by Mark Richard
YOU KEEP WORKING FOR THE NEWSPAPER and read books by the Thunderbird pool. You read books and play dominoes with Brian and drink pitchers of beer when the bar is slow. The books these days are short books often with a few short stories. Some days you finish a book after just one pitcher and pass the book to Brian, and you begin to think you could write some stories at least as well as that.
So you start writing stories about things you know, stolen boats, busted dope deals, petty murders, strange weather, things you see firsthand in the T-bird Lounge. You send them to Esquire, sometimes one a week, and they keep coming back. Sometimes they have notes attached suggesting you rewrite the story, but you never do; you toss them in the trash.
An editor at the magazine, Tom, calls you and says he likes one of your stories, do you want to work on it with him? Nah, you say, you tell him you’ll just send him another one, you don’t have time to work on the story, you’re on deadline for Ship of the Week. Okay, he says, he says he’s coming down to the Outer Banks that summer, if you get a break, maybe you can get together. Okay, you say.
When you meet Tom, he tries to tell you how things work. He says if you’re serious about writing fiction, you should move to New York. Okay, you say.
Finally you read a book of stories you like, and you close the book, and you’re facedown on a chaise lounge by the T-bird pool, and you’re looking down at the pretty girl on the back cover, and she is looking back, and you get up and walk into the T-bird Lounge and announce, Boys, I’m moving to New York City to be a writer!
No one pays any attention to you because you often walk into the T-bird with its dramatically fast-opening pneumatic door with something dramatic or stupid to say. Recently you’d said, Remember, boys, Abraham Lincoln didn’t die in vain, he died in Washington, D.C.
But they see you quit your newspaper job, which gets you evicted from the penthouse, and you start crashing on their sofas, and Brian the marine biologist bartender’s wife wonders for how long when she finds you scavenging their refrigerator one afternoon. Brian says don’t microwave anything you find in the freezer, a lot of those are toxic fish specimens. When you mention there’s a couple of frozen seagulls in there, he says, yeah, that’s another project.
You meet an industrial furniture dealer’s mistress at the T-bird, and she leans on her boyfriend to get you a job working for some rough guys carrying Makita drill guns and crystal meth putting together cubicles on military bases on long weekends. You’re valuable to them because you can read blueprints and can sort the hundreds of crates coming off the trucks for seventy-two hours without a break.
During a job in Hampton at Fort Monroe you visit the on-site museum where Jefferson Davis was held after the war, the sun dappling a pattern on the ceiling of the upper masonry wall of the cell just as it must have done when Jefferson lay watching it in his bunk all those months considering the Lost Cause.
Your roommate in the cheap motel the company pays for is a black guy who drinks gin in the dawn when he thinks you’re asleep. You can hear the tin metal cap spinning off and back on the gin bottle, the sipping in between. God, he looks familiar. For a few days you can’t place him. He says you look familiar too. He also says about women, It all a hole.
Going out the door one morning, you turn and see him put on his hat, and you say, You’re one of the Blind Boys, aren’t you? I remember you from the radio days. He says he thought you looked familiar when you talked. He says he sometimes used to fill in when his uncle needed him to. But I ain’t blind, he says. I see that, you say, and you all go to work.
IT IS THE WEEK OF YOUR THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY, and instead of sitting in a wheelchair, you are hitchhiking along Virginia Beach Boulevard after selling your car. You are moving to New York City to become a writer.
It turns out your New York girlfriend is a swimsuit model who is in videos in store windows on Fifth Avenue. She finds you a place to stay on a futon on a friend’s floor in Queens. You call Tom and say, I’m here, now what?
You and he sit in a bar, and he draws up a list of ways you could possibly become a writer. One thing he puts on the list is a writing class with a guy who is an editor at a publishing house. The class costs two thousand dollars. Tom is not so sure it’s a good fit for you, but you think it’s kind of like a lottery: you buy in on the chance the editor sees your work and you get published, so you borrow the money from your girlfriend and sign up for the class.
The teacher is named Gordon and he wears khaki shirts and trousers and a military campaign hat. The classes are six hours long and are in a rich lady’s apartment. Sometimes Gordon talks for the whole six hours, and he says things about writing you have never heard, like what makes art is the occult, the arbitrary, the unexampled, the uncanny, the passionate, the intractable, the dire, the dangerous. When you stand up to read a story you’ve written about a storm at sea, after a couple of sentences he tells you to sit down, that you’re just writing adventure stories for teenage boys.
Maybe Tom was right, this isn’t a good fit for you, so you go see Gordon and tell him you’d like to drop out of the class, and you’d like your money back. He says, No refunds. Okay, you say, just prorate it, and he says, No refunds.
Two thousand dollars is a lot of money, and you’re still looking for a job. In your Queens neighborhood is a bar called the Irish Pony, and even though it’s mainly for Irish, you explain to them how the Irish settled the South, and after a while it’s okay for you to drink there. The night before St. Patrick’s Day you stay in the bar until dawn drinking green beer and doing shots of Irish whiskey. When you head home, it’s starting to get light, and you remember you have a ten o’clock job interview. You take a cold shower and put on your cheap grey summer suit and pick up your cheap plastic briefcase and head to the No. 7 train stop. The cold doesn’t seem to help sober you up.
When you get into Manhattan, there’s a big parade down Fifth Avenue that you have to cross to get to your job interview. The policemen will not let you cross. About a hundred bass drums come down the avenue booming, booming, booming, and the booming feels as if someone is punching you in the gut, and you look around and there’s a construction site and you have to stand on tiptoe to throw up green beer and Irish whiskey into a Dumpster. Some construction workers look down and laugh at you and point. You wipe your mouth slime on your suit sleeve and dab at the puke on your tie with a handkerchief, and when there’s a break in the parade, you tuck your little plastic briefcase under your arm, and you limp across the avenue the best you can.
Upstairs in an office building you check in with a receptionist who leans away from you when you tell her you’re there for your job interview, and you hope you have a breath mint. She tells you to have a seat. The next thing you know two big guys in dark jackets are shaking you awake where you’ve been curled up asleep in a fetal position on a couch, your little plastic briefcase for a pillow. You think it must be time for your job interview. Instead, they lift you by your elbows and tell you the interview is over as they bum-rush you out of the office of the business for which you are seeking employment, a public relations firm.
YOU FIND WORK BARTENDING FOR A RESTAURANT that is hiring people with Southern accents. It’s on the West Side Highway. There’s a view of the Statue of Liberty across the way.
Things aren’t going well for you in the class. You sit on a radiator and glower at Gordon. Two thousand dollars is a lot of money. You decide to write a story for the next class that’s a parody of the things the teacher is praising. It’s a little story called “Momma Hates Texas.” You tell him you’ve brought something to read, and when you stand up to read, he doesn’t stop you, and you read to the end, and he says you’ve had a breakthrough!
Whether you want to admit it or not, you have had a breakthrough, and Gordon’s class is the place you begin to understand what he means when he says an artist can find salvation in his art. You work hard and he pushes you hard, he becomes an advocate for you. He lets you sit in his office and watch him
work, he buys you a brandy downstairs when you need one, and gives you a fleece-lined bombardier’s hat during one of the coldest winters on record in New York. He will publish your first short story collection, and in his class you will meet the girl you will marry ten years later and who will bear you three sons. You will miss him keenly when later he says you have abandoned him and he has no use for you.
THE FIRST PIECE OF WRITING you sell in New York is a true story that happens to you coming home one night from working at the bar. It’s about four in the morning, and you’re in the bottom of Grand Central waiting for the train back to Queens. You have about two hundred dollars in tips hidden in the storm collar of your old diesel-stained sea coat, the warmest thing you could bring from home to wear in New York City. Three black guys come down the end of the platform, see you, and start to walk toward you. You start walking to the other end of the platform, there’s some stairs leading up to a tunnel, but with your legs you know you’ll never outrun these guys. When you get to the bottom of the stairs, you turn and there they are, standing around you, and you know what they want. You’ve never been robbed before. One of the guys reaches out for your arm, and at that moment in the stillness of the station you hear footsteps coming down the tunnel up the stairs. As the footsteps get louder, there’s whistling, then singing, a hymn, and you pray to God it’s a big Irish cop with a nightstick and a gun, and you see that your three guys hear it and stop and wait to see who it is, and all four of you turn your faces up to the top of the stairs as the footsteps approach and the singing becomes louder.
Suddenly there’s nobody there. The footsteps stop, the singing ends, right at the top of the stairs. It seems to be just as spooky for the three guys who are about to rob you as it is for you.
Just then the No. 7 train roars into the station and people get out, including two transit cops, and you get on the train and go home.
The next day you get a call from your mother and she wants to know how you’re doing in New York City. She was against you moving to New York. She says the night before she had woken up wide awake because she had a feeling that you were in danger. She says she got down on her knees beside the bed and she prayed that you would be surrounded by legions of angels.
You write up what happened to you and take it to Guideposts magazine, a magazine that publishes stories of faith, the only place you think might be interested. You hand-deliver it, and you notice in the elevator directory that Playboy is in the same building, and you remember the bad erotic story you once wrote about a naked woman up a tree at whom enraged townspeople were throwing their shoes.
The editor of Guideposts telephones and says to come to the office, where he tells you he’s going to run your piece in a section called His Mysterious Ways. He’s a pleasant man, and on your way out he says he wants to give you something; he gives you a parallel Bible that has the King James, New International, Living Bible, and Revised Standard versions laid out side by side. Thank you, you tell him, and he smiles and says, You don’t deserve it.
YOU GET FIRED FROM THE BARTENDING JOB for stealing a hundred dollars out of the register, even though you didn’t do it. It was the slightly autistic bartender you worked with. For three months you and he had been using an old-fashioned cash register, and one night in a crush of people he came up to you and asked you where the Eleven key was on the register, and you tell him it’s the Ten and the One keys pushed together, and you realize the source of all the overages and shortages on your shift; you had thought it was just the manager skimming.
FROM THE CLASSIFIEDS IN the New York Times, you find a job at a private investigation agency on Wall Street. It’s mostly verifying résumés and doing background checks on people handling large sums of money. You’re working with a bunch of real New Yorkers. When you all go to lunch and you stand looking up from the base of a World Trade Center tower, they say, Pretty tall, huh, Gomer?
Some of the guys working are off-duty cops and detectives, and they teach you how to work the slush pile of cases nobody wants for extra cash, like that of the Korean girl who disappeared in Chinatown, all you have is her last known address. An old cop says to call her landlord and tell her you’re the missing girl’s boyfriend and you want to come pick up her stuff. The cop gets on an extension and coaches you through it; when you ask the Chinese lady about the girl’s stuff, she says, you think, that until somebody pays the back rent, nobody gets the girl’s things. The cop puts his hand over the receiver and says you’re worried about the stuff, and the Chinese lady says it’s all safe in bags in the basement, just bring the back rent, and she hangs up. Good, says the cop, let’s go, and he hands you a ConEd hard hat.
You find the address, and when the Chinese lady answers the door, the cop says you’re there from the power company. He’s got a clipboard, he’s told you beforehand that the Chinese are very respectful to people with clipboards and badges. He tells the lady that he’s got a few questions for her, while you go in the basement and check the lines. You’re nervous, and you go down in a stinking basement and see some black trash bags and go through them, looking for address books, personal items, anything. You find some bank statements, a personal phone book, and a crack pipe, and you stuff them all in your pockets.
Back at the office you spread the items out on the detective’s desk, someone else was using the lunchroom table to sift through a bag of somebody else’s trash, and by the end of the afternoon you’ve pieced together that the young girl probably developed a crack habit, went into debt to at least one dealer, maybe two, and they probably did away with her. The cop says there’s a catacomb of streets under Chinatown and lots of bodies buried there all the time. Unfortunately for you, you have to call the girl’s parents and tell them what you think happened. And since you didn’t find the girl, no body fee for you.
Another case is easier. An investment banker was having an affair with his best friend’s young daughter out at a country house in Connecticut. When the best friend came home unexpectedly, the banker went out on a second-story ledge that was covered in old snow and ice to hide, naked. While the friend was confronting his daughter about whom she was sleeping with, the guy on the ledge apparently lost his footing and fell to his death on the garden path behind the house, where he lay for a few days until someone found him. The police found footsteps in the snow on either side of the body; someone had come and gone a couple of times, stepping over the body in the snow. You’re trying to determine the girl’s shoe size because you have a copy of the police report. It was the girl all right, and when she’s asked later why she just stepped over the body at least twice coming and going, she said it was because she was busy, okay?
You lose your job at the investigation agency because you seem to be unable to master the style of the Account Summation Document. Your reports are too narrative-driven and too objective. In your reports, it’s hard to tell if anyone is guilty of anything. One of your buddies tells you the bosses also know that you are writing short stories on company time and they are unhappy that you continue to wear boat shoes to work.
YOU ARE LIVING OUT OF A SUITCASE, carrying a cardboard box of papers and a small electric typewriter from the end of one person’s sublet or lease to another. You live up in East Harlem, the only white person in the whole building. There’s a jazz bar where you go, and if it’s too late to go home, you stay in the bar after the bar is locked up. This is what the owner does for people, lets them stay in the dark at the bar and drink and try to keep track of what they owe. It’s in this bar that you meet your cousin. You’re holding some Jewish kid by the throat who claims to be a real American because his ancestors came over to Ellis Island in steerage, and you keep saying you had two ancestors who died at the Alamo, goddamn it, and a bouncer is about to throw you out, when the piano player who is on break hears what you’re saying about the Alamo and tells you his ancestors’ names and you don’t believe him, because they’re the same as yours. He takes out his wallet and shows you his driver’s license; he’s nam
ed for one of the Alamo heroes.
When a cop gets shot in the face on your block, your cousin offers to let you stay at his place on the Upper West Side. He cooks gumbo on Thelonious Monk’s birthday every year, and one night you remember the girl who had just come from her Broadway musical where she stars, and your cousin accompanies her on his white baby grand, and then an opera singer comes in from finishing her performance at the Met and sings, and some jazz players come later, and at some point there are some guys from a circus, and they are juggling items from your cousin’s refrigerator in a complete circle through the house and over the heads of people, and you have a profoundly erotic experience with a Columbia coed simply by helping her squeeze the heads off several pounds of shrimp for the gumbo onto a soggy newspaper in the kitchen. At daylight savings time every fall, you and your cousin turn your watches back an hour for every bar you hit until you’re drinking in the distant past.
YOU GET BY PROOFREADING LEGAL DOCUMENTS at night down on Wall Street and writing articles for the city’s weekly papers, little impressionistic pieces, like being backstage when Ringling Brothers Circus comes to Madison Square Garden. When an editor from the New York Times calls, no one is more surprised than you.