by Bill Barich
Marco was seduced, in thrall, eager to do Frederick’s bidding. Together they launched a series of side projects, leaving Buster to struggle. They created some phony stationery from the Department of Defense to be employed for mischief. Ever cheered by the prospect of disaster, they assembled a guide to earthquake safety. It offered such hints as “Get under a table and stay there for four days.” In Chinatown they found a box of old linoleum blocks that had once belonged to a newspaper, printed dozens of them, and supplied absurd captions in English. There was no end to their madcap energy, and no profit from it, either, but they were irresistible, even to Buster’s most loyal supporters. They were funny, playful, and unpredictable, while Buster was somber and stoic. Buster had the blues.
Before long, there were two salons uneasily occupying the same space. Buster felt outraged and betrayed. The free spirits were a threat to his livelihood. In response, he grew more dogmatic, and his opinions, never very adaptable, were set in stone. I once listened to him lecture on why Goudy, and Goudy alone, was the only typeface appropriate to a particular poem. He began the discourse around noon and finished it in the early evening. His beer consumption increased, and his temper got the better of him, too. He envied Marco and Frederick’s liberty, although he disapproved of their antics. The attempts at compromise, and the brief flourishes of harmony, were destined not to last.
So we were all surprised when the feuding trio collaborated on Buster’s new book of poetry. It wasn’t a big book, only twenty poems or so, but he’d been saving spare change for two years to buy the paper. The Knothead Press would publish five hundred copies, some in cloth to be signed by the author, and try to sell it to stores and libraries, a first for Buster. There would be a huge party, of course, and the typeface would be Goudy.
For once, Frederick didn’t snicker, and Marco outdid himself, giving up his usual obsessions to focus on the book’s pastoral tone, evocative of Buster’s childhood in the Northwest. He produced a powerful image of a hawk on the wing, and another of its prey, an oblivious field mouse in the tall grass. Taken together, the images captured the urgency beneath the calm surface of the poetry.
That was the final group effort. On the sly, Marco and Frederick planned to go into business for themselves, somewhere in the country where they could live cheaply. As for Buster, he sank deeper into debt. With his back to the wall and Zoe anxious about the future, he stooped to printing menus, leaflets, and wedding invitations. For a while, he even served as a vanity publisher of hideous novels and delusional memoirs. The awful prose gave him migraines, he complained, and I thought he was kidding until the afternoon I found him in the dark shop with a cold beer pressed to his forehead. His book was a letdown, too, despite the moving poems and elegant design. Not a single critic reviewed it, and it couldn’t have sold more than fifty copies, judging by the cartons still on hand.
The salon limped along, stumbling toward its grave. Buster was too busy to read manuscripts or be convivial anymore. I lost touch with him myself, mostly because I’d faced up to reality and admitted I wasn’t a poet of any kind, not yet. The hard truth hurt a bit, but I also felt a little relieved. Instead of staring at my navel all day, I got a steady job, and the regular paycheck did wonders for my mood. For the first time since I’d arrived on the coast, I had food in the fridge and enough cash to buy books rather than read them on the sly. I gained a renewed respect for Buster, too, and what he’d been willing to endure for his beliefs.
As bankruptcy loomed, Buster sold his presses and equipment to a liquidator. He and Zoe split up shortly after that. Ultimately, he left the city to find a new life. Where he landed I’ve never been entirely sure. According to one rumor, he remarried, moved to Maine, and teaches book design at an arts college. That’s the rumor I choose to pass along, remembering his kindness to us all. If anybody deserved a happy ending, or at least a second chance, it was Buster. I still have an inscribed copy of his last book, along with some broadsides and a few copies of Wooden Leg, and whenever I dust them off and show them to friends, I’m amused when somebody remarks (and somebody always does) that the collection must be worth a small fortune.
Narrative, 2005
A Real Writer
All tales of reckless youth involve a large measure of folly, so I continue to be amazed that my brief career as a literary agent yielded any positive results. Whenever I remember those long-ago days, I see before me the dark, drafty, incredibly sloppy railroad flat near Golden Gate Park I shared with Hank Daniels, my old roomie, who cooked up the plan to take the publishing world by storm. This was in the early 1970s, during the last gasp of hippie glory, when Nixon was unraveling and San Francisco still welcomed grand gestures destined for defeat.
Hank came west from rural Oklahoma, so he had no defenses against the city’s magic. It sucked him in and filled him with ambition. In a few short months, he’d gone from being a humble bus driver’s son to a first-rate seducer adept at picking up women. Handsome and charming, he’d even landed a good job as a west coast sales rep for a New York publisher. His salary might be modest, but it didn’t cramp his style. He wore expensive snakeskin cowboy boots, drove an electric-blue Porsche, and slept on a king-sized waterbed, where he often dreamed that he could fly like Superman. Success and power, those were Hank’s totems.
I had no totem myself unless you count confusion, although I worked in the book business, too, as a part-time stock boy for a local wholesaler. That’s how I got to know Hank. He made regular stops at our warehouse on behalf of his employer. When we first met, he was frazzled because he was breaking up with his high school sweetheart, who followed him to California. He was so touched that he bought her an engagement ring and moved her into his apartment, a maneuver he regretted the minute he realized it would curtail his nightly cruising. Advance planning was never Hank’s strong suit. At any rate, he had to leave her. “I let her keep the ring, anyway,” he told everyone, easing his conscience. Meanwhile, he’d found a new flat by the park and was looking for somebody to split the rent.
I was the ideal candidate. A weird green mold was creeping over the walls of my studio on Cole Street, plus I’d been robbed twice and owned almost nothing of value anymore, except the typewriter I relied on for banging out my stories and poems. The stuff was awful, and I knew it and never showed it to anyone, but I held a secret belief that in the Haight-Ashbury’s utopian atmosphere, where human potential was supposed to be boundless, I might yet become what I wanted to be, a real writer. So Hank’s pitch appealed to me. For an extra thirty bucks a month, I could have three rooms instead of one, all mold-free. Far out, I thought. I’ll make the nicest room my study.
At the end of the month, I packed a suitcase, put my typewriter in its case, and walked over to my new digs. The flat was on the top floor and afforded us a fine view of Kezar Pavilion, where the roller derby matches ended with bottles breaking and the fans butting heads in bloody fistfights. Our landlord was Chinese and operated a tiny pizza parlor in a storefront down below. He took great pride in his pizzas, even though they didn’t resemble any I’d seen before. His “special” involved bean sprouts and water chestnuts on top of a traditional tomato-sauce base. After a blast in the oven, the sprouts turned black and crinkly, but he regarded this as a culinary breakthrough, not a disaster.
Living with Hank proved to be easy. He left after breakfast to make the rounds of Bay Area bookstores, so I often had the flat to myself and passed the hours reading and daydreaming. Sometimes I didn’t get up from my mattress on the floor until the early afternoon. My boss at the warehouse, a crusty old Socialist who harbored both confused hippies and draft dodgers, gave me a discount on his stock, and that allowed me to build up a small library. I browsed through the samples that Hank’s company sent him, as well, but what really intrigued me was the pile of manuscripts stacked by his waterbed. They belonged to aspiring writers who hoped Hank would like their work, send it to the honchos back east, and recommend that it be published.
Tha
t was wishful thinking. Hank read very little and had no interest in literature, but he still felt guilty about ignoring the manuscripts. He was also clever enough to know that somewhere in those thousands of pages there might be a diamond in the rough, the next Richard Brautigan or Hunter Thompson. The publishing industry had lately embraced the hippie scene as a moneymaker, even hiring editors fresh out of college, who smoked a little dope. Why not open a literary agency that catered to the long-haired masses? Such was Hank’s inspiration one evening when we were stoned ourselves. What a great idea! It would alleviate his guilt and maybe earn us some cash. Since I was addicted to reading, I could sort through the slush pile in search of gems while he did the wheeling and dealing. We’d be a perfect team.
I was forced to admit that his idea, while not really all that great, had some merit. Agents of any kind were scarce in town, and I certainly had nothing to lose, but I still hesitated because I was an aspiring writer, too, and a terrible snob in the bargain, assuming a kinship with the immortals. In my arrogance, I thought the agent game was ruled by such brassy, cigar-chomping sharpies as Irving “Swifty” Lazar, who made headlines by selling trashy blockbusters for millions, so when I finally caved in to Hank’s pressure—not for nothing was he a salesman—I insisted that we call ourselves Larry’s Literary to suggest the oily nature of the trade.
I intended this as a joke, but it worked to our advantage. It generated a flurry of free publicity as the hippies tried to guess the identity of our silent partner. I did my best to feed the rumor mill. In one version, I cast Larry as a movie mogul from Los Angeles eager to tap into a fresh pool of talent up north; in another, Larry was a Berkeley philanthropist so crippled by shyness that he couldn’t bear to meet an author in the flesh. Hank contributed to the buzz with his design for our business card. It featured a swirl of barely legible script as in a Fillmore poster, next to a drawing of a buffalo. That would be our logo, he said, and would certify us as pioneers. We were very pleased. Being an agent was a lot more fun than we had figured.
It was a sign of the times, I suppose, that anybody at all took us seriously. But we soon learned, much to our horror, how desperate some people are to see their words in print. As soon as we distributed our cards, the deluge began. Hank kept his job, so I ran our “home office,” a spare room outfitted with a table, a filing cabinet scavenged from the boulevards, and my typewriter. Despite my initial misgivings, I experienced an odd contentment while I sipped my morning coffee and waited for the phone to ring, glad to have a purpose in life at last. No longer was I just another drifter. Now I could explain to my parents what I was doing in San Francisco, the very hallmark of maturity they were convinced they’d never see.
Dealing with our would-be clients was tricky. There were pushy callers who asked about our track record and wondered if we had the “muscle” to handle a masterpiece like King: Sheepdog of West Marin, but most others were anxious and a bit wary, accustomed to being rejected. If they wanted an honest opinion of their writing, a service I thought we actually could supply, I asked them to send a sample, but I disqualified some callers on the spot because I smelled trouble. One fellow warned me that he wouldn’t accept less than $50,000 for his first novel, for instance, which was about (and I quote), “Man’s inhumanity to man.” Anybody who invoked Joyce or Proust as a model I also avoided, along with paranoids expecting to be cheated and poets who described their poems as “an exploration of self.”
That may sound cold, but I was really being far too nice. Worried that I’d hurt someone’s feelings, I listened patiently to monumental bores and towering egomaniacs. Often I traveled long miles to meet somebody who’d piqued my curiosity, usually by lying. Once I rode a Greyhound all the way to Fresno to chat with a scholar who claimed to be an expert on Buddhism. He served me green tea in a tiny cup and gave me a pamphlet about the Rosicrucians. Worse things happened all the time, most spectacularly when an ex-convict, recently released from San Quentin after doing ten years for manslaughter, knocked on the door, engaged my sympathy, and read aloud to me from the ripping yarn he’d composed behind bars. His performance held me captive for nearly an hour.
There were consolations. There had to be. Every now and then I came across a manuscript that woke me up and drew me in. It could be the writer’s voice, the integrity of the subject matter, or a sense of emotional truth, but I could always tell when I was in the presence of genuine, heartfelt prose, and I soon became painfully aware that my dreadful stories and poems lacked those qualities. I simply made up my stuff (I once set a story in the Peruvian Andes) and imagined I was being creative, so the process of sifting through all those submissions and trying to separate the gold from the dross was an enormous help to me. Without knowing it, I was developing a tough critical eye I’d be brave enough to focus on myself someday.
While I was shoring up the office, Hank exercised his charm. He dusted off his credit card, flew to Manhattan to meet the young rebels in publishing, and sold two manuscripts, one on witchcraft and the other on tantric yoga. We were thrilled and celebrated for days, but our trendiness betrayed us. The rebels continued to snap up tracts on the latest hippie fads, but they passed on all our serious fiction and nonfiction—an insult to my taste, I believed, and to my aspirations—and I got so tired of hearing the phrase “a near miss here at Knopf” (or Scribner’s or Simon & Schuster) that I promised to work even harder for Arthur Bendel, our star literary client, until I secured a contract for him with a first-rate publisher.
* * *
Bendel was more than a client, really. He was my friend and mentor. I thought he had a touch of genius, and he didn’t argue the point. For more than a decade, through a pair of failed marriages, he’d written three brilliant, difficult novels, all unpublished except as bits and pieces in little magazines. The novels were flashy enough to have attracted a big-time agent at William Morris, but the agent gave up after a year or so without a sale. Arthur was disappointed, of course, but he shrugged it off and started on his fourth novel. He couldn’t be budged from his purpose. He had a monkish devotion to his craft and no other serious loyalties except to his daughter, Brianna, a precocious six-year-old, and the San Francisco 49ers, whose football fortunes affected his mental stability.
Like almost everybody else, Bendel reached Larry’s over the transom. When his sample chapter arrived, I approached it with the usual ho-hum attitude, but I was soon in a state of high excitement. Man, could this guy write! Every sentence crackled with energy, passion, and wit. His language was also distinctive. It didn’t sound musty or bookish. Instead, he captured the cadences of the street—American talk, our knock-about anthems. And how I admired his clarity! I never had to slog through a bog of murky prose to catch a glimmer of meaning. True, he got carried away and lost the thread of his story at times, but I was certain any skillful editor could iron out the wrinkles.
Bendel was a discovery, an original. Full of enthusiasm, I called him right away to heap on the praise, but he was curiously subdued. Though he had the grace not to say so, he’d heard it all before. Still, he invited me to visit him later that week to discuss our options.
For our meeting, I fished an old tweed sports coat from a closet to suggest how professional I was, and walked through the park to the Richmond District. I would take this walk often in the months ahead and always looked forward to it. It had such promise, such a bright expectancy of good times. While conga drummers in their colorful dashikis pounded out a relentless beat, young women fluttered around them like butterflies, and I’d breathe in the sharp, healing smell of eucalyptus, feel a bracing hint of the ocean on my skin, and believe in my innocent way that anything was possible.
Bendel lived in an ugly stucco building. Even on sunny days, it seemed wreathed in fog. When I rang his bell, an eye peered at me through a peephole, after which Arthur unlocked his many locks and stood before me in a rumpled Pendleton, baggy jeans, and carpet slippers. Like Auden, he preferred the slippers for comfort and even wore them for a
stroll around the block. In his early thirties, short and stocky, with a long fringe of blond hair around his balding dome, he projected the distracted air of the literary elite. I could see in an instant that he didn’t know who I was, or why I’d come. He blinked at me as a miner might do after several hours down a shaft, trying to adjust his deprived senses to the universe above ground.
When I reminded him of our appointment, he chuckled. “Absentminded,” he mumbled. “Goes with the territory.” He led me into his threadbare living room, where the only stick of furniture was a leather recliner positioned inches away from a big Sony TV. He’d bought the set on credit to indulge his obsession with the 49ers. The recliner was Bendel’s throne. His guests sat on the floor, or dragged in a kitchen chair.
I chose the floor and offered him a beer from the six-pack I’d brought as a token of my esteem, but he declined. “Too early,” he explained. He never touched a drop of alcohol until he finished his daily stint around five, when he dived wholeheartedly into a half-gallon jug of Early Times, the bourbon that Walker Percy, his favorite modern novelist, was rumored to drink.
I had never met anyone as disciplined as Bendel. His entire life was arranged around his writing, and he never broke with his routine. While I was still snoozing, he ran five miles every morning and ate a nutritious breakfast of bran cereal and fruit. He swallowed vitamins by the fistful, too, so I took him for a health nut at first, but he was only hoping to counteract the effects of the booze. If he didn’t have to report for work as a substitute teacher—that was how he paid his bills—he lashed himself to an IBM Selectric until quitting time, and then started on the bourbon. It eased his lonely evenings. On the romantic front, he had problems. His past marriages haunted him, and he was pursuing an African American woman, a fellow teacher, who deflected his every advance.