by Steve Hely
Back at my table, some well-meaning bald guy who’s Polly’s boss or something would turn to me and ask, “So Pete, what do you do?”
I’d answer, “I write fake application essays for foreign kids.”
My neighbor would look at me with enough shame for two. Then, first chance he got, he’d wheel himself—for some reason I pictured this guy in a wheelchair—to the bar.
Rumors of the shattered ex-boyfriend whose pathetic presence was a blight on the reception would trickle through the hall. The aunts and cousins and the reverend would all hear about it. As I stumbled to the bathroom, Polly, glowing and radiant, would clutch the firm arm of her new husband, and point at me, and whisper to him about the sorry wretch she toyed with in her younger days. Then they’d kiss, full on the mouth, as the entire assembly applauded.
I’d end up carried home by my two remaining college friends, Lucy and Derek. They’d haul me back to the Marriott as I alternated between begging them to stop for pancakes and passing out.
Polly would win. The whole event, from the reading of First Corinthians 13 to the dainty little chocolate tarts with raspberry filling and the creepy old guy who dances with the little kids, it wouldn’t just be a wedding. It would be a celebration of how Polly defeated me.
That’s how I thought about it at the time.
Now, you might suggest that I could’ve just declined Polly’s invitation. But that would be admitting defeat. I’m lazy, but I’m no quitter. I wouldn’t let her have the satisfaction of telling her friends, “I wish Pete had come,” and later sending me a little note about how “unfortunate” it was that I “couldn’t make it.”
Again, I’m not proud of feeling this way. I’m just trying to let you know where my head was at.
After work, on the way back to Somerville, I stopped at a liquor store and picked up a case of Upstream Ale. I don’t even like Upstream Ale. It tastes spiky like it’s brewed from a mixture of club soda and creamed corn.
But the label features a grinning cartoon salmon. He’s flinging himself into the air from a rocky stream. He’s smiling like he loves the challenge. That was the spirit I needed.
A few hours later I was sitting on the couch in my apartment, watching TV with seven empty bottles of Upstream Ale in front of me, eating some smoked almonds I’d found in the bowels of our kitchen cabinets.
Next to me was my roommate, Hobart. He was eating instant mashed potatoes right out of the pot. This was the only thing he ever ate.
Hobart had hair that looked like a nest made by an incompetent bird. He seemed not to know how to shave quite right, so tufts of fur were always lingering on his face.
But lifewise, he seemed to have me beat. Hobart was a grad student at Harvard, studying for a joint MD/double PhD in chemistry and economics. The only books on his shelves were volumes of medical reference and a thin guidebook called The Gentleman’s Code: Etiquette for the 21st Century Man. This was produced by “MacAllister Distillers, Crafters of Fine Spirits Since 1818.” Hobart had gotten it for free with a bottle of whiskey he bought one night after a pained conversation with his girlfriend back home in upstate New York. At least half of his conversations with this woman were followed by hours of piercing sobs. This was his major flaw as a roommate. On the plus side, he was rarely home. When he wasn’t studying, he was a research assistant at Lascar Pharmaceuticals, where they made medicines to control attention deficit disorder.
Hobart and I sat on a secondhand beige couch that sagged and slumped like an old lady’s bosom. We watched our TV, which had had a green tint ever since an incident three months ago when I threw my shoe at a commercial for a Zach Braff movie and scored a solid hit.
I’d like the reader here to really get a sense of how pathetic our apartment was. It’s important, storywise. Just know that there was a scratchy gray carpet splotched with Rorschach stains, random bolts and things sticking out of the walls, and deep fault lines in the plaster. There were no posters. I’ve never had a poster I wasn’t later embarrassed by, so why bother? Some US Postal Service crates held my old paperbacks. A review copy of Peking, a novel Lucy had sent me, had been on the coffee table for months. We used it as a coaster.
I opened another beer.
Hobart had only one vice, and he was indulging it now. It was a show on CBS called Summer Camp. If you never saw it, it was a reality show—basically a Survivor rip-off—where there’d be four teams of “campers” and they’d compete in canoeing and making s’mores with, like, Mario Batali as the guest judge. But the unbelievably unsettling and creepy “twist” was that each team consisted of half adults and half six-to eight-year-old children.
Now, obviously, if I start writing about how weird this program is, how it’s a sign of the complete post-postmodern collapse of Western civilization, I could fill a whole book, so I’ll just point out one crazy thing, which is that the kids—because they were all screwed-up precocious showbiz kids whose brains are so warped they know how to smile on cue and so forth, are always much smarter than the actual adults.
Hobart watched this show every Friday, without fail. What dark recess of his brain compelled him to do this, I don’t know, but I didn’t complain. Tonight a six-year-old named Brooke was in a screaming match with a divorced accountant over this berry-picking challenge they’d been teamed up on.
This took my mind off Polly’s wedding.
The show went to commercials, and Hobart clicked around from police videos to European soccer.
In a way, I guess all the events that followed were the result of a channel flip. Because Hobart clicked again and paused, because he saw the comforting figure of Tinsley Honig.
Hobart and I agreed that Tinsley was our favorite television-news-magazine journalist. Several times Hobart and I had watched her auburn tresses float about her porcelain-doll face as she interviewed a nun who makes prizewinning saltwater taffy, or an autistic kid who’s an expert on the Founding Fathers, or teacher who turned an inner-city classroom around by teaching the kids Scrabble.
On this night, Tinsley was sitting on a country porch, on a hand-crafted wooden bench next to an older man, stout as a beer keg, with a thin beard like an evil count. The camera shot from a distance, so as to take in the gables of the enormous house and the piney mountains in the distance. The house was the kind of glorious country house that people in catalogs live in, where the woman modeling the Sea Pine Rangely Knit pullover brings iced tea to the man modeling the Cropped Linen Washables.
Tinsley had on her trademark Listening Face, cocked fifteen degrees to the left, one slender finger on her chin. The stout man was talking. He spoke as though for medical reasons he had to keep his lips as tightly sealed as possible. His voice sounded like crinkling tissue paper.
“Some say the novel is dead. Well, some say the Devil is dead. I don’t think so,” he said. “Writing is a cudgel I wield to chase away the brigands who would burn down the precious things of the human heart. Today we have too much of the image, video screens everywhere. Girls barely off the playground gyrating about like trollops at a Turkish bordello. But words still count. They still break hearts, and heal them.”
“Don’t change this!” I cried, with difficulty because at that moment I’d been seeing how long I could hold eight Upstream Ale bottle caps in my mouth. I recognized the man with the thin beard and the tissue-paper voice. It was terrible novelist Preston Brooks.
The screen cut to Tinsley and Preston walking by the reeds along the edge of a brook. Over the footage, Tinsley’s voice-over was saying, “There are no teenage wizards, or codes hidden in paintings. But Kindness to Birds, a quiet story of love, family, and the power to believe, has touched readers across the country on its way to the bestseller list. I traveled to Preston Brooks’s horse farm in West Virginia, to talk to a writer who says he’s an old dog”—here her voice lilted upward—“who’s learned a few new tricks.”
Cobralike I shot out my arm and snatched the remote from Hobart.
“I was a foolis
h kid, a dumb kid, so I dropped out of school and joined the Air Force,” Preston was saying. “There’s a lot wrong with the military, more now than there was then. But they know what to do with a dumb kid. They sent me up to a radar post on the DEW line in Alaska. That was my job, for three years—listening. I didn’t know it then, but it’s the perfect training for a writer. In the Arctic, I listened to the elders of the Gwich’in people. They’ve lived there for thousands of years. They know a thing or two. We’d all be in better shape if my grandchildren listened to a Gwich’in elder for a while, instead of Lindsay Loohoo and Dee-Jay Stupid Face, or whatever these rappers are calling themselves now.”
Preston held out his arm and stopped Tinsley short. He crouched, and scooped something off the ground. The camera went in close and showed a newt, or a salamander or something. Some kind of terrified lizard, trembling on Preston’s palm.
After a moment’s contemplation, Preston put it down. The newt was shaken for a second but then realized it got off easy and made a dash for the reeds.
“Uh, Pete?”
Hobart was staring at me.
“We’ll miss Fireside Chat.”
I’d like to believe I said something soothing, but I think what I did was sort of swat my hand. In any case, I missed what Tinsley asked next.
“… Four Roses, Old Charter, Mud River, Jim Beam, Crooked Chinaman, Colonel’s Daughter,” Preston was saying. “I drank any kind of forgetting juice in a bottle. I kicked around from job to job. I was in a granite quarry for a while. On a lumberjack crew. One summer I tried to mine uranium. Spent awhile in a fish-gutting plant in Tacoma. Hell of a way to earn a dollar.
“Then one morning I woke up in an alley in Minot, North Dakota in the snow. I rooted around in a trash can, hoping to find an old jacket. And I found a tattered copy of Of Mice and Men. Maybe from an angel’s hand. Maybe just a lazy schoolboy. But I read it. And John Steinbeck showed me there was stronger stuff than whiskey.”
I leaped up and tossed the remote against the wall, where it smashed and the little batteries rolled out. First of all, it was obviously a lazy schoolboy. I am 100 percent certain a tattered copy of Of Mice and Men was not put there by an angel’s hand.
Second, Of Mice and Men? That stupid ninety-page eighth-grade-English Hallmark Special bullshit about the retarded guy who loves rabbits? You want me to believe that kept you off whiskey?!
Hobart was looking at the broken remote. “Maybe we can change it manually.”
The TV cut to Preston Brooks leading Tinsley into an airy, book-lined office with bay windows facing a still lake.
“I call this the dance hall,” he said. “Because characters will appear, and introduce themselves and ask me to dance. The character always leads. I bow, accept, dance for a while.”
Tinsley nodded sagely as though this were the wisest, truest thing anyone had ever said. Then she pointed at a vintage typewriter.
“And you always work on a typewriter.”
“My daughters tell me to get a computer. But they also told me we’d have eight years of Jimmy Carter, and magnet cars. So what do they know? I hate the damn things. A typewriter was good enough for Faulkner, and it’s good enough for me.”
“Oh, come ON!” I shouted at the TV. Hobart was crouching over the broken remote.
Preston nuzzled his cheek against the tongue of a horse that leaned over a picket fence. “A horse can tolerate anything except a liar. A horse knows a liar. Readers can tell a liar, too. If I put one false word, one lie, down on the page, readers would buck me as fast as a horse bucks a fool.”
Then Tinsley began explaining the plot of Kindness to Birds. It was something to do with a convicted prisoner named Gabriel, who finds redemption during Hurricane Katrina. The video accompaniment to this was Preston, playing washboard in a zydeco band. Apparently he’d spent time in Louisiana “helping hurricane victims, and listening to their stories, and learning the rhythm of their language.”
Tinsley explained that Preston was head of the creative writing program at Shenandoah College. And we watched as he declaimed from his book in front of a packed college lecture hall.
“Is they chickory in that coffee?” she bellowed down, in a tired voice that still shook like a thunderclap, a calling-hounds voice.
“No, ma’am,” Gabriel hollered back, steadying himself against the buckboard of the Tidecraft Firebird, swaying in the swamp water that swelled and fell like the breast of a mother asleep. “No chickory, but you sure a Cajun woman, asking for chickory coffee when you stuck on a patch-tar roof and more water coming up, they sayin. Now reach out your hand, Mez Deveroux.”
And slowly her fingers, rich in texture as a knitted throw rug, fitted into Gabriel’s palm, stained by motor oil and bacon grease. And they looked at each other, and felt that touch, the one from the other, until each helped the other and soothed the other and where the one began and the other ended was lost to both of them.
One could spend hours parsing that intricate latticework of literary sewage: the cartoon bayou dialect, the touches of “realist” detail, the labored folksy imagery, the vague notes of spirituality and transcendence muddied enough to make it palatable to anyone. I didn’t bother. Instead I focused on Preston’s audience.
Maybe you’d have to see this audience to understand my epiphany. And weird issues with Polly were in play—I’m not going to psychoanalyze myself. I’ll just tell you what I saw.
In the rows of the lecture hall, listening to Preston, their backs arched forward and their eyes expectant, were rows of college girls. Young women in little sweaters and tight jeans, pliant and needy. Girls with names like Sara and Katie and Chrissy, no doubt, who had read Chronicles of Esteban and Kindness to Birds while curved on couches in their bras and pajama bottoms, giving themselves over to this magician of words. Cornfed girls from small towns, where girls were still graceful and feminine. Pageant winners and soccer players and swoony pseudopoets. Girls who were smart-cute and wildly passionate, who’d traveled from Connecticut and California to Shenandoah College to submit themselves to Preston Brooks. Their faces yearned with nameless desire, pleading with Preston to guide them and fill them with hard truths.
That was when it all came together. That’s why I always tell people Preston Brooks was my inspiration. Because right then, I figured him out. I realized what a magnificent, ridiculous bastard he was.
Down in the uranium mine, or at the fish-gutting plant, he’d realized that work is for chumps. And one day he got his hands on Of Mice and Men. He’d realized, “Hey, I could pull this off!”
He’d had a vision. He saw that life as a famous novelist would mean sitting around in a country mansion, playing with horses. So he strung together some mushy novels and pawned them off on thousands of book-buying saps. He’d moved out to West Virginia. This was a perfect defense, because what publisher in Manhattan would dare say a guy from West Virginia was inauthentic? In the publishing houses and news-show conference rooms they took him to be a backcountry sage. They bought him as a wise old uncle who could give something authentic. He spoke in platitudes dripping with writerly juices, and Tinsley Honig came out to pay homage at his feet as he churned out “realist” detail from a beat-up typewriter in exchange for fortune.
And, best of all, college women, women at their most nubile and desperate, would pay to come fawn over him. In late-afternoon office hours, they’d hold some crappy story in their trembling hands and he’d start issuing platitudes in his tissue-paper voice.
“In an age when zealots would blow us all to bits, I parry with something more explosive than a bomb,” Preston declared to the hall. “Words. Words alone can mend the heart,” Preston told them as he folded up his text. Katie’s and Sara’s lips quivered with ecstasy as he spoke.
The screen cut back to Preston and Tinsley walking again, now with the sun going down.
“Let me tell you a story. That’s my trade, after all. I’m a teller of stories. This one happened in 1653, when England was going
through a hell of a bad time.” Tinsley leaned in to him and listened. “Churches were being torn down and destroyed. But in one place, a place called Staunton Harold, a man built a church. I’ve been there. I’ve seen the church, prayed there. There’s a plaque on the wall. It says, ‘In the year 1653, when throughout the nation all things sacred were either demolished or profaned, this church was built by Sir Robert Shirley, whose singular praise it is to have done the best of things in the worst of times, and to have hoped in the most calamitous.’”
If you’re trying to picture this, imagine a sort of hammy, B-grade character actor pretending to be a solemn preacher. That was part of Preston’s genius. I saw that now. He was an actor, and he’d written a pretty good role for himself. I wondered which church newsletter or book of anecdotes for ministers he’d gotten this little story from, but I gave him credit—it was good material.
Preston stopped, and Tinsley stopped next to him.
“To do the best of things in the worst of times, and to hope in the most calamitous. That’s why I write.”
The TV cut to an anchor in New York. She paused for an appropriate length, then half smiled and said, “Powerful stuff,” before segueing into a profile of a cabdriver who got his leg crushed by a bus and now does stand-up comedy about it.
Hobart retreated to his room to check the Summer Camp message boards as I stomped around, aflame with beer and epiphany. Preston Brooks is a genius, I decided. He’s the greatest con artist in the world.
It’s hard to describe how you feel when you discover something like that. I guess the closest metaphor is that it’s like solving an irritatingly stupid brainteaser that has stumped you for a long time.
I thought about the pictures I’d seen at lunch, of Pamela McLaughlin and Nick Boyle and Josh Holt Cready. Of course! They were all con artists! They’d been staring out at me like a grifter stares at a shill! The costumes, the Civil War getups, the fake crime scenes, the armored vehicles—it was all part of the act! If you could write a book and act like you meant it, the reward was country estates and supple college girls.