by Pete Dexter
Needless to say, I have been meaning to compliment Mr. Milch on his series and his genius for quite a while, but having missed him the night Mrs. Fleder put her foot down on the business with the cowgirls’ undergarments, I guess the best thing to do now is just sit back with the rest of the viewing public and wait for him to do it again.
But I digress. We were talking about Esther. Thank my lucky stars for Esther.
And speaking of lucky stars, what to do with Mrs. Dexter? Oh, I’m afraid we have caught our petticoats on the old horns of a dilemma this time. Does she qualify as unpaid? Thirty-one years together, sickness and in health, childbirth, PMS, menopause, and still in some mysterious way I don’t know the woman at all. This much I can say absolutely: Mrs. Dexter is not remotely inexpensive. On the other hand, she obviously doesn’t do the things she does for money. She is probably over there in the house as I write, ironing my underpants so that there will be no chance of old Magoo popping out for a visit if some visitor should materialize out of the desert. Mrs. Dexter has spent twenty years getting me to wear something over my underwear, and not just now and then, but every time I so much as run to the grocery store. She teaches that consistency is the key to success, and I have come to realize over the years that she is telling me something even bigger than the story of underpants, she is telling me about life and writing.
The woman in fact may have already given me all the criticism a writer ever needs: “Think about it Peter,” she said recently, even though she knows I hate being spoken to in italics, “why do you think they call them underpants?”
Mrs. Dexter and I have a daughter, Casey, who inherited many of her mother’s wonderful traits but never picked up the knack of speaking in italics, and she also gave the book high marks, and claimed it was not just because I am her father, and the truth is that with the possible exception of Mrs. Dexter herself, there is no one I care more about pleasing.
Which for some reason brings me to Esther. I wonder if Esther needs something buffed. Which for some reason brings me to Cousin Bill, and I guess that we all know what Cousin Bill wants buffed.
But then perhaps the less said about Cousin Bill and buffing, the better, and thus let us matriculate (to use a word that belongs to Padgett Powell) on over to the nonprofessional readers of the shorter version, Dr. Catherine Robinson and Ms. Betsy Carter. Dr. Robinson said it was an honor to look through my stuff for errors but I have not heard back on that yet, and all I can say is that it is a hard thing, waiting for the call with the results from the doctor. Ms. Carter, meanwhile, pronounced the work lovable although she did take exception to the use of the simile teeth like Chiclets, used twice in the same paragraph, which I found and changed, not liking it much myself, although the real problem Ms. Carter and I have lies in the matter of perception. She hears teeth like Chiclets and thinks of a big white anchorman smile, and I write teeth like Chiclets thinking of the feel of teeth loose in my mouth after they have been knocked out of the gums. She is entitled to her opinion, of course, but the truth is that all the high living in New York has caused her to lose touch with the common people.
Oh, and James Ellroy. If it’s all right to thank him before I thank Esther again, Mr. Ellroy didn’t read this one for me, but back in the days before I was a writer of acknowledgments I authored a novel called Train, which was set in Los Angeles in the 1950s, and telephoned Mr. Ellroy out of the blue one afternoon and asked questions regarding that city that must have called into question why someone who didn’t already know this stuff would even try to write about it, and Mr. Ellroy was not only patient and friendly and gave me all the time I needed, he also knew what he was talking about. This is a very rare sort of phone call for me, and a pretty persuasive argument for going back to answering the phone, and these days the phone never rings with good news without my remembering Mr. Ellroy’s consideration and patience. This has happened maybe twice since the publication of Train.
And as long as we’re headed backwards, I should also mention Bob Loomis, my editor back at Random House in the days before I wrote acknowledgments, who was honest and gracious with me through five novels and deserved to be thanked personally and graciously for that when I left, and wasn’t. And not only that, I think he was the one who suggested Esther to me when it was time for my previous literary agent—a handsome, very snappily dressed up-and-comer in the business whose name I couldn’t remember even during those few months he represented me—to leave the premises. Somehow when I thought of the future with this fellow I thought of living with a goiter, and the truth is, even if he were still my agent I cannot imagine myself thanking him for anything except perhaps once saying that he had worked too long and too hard—he may have been twenty-five at the time—to represent a one-time novelist who was not ready to commit to him for the duration, and saved me the half hour or so it would have taken to fire him diplomatically. And I know that sounds harsh, but at least I didn’t have him whacked, which I am sure could have been arranged with a two-minute call to Esther, whom I’ve been meaning to thank for several paragraphs now but haven’t found the opening.
And so we come to the end of this song of appreciation only to realize there is one more category, those volunteers not just unpaid, but who have gone to some personal expense to make this book possible, a category of one as it happens, the former heavyweight fighter Randall Cobb, whose left arm and by implication his career were done damage that could never be repaired one cold night twenty-odd years ago in a since-gentrified neighborhood of Philadelphia when he waded into as unpleasant a setting as that city has to offer and saved enough of my brain from the bats and tire irons of the outraged citizenry that I could later tie shoe laces and write books, which all these years later it turns out is everything I need (along with Mrs. Dexter and the offspring, some scenery and a dog or two) to be happy.
And Esther.
Don’t let me forget Esther.