Mentor: A Memoir

by Grimes, Tom

  Syracuse turned me down next. But rather than simply sending a letter, the program’s staff returned my application manuscript, upon which someone had scrawled and then partially erased the words B-, boring. This may have been due to laziness. After all, someone could have used Wite-Out to mask the handwriting, made a copy of the original page, and replaced it with an innocent replica. Not only would this have been kind, it also would have been postmodern: a copy of a copy of a copy, like a Warhol lithograph of soup cans or Marilyn Monroe. Classic rejection letters lie to minimize an author’s pain: “We regret.” “We wish we could.” “We’re sorry but due to space limitations.” But editors never regret, wish, or feel sorry: they simply avoid being cruel, and the staff at Syracuse hadn’t. At best, its response was careless, at worst, mocking and sadistic.

  I recall being furious about the rejection, and so, one frustrated afternoon, I violated every waiter’s cardinal rule: on your day off, never answer your phone an hour before service begins unless you want to listen to a sick or hungover colleague beg you to work his or her shift. But as I was in the mood to punish myself for continuing to be a failure, I picked up the receiver and said, “Hello.”

  The man’s voice, slightly hoarse from smoking cigarettes, was several octaves higher that it had been the first time I’d heard it. Now, it sounded confident, coolly eager. And rather than callously avoiding me, the man speaking was searching for me.

  “This is Frank Conroy from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” the voice said. “I’d like to speak to Tom Grimes.”

  My hand trembling as if I’d done something wrong, I answered, “Speaking.”

  “I never call anyone,” he said, “but I’ve read your manuscript.”

  I don’t remember what Frank said next. I do remember flashing on an image of our kitchen trash can crammed with Stop-Time’s torn pages. Nevertheless, my pages had bridged the chasm between “Fuck Frank Conroy” and the fact that Frank Conroy was speaking to me. He praised, in words I can’t articulate, the excerpt of my unfinished novel. Attempting to write the book terrified me. A premonition that I may have been setting myself up for a literary failure from which I’d never recover stalked every word I wrote. Perhaps I’d taken on too large a subject, but within a minute of half hearing Frank’s voice, I trusted his interest in my work and I said, “I don’t know if I can finish the novel without help.”

  He said, “Well, when you’re here, you’ll get it.”

  I muttered, “Thanks.” And then there was a pause before he spoke again.

  “Your file says you’re a waiter at Louie’s Backyard in Key West. Is that the place on the water?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Instantly forgetting literature and sounding like a boy recounting a day at an amusement park, he said, “They make the best meat-loaf sandwich I’ve ever had!”

  Wanting to somehow return his generosity, I said, “I’ll get the recipe for you, if you want it.”

  Then Frank did what, as I would later come to understand, Frank always did. He said, “Give it to Connie when she calls you. You’re getting our top scholarship.” In his mind, no misgivings existed; I’d take it. “See you in August.” He hung up before I could say, “Okay.”

  I can’t say what happened after I returned the phone to its cradle. In a creative writing workshop, this is when the famous writer overseeing the conversation (I’ll call him Frank) says, “First off, don’t be vague. Don’t just have the character wander around the apartment, dazed. Give the reader concrete details. You have five senses at your disposal: touch, sight, sound, taste, and hearing. Use them. As in, ‘I heard the front door close. The loud crackle of a brown paper grocery bag drifted up the stairwell.’ (Is drifted the best verb?) ‘My wife was home, and the ceiling fan whirred as I stood in the living room, waiting for her.’ We know she’s going to walk through the living room doorway moments later, so don’t write, ‘moments later.’ It’s redundant and stupid. These characters have cats. Have one cat stroll toward the staircase. Or the other one raise its head from the seat cushion it’s lounging on. Don’t just have the narrator say—and why is the author using first person, anyway? Third would distance the writer from the main character. That way the author doesn’t risk self-indulgence. Follow? The character’s life has suddenly—never use the word suddenly—the character’s life has been altered in a manner he doesn’t yet fully comprehend. But, in addition to excitement, the situation requires a touch of gravitas. I’m not saying describe a funeral. Just don’t have the main character leap up and yell, ‘Yippee!’ Above all, avoid melodrama. Understate the narrator’s emotional reaction. What the author withholds, the reader supplies. Establish and maintain the story’s cocreation; it’s essential. Have the character do something he’d normally do. Open a beer. Put the can in a rubber holder so the can doesn’t sweat. And if you risk having him recall the shredded pages of Stop-Time as he drops the flip top into the trash, don’t linger on it. One sentence. At that point, his wife walks into the kitchen, carrying groceries. It’s probably best if she doesn’t say anything. And when he speaks, leaving out ‘he said’ depersonalizes his statement. Remember, the reader knows what’s coming. Nothing in the narrator’s life will ever be the same. So capture his astonishment in unadorned dialogue. ‘Frank Conroy called. I got into Iowa.’ End of scene. End of chapter. Any questions?”

  No.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The day after my conversation with Frank, I pedaled to the local bookstore where I often spent hot afternoons among its deserted stacks, skimming and then purchasing dusty, inexpensive editions of used books. I rarely could afford to buy new, expensive books, which the owner refused to discount. He was a thin man with dark red hair and a mustache I found pretentious. He sat near the cash register, adjacent to the front door. Since he also refused to air-condition the shop, a six-foot-high fan spun above his head as he perched on a wooden stool, leafing through a book. He never said hello to me, not when I walked in, not when I set books on the counter for him to ring up, and definitely not when I left the store empty-handed. Even when a book was published by a writer so important to me that I couldn’t wait a year for it to appear in paperback and spent $12.95 for the hardcover, he still refused to acknowledge me. Occasionally, I’d see him at a literary event in town—a reading, a talk. Afterward, he would always make his way through the exiting crowd to shake the celebrated author’s hand and smile throughout their discussion, starstruck and fawning. Then he’d hand the writer his business card and the following day autographed copies of the writer’s books were on display in the bookstore’s window.

  After chaining my bike to a parking meter, I walked into the store, worried that a copy of Stop-Time wouldn’t be in stock. But in the alphabetically organized fiction section, I found several editions. Some had brittle yellow pages; others were damp from Key West’s humidity. A few were water-stained, the typeface distorted by the book’s bloated pages. Among the group stood three recent Viking Penguin paperbacks. The words “Author of Midair,” the title of Frank’s story collection, were printed beneath his name. Between its appearance and Stop-Time’s, eighteen years had passed, and, as Frank’s initial celebrity faded, he’d become a largely forgotten writer. Stop-Time had been a 1968 National Book Award finalist for nonfiction, and despite its modest sales—seven thousand copies in hardcover—at age twenty-nine Frank’s stardom was confirmed by New York’s literary heavyweights. Norman Mailer called Stop-Time , “Unique, an autobiography with the intimate unprotected candor of a novel.” William Styron praised it. Soon, Esquire and the New Yorker commissioned articles and essays. Frank swigged bourbon at Elaine’s, a chic Upper East Side restaurant where Woody Allen had a reserved table. Hollywood began to send Frank five-figure checks for doctoring screenplays. With his wife and two young sons, he moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn Heights, and, on Nantucket Island, he reconstructed, with the help of a crew of hippies, an unheated barn, which would be their summer house. As a boy, Frank had been rootles
s and poor. Now he had two homes, two sons, and, because of his wife’s trust fund and what he earned from writing, he had money, too.

  “Success was an intoxicant,” he later wrote about that period of his life. “Music, movies, my favorite bar, the excitement of meeting new people after my first book came out. There was a kind of forward momentum I never questioned but simply rode, night after night, a continuous social stimulation to which I became addicted. And the more my marriage weakened, the more desperately I tore around town. Much deeply foolish behavior, and I blame no one but myself for that. Years of hysteria.” At thirty-five, Frank “had no job, an unpredictable income as a pianist and freelance magazine writer, no savings, and no plan.” After his divorce, his time with his sons—one five, one seven—would be limited to three months each summer. Otherwise, he was absent, mimicking his own fatherless childhood. He retreated to Nantucket, where he tried working on a scallop boat, but found he wasn’t strong enough to keep up. Each winter, he had to crawl under his barn to deice the frozen aluminum pipes with a blowtorch. Soon, screenwriting assignments dwindled to nothing, and magazines no longer commissioned him to write articles. He was alone and had only one means of rescuing himself: the piano. As a boy, he’d taught himself how to play. So he put together a jazz quintet, which began to perform at a club called the Roadhouse. Summer tourists filled the band’s coffers, and each winter local patrons provided enough money to allow Frank to pay his mortgage and buy groceries. He’d survived without help from New York. “Once you leave, people simply forget about you,” he wrote. Iowa hadn’t. Just as I’d been stunned when I received Frank ’s call, he was astonished to receive a call from John Leggett, at the time the workshop’s director. The call would change Frank’s life. “Forty, broke, unemployed and in debt, I accepted an offer to come to Iowa and the well-known Writers’ Workshop more from a sense of desperation than any deep conviction that I’d know what to do when faced with a roomful of young writers. I was, in fact, apprehensive.” That passed. By the time Frank called me, he’d become comfortably authoritative. Like a character out of Dickens, Frank’s literary touchstone, he’d risen from debtor to the workshop’s director. Stop-Time had survived, too. Twenty years after publication, it was still in print. I can’t remember when I first read it, or recall buying my first copy—I’ve had several—or even squeezing it onto a shelf among the hundreds of books I owned. But, at some point, Stop-Time appeared, like an unanticipated supernova, in my literary galaxy. And since Frank’s story was similar to mine, I was drawn to it, the way gravity draws planets toward the sun. In the sweltering bookshop, I clutched an intact copy of it bearing a subtitle: The Classic Memoir of Adolescence. Above Frank’s name, an Andrew Wyeth-like illustration depicts a black-haired boy. His age is indeterminate—he might be twelve, he might be fifteen. He leans against a building’s outer wall, its color a washed-out tan, duskier than a strip of white pine. In the distance stand two leafless trees. A wintry sun casts no shadows. The boy wears a dark green, zippered jacket, visible from its collar to midarm. His head tilts toward the reader, who notices the boy’s partially closed eyelids, his straight but somewhat thick nose, his graceful lips. It’s a somber portrait, the boy’s expression guarded, his vulnerability unmistakable. Copy in hand, I walked to the register, where the owner ignored me as I laid three one-dollar bills on his tacky countertop and then waited for change. I unchained my bike and rode home. I had several hours before I needed to prepare for the night’s shift. So I sat on our apartment’s small deck and began rereading Stop-Time, freshly curious, and absolved of my literary sin.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Every author is required to use only those details that advance the story. If a detail is essential, keep it. If it isn’t, cut it. So I won’t dwell on the elation I felt after I’d served my final customer, or describe my hellacious trip through thunderstorms, traffic jams, treacherous mountain roads, and oceans of cornfields from Key West to Iowa City in a U-Haul truck, accompanied by Jody and two sedated yet nonetheless cranky cats. Instead, I’ll tell you about Connie Brothers. Connie had shoulder-length, pecan-colored hair. At forty-five, her face lacked wrinkles and crow’s feet, and her round cheeks were always faintly pink, as if she’d just come in from the cold. A small, nearly undetectable mole resided above the right side of her mouth. Connie was slight, she stood about five foot six, and other than the fact that she never wore jeans, I can’t recollect a single blouse or skirt from her nondescript wardrobe. In a way, this simplicity made her seem, to me, otherworldly and eternal. I’ve known Connie for many years, and her looks defy age. Perhaps her continual happiness keeps it at bay. I don’t know. But I’ve never seen her upset or angry. And not once have I entered her office without her looking up to smile at me.

  The day after Frank and I spoke, she called me. Her voice was slightly nasal yet softened by a perpetual whisper. At times, she sounded like an excited schoolgirl revealing a secret to a friend, and I don’t believe she ever uttered my last name. From the outset it was, “Tom? It’s Connie.” She mentioned reading my application manuscript. Then she said, “Frank wants you to have the Maytag,” a scholarship named for the washing machine company. “It’s ten thousand dollars a year, and you aren’t obligated to do anything but write.”

  “Really? ”

  “Yeah.”

  “Frank mentioned this, but can I ask you something?”

  “What is it? Tell me.” Her tone shifted to one of concern. She must have sensed my nervousness and the fact that I hesitated to ask what I wanted to ask, as if by doing so I’d be breaking a rule or causing trouble.

  “Well, do you think I could teach instead?”

  “You mean you’d rather work than have the scholarship?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now why would you want to do that?” she said, as if she’d encountered an endangered species and wanted to know how it survived.

  “I may want to teach after I graduate,” I said. I’d be thirty-five by then and I’d sworn never again to utter the words “Can I tell you about our specials this evening? ” I explained that I wanted to see if I liked teaching. If I did and if I was good at it, then having two years of experience would strengthen my résumé.

  “No one’s ever turned down the Maytag before.”

  “You think it’s a bad idea?”

  “No, no, not at all.”

  “Should I do it?”

  “Are you sure you want to?”

  I glanced at Jody, who was seated next to me at the kitchen table. She nodded. “Yes,” I said.

  “Absolutely? ”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell Frank.”

  I’d neglected to consider the possibility of antagonizing him and didn’t know if he was as quick-tempered as my father. “Will he be upset? ”

  “Of course not. He said to give you whatever you want.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Positive? ”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then. Ask him.”

  At a salary that would equal the scholarship’s stipend, ten thousand dollars for the year, I was assigned to teach sophomore literature courses, rather than freshman comp. I could choose the books I wanted to teach. Since I was writing a first-person novel, I decided that I would study, along with my students, first-person novels.

  “And Frank’s okay with this idea?”

  “Actually,” Connie said, “he admired it.”

  Jody and I found a small house with a second-floor room adjacent to our bedroom where I’d work. I assembled my makeshift desk in front of a window that looked down on a narrow dirt road and the back-yards and wooden garages bordering each side of it. It was August, and the leaves of the treetop outside the window partially obscured my view, but they left enough natural light for me to write by each morning. Before classes started, I prepared my syllabus and began to read the novels I would teach. On the first day of classes, I opened a spiral-bound, red-covered noteboo
k. After ruling out notebooks with cerulean blue and pea green covers, I’d bought five red ones. I’m a superstitious writer. I didn’t want to switch colors as I wrote the novel, and my intuition had drawn me to red, which I believed would bring me luck, as would the new pack of twelve No. 2 pencils, a thumb-sized pink eraser, and a handheld pencil sharpener with a transparent plastic casing that allowed me to see the sharpener’s blade peel away thin slices of wood each time I needed to write with a finer point.