from the scratching of our dueling fountain pens.
But it was no good. I had helped Miles along with his plot and now I couldn’t get it out of my head. I was off and running and writing something but soon enough I realized I was just writing his story all over again, but better. The thing that really got to me as I wrote was that it really ought to have been my story in the first place. You should always write what you know and I was something of an authority on unwanted relatives, but of course Miles couldn’t know that. Now that he had started writing that story, I couldn’t go and write anything similar, even if he was going to botch the ending.
“How’d you come up with the idea for that story, anyway?” I asked, feeling irritated that I hadn’t thought of it first. Miles looked up.
“I was trying to remember some of my father’s stories about the Battle of the Marne; that’s why I picked the setting. And the idea of brothers and all the rest of it”—he shrugged—“just came out of my imagination. Like I said, I’m not sure it’s any good. I usually can’t tell about my own work until several drafts and a few months later.”
“Well, it has potential. I wouldn’t take it too hard,” I said. “You strike me as a guy who works pretty hard at it, and that’s what counts, right?”
Miles looked at me, not saying anything.
“Say, I’m thirsty,” I said. “Why don’t we order up something stronger than coffee?”
After a brief bout of resistance he could see I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. We spent the afternoon drinking and talking about the Pulitzer and the Nobel and the differences between French writers and Russian writers and to tell the truth I had a decent enough time talking to Miles. I decided it would be fine if we ran into each other on our own again, so long as I didn’t have to sit across from him as he scribbled away in his notebook, writing the kind of stories I should’ve been writing but with all the wrong endings.
3
After that day in the café with Miles I decided to try to jump-start my writing by going on a bender and hitting each and every party I could. The idea was, I was a young guy and I ought to be gathering experiences and then once I had a bunch of wild stories inside me the writing would just flow. This had an unfortunate side effect other than the obvious, because besides hangovers this was also how I made the acquaintance of a one Mr. Rusty Morrisdale.
Rusty Morrisdale was the assistant to a very important and well-known literary agent who, before the war, had been credited with making a handful of writers very famous. Rusty’s boss was quite old; no one knew exactly how old the famous agent was and just like the man’s career his age had become the stuff of legend. I won’t mention his name here but if you know anything about publishing at all then you will know exactly whom I mean. According to most people in the industry you were not an important writer unless this literary agent had discovered you and anointed you and introduced you to all the best editors. Anyway, that’s what they all said and here Rusty was, the personal secretary to this man.
I think it must’ve been because of Bobby that Rusty came around at first. Rusty was a scrawny, rat-faced dandy of a kid who acquired his nickname by virtue of his rust-colored hair. I mentioned Bobby was beautiful in a way that even guys who went around with girls noticed and Rusty was not the sort to go around with girls at all and so was even more likely to pay his respects to Bobby’s beauty. There was something kind of dopey and all-American about Bobby, and yet he and his lopsided grin were difficult to resist. He was a tanned, gangly kid who looked like he had spent half of his youth going to Sunday school and operating farm equipment and the other half stealing eggs out of chicken coops and lamming from the police for petty crimes. He’d taken the bus to New York from Utah and was desperate to do anything or know anybody who might scrub some of that squeaky Salt Lake rime off his skin. Bobby had great intellectual aspirations and always wanted to talk about important books but unlike Swish if you actually entered into a conversation with him you discovered he had not read that many important books so much as seen and admired their jackets. I’m guessing Rusty saw Bobby from afar and got the bright and thoroughly unoriginal idea it might be nice to bed him and after getting a little closer to Bobby and speaking with him, this desire had only increased in both magnitude and intensity.
When a guy named Rex Taylor who I’d been pretty chummy with at Columbia invited me to a house-party he was throwing, I invited Bobby. He’d recently broken things off with both of his girls and was primed for some fun. It was always a smart thing if you were going to a party to invite Bobby, because all the prettiest chicks flocked to Bobby and if you were standing next to him it was like they were flocking to you, too. He was supposed to go drinking with Rusty that night and he told Rusty he couldn’t go because now he was going to go to the party with me, but then I guess Bobby felt pretty bad about leaving Rusty out in the cold like that because he ended up telling Rusty he could tag along if he liked and of course Rusty liked. It was a BYOB party and when Rusty met us at my apartment he showed up carrying six bottles of eighteen-year-old scotch and so we thought maybe in the end it was all right to have him along. I didn’t know who Rusty was or who he worked for then, but I figured the math was right because anyone who showed up places with six bottles of eighteen-year-old scotch was OK in my book and so we loaned him a shirt and helped him peg his pant legs to match ours and then set out as a group to find the party.
Rex lived rent-free in a swanky brownstone on West Seventy-fourth Street. His parents owned the building and evidently his old man felt differently than mine did about the value of earned pleasures. The Taylors were old money and their fortune slid from one generation to the next with ease. My family was old money, too, but only on my mother’s side. This meant My Old Man had
come up in the world. He had that way about him that people who are raised poor and come into money later in life do in that sometimes he was a spendthrift and other times he was a tightwad. He blew hot and cold when it came to giving me money and I guessed this was partly because of that business out in Bensonhurst. In any case it was irritating because it meant he was an unreliable source of income. Sometimes when he was in a generous mood after having drunk a lot of martinis with his lunch or else wine with his dinner he would remember how he had been the recipient of a lot of people’s benevolence and then he would soften up and slip me fifty bucks here or there but I always had to ask.
Together Bobby, Rusty, and I rode the train up from the Village, carrying two bottles of scotch apiece. Bobby got the idea to open one of his bottles and we passed it around some on the train, our breath coming alive with the hot caramelized odor of malt and oak as middle-class businessmen with their newspapers and umbrellas frowned at us and scandalized mothers scooted away from us and hugged their children tighter. At Forty-second Street a real-life Indian got on the train wearing a beaded belt and a feathered headband and long black braids and all of that business and Bobby, already feeling warm and friendly from the scotch, held out the opened bottle to the Indian and said, “Little sip of fire-water for ya, Chief?” Bobby could be as obnoxious as he liked because somehow it still came out charming. No one ever said no to Bobby and neither did this Indian. The Indian regarded Bobby with a black-eyed stare, then nodded in a serious way and took a decent-sized swig of the bottle and handed it back to Bobby. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stared straight ahead again as stoic and somber as anything and it struck me we had just had ourselves an uneasy sort of peace-pipe ceremony the way heroes did in all the Westerns. We got off the train at Seventy-second Street and it looked like the Indian was continuing on and I felt a little embarrassed when Bobby stood on the platform and raised his hand and said “HOW” in a deep voice because I doubt the Indian liked that but then maybe he got it from people all the time and was used to it. Then the train doors closed and the Indian slid sideways out of our view and we went aboveground where it smelled like wet leaves because we were so near Central Park and we walked westward for a few blocks until I finally recognized Rex’s brownstone.
Three-Martini Lunch Page 2