The Man Who Cancelled Himself

by David Handler

  “I don’t want her money.”

  “And this place is ideal.” He gazed out the window at the purplish pre-dawn. “Not a soul will be able to find us here.”

  “Here?” I cleared my throat and tried it again, minus the surprise. “Here?”

  “Why not? It’s the perfect hideout for a few weeks. And, wait, I know exactly what you’re thinking …”

  “No, Thor, I don’t believe you do.”

  “I’ll work hard for my keep while you two are busy writing. I’ll chop wood. I’ll clear brush. There’s no job I won’t do. And there’s nothing I can’t build or repair.” This was true. Thor had been just about everything in his time—merchant seaman, forest ranger, railroad brakeman, even an ordained minister. “How about it, boy?”

  I shook my head. “Thor, it’s out of the question. That chapter of my career is over. Besides which, there’s Merilee to consider. There’s the baby …” At my feet, Lulu grunted. “… There’s Little Miss Short Legs.”

  “Will you at least think about it?”

  “I’ll think about it. But I’m not doing it.”

  “Good man,” he exclaimed, grinning at me. “Knew I could count on you.”

  “I said I’d think about it, period,” I snapped. “Now shut up and eat your eggs.”

  But he kept right on grinning at me. Because I was going to say yes—and he and I both knew it. Because he was my friend. Because he needed me. And because once, twenty years ago, when I was standing at the crossroads, not sure whether to shit or go blind, Thor Gibbs had come along and changed my diapers.

  Thorvin Alston Gibbs. Ah, me. Where to begin? He was, perhaps more than anything else, a grizzled son of the Big Sky Country. Part cowboy, part wilderness advocate, part champion hell-raiser—a bard of the barroom, through and through. And the last of the literary he-men. His autobiographical first novel, A Montana Boyhood, published in 1949, squared him right up against Mailer as the most gifted novelist of the post-war era. Critics even labeled him the heir apparent to Hemingway himself. Thor was, in fact, the last man to interview Papa. And the first to champion the Beat era. It was Thor Gibbs who coined the expression “beat generation.” He was a pallbearer at Kerouac’s funeral. He held Cassady’s head when the legendary hipster died by the side of the railroad tracks in Mexico. He rode the bus with Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. And he inspired a generation of young writers to dream.

  Chief among them—me. Thor Gibbs was writer-in-residence for a year at that overrated Ivy League breeding ground where I received my so-called education. He was my teacher, my drinking companion, my mentor. It was Thor Gibbs who gave me the courage to take those first faltering steps down my own road. It was Thor Gibbs who pushed me, goaded me, dared me to transform my raw, feverish ramblings into a novel—the novel. It was Thor Gibbs who pronounced me a writer and proudly passed my manuscript on to his agent. I dedicated the first one to him. So did other writers of my generation. Thor Gibbs was our hero, our guru, our shaman. I suppose he was the only man I’d ever looked up to and, possibly, even loved.

  Which is not to say that everyone was crazy about Thor Gibbs. A great number of women, for example, had hated his guts ever since the 1980 publication of The Dickless Decade, his bestselling male-backlash treatise which dared to link the decline of America in the post-Vietnam era to the rise of modern feminism. “Seemingly overnight, we have gone from the America of Tricky Dicky to the America of limp dicks,” Thor wrote in his trademark incendiary prose. “In the name of women’s rights we have created a generation of tame, passive, spiritually detumescent little whiners. Men who are afraid to lead, afraid to create, afraid to dream. These are the new lost boys, and they are dragging this once mighty nation down with them.” Seemingly overnight, The Dickless Decade transformed Thor Gibbs into the high priest of the hairy-chested men’s movement—and possibly the most famous chauvinist pig in America. To feminists, he was a loudmouthed troglodyte, a misogynistic boob. He was Rush Limbaugh in faded blue jeans and Native American jewelry.

  Not that he hated women. He had loved and been loved by many women through the years, including a number of rather famous men’s wives. But no woman had he loved quite so passionately, so publicly and so improbably as Ruth Feingold. Baby Ruth, the self-described loudmouthed New York broad, the crusading public defender and U.S. congresswoman, and one of the driving forces of the women’s movement in America for the past thirty years. A co-founder of the National Organization for Women as well as a major ERA and abortion rights activist, Ruth Feingold was one of the movement’s founding four. Betty Friedan was its architect. Gloria Steinem was its face. Bella Abzug was its engine. And Ruth Feingold was its mouth. She’d debate anyone, anywhere, anytime. She was a windup sound bite, a feisty pit bull, impatient, prickly and razor sharp. It was a few months after her unsuccessful 1978 bid for mayor of New York that her marriage to millionaire real estate scion Barry Feingold went belly up. He left her for a man (or another man, as numerous wags quipped), the young fashion designer Marco Paolo, who went on to popularize the Hasidic look in leisure wear. Barry Feingold left Ruth with their little girl, Clethra, and some serious ill will. She met Thor Gibbs not long after that on MacNeil Lehrer. The two of them had been brought in to debate the ERA. Their heavyweight confrontation was such a whopping success that a lecture agency decided to pit them against each other on the college campus circuit, much as they had Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy. To everyone’s shock, they fell madly in love (Thor and Baby Ruth, not Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy—at least not as far as I know). They got married. They had a son, Arvin, presently aged fourteen, for whom Thor had penned The Thinking Man’s Diet, his slim little guidebook of pithy thoughts on modern maleness (“Every man should own at least one dog and one motorcycle in his lifetime, and learn how to take good care of both”), which enjoyed a robust 173 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. And, inevitably, led to The Thinking Man’s Diet for Mind and Body, a he-guy celebration of beans, nuts and wild greens. Low on cholesterol. High on flatulence. It, too, became a bestseller.

  And then it blew up big time. Mega-big time.

  Thor had just left Ruth for little Clethra. The pair claimed to be madly, passionately, blindly in love—and Ruth be damned. Devastated, outraged and humiliated, Ruth first tried to take her own life with sleeping pills. When that failed, this noted champion of battered spouses then tried to take Thor’s life with an eight-inch boning knife, an attack for which she was widely applauded by sympathetic women on a number of television talk shows. When that failed she went to court—suing for sole custody of Arvin. According to Ruth, Thor was perverted, evil and totally unfit to be a father. According to Ruth, this was a man who had actually been having sexual relations with his own stepdaughter in their own home while Clethra was only sixteen, which in New York State constituted statutory rape. And which opened the door to criminal proceedings. Thor had countersued, branding Ruth as not only desperately insane but as a physically abusive parent. Clethra was claiming that her famous mom routinely beat both her daughter and Arvin about the head and neck with her fists, her open hands and sometimes a rolled-up newspaper. The Village Voice, if you must know. Frequently, Clethra charged, she even drew blood. For the time being, a judge had sided with Ruth, barring Thor from seeing Arvin. But the bitter custody case was still working its way through the courts.

  And, mostly, through the media. It was a first-class tabloid whopper, an egonomic calamity of global proportions, the loudest, tawdriest, horniest real-life soap opera of the year.

  Everyone, it seemed, had dirt to spill. Arvin’s onetime nanny, a Colombian woman whom Thor said he’d fired years before for stealing, claimed she found the macho author and his stepdaughter together on the girl’s bed when Clethra was only fourteen. His finger, the nanny revealed, was where it shouldn’t have been. And Clethra was moaning with pure animal pleasure. And little Arvin was watching … A would-be poetess who had once been a college classmate of mine and was no
w a high-ranking official of the Home Shopping Network claimed Thor had routinely forced her and other attractive young students to perform oral sex on him in his office while he talked dirty to them. She said he smelled like a goat.

  Everyone, it seemed, had a joke. Did you hear? Thor Gibbs is writing his life story. He’s going to call it Honey, I Fucked the Kids.

  Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion. “I’m sorry, but decent men do not mess around with the siblings of their children,” wrote one outraged Daily News columnist. “I don’t care if she was fourteen at the time or sixteen or seventeen. It’s still de facto incest.” Many of his followers felt betrayed by him. “Thor Gibbs showed me the way,” wrote a Fortune 500 CEO in a letter to The Wall Street Journal. “He taught me how to live my own life when I thought I had forgotten how. Now who do I turn to?”

  Opinion about Clethra was quite divided. Some thought she was a dirty, conniving little nympho. Others felt she was merely the sexual prey of a sick, cruel older man. Her mother’s stand remained unequivocal. “Clethra is not to blame,” Ruth stated flatly. “I want her to know I love her. I want her to know she can come home anytime she wants.” Possibly the most poignant opinion of all came from the youngest member of the family. “Dear Dad,” young Arvin wrote in an open letter that was widely reprinted. “Why can’t we be a family again? Why can’t we just love each other?”

  Why, indeed. No one had a very good answer to that one. Except that it was way too late. All of them had become the human bait in that season’s media feeding frenzy. Trashed for cash and burned. And once that happens there is no going back. And there are no longer any heroes and there are no longer any villains. There are just victims.

  With the possible exception of little Clethra, who wasn’t making out too shabbily. After all, she was getting the man she loved, two million dollars and a career—her publisher wanted to morph her into a feminist star like her mother before her. Shrewd thinking on their part. The women’s movement needed stars, needed leaders, needed an agenda. Since its heyday of twenty years before, it had become splintered and somewhat besieged. Personalities had clashed. Feuds had erupted. And the center had given way. There were no vanilla feminists anymore. There were eco-feminists, deconstructed feminists and post-feminists. There were neo-feminists, New Age feminists and egalitarian feminists. There were victim feminists and there were power feminists. There were radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon and there were anti-feminists like Hurricane Camille Paglia. True, abortion remained a powerful issue. True, a galvanizing event like the Clarence Thomas hearings emerged from time to time to unite everyone. But for many women, such as the millions of single working mothers who were just trying to survive month to month, there really was no women’s movement anymore. Just a shelf marked Self Help at the nearest chain bookstore, where women ran with wolves or from wolves, where women loved too much or too little, where their genuine fears and fantasies were reduced to so much touchy-feely grist for the psychobabble mill. More than anything, the movement needed new blood. There were a few young stars, like lite feminist Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, and Katie Roiphe, who had written The Morning After when she was barely out of college. But no one who’d been able to grab center stage and hold it. So why not she of the royal blood? Why not Ruth Feingold’s own daughter, Clethra? She already had one leg up, so to speak. She was a famous bad girl, a rebel. Lots of young women would be anxious to hear what she had to say. No question there.

  The only problem was I didn’t feel like helping her say it. And about this there was no question either.

  Me, I’d been living the sweet life on the farm for the past several months. Merilee’s farm, technically. The one she’d bought after we split up the first time. Or maybe it was after we split up the second time. Who the hell can remember anymore? The farm was in Lyme, Connecticut, that relentlessly bucolic little Yankee eden situated at the mouth of the Connecticut River on Long Island Sound, halfway between New York City and Boston. Lyme, for all of you history buffs, was established in 1665 by whalers and shipbuilders. These days it was known mostly for ticks, as in Lyme disease. Also for its gentlemen’s farms, its historic homes, its rich WASPs and its very rich WASPs. There was a town hall, a Congregational church, general store, boatyard, and not much else, unless you count cows. Modern civilization was seriously frowned upon in Lyme. No condos. No cinema multiplexes. No Golden Arches. Not much in the way of crime. Unless you count bad taste, and in Lyme they do. Lyme did pride itself on being open-minded. Minorities, eccentrics, even politicians were welcome, provided they didn’t try too hard to impress—showiness of any kind was seriously frowned on. Good manners were considered important. Privacy was prized above all. Only a couple of thousand people lived there. Happily, very few were celebrities.

  Actually, Merilee was probably the biggest one, but this tends to be true no matter where my ex-wife finds herself. Merilee Nash is a beautiful and glamorous star of stage and screen, winner of an Oscar and two Tonys. She doesn’t exactly blend in. Lately, though, she’d been keeping a pretty low profile. We both had been. Call it a taste of early retirement. Call it an escape from the prying eyes of the so-called real world. Call it what you will. The simple truth was we wanted to be left the hell alone for a while. The farm was our safe haven. Eighteen acres in all. There was the main house with its seven working fireplaces. There was the post-and-beam carriage barn of hand-hewn chestnut, the chapel with its stained glass windows, the duck pond, the brook that babbled. There were the vegetable gardens and herb gardens and flower gardens, all of them Merilee’s doing. There were the apple and pear orchards and the open pasturage that tumbled down to Whalebone Cove, where there were six acres of freshwater tidal marsh that held one of the state’s largest remaining stands of wild rice, not to mention several rare marsh plants. Also birds, if you like birds. There were bald eagles, great blue herons, long-billed marsh wrens. In the fall, osprey hunted the shallows. For a while, Merilee had kept animals—until she developed an unfortunate attachment to Elliot, her late pig. So lately we’d shared our safe haven only with Lulu, my faithful, neurotic basset hound, and Sadie, the gray and white barn cat.

  Oh, and there was the baby.

  I suppose you want to hear my horrifying tales of the crib. All about it … her … Tracy. Everyone does. She was six months old that fall, blonde and beautiful, possessor of Merilee’s bewitching emerald eyes and her full attention. As I’m sure you must know if you read a newspaper or watch Hard Copy, A Current Affair, Inside Edition or Entertainment Tonight, Merilee had decided to go have herself a love child. Much fuss was made over the identity of the father, since she told the world it wasn’t me. Hey, she told me it wasn’t me—until several weeks after the blessed event. She did this because she knew I wasn’t big on midget human life-forms and because she didn’t want to pressure me and because she is an actress, and therefore incapable of doing anything in a quiet, rational way. It was an ugly experience. I know I found it ugly. I can only imagine how it was for Merilee. The two of us weren’t speaking at the time. This often happens when you throw together two highly gifted, highly sensitive semi-adults who are not completely sane. That fall, when Thor Gibbs showed up, we were. Speaking, that is. I had decided to forgive Merilee. And she had decided to let me.

  Mostly, Merilee and Tracy were in their own little world. Tracy was hers, hooked up to her day and night. Me, I had my own full-time responsibility—Lulu, who deeply resented this new little throw pillow that drooled and spit up and cried and sometimes smelled really bad. We’re talking serious sibling jealousy. I tried to convince her we loved her as much as we ever had. I got a videotape called What About Me? for the two of us to watch together. We read a story, Ezra Jack Keats’s Peter’s Chair. We even did a coloring book, My Book About Our New Baby. But it was no use. Lulu was inconsolable. Periodically, she’d even taken to wading morosely out into the middle of the duck pond with the intention of drowning herself. She can’t swim, you see. I
didn’t know what to do about her. I only knew Merilee and I both had our hands full. It was just as well we’d both decided to retire for a while.

  Not that I had walked away from my first career. Not me. Not Stewart Stafford Hoag, that tall, dashing author of that smashingly successful first novel Our Family Enterprise, the one that led The New York Times to label me “the first major new literary voice of the Eighties.” I’m referring to my second career. I’m a pen for hire, a ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs. Not just any ghost, mind you. I am the ghost—the best money can’t buy—with five, count ’em, five no. 1 bestselling memoirs to my non-credit, as well as somebody else’s bestselling novel. I am not one of the lunchpail ghosts. I cost a helluva lot more, for one thing—generally a third of the action, including royalties. The usual As Told To kids don’t command nearly so much. But they also don’t know how to treat celebrities. They handle them with kid gloves. I wear steel mesh ones. I also carry a whip and a stool. And when I’m in the cage with them I never, ever let them know I’m afraid. If I did they’d eat me alive. There’s something else that sets me apart from the others—and I’m not referring here to my wardrobe or to my uncommonly short, four-footed partner with the doofus ears and the unwholesome eating habits. It’s simply that, well, some rather ugly things have this way of happening when I’m around. That’s because memoirs, good ones at least, are about dirty secrets past and present. Generally, there’s someone around who wants those secrets to stay safely buried. And will go to any length to make sure that they do. Just one of the many reasons why my days and nights doing the Claude Rains thing were behind me. Or so I had hoped and prayed.

  I had given that all up so as to concentrate on novel number three. Yes, there was a novel number two, Such Sweet Sorrow, about the stormy marriage between a famous novelist and famous actress. Doesn’t ring a bell? I’m not surprised. It hardly even got reviewed, unless you count that snotty capsule in The New Yorker, which called it “an appalling waste of trees.” That one really hurt, because only God can make a tree. I don’t know who or what makes critics. Possibly some form of virulent fungus. As for novel number three … it had been in progress for nearly four years now. Frankly, it was going a little slowly. Frankly, all I had to show for it was one paragraph. More of an image, really. A creak on the stairs. Not that this was all that I’d written. Hell, no. I’d written hundreds and hundreds of pages more. Whole plots, subplots, characters … You name it, I’d written it. And scrapped it. When you’re young, writing is about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. You plunge recklessly ahead, utterly fearless, utterly convinced that no one has ever before done what you’re doing. That gets harder as you get older. Because you realize that everything’s already been said before—by better writers than you, by lesser writers than you and by you. Not that I was giving in to it. I rose early every morning and retreated to the chapel. It was a small chapel, one narrow room with no electricity and not much in it—one Franklin stove, one harvest table, one chair, one oil lamp, one typewriter, one former genius. There I sat, day after day, waiting for the damned thing to bubble to the surface. And waiting. But it wouldn’t come. I was even beginning to wonder if it was there at all. This was me facing a cold, hard reality—that I simply didn’t have anything more to say. Possibly I was even through.