How I Became a Famous Novelist

by Steve Hely

  Preston Brooks was not there in person, unfortunately. As I walked through the aisles, I fantasized about crossing paths with him—the two of us looking each other in the eye and squaring off. Maybe there’d be a final showdown.

  When I saw his new book, I held myself back. I played a game of trying to imagine what new heights of sentimentality and emotional prostitution he’d reached: little children going to look for long-lost brothers with hobo satchels over their shoulders. Two orphans falling in love and trying to raise a child the way they’d wished they’d been raised. A veterinarian who travels the country healing the hearts of old worn-out dogs.

  But my wildest flights of shamelessness could not outdo the Master.

  Preston Brooks’s new book was called The Widows’ Breakfast. Amazing, right there. He’d beaten me with the title alone. But the subject was five widows—yes, one of them was black. They meet in 1942, when their husbands are all training to be pilots in World War II. And starting in that year, they have a tradition of getting together for breakfast on the morning after the funeral, anytime one of their husbands dies.

  The widows’ breakfasts go through the years, and changes and grandchildren and that sort of thing, the kind of stuff that sells Kleenex by the cartload to aging women who can barely keep it together at the mere mention of the passage of time.

  What a tremendous genius he was. He made it look so easy. If I’d met him in the aisles that afternoon, it wouldn’t have been a showdown at all. I’d have shaken his hand.

  That set the tone for the rest of my afternoon.

  Up the escalator on the second floor, I stood at the back of a big auditorium and heard the panel I was originally on.

  There was Josh Holt Cready, in the flesh. He was a tiny squirt of a thing, and his wire-rim glasses made him look like some kind of termite or poisonous beetle.

  He spoke in a low, reedy whisper, so the packed-in crowd had to crane forward to hear him issue pronouncements: “Sooner or later, everybody in my generation will grow up. They’ll get tired of Shakira. They’ll turn to Saul Bellow. They’ll weary of South Park and they’ll remember Mansfield Park.”

  Kudos to him for that. Great material and well delivered. A few eager school-principal types stood up to try and spark a standing ovation.

  I leaned back against the far wall of the auditorium and pretended the applause was for me.

  Having spent the day so far in cultural betterment and self-congratulation, I decided it was more than okay to start drinking.

  TWO TERRIFIC THINGS THAT HAPPENED, AND THEN THE NEXT MORNING:

  The First Terrific Thing

  Down one of the touristy streets, across the train tracks and around the corner from the Convention Center, I saw one of those prefabricated Irish pubs with the Guinness signs and the etched lettering, this one called Bobby Sands’.

  I walked in, and from the San Diego sunlight it took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dull darkness favored by daytime drinkers. My attention was drawn to a loud monologue being delivered around the corner of the L-shaped bar.

  “If we’re gonna be an empire, then fuck it. Let’s be an empire.”

  This was being delivered by a jowly man in sunglasses. His audience was the bartender. Not one of those glass-shining bartenders you see in old movies and New Yorker cartoons—this was a young guy with a pile of curly hair, grinning at all this as though it were a comedy show specifically for his amusement.

  “But an empire needs to get its hands dirty. Decimate. You know where the word decimate comes from? Ancient Rome. When they’d conquer a city, they’d go like this: one two three four five six”—the jowly man counted off among the three of us—“seven eight nine ten thwack.” He stared at me and mimed chopping. “Chop off his arm. Do that in Iraq, no more insurgents. That’s power. Imperium. Something they can understand. ’Course you can’t do it there because the goddamn TV cameras are in your face.”

  The bartender slid down to me and asked me what I’d have.

  But I was staring at the jowly man. He looked familiar. His flesh hung off his neck and bunched together like the curtains at my aunt’s. The skin around his eyes was cracked like poorly kept pavement. He was drunk or crazy or some epic combination.

  “Here, wait, we’ll ask him,” said the jowly man, “see if he knows.” He fired a firm point at my face. “Which way is east?”

  Just as he asked this, I realized who the jowly man was. I remembered him from his picture, driving the amphibious landing craft. It was Nick Boyle, author of Talon of the Warshrike.

  “Which way is east?”

  The bar was running perpendicular to the street—I was facing the bottles—I’d come from down the street—behind me was the ocean—so—

  “That way!”

  “All right, you pass,” said Nick Boyle. “That way’s the Chinese, and that way’s the Iranians. And that way, God help us, is the fucking Mexicans.”

  “I hate to tell you, but there’s plenty of them that way too,” said the bartender, pointing north.

  “Every fucking way, the Mexicans.”

  I ordered a hard lemonade. This was a panic decision.

  “Hard lemonade, Jesus Christ,” said Nick Boyle. “Give him a fucking vodka or something. Stolichnaya. Put some hair on his balls.”

  “I guess I’ll put some hair on my balls,” I said.

  “Don’t underestimate the Iranians,” said Nick Boyle. “They’ve got some very good submarines.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “I’m sorry—you’re Nick Boyle, right?”

  “Depends who’s asking. If you’re the IRS, no. If you’re my ex-wife, no.”

  “I think your ex-wife would probably recognize you,” I said. I accompanied this with the nervous laugh of male submission.

  “After a bottle of red wine and a couple Xanax she wouldn’t recognize fucking Santa if he punched her in the tits.”

  This sentence stunned me such that I spit up a little.

  “So that’s pretty much anytime after eleven in the morning.” Nick Boyle looked me over. “You don’t look much like my ex-wife though.” Long sip from his glass of vodka. “You’re about thirty pounds thinner.”

  Nick Boyle! Stumbled upon in a San Diego bar! Surely this was it. This was what literary life was meant to be like!

  “I don’t mean to be a gushy fan,” I said, “or, you know, sure you hear this but I loved—love—your books. I remember one summer just sitting on this horrible scratchy couch we had, you know, ninety degrees out, rattly air conditioner going, and just plowing through them. And I didn’t want to get up, even though my legs were just horribly itchy.”

  Didn’t need all that detail. But the sense memory of it was strong—I couldn’t think about Talon of the Warshrike without feeling the spiky burrs of that couch, upholstered with sixties rug sample seconds.

  “Arma virumque cano,” Nick Boyle said, with a tired cadence, as though this were a cliché as worn as That’s the way it goes or Can’t win ’em all.

  “What?”

  “Arma virumque cano. I sing of arms and the man.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s what’s worth writing about. Half these fucking critics don’t get that. But tree houses and sewing clubs aren’t worth writing about. Arma virumque cano. I sing of arms and the man. You know where that’s from?”

  Nick Boyle pointed at me but didn’t give me enough time to answer wrong.

  “That’s the first line of the Aeneid. That’s what it’s about and there’s no apology. Oldest story in the world.”

  So now the ice was broken, and I was treated to

  THE THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS OF NICK BOYLE

  • ON GOVERNMENT REGULATION: “This bar should have peanuts. Every bar in America ought to have peanuts. Why can’t the government regulate that? In the shell, too.”

  • ON HOW HE CAME UP WITH HIS IDEA FOR TALON OF THE WARSHRIKE: “I went to Venice with my ex-wife. We were taking a night cruise, and looking back at the city I thou
ght, What if somebody blew this place up?”

  • ADVICE FOR A YOUNG WRITER: “Thing of it is, I’m not a good writer. Prose, sentences, that stuff, I don’t know about it. I had a lawyer’s training, a business training. So I wrote clear and direct. But let me tell you something. Prose, frills—people don’t care about that stuff. They want stories. This is why Hollywood’s kicking their ass. It’s why I can make the switch over to movies, video games—all I do is sketch out the story.”

  • ON VIETNAM: “The Viet Cong were desperate! The Tet Offensive wiped them out! And then we pull back. What kind of nation pulls back on the verge of victory? Any boxing coach could have told you it was a shit way to win a fight.”

  • ON HIS CAREER AS A BUSINESSMAN: “Writers love to knock capitalism. They’ll write five hundred pages about some hard-working farmer, but a guy working in a corporation to give his family a good life is a worse criminal to them than Stalin.”

  • ON THE CURRENT STATE OF AMERICAN LETTERS: “Half the books these days are about smoking dope, masturbating, and crying about your girlfriend.”

  • ON HIS OWN WRITING: “Here’s the thing—I didn’t know this when I was writing. But it came through anyway—everybody, everybody, wonders if they have it in them. What’s a hero? What’s a story ever been? It’s a hero proving himself. Delve into the psychology shit all you want. That’s been the backbone of stories since cavemen around a fire.”

  • ON WHAT IS THE BEST “KILLING PISTOL”: Smith & Wesson 640.

  • ON PRESTON BROOKS: “A sentimental faggot.”

  He said it, not me.

  If the reader is having trouble picturing any of this, he or she should note that we kept drinking through it all and the statements were delivered with greater vigor and reduced precision of pronunciation.

  Toward round three or four, he described to me the amphibious landing craft he owned, the one I’d seen in his picture in the New York Times Magazine.

  “That’s a Higgins boat. Ike said those boats won the war. Two-inch draft! Goes right over coral, obstacles, anything!”

  “A two-inch draft!” I exclaimed, with the thinnest understanding of what that meant. He told me how he’d bought his from a crusty Coast Guard coxswain who’d lost an arm ramming one into Tinian.

  “At Omaha Beach, one of those boats, the whole damn thing, men, metal—vaporized! Completely gone. Ran over a mine or something. Goddamn if that isn’t courage!

  “I tell you,” he said, now leaning in on me, his breath leathery and thick, “that’s all I’m doing with my books. Moving around men and machinery.

  “All right,” said Nick Boyle finally, looking at his watch, “I gotta go give a talk at some high school. Tim was it?”

  “Pete.”

  “Stay the course.”

  He waddled out, and I sat there beaming. I’d done it. From the scratchy couch to bending elbows alongside him, Nick Boyle himself. The bartender presented me with a lengthy bill for both of us, which I paid without complaint.

  The Second Terrific Thing

  I’ll understand if the reader finds it a little coincidental that I met two famous authors on the same day. But remember that this was, after all, the BooXpo, and famous authors were swarming around all over the place. I’m pretty sure I saw Alexander Solzhenitsyn, too, although it may have just been a homeless person. I saw Tom Wolfe, or at least a Tom Wolfe impersonator. Stephen King was walking around, and I would’ve tried to talk Red Sox with him except he was eating a pretzel.

  By midafternoon, something about the air of the place was getting noxious—all those packing crates of unread pages, and the smell of coffee encrusted in the mouths of manic readers, cycled through their breath. I walked outside to catch a Pacific breeze, turned to do a walking loop of the Convention Center, and saw Pamela McLaughlin.

  She wearing a thick leather jacket the color of an old record, with her mussed-up half-blonde hair flopping around on her shoulders. At the second I saw her she was simultaneously lighting a cigarette and blowing her nose. My first thought was That’s very efficient! and then I thought, It’s also very dangerous, and then I realized, Hey! That’s famous paperback mystery writer Pamela McLaughlin! and then I thought, Pamela McLaughlin lights her cigarettes and blows her nose at the same time? That’s very odd, and by then I was almost on her and I had to say something.

  “I’m a real fan!” is what I ended up saying.

  “Huh?”

  “Of your books.” This wasn’t true. As of yet I hadn’t done more than flipped through them derisively in the grocery store. “You’re Pamela McLaughlin, right?”

  She issued a dismissive, let’s-hurry-things-along nod.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  It was going very badly, this, and I needed to say something coolly casual to recover.

  “You just in town to see the pandas?” I said this with a smile twisting into place, because I was proud of how clever it was, but then the smile untwisted as I was finishing, becoming almost a frown as I remembered I was stealing that line from an old Simon & Simon.

  But I guess she hadn’t seen that episode, and the twisting of my face maybe just came off as lascivious, because she shot a line of smoke above my left ear and said:

  “I’ve been meaning to go to Sea World. Feed the penguins,” and it was clear then that she was game to play along.

  “I’m Pete Tarslaw. I wrote The Tornado Ashes Club.”

  “Pammy McLaughlin. I didn’t read it.”

  Awesome. Kudos for her for saying it; that was my attitude. I pointed at her cigarettes and said—because this is what a cool guy would say, right?—“Those things’ll kill ya.”

  “They’re not the only ones trying.”

  Up close it was clear how much airbrushing had been done by the New York Times Magazine. Her face looked like a baseball mitt. A new baseball mitt, mind you, not some old worn-in glove on display at Cooperstown in an exhibit about “Hope and Sorrow: Baseball in the Depression.” Her cheeks looked like the palm of a new Wilson before you’ve had a chance to break it in. There was a dense thicket of wrinkles, some of them so deep I’d wager you could stick a penny at least a third of the way in. Her hair was blonde, but not Viking-wife blonde, more the color of a pale wood cutting board. She was muscular, too. Shoulderwise she could pass for a field hockey coach.

  But she also possessed a brazen adult confidence I wasn’t used to, and it made me kind of giddy and afraid, like a high school sophomore getting hit on by one of those creepy divorced teachers you hear about in Florida.

  Pamela had said in interviews that she always carried a gun, and I wondered where it was right now.

  In retrospect this moment was also the height of my own confidence. I mean lifetime—that exact minute, too. So maybe I was projecting some alpha-male pheromones, and she was projecting queen-bee chemicals, or whatever, and they were mingling in the air. That would explain the next thing that happened, which is she stubbed out her cigarette with the bottom of her black boot and looked me square in the eye.

  I realize, by the way, that this is all beginning to sound a bit campy. But that was the exact appeal. It was that thing of How long can this possibly be sustained?

  “I’m going to Mr. Fung’s,” she said. “Bar near my hotel. Are you coming?”

  Yes, of course I’m coming, you fantastic nose-blowing smoking boot-wearing mitt-faced vixen! is what I thought.

  “I’m always in for a dumpling,” is what I said. I’m not sure that’s any better of a thing to say.

  A STORY PAMELA MCLAUGHLIN TOLD ME AT MR. FUNG’S

  “All this was brain splatter.” She indicated a section of cocktail napkin meant to stand for a murder scene she’d been to, near the Liberty Bridge on the south side of Pittsburgh.

  “By the time I got there, a rookie had picked up most of the skull chunks. Probably thought he’d impress the bosses by doing the dirty work. So when I rolled up, the detective was screaming at him. ’Cause all that’s crucial; you want to map the bla
st backward, locate the shooter.

  “Not that it really mattered. Shooter was in a car, fired out his window. The real question is how they got the victim, Evan, how they got him out of his car.

  “In a murder case, you always start with the husband or the wife. This guy’s wife was a wispy toothpick. Very mannered— she’d been born in France. Right there everybody’s suspicious. Her family had a wine importing business. So that didn’t play well either, in a city of beer drinkers. But she had tiny little spider arms—no way she could have fired a shotgun. And why would she do it out here? So then you start looking for affairs— his or hers. When you shake that tree, you always get some apples.”

  Pamela really said that.

  “Every murder, every one, is a soap opera. You’re just watching it backward.

  “That’s where the toxicology matters. They ran this Evan’s blood work downtown. Turns out he’d taken some amyl nitrates. They relax the anus. He was down here for sex.” She laughed. “When that report came back, the detective had to pay me twenty bucks. He couldn’t believe he was gay.

  “The wife, she had a close friend, Kent. Very handsome guy. Gym muscle. One of these upscale gay hustlers you hear about. Anyway, they got the computer whizzes on it. In a few hours they figured out this guy Kent roped in Evan on the Internet. Two hours more and they found the receipt for the shotgun. Here’s the best part: this guy Kent, he bought the shotgun over the counter at Bear Mountain Hunting Supply! If I put that in a book, readers wouldn’t believe anybody could be so stupid. I mean, if you’d seen this guy—he probably walked in wearing a Charvet shirt or something. Whoever sold it to him must have known he wasn’t going duck shooting.