Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  It was about ten-thirty when I walked into the Hat and submitted myself to the X-ray gaze of Clement. I was glad that I’d thought to give Tony Sloviak the little gun; it was said that if you tried to enter the Hat with a weapon concealed even in the innermost recess of your body, Clement would still do what was necessary to relieve you of it. The house band was between sets, and the jukebox was playing Jimmie Rodgers. I stood a moment on the apron of baby-aspirin-orange carpeting that ran all the way around the lounge, trying to get my bearings. It had been a couple of years since my last visit and things seemed to have deteriorated. The plywood subfloor showed through the carpet, which was pocked with cigarette burns and stained everywhere by substances whose nature I didn’t care to speculate on. The wall of mirrored tile was gapped like a bad smile with empty spaces. Behind the bandstand someone had defaced the big mural, which showed the proprietor wailing away behind an enormous fortress of a drum kit. His sticks were each equipped now with a pair of hairy testicles and he sported a Dalí mustache. The dance floor was dimpled with heel marks. I looked around, expecting to see a couple of tables surrounded by writers and WordFesters and a cloud of pink smoke, but there was only the usual crowd of Hat regulars, looking at me with expressions of derision or mild annoyance. I have no doubt that my face held a stupid aspect.

  Out on the floor there were a handful of couples doing the buckethead and the barracuda and the cold Samoan, to the weary and inexorable groove of “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” and near the center of the crowd of dancers were Hannah Green and Q., the man who haunted his own life. Hannah was an ungraceful but energetic dancer, capable of admirable feats of pelvic abandon, but the best you could say for old Q. was that he was making no effort to cling to some outmoded notion of dignity. It sounds uncharitable of me to say so, I know, but his attention seemed to be occupied less by his own movements than by the slow vertical mambo of Hannah Green’s breasts. I waved to Hannah, who smiled at me, and when I looked around and gave my shoulders an exaggerated shrug, she pointed to a table in a far corner, away from the dancers, the bandstand, and all the other customers. At this table sat Crabtree and James Leer, behind a long, crazy skyline of Iron City bottles. James was slouched down in his chair, his head tilted against the wall, his eyes closed. He looked almost as if he might be asleep. As for Crabtree, he was staring off at, or past, the people dancing, with an expression of happy concentration. His arm was extended down and away from his body, at a delicate angle, as though he were about to choose a bonbon from a tray. His hand, however, wasn’t in evidence; it had disappeared under the table, in the general vicinity of James Leer’s lap. I shot what must’ve been a fairly panicked look at Hannah, who bared her teeth and screwed up her eyes, the way you do when an ambulance goes screaming by.

  I stopped a waitress on my way over to the table and asked her to bring me a shot of George Dickel. By the time I got there, Crabtree’s hands were both visible, and James was sitting more or less upright, his cheeks flushed. The high, flawless forehead that had led me to believe him a rich boy looked feverish, and his eyes were lustrous with something that might have been either euphoria or fear.

  “How are you feeling, James?” I said.

  “I’m drunk,” he said, sounding very sincere. “I’m sorry, Professor Tripp.”

  I sat down beside Crabtree, glad to be off my feet. The pain in my ankle was getting worse.

  “You’re all right, James,” I said, feeding him the same smile of reassurance I’d already fed him twice that day; the first time as his story was hung up for slaughter in workshop, and the second as I led him into the Gaskells’ bedroom, telling him that everything was fine. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Sure it is,” said Crabtree. He handed me his bottle of beer, half full, and I tipped it back and took a long warm swallow. “Thought we’d lost you, Tripp.”

  “Where is everyone?” I said, setting the empty bottle before him with a flourish, as though I’d just performed some alcoholic parlor trick. “Did it work out to be just the four of you?”

  “Nobody else showed up,” said Crabtree. “Sara and what’s his name, Walter, they said they were going to go home first and then meet us here. But I guess they just decided to stay home. Curl up on the sofa with the dog.”

  I glanced at James, expecting a little guilt to show in his face, but he was too far gone for that. I doubted if he even remembered what he had done. He’d started to wink out again, his head drifting back against the wall.

  “Is that just beer?” I said, jerking my head in his direction.

  “Primarily,” said Crabtree. “Although I gather you two staged a little raid on the Crabtree pharmacopoeia.’

  “That was a while ago,” I said, reaching down to press my fingers against the bandage on my ankle. “He shouldn’t be feeling any of that anymore.”

  “Well, you two missed a few bottles the first time,” he said. He tapped the hip pocket of his dollar green jacket. “And James here was curious.” He turned to watch the young man as his lips parted and a tiny flag of saliva flew from one corner of his mouth.

  “He’s out,” I said.

  We sat for a moment, watching the regular rise and fall of James Leer’s chest within his glen plaid shirt. The skinny little tie had come halfway unknotted and drooped at his throat like a blown flower. Crabtree dabbed at the ribbon of spit with the corner of a cocktail napkin, tenderly, as though wiping a baby’s mouth.

  “He has a book,” said Crabtree. “I hear he has a novel.”

  “I know it. Something about a parade. Love parade.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just found out myself tonight. He’s carrying it around in that knapsack of his.”

  “Is he any good?”

  “No,” I said. “Not yet he isn’t.”

  “I want to read it,” said Crabtree. An oily lock of hair had fallen down across James Leer’s forehead, and he reached out to brush it back.

  “Come on, Crabtree.” I lowered my voice. “Don’t do this.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  “He’s a kid,” I said. “He’s my student, man. I’m not even sure if he’s—”

  “He is,” said Crabtree. “Take my word for it.”

  “I don’t believe that he is,” I said. “I think it’s more complicated than that. I want you to leave him alone.”

  “Is that so?”

  “He’s really fucked up right now, Crabtree.” I lowered my voice all the way to a whisper. “I think he was planning to off himself tonight. Maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, he’s a mess. He’s a disaster. I don’t think he needs sexual confusion thrown into the mix right this minute.”

  “On the contrary,” said Crabtree, “it could be just the ticket. Hey, what’s the matter, Grady?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “What do you mean?”

  “Looked like you just, I don’t know, winced.”

  “Oh,” I said. “It’s my foot. My foot’s killing me.”

  “Your foot? What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just—I fell.”

  “Yeah, you know, you look kind of shaken up,” he said. His eyes had lost their fevered Cortés luster, and I thought I saw real tenderness in them for the first time all night. Our chairs were pushed close together and he leaned his shoulder against mine. I could still smell Tony’s perfume on his cheek. The waitress arrived with my shot of Dickel and I sipped at it, feeling the slow poison work its way into my heart;

  “I like the way she dances,” said Crabtree, looking out across the floor toward Hannah Green and Q. The selection now playing was “Ride Your Pony,” by Lee Dorsey. One of the many features that marked the Hat as a survivor of the great lost era of Pittsburgh dives was its telephone jukebox. There was no actual box, only a coin-operated telephone, black and heavy as an old steam iron, mounted on a pillar at one end of the dance floor. Attached to this phone by an oft-repaired length of wire was a dog-eared, barbecue-stained playlist, typed
a million years ago by some manic alphabetist, that featured over five thousand selections, grouped by genre. You picked your songs, dropped your quarters, and had a drunken, shouted conversation with an old Slovenian lady hidden away somewhere in Pittsburgh inside an underground bunker of black vinyl. A few minutes later you would hear your songs. At one time, according to Sara, many bars in town had been so equipped, but now the Hat was one of the last. “She shows a heavy Pharaonic influence, I’d say, in the elbow movements. With perhaps just a soupçon of Snoopy in the feet.”

  “How long have she and Q. been going at it?” I said.

  “Too long for Q., I think,” said Crabtree, shaking his head. “Look at him.”

  “I know it,” I said. “Poor bastard.”

  I attempted to ignore the ivy fingers of desire for Hannah Green that climbed along my spine as I watched her dance.

  “Hey,” said Crabtree, “look at that guy.”

  He pointed to a table just at the edge of the dance floor.

  “Who? Oh my.” I smiled. “The one with the hair sculpture.”

  He was a small man, with delicate cheekbones and an amazing, radiant, processed pompadour, a cresting black tidal wave of hair atop his head. Many of the great hairdos of bygone ages, I’d found, survived to this day in isolated pockets of Pittsburgh. The guy was also wearing an elaborate velour warm-up suit, piped and embroidered with gold and crimson ribbon, and he was puffing on a long, thin cigar. His hands were too large for the rest of him, and you could see bright pink traces of some ancient injury puckered around the right side of his face.

  “He’s a boxer,” I said. “A flyweight.”

  “He’s a jockey,” said Crabtree. “His name’s, um, Curtis. Hardapple.”

  “Not Curtis,” I said.

  “Vernon, then. Vernon Hardapple. The scars are from a—from a horse’s hooves. He fell during a race and got trampled.”

  “He’s addicted to painkillers.”

  “He has a plate in his head.”

  “He lost a toe to sugar diabetes.”

  “He can’t piss standing up anymore.”

  “He lives with his mother.”

  “Right. He had a younger brother who was a—trainer.”

  “A groom.”

  “Named Claudell. Who was retarded. And his mother blames Vernon for his death.”

  “Because, because, because Vernon let him—groom some mean stallion—and he got his head stove in. Or—”

  “He was killed,” said a sleepy voice, “when a gangster named Freddie Nostrils tried to shoot his favorite horse. He took the bullet himself.”

  We both turned to look at James Leer, who opened one bloodshot eye to regard us.

  “Vernon, over there, was in on the hit.”

  “That’s very good,” said Crabtree, after a surprised moment. We watched as the eye closed once more.

  “He heard what we were saying’ I said.

  Working on his sixth or seventh bottle of Iron, Crabtree did not look overly concerned by this. I took another few sips of poison from my shot glass. After a few minutes the silence between us seemed to have taken on an insufferable weight.

  “Poor old Vernon Hardapple,” Crabtree said, sorrowfully shaking his head. He smiled. “They always come out sounding so unlucky.”

  “Every story is the story of somebody’s hard luck,” I said, quoting the silver-haired cowboy writer in whose class we had met twenty years before.

  “Hey, teach,” said Hannah Green, bounding toward us in her sharp red boots. “I want you to come and dance with me.”

  WE DANCED, TO “Shake a Tail Feather,” and “Sex Machine,” and some scratchy Joe Tex number whose title I couldn’t recall. I danced with Hannah until the band came off break, and as they climbed up onto the platform and got behind their various instruments I went back over to the table and hit up Crabtree for another codeine and a couple of whatever else he was selling. I needed something for my ankle, and something else for my sense of shame—don’t think I didn’t feel ridiculous, thrashing around out there like one of Picasso’s wounded minotaurs, lumbering blindly after an angelic young girl. Crabtree had managed to revive James Leer, for the moment, and they were engaged with old Q. in an apparently intricate consideration of the function or meaning of the cockatoo in Citizen Kane. Crabtree was by no means a film buff but he had an excellent memory for narratives and his gothic imagination found much to appreciate in the work of my girth brother Orson Welles. Or at least that was the impression he wanted to give James Leer. Under the cold and inescapable gaze of Q. or his doppelgänger, Crabtree held out to me a palmful of blue grapeshot, pink moons, gray goldfish, little white pentagons shaped like tiny home plates.

  “Christ, your hand looks like a bowl of Lucky Charms,” I said. “Let me try one of those white ones.”

  I washed it down with something roiling around in a shot glass on the table in front of Crabtree that stank of ketones and aldehydes and that I thought might have been bad tequila. Then I went back out onto the floor and danced for another hour to what grizzled old Carl Franklin called the R & B stylings of Pittsburgh’s very own Double Down, until I could no longer feel my ankle and had lost the better part of my shame. Hannah rolled up her sleeves, and unbuttoned the top two buttons of her flannel shirt, revealing the threadbare neckline of a white ribbed undershirt and a filigreed locket on a thin silver chain.

  While she danced she kept her eyes closed and described solitary, interlocking circles across the floor, so that there were moments when I felt that she wasn’t really dancing with me at all, but simply employing me as a kind of fulcrum, a hub on which to hang the whirling spokes of her own private revolutions. And no wonder, I thought; if I were her I certainly wouldn’t have wanted anyone to think that I could possibly have chosen such an elephantine piece of machinery as myself, all vacuum tubes and gear work with a plain old analog dial of a face, such a dented, gas-guzzling old Galaxie 500 of a man, for a dance partner. But then she would open her eyes, favor me with her spacious Utah smile, and give me her hands, so that I could spin her for a second or two. Whenever our faces drew within each other’s orbit I felt compelled to speak, generally to express my doubts about the wisdom of my dancing, with her, at all, and when Double Down broke their set again I was relieved, and I started for the table. But she took hold of my wrist, dragged me over to the magic black telephone, and dialed up three songs.

  “‘Just My Imagination,’” she told the operator, without consulting the tattered playlist. “‘When a Man Loves a Woman.’ That’s right And ‘Get It While You Can.’”

  “Uh oh,” I said. “I’m in trouble.”

  “Hush now,” said Hannah, as she reached up and put her arms around my neck.

  “I’m going to regret this tomorrow,” I said.

  “That’s nice,” she said. “Everybody ought to have a hobby.”

  A few other couples joined us on the dance floor and we lost ourselves among them. I’d never been able to figure out exactly what was involved in slow dancing, so I contented myself, as I had since high school, with gripping my partner to me, letting out awkward breaths against her ear, and tipping from foot to foot like someone waiting for a bus. I could feel the sweat cooling on her forearms and smell a trace of apples in her hair. Somewhere in the middle of Percy Sledge’s testimony the combination of substances I’d introduced into my bloodstream in the course of the evening reached a kind of equilibrium, and I forgot, for a moment, all the bad things that had already happened to me that day as a result of my foolishness and bad behavior, and all the good reasons I had for leaving poor Hannah Green alone. I was happy. I kissed Hannah’s apple yellow hair. I could feel them unlimbering the old siege engine down inside my boxers. I think that I must have sighed, then, and for all the fizz and ichor flowing at that moment through the ventricles of my heart, it must have come out sounding unutterably sad.

  “I’ve been rereading Arsonist,” she told me, to cheer me up, I supposed. “It’s so great.” S
he was referring to my second novel, The Arsonist’s Girl, an unpleasant little story of love and madness I’d written during the Final Days, down inside the doomed bunker of my second marriage to a San Francisco weatherwoman whom I’ll just call Eva B. It was a slender book, whose composition had cost me a lot of misery, and I had a pretty low opinion of it, myself, although it did contain a nice description of a fire at a petting zoo, and a pretty good two-page sex scene in which my reader was given a taste of the heroine’s rectum. “It’s so fucking tragic, and beautiful, Grady. I love the way you write. It’s so natural. It’s so plain. I was thinking it’s like all your sentences seem as if they’ve always existed, waiting around up there, in Style Heaven, or wherever, for you to fetch them down.”