by Larry Brown
“Hey, Barlow, I’ve got some new poems,” he said.
He’d caught me at the typewriter, in the act itself, which, of course, was almost sacred to me.
“I’m kind of busy, Raoul. I’m trying to write.”
“Oh, come on, man, I brought you some beer. Sit down and read these poems.”
I hated to have to mess with him, but I was almost out of beer.
“The only way I’ll read them is if you leave me some beer, Raoul. I’m trying to write.”
“Hey, man, take all the beer you want. You understand this shit, Barlow. Read these poems. Tell me what you think about them.”
Raoul sat on the couch and I started looking at his poems.
“I’ve got some women we can pick up later, Barlow.”
“Great, Raoul.”
The first poem was about a bullfighter. There was a lot of blood and sand in it. There was a lot of death in the afternoon. The bullfighter was a candyass, though; he couldn’t face the bulls. Finally he ran from one and got a horn rammed up his ass and had to have a colectomy. And then he just stayed on a cot in a cantina for the rest of his life, sucking on a tequila bottle.
“This poem sucks, Raoul.” I laid it aside and picked up the next one. “I think it’d be a lot better if you tried to make a short story out of it.”
“I know, man, I know. I don’t know the prose, though, man, I don’t know the prose!”
The next poem was about a garbageman who tried to smell the roses in life every day. And as bad as it was, Raoul had his finger on something. He was touching the hurt in people, trying to. For that I gave him an A.
“Listen, Raoul, you’re a good guy. You’ve got some humanity in you even if you did put a lot of dope on the streets of Jackson, Tennessee.”
“It was just a one-time thing, man.”
“Listen, Raoul, none of that shit matters. If you want to write, you’ve got to shut yourself up in a room and write.”
“I’ve been thinking about doing that, man.”
I got one of his beers and looked at the next poem. It was called “Viva Vanetti.” It was about a Mafia hit man who weighed four hundred pounds and was nicknamed the “Salsa Sausage.” He went around killing people by submerging their heads in vats of pizza dough.
“This one sucks, too, Raoul.”
“Read the next one, man.”
“How can you write good stuff one minute and such crappy stuff the next?”
“I don’t know, man. It just comes to me.”
I swore for a little bit and then picked up the last poem. It started off hot. The narrator was screaming things about lost pussy, and alleycats rutting behind garbage cans. It had the heat of a summer night in the city in it. It had people on dope, switchblades, and cops who slapped the hell out of people and screamed in their faces. It had people trapped on fire escapes and gorillas loose from the zoo. It had everything in it. I was a little pissed that I hadn’t written it. It was A-OK.
“It’s great, Raoul. Son of a bitch is great. It’ll be published.”
I didn’t tell him that might take ten or fifteen years.
“No shit, man? No shit?”
“I don’t know how you did it,” I said. “You ought to try writing some stories.”
Raoul got up and started walking around the room.
“Wow, man,” he said. “Wow!”
“Let’s go get the women, Raoul,” I said. I was ready for the women.
“Oh, shit, man, we can’t go get the women now! I’ve got to go home and type up a clean copy of that poem. I’ve got to get that poem in the mail, man!”
Then he rushed right out the door. Then he rushed right back in and snatched the poem out of my hands.
“Thanks a million, Barlow! I’ll never forget you for this!”
I drank four or five more of his beers and thought about the unfairness of everything. A guy like Raoul could make one big score and have it dicked for the rest of his life. But poetry was a hobby for him. It wasn’t life and death for him. All he wanted was to see his name in a magazine. He wouldn’t starve for his art. I was down to thirty-two dollars, and about to starve for mine.
I started writing another story.
4
My mother came to see me. I’d had about four beers that afternoon. I knew she was going to lay a lot of stuff on me that I didn’t want to hear.
“How are you doing?” she said.
“I’m doing all right.”
“Have you seen the children?”
“Not lately.”
“Well, what are you going to do?”
I wanted to reach for a beer but I’d been raised not to drink in front of my mother.
“What else? I’m going to keep writing.”
“After all it’s cost you.”
“Right.”
“After you’ve lost your whole family over it.”
“Wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to stop now, would it?”
She started crying. I knew she would. I went ahead and got the beer. She was probably thinking How did I ever raise this cold-blooded child?
I sat down with her.
“Look, Mama, I can’t help it that I want to do this. It’s not even a matter of wanting to. I have to. I can’t live without it.”
“Well, how are you going to live? You don’t even have a job.”
I looked out the window.
“I work when I need the money. I paint a house once in a while. I work for a while and then I write for a while. I’m okay. Don’t worry about me.”
“It’s my grandchildren I worry about. How are you going to pay your child support? When are you going to get to see them?”
“I guess I’ll see them when she lets me. Have you seen them?”
“Yes.”
“What did they say?”
“They wanted to know when you were coming home.”
Then she started crying again.
5
I hadn’t made love in about sixty-four days, which is not an easy thing after you’ve been married and used to getting it whenever you want it. I didn’t know many women and had great difficulty communicating with them. Most of the women I did know were friends of my ex-wife or wives of my friends. I was never able to tell women just exactly what I thought about womanhood in general, what wonderful things I thought women were. I had composed several poems about women that I had not submitted to any of the literary quarterlies, but basically they sang the praises of legs and breasts and long hair and painted toenails, red lips and nipples. Once in a while I would take these poems out and read them and then put them away again.
I missed my children. They were big holes torn out of my life. I knew that I had torn a big hole out of their lives. I hoped that their mother would have the good sense to marry a good man who would take care of them and give them a home, educations, food, love. I knew there’d never be a reconciliation. Their mother didn’t want it, and I didn’t want it. Our children and our parents were probably the only ones who wanted it. I only had one life, and I’d be damned if I’d live it in a way that would make me unhappy and please somebody else. I had already lived that kind of life, too much of it already.
6
The money ran out and I knew I’d have to go back to work. I knew also that my ex-wife’s lawyer would soon be dunning me for an alimony payment which I didn’t have. I considered full-time employment for about fifteen seconds, and then realized that since I had made the choice to be sorry, I wanted to be sorry full-time.
I went back to painting houses. I painted houses in Oxford, in Taylor, in Toccopola, in Dogtown. I wore paint-spattered clothes and let my hair and beard grow out. I wrote at night, with beer in the cooler on the floor next to the desk. All of my stories came back in. I bought a small postage scale and weighed my own envelopes to the penny and mailed them back out. Nothing, nothing. Nobody wanted my work. Sometimes I wrote all night and staggered out the door the next morning to paint houses. I painted houses for twenty-th
ree days straight and then took the money and retired again. I hit the grocery store first. Forty pounds of leg quarters that I could fry and keep cold in the fridge. Salami and baloney. Cheese. Chili and hot dogs. I got a few brown steaks that were already frozen, perfectly good cheap meat. The rest of the cart I filled up with beer and cigarettes.
They were good days. I slept late and got up and read the newspaper and made coffee and breakfast, then sat down and started writing. Stories, nothing but stories. The last novel had taken me two years, and I wasn’t ready to commit to that kind of time again right away. I could write a story in two days, revise it in a couple of hours, and be ready to start another one. I wrote through the afternoons, stopped for a while to fix something for supper, then went back to writing again. There was nothing I could do but keep going. I had already made all my decisions.
7
I thought she looked bad when I saw her. She was coming into a bar with some other people just as I was going out. She saw me and she stopped, so I had to stop, too. The people with her spoke briefly, friends of ours, friends of hers, ex-friends of mine, evidently. People who had been to our house and eaten with us and shared our wine and music. Or maybe they just wanted to get out of the way. I didn’t blame them. The end hadn’t been nice. The end had been nasty. Nasty people and nasty words and phrases and nastiness to make you go puke in the gutter. Me, her: both of us.
I didn’t ask where the kids were. I didn’t want to seem accusatory. I didn’t want to seem drunk, but I was. I’d been in there for four hours. I was on my way to try and weave my key into the ignition. Everything that might be said would be forgotten the next morning. Just a black hole with her somewhere standing in it, a picture of her face to rock to sleep against your pillow.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
“You leaving?”
“Me? Well, yeah, I think so. What you up to?”
“Oh, nothing. Just out here looking for somebody to fuck. Right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I am. Fucking everybody I can. You know how that goes, trying to fuck everybody you can.”
I didn’t say anything, so she went on by herself.
“Yeah, I’m trying to get enough together to have a gangbang about midnight if I can. If I can find enough of them still sober enough to fuck. A lot of men have that problem, you know. Start drinking beer about nine o’clock in the morning and drink all day and then have a bad case of the limpdick about dark.”
“You doing okay?” I said.
“Nah. Ain’t getting enough dick. This one of your hangouts, huh?”
“I come here sometimes.”
“I bet there’s some real sluts in here. It must be.”
“You seem to be in here.”
“Yeah, I just got here, though.”
“Where’s the kids?”
“None of your fucking business. Where’s my money?”
“What money?”
“Oh. You ain’t got my letter from my lawyer yet?”
“No.”
“You’ll get it tomorrow, probably. He mailed it yesterday. I hope you’re ready to fork over your alimony payment of three hundred and twenty-five dollars.”
“Three twenty-five? I thought it was one seventy-five.”
“You get to pay the lawyer fees. He don’t like waiting on his money. You’re paying him a hundred and fifty for five months. Then you can go back to one seventy-five but after that I’m going to ask the judge to raise it back to three twenty-five since I ain’t getting enough with two kids to feed and a house payment to make. You fucked anybody in here tonight?”
I just looked at her for a minute.
“Why does there have to be all this ugliness? Why do you have to act like this? Do you hate me that bad?”
“You goddamn right I do. And I’m gonna make you pay for every night I have to stay by myself.”
“I don’t have that kind of money.”
“You better shit it then. Your mama said you’d been painting houses.”
“Well. Some.”
“Well, the kids ain’t asked about you. I told them you left us. You better paint plenty of houses is all I can say.”
“I’m not working that much. I’m trying to write, too.”
“Ha! You better forget that shit. You’re not gonna divorce me and then think you’re gonna get to do what you want to. Uh uh, honey. Me and these kids come first. You brought em into this world and you’re gonna take care of em till they’re twenty-one. And if that don’t leave you enough time for your life, tough shit.”
“Why do you have to make me so mad? Why do you have to make me want to bust your face open for you?”
“I just wish you’d try it. I’d have your ass stuck in that jail so fast it’d make your head swim.”
“When do I get the kids?”
“When I get ready.”
“That’s not what the judge said.”
“Well, you just let me know when you want em. They can be sick sometimes, you know. They can be out of town.”
All she wanted was for me to fall on my knees and grab her leg and beg to be taken back, so she’d have the enjoyment of turning me down. All she wanted was to be filled with hatred and bitterness for the rest of her life, and to turn her life into a secret and twisted and perverted thing that would torment her as badly as it would me. You read about these killings in the paper, between men and women, husbands and wives, ex-Adams and Eves? This is how they happen.
8
If I killed anybody that night, I didn’t know anything about it the next morning. I woke hot, sweating, dizzy with the heat. I pulled down all the windows and blinds, turned on the air conditioner, and made some coffee. While it was perking I picked up a clock and looked at it. 11:30. The mail had already run, surely. I put on a pair of blue jeans and slipped my feet into my house shoes and went down the driveway. There were three manila envelopes inside the mailbox. I went back to the house with the little mothers tucked under my arm.
I poured myself a cup of coffee and stirred some sugar into it, didn’t have any milk. I lit my first cigarette. I was almost out of beer again, but I hoped Monroe would leave me alone.
The news was bad, but it was news I was used to. I sat down on the couch with my coffee and my cigarettes and an ashtray and the three stories. All I could remember was her being nasty to me, and something about a pine tree being hung under my wheel on the way home. I looked at my tennis shoes on the floor. They had mud and pine needles on them. I opened the first envelope.
It was a plain rejection slip from Spanish Fly. On it was scrawled: Nice, try again. And some scribbled initials. What? Nice but not nice enough to publish? Nice enough to publish but you’ve got two years’ worth of stories already accepted? Explain yourself here. Somebody might be getting ready to hang himself over this shit. What about Breece D’J Pancake? What about John Kennedy Toole? Nice, try again might have driven them over the edge.
I was silently weeping. I had anger. I tore open the second envelope. I knew it would be more of the same. There was a long, neatly typed letter from the assistant editor of Ivory Towers that said (along with Dear Leon):
This story came so close to being accepted. Majority rules and many people who read it misinterpreted it. We have had an argument for two weeks here over it. “White Girls with Black Asses,” do you think you could tone that down a little bit, maybe change it to something else? Because the story doesn’t really fit the title. And although it works wonderfully, what is the reason that Cleve beats his wife? He is always remorseful after he does it, enough to where he lashes himself to the tree in the lightning storm. Some people were revulsed by it. I must say it’s one of the strongest things I’ve seen in a while. I would never tell you how to write. But maybe if you changed the title another magazine might be interested in it. We would love to see anything else you would care to send us. Please keep writing. Don’t let this be disappointing to you. You have great talent, and
with material like this you will need great stamina.
All warmest wishes,
Betti DeLoreo
The next question was, what did Betti DeLoreo, Betti Del Oreo, look like? Was she married? Was she seventy years old? Would she be willing to meet with me and give me some of her nooky on the strength of my work? They were uncertain questions, and my hands were shaking just to think that a letter might come back one day minus the story I’d sent off.
I opened the third envelope. It contained a story that had been going around for two years. There was a rejection slip from Blue Lace attached to it. It seemed that my material was not right for them; however, it was no reflection on the work itself, and they were sorry they were unable to make individual comments on each story because of their small staff, et cetera.
9
I went to town to get some more beer. I hadn’t been answering my phone, even though it had rung several times. I knew it might be the lawyer, and I knew it might be Monroe, wanting me to go back to work. I had enough money to tide me over for a little while, and I didn’t want to go back to painting houses until I had to. I knew the alimony payment would have to be reckoned with before long, and that was making me nervous, and I needed something to drink while I worked. It seemed like the harder I tried, the worse things became. I wondered how other people dealt with it. I tried to bury myself in my work, forget my feelings and my shortcomings and my fears and the sick weak hangovers that accompanied a night of writing and drinking. In winter it would be too cold to paint houses and what would I do then for money? I could work for the rest of the summer and try to save a little, but there wouldn’t be any way I could save enough to pay the alimony. If I couldn’t pay it, she’d have me put in jail. But maybe I’d be able to write in jail. I hoped I would.