by Steve Hely
She’d heard of mutual funds, and this one cited some intelligent-sounding ancient Roman analogies that warmed her heart and inspired confidence.
So she sent them all her money, which wasn’t much. Via Appia had invested all of it in a brine shrimp company, without bothering about the necessary regulations or paperwork. The money never came back.
The misfortune would’ve been this poor woman’s to bear alone, except that her son happened to be a Massachusetts state senator and the chairman of the Transportation Committee.
So the chairman called the attorney general, only to learn to his great indignation that defrauding old people in this particular way wasn’t really a crime, at least not a state crime, so then he called the governor and made some irresponsible threats about highway funding. Then the governor called the US attorney.
This chain of phone calls ended with state troopers tracking down Jon Sturges. They did so in a cloddish enough fashion that Jon Sturges moved to the Cayman Islands. He didn’t, however, allot much time to pack.
So the troopers found some pay stubs and such, which led them to my computer, which contained the very letter this elderly woman in Chelmsford had received. It had gone to some 200,000 nursing home residents, making it almost certainly the piece of my writing with the widest readership.
To be honest, after what had happened to me in Texas, I was numb to all this. I can’t really remember feeling much passion either way about it.
Maybe a part of me was almost happy about it, happy the way you are when you get the punishment you know you deserve.
Maybe that’s what made the coffee taste so good.
Finally the prosecutor came out and led us in. She wasn’t even slightly intimidating—she introduced herself as Carolyn and she couldn’t have been over thirty. She led us into a perfectly bland conference room. There was another prosecutor there, Mike, who was huge and buff, but in a going-to-the-gym-too-much way not in a busting-heads way.
There was a tape recorder, too. Aunt Evelyn took out her own tape recorder and put it next to theirs. “I trust no one objects?” This seemed to intimidate Mike and Carolyn, but they didn’t object.
Then there was a round of legal discussion between Mike and Carolyn and Aunt Evelyn. I’d been firmly instructed to stay out of it, so I did. If they included all that preliminary stuff in Law & Order, each episode would have to be nine hours long.
Then Mike was allowed to talk to me.
“Mr. Tarslaw, we don’t want to make a bigger deal out of this than it has to be. I can tell you quite explicitly that our goal is to bring charges against Mr. Sturges. Not against you or Mr. Mausbaumer.”
“Mr. Mausbaumer?”
“Hobart Mausbaumer. He’s your roommate, is he not?”
“Yeah, Hobart. He doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
Carolyn opened a folder and handed a paper to Mike, who looked it over.
“On 5/06/08, when our agents visited 1815 Lindsay Street, Apartment Five, to execute a warrant on your computer, Mr. Mausbaumer informed them unprompted that he had provided you with an unscheduled pharmaceutical, Reutical. At that point he was advised of his legal rights and declined counsel.”
Mike looked up. “He’s described here as being very agitated and upset.”
“Goddamn it Hobart!”
Aunt Evelyn didn’t break. “I’d like to state clearly that this is new information. We’re here to discuss a proffer for a charge of mail fraud—”
“Look,” Carolyn said, “we’re not the FDA. Reutical—it’s not our business. You know the pressure we’re under. We just want to get this concluded so we can pursue Mr. Sturges.”
Then there was another round of legal discussion. Seriously, if Law & Order were even slightly accurate it would be crushingly dull.
The end result of all this is that I had to answer a few questions. Did I know Mr. Jonathan Sturges. Had I been in the employ of Via Appia Funds. Had I written documents on behalf of Via Appia Mutual Funds. So forth. There was only one that threw me.
“Do you know Mr. Hoshi Tanaka?”
“Wait—who?”
“Mr. Hoshi Tanaka. He’s Mr. Sturges’s partner.”
“Is he a Japanese guy who goes to Wharton?”
“I have an address here of 65 North 34th Street, Apartment Six, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”
“Christ.”
“Do you know him?”
“No … I mean, no, I’ve never met him. I wrote his business school application essay.”
More legal discussion. Carolyn handed Aunt Evelyn a document. She read it over. I signed it.
The end of all this was I was sentenced to six months of house arrest. But—thank God for Aunt Evelyn—I wouldn’t have to wear one of those ankle bracelet things.
The house in which I was under house arrest was actually a condo. A move away from Hobart seemed like a good idea.
So I bought a one-bedroom place on Revere Beach. I had a view of the Atlantic after all. But if you’ve ever been to Revere Beach, you’ll realize this was not quite a home from the back of the New York Times Magazine. It’s one of those faded resort towns where framed pictures from century-old postcards are now unrecognizable. On the beach, chunky, grease-fattened seagulls pick their way through the waste of used condoms and torn-up lottery tickets, and Ziploc bags flap from the crevices in the wooden benches. Down the road is the dog track, Wonderland, the most ironically named place in the world, a hangout for degenerates who can’t afford a bus ticket to the Indian casino.
Still, I paid for my one-bedroom up front, in cash, because The Tornado Ashes Club kept selling.
“Any press is good press,” and there was plenty. Preston’s tirade against me was replayed on Fresh Air, and, I’m told—although I couldn’t watch—that the old bastard went on Charlie Rose. Once the criminal element was revealed, it was like a whole new basting and everybody went back for more. My name became a touchstone for pundits arguing about the vapidness of my generation and the demolition of standards.
The whole business raged on the Internet as well. I stopped Googling myself, out of sheer exhaustion, when somebody discovered I’d plagiarized passages from Hearts of Ice and Blubber. They had to fire David Borer for lousy editing after that came out, and what became of him I don’t know. Lucy got his job. She also hooked up with Josh Holt Cready at a party.
My royalty checks got even bigger after the Vanity Fair article came out. I can’t blame them for doing the piece—young literary prodigy turned mutual fund con artist and plagiarist is kind of a home-run story. But I wasn’t thrilled with whom they chose to write it. Obviously, I’m no expert on ethics, but if Pamela McLaughlin’s going to do an “in-depth investigation” of me, she should at least mention our night of passion at the W.
But whatever—it sold books. Things weren’t so bad, really. I’d sit around and watch TV. Kelly’s Roast Beef was within my 2,000-foot restriction, so I ate a lot of clam strips.
Aunt Evelyn still believed in me. So much so, in fact, that she worked an “educational exceptions” provision into my plea bargain. If I wanted to leave my home for “legitimate educational purposes,” I just had to send a petition to Carolyn.
I only did this once, and it was to visit my alma mater.
Granby College had, at great expense and with enormous fanfare, hired away from Oxford this British professor of English Literature named Michael Mintz.
You maybe have seen this guy on Fox News. They love him there. He’s got long hair and he always wears a scarf, and he’s very pretty. His big idea, the idea that got him so much attention, is free market criticism.
Basically, he doesn’t believe in literary merit or anything like that. According to him, the only way to judge a book, or any work of art, is by how popular it is. “Any other method,” he says, “is nothing more than elitism.”
When he got to Granby he sent me a very kind note. He said he was impressed by my “eye for the marketplace,” and he invited me out to joi
n him for lunch.
MY LUNCH WITH MICHAEL MINTZ
I had him meet me at Stackers, for nostalgia’s sake. We both ordered Meaty Meat Combos, and he dove into his with manic English energy.
He told me he taught English 10B now, a class I myself had taken. I asked if they were up to Middlemarch yet.
“Oh no,” he said, “that’s been completely cut out. We’re reading The Diary of Penelope Smoot. Marvelous book—in the 1870s it outsold Middlemarch threefold. It’s a servant’s narrative of her cruel mistress, sort of a Devil Wears Prada of its day.”
He put his sandwich down and clasped his hands together. “What I ask students is—why? Why is a book so popular? What does it touch? Because people are the judge of books. Not academics. Not reviewers. People.”
This point got him very agitated. He started to go off on how stupid academics were.
“Why should we trust the ethereal ever-changing whims of a self-appointed elite?” he said. “A hundred years ago, the ‘learned professors’ would’ve had us all bogged down in Latin verse and racialist studies of man. I say throw out the theory. Let’s look at what’s quantifiable. What can be measured. What the People want. There’s no such thing as an ‘underappreciated’ novelist. Books are inexpensive to produce, inexpensive to buy—they’re an almost perfect free market, perfectly efficient, and they resolve themselves.”
He went on in this vein for a while.
“But this is an idea that academics simply can’t grasp. Try telling this to Harold Bloom at that lunatic asylum they run down in New Haven. Did you know,” he said, “there was outrage—outrage—among a certain set of the Granby campus over signing me? Why? Because I was expensive! Well, absolutely! I’m good at what I do, and this is a free market! That’s why I came to the United States at all—I’m not coming for free, am I? But academics, of course, are simply not used to competing in a market like that.
“See, you, I think, grasp this.” The reason he’d invited me out here, it turned out, was that he wanted me to donate my papers to Granby. “We’re going to start a new archive on all this. This is the future of literary studies. Market motive. The long tail. Profit-taking.”
Then he started talking about Melville. “Think of Melville,” he said. “Why did he write? For money. One reason only. Money.”
“But wasn’t Moby-Dick a failure, moneywise?” I asked.
“Of course. We don’t read Moby-Dick in my class,” he said. “We read Typee. Huge best seller in its day. Full of cannibals. Look,” he said, “the novel was once a populist form, but these days it’s like opera, kept alive by foundations and a few wealthy patrons. It can’t sustain itself. If it wasn’t for the Guggenheims and the MacArthurs, Thomas Pynchon would have to write for CSI: Miami and Cormac McCarthy would be a blackjack dealer.”
Mintz went on—he was really worked up. “But what isn’t dead is story. Please! Tell me a story! Everyone is begging! Look at the tabloids—Britney, Hazel Hollis, whatnot—they tell a story!
“What you should do now, of course,” he said, “is write a memoir. Far and away the most popular genre of our time. Nothing compares. The novel’s in the ash heap.”
So that’s what I decided to do. I decided to write a memoir.
But I resolved to make it as true as possible. I’d tell it the way it had happened. I’d get to the meat as efficiently as possible, cutting out the middle parts I’d learned to fill with lies and spackle. To tell my story, I’d need to include some examples of bullshit, but I’d leave those clearly cordoned off.
Here it is. I even managed to include a story about a murder.
Apologies to those who don’t come off so well. But I get it as badly as anyone.
Michael Mintz was right—people do want memoirs. If I told you the advance I got for this thing you’d vomit with disgust.
I wrote most of it down at Sree’s, after my house arrest was over. I’d drive down 93 and chat with Sree for a while. We’d talk about Ghostbusters. He told me the old man in the Patriots jacket had died. I’d order a fish fry and type.
During the time it took me to write this, I only read two books.
The first I found one day at the Stop & Shop. It was called The Many Passions of the Bloodsweeps. On the cover are the two impressively bosomed Bloodsweep sisters, Xenia and Eustacia, in the respective embraces of Captain Topwater and Fermenteen Adanock. How this book compares to others in its genre I’m not sure, but there are some exquisite lines, like: It was there, out in the poorly roofed bothy, between pitchforks and heaps of peat moss, pushed up against cracking oak boards, that Lady Xenia had first found the flower of her ladyhood blossoming, first felt the ache of woman, and first found its one effective salve—the arms of a boy, coiled with formations of muscle hewn from his labor.
But the important thing is that this book was written by my former coworker Alice Dwyer, and I’d like to make up for some childish pranking on my part by recommending it here.
The second book I read was the one Lucy had given me a long time ago: Peking by Bill Lattimore.
Peking follows two characters. The first is a hunter-gatherer who’s traveling across a valley 300,000 years ago. The second is an American paleontologist, Charles Naughton, working in China, who discovers the first man’s skull in 1937. It’s the story of the fossil known as Peking Man.
I’d heard of Peking Man, in passing, in some class or another. But when I was finished reading Peking, I felt I had to fling the book across the room, to get it away from me, like it was radioactive.
That’s how powerful it was. It might be my special curse that I could tell just how good it was.
The book follows the story of the nameless man, who became a fossil. But it’s not all Clan of the Cave Bear stuff—the language has this unbelievable resonance, it’s like reading your own dream. The novel also tells the story of Naughton, who digs up this fossil, millennia later, just before the Japanese invade. It’s two tiny stories, really, but somehow, together they slice a cross section of the whole of human experience.
It’s a book about searching, and losing things. It’s about human connections, how tangled we are with each other. How we struggle and grapple and claw our way across the earth. There are scenes in it, sentences even, that seem realer to me than my own memory—the man feeling a burning in his throat that his child has, too. Naughton turning the dust on his hands into mud as he pours a trickle of water down his arms. It’s about fear and seizing. The way you have to settle. The way we’re all cursed with an idea of perfect when the world is so messy. How there’s never enough of anything. Mostly it’s simple, tiny scenes—there’s the Japanese invasion, but it comes in a broken-down truck, the skinny officer trying to hide how bad he has it. There’s a tiger, but he’s seen in snatches and glimpses and a quiver on the skin and when they finally kill him, his flesh hangs in the sun and gets pecked away by birds and flies, viscus drying into dust. You can feel thumbs pressing against rocks, and you’re made to feel this stress, this weight we all shoulder, and you can feel the desperation to keep digging, to break through, to transcend the earth. As if there might be something other than the earth.
You get lost in the language of it, but not because it’s trying too hard. It’s not. What it’s really about—and I thought about this for a whole day, sitting at the bar at Wonderland—is how the cruelties we inflict on each other start out so small but become inevitable. It’s about what kind of creatures we are and how we came to be this way. These fictional characters that only exist as words on a page somehow seem to know better than I do how to live your life. That the only way to live is to lose yourself.
I can’t even describe it right. And I won’t bother excerpting it here. Go find it.
I wish I’d written something that good.
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