White Tiger on Snow Mountain

by David Gordon

  I was smiling into the carpet, amused that this knucklehead didn’t even know we were in a hotel, when I realized where he was headed. “No!” I moaned, loudly, or thought I did.

  “What the fuck is this?” Tony yelled. “You a homo too?”

  “Help! Help!” I heard Derek trilling in panic.

  I began heroically to crawl. “Don’t go in there. That’s my retarded little brother’s room.” I climbed to my feet in time to greet Tony as he stormed out, waving a fur-lined pair of cuffs and the dildo ball gag.

  “What the hell were you going to do to my cousin?” His fist slammed my temple, or perhaps a freak lightning burst entered the hotel and split my skull, but either way, the entire city went dark.

  I woke up the next day on the bathroom floor, my wrists cuffed to a sink pipe and the ball gag in my mouth. As I lay on the tile, facing a wall-length mirror, the dildo that jutted from my face jiggled and hopped like Pinocchio’s nose, mocking me gleefully.

  “Help . . .” I heard Derek whispering hoarsely.

  “Glurg bur vip glurg,” I answered.

  “Who’s there?” I could hear him thrashing about like a trapped rabbit.

  It took me three hours to unscrew the pipe, while our cell phones both rang ceaselessly. Finally it came free, releasing a faceful of old stinkwater. I pulled off the ball gag and stumbled in to Derek. His eyes were wild with fear.

  “Call the cops,” he burbled. “We were robbed by a Chinese gang.”

  “Well, not quite.”

  I explained. He was not pleased. But considering his own indiscretions, he agreed that the cops, the Lionheart people, and Dr. T were all best left uninformed. Besides, there was barely time to clean up and get to the ceremony. Derek fetched his suit, and I went to the minibar to ice my nose and lip. I looked like a cartoon of myself.

  “Oh God, no,” he called again. For a second, I thought Tony was back with his platoon, but I found Derek alone in his undies.

  “What?”

  “He took my laptop. My Lionheart speech was on there.”

  “I’m sure if you calm down you’ll remember. There was this time I got high and accidentally erased . . .”

  “You don’t understand. I didn’t write it.”

  “What?”

  He sat on the couch, looking into his hands. “I didn’t want you know. A ghostwriter did it. I didn’t even write the book.”

  “Oh.” I sat beside him. We shared an exhausted silence. I knew he was afraid of my judgment, but for the first time since we’d met, I felt none. Even as a phony and a cheat, Derek had managed to provide a grateful world some hope and comfort. What, in my twenty years, had I given?

  “Find some paper and a pen,” I said. “I’ll write your speech.”

  The Lionheart went off smoothly, or so it seemed from the echoes of laughter and applause. With my ward safely delivered backstage, I’d decided to ride out the ceremony in the bar. I was not conspicuous. This was a writerly gathering after all, and drinks were free; I was shoulder to shoulder with thirsty literati. I elbowed in beside a long-haired old man in a shabby overcoat, and before I knew what I was saying, almost as a joke, I called out, to no one really, “Double shot of bourbon, quick.”

  I was shocked. This is how it happens, I thought, just like the stories I’d heard. You lose your way. You forget. And then, without knowing it, you sleepwalk into a nightmare from which no one is promised to awake. I saw that my hands were trembling, and I gripped the bar. I noticed that the old man next to me was doing the same thing, clutching the marble with white knuckles, although not, in his case, just for moral support. Then I realized who he was. A poet. Very great.

  “Raymond Torquette,” I said.

  He turned, the dank gray locks parting to reveal an eagle beak, sunken cheeks, overgrown white brows, and way, way back there the black eyes that had glowered from the book covers of my youth. “What?” he asked.

  I held out a hand to shake. He didn’t let go of the bar. “I just want to say that it is a great honor to meet you. Your work has meant a lot to me.”

  “Then buy me a damned drink,” he said, in the lordly growl I’d heard in recordings. “I’m broke, and the damned bartender won’t serve me.”

  I was about to say the drinks were free, but then I noticed the empty glasses on the bar, and the stains on his shirt, and the torn front pocket flapping open, as though for quick access to his heart, and I understood why the bartender had cut him off. A drink landed in front of me, dark whiskey swelling the rim of a thick glass. “Bourbon double,” the bartender said. My nose tingled. I took a deep sniff and pushed it toward Torquette.

  “Here.”

  He brightened. “Hey, thanks,” he said. The two shivering hands went up slowly and closed around the glass like a wounded bird. He bent to meet the drink and sucked it up, tilting back to let it slide on down. I could imagine the warmth spreading through him, like golden fire, like rough honey, like love. I even felt a bit better myself. Then I smelled urine and noticed the puddle at the great poet’s feet.

  I got Ray Torquette to the men’s room, put him in a stall, and tipped the attendant twenty bucks. Then I went to find Derek in the ballroom, surrounded by admirers.

  “Listen,” I whispered. “Ray Torquette passed out. I’m taking him home.”

  “Ray Torquette? He’s here? I’m coming.”

  He made his excuses and met me out front, where I was strolling with my arm around Torquette, asking him where he lived and getting only burps and muttered goddamns. Derek hailed a cab, and we propped the gray eminence between us.

  “Where to?” the cabbie asked, and Torquette, from some kind of reflex, called out an Upper West Side address. We cut through the park in silence.

  “I can’t believe this is Ray Torquette,” Derek said as the noble head lolled on his shoulder. “I used to recite his poems with my eyes closed, like prayers.”

  “I know,” I said. “I remember the first time I read Burnt Edges, I wanted to cry. Not because it was sad, because it was just so good. He made me want to be better. To write better. That’s the best compliment I can give.”

  “Yeah,” Derek said. “It is.”

  The taxi stopped at a crumbling SRO. We hauled Torquette up in the elevator and found his key, the only thing his pockets contained besides wads of linen napkins embroidered with a lion’s head. His room was appalling. Roaches scattered when we flicked on the single bulb. The thin foam mattress was covered in rubber sheets.

  We didn’t say much, Derek and I. What would we say? We got him into bed and rode the elevator back down. I shook his hand.

  “Thanks,” I said. “And congratulations, you did it.”

  “Whatever.” He shrugged. “We did it.”

  “Anyway, you’re free. Go celebrate. But I need a meeting.” I turned to leave.

  “Hey, wait,” he called. “Can I come?”

  We went downtown to Midnight Madness, a meeting summed up by its name, and sat on folding chairs and drank rank coffee. We heard a bunch of losers describe their downfalls, and we laughed and laughed. Then we held hands and prayed, each to his own strange god.

  Derek asked me to sponsor him, and he stayed sober for a few months, calling every day, going to meetings. Then he stopped, but I saw in a magazine that a huge movie star had signed on to play him. I also read on the Internet that he bumped up from models to supermodels. In August, Ray Torquette died of cirrhosis. The Times did a roundup of comments by famous writers, and Derek’s quote was especially moving: “He made me want to be better. To write better. That’s the best compliment I can give.” The movie came out, and I saw him on Charlie Rose and David Letterman and even back on Oprah, where he cried about being high the last time and she hugged him and the audience cheered. He signed a new deal, for a memoir called The Prevaricator’s Lament. Then he OD’d in a hotel room in Maui and died.

  Meanwhile, I got another job, teaching writing in a men’s prison, where I had no problem resisting the urge to exp
ose myself. It was scary at first, but the students loved it, and one or two could write. After a great deal of urging from friends, I also sent a couple of new stories to Yoel, Derek’s agent, like he’d asked. A month later, I got a response. He’d had his assistant read them and, unfortunately, my stories were “not for us.” I was disappointed, of course, but he was right. It’s not for them. It’s for us.

  What I’ve Been Trying to Do All This Time

  The Argentinean girl first contacted me via the mail. Well, not me, exactly. Oddly, the letter was addressed to “The Estate or Rights Holder of . . .” and then my name. Inside, the salutation declared, “Dear Sir or Madam” (were there female Davids in Argentina?), then went on to explain:

  “I am a university student here in Buenos Aires (similar to your All-American Co-Eds) studying North American Post-Modern Culture, and I am writing my thesis on David Gordon and am hoping to arrive to New York for researching soon.”

  I was taken aback, to say the least. It’s true, I am a writer, and I would consider my work to be postmodern in some respects (although modern in others), but the fact is, I’ve never really published anything, yet, and as far as I know, no one has even read my novels, which sit, unfinished, in my bottom drawer, so I found it a bit hard to see how I could be the subject of a thesis. Still, out of curiosity and, I suppose, vanity and even, I admit, a kind of desperate, magical hope that she was somehow aware of my work, I wrote to the email address she provided.

  She wrote back immediately, but it seemed there was some cultural confusion since she now addressed me as my own “Representation” (or was this postmodern?) and suggested we talk further via Skype.

  So I went online, downloaded Skype, and dialed her up. Moments later, via the miracle of digital technology (I think), a vision appeared of a pale oval face, high forehead, and small red mouth, dark hair so black my screen read it as a kind of purple puddle. Black eyes like giant drops of blue ink.

  “Hi!” I shouted, waving, since I still couldn’t grasp the distance between us. “I’m David Gordon!”

  She jumped, as if a continent weren’t far enough, and her expression was, if this is even possible, a mixture of wonder and horror.

  “You are alive!” she gasped. “I thought you are dead for a long time now.”

  “Me? No. I’m alive. For a long time now.”

  “I see . . .” She seemed disturbed by the news, frowning and biting her lip most fetchingly. “This could be a problem for my research. I have describe you as a deceased figure.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “But I have been tired lately. Maybe if you just wait a little longer.”

  Now she laughed, a dazzling display: dimples, sparkling eyes, that one heartbreakingly crooked tooth. “No, no, is OK! I think you better live. Anyway, I like your blue eyes.”

  “Really? Thanks.” I’d forgotten what a selling point that could be among the darker-eyed nations. I stroked my chin thoughtfully, trying to call attention to what I felt was my other main feature, the sprouting new beard, which my mother and the cashier at the deli both found very manly. “I’m sorry, though, that I didn’t have time to shave.” I said. “I look so scruffy.”

  “No.” She shrugged. “Is not so big. Is OK normal for a Jew, I think, right? Here we don’t have so many Jew with big scruffy. Mine is too little.”

  “Which is?” I asked. The conversation was getting away from me.

  She tapped her tiny freckled curve of a nose. “The scruffy. Is how you say Yiddish, right?”

  “Oh, I think that’s schnoz, if it’s even Yiddish. Or Italian? You think that I have a big schnozollah?”

  She shrugged again. “No, a small salad maybe. Or a boiled egg.”

  In any case, it came out that her research was into cultural and literary “Marginalism,” and I apparently qualified, dead or alive. In a move that her professors found brilliant for one so young, and that had earned her a grant to travel to New York, she had evolved past the early postmodern fascination with footnotes to focus her research on acknowledgments pages. By digitally digging in the data mines via methods that boggled my late-twentieth-century brain, she had somehow discovered the following intertextual facts, which I myself had completely forgotten:

  1) I was thanked, along with a few other people, in the acknowledgments to Walter Benjamin’s Grave, a collection of essays by anthropologist Michael Taussig. As it happens, Mick was my landlord at the time. After a random chat in the kitchen about Bataille, he handed me some pages and asked me to look at them. I offered a few comments, and to my amazement, he returned a couple of hours later having incorporated my thoughts, then kindly and needlessly thanked me in his book. Frankly, I can’t even recall what I said.

  2) I was also thanked by another roommate: My old friend Paul Grant (known to some of us as Bud) translated a book by Serge Daney, the former editor of Cahiers du cinéma, dead now from AIDS. I read the manuscript at one point and caught a few grammar goofs, maybe.

  3) Weirdest of all, and requiring the least actual effort, I was thanked on the back of a Bad Religion record. When I was living in LA, I gave my friend Brett Gurewitz, who is a big chess freak, a copy of Nabokov’s book of chess problems and the novel The Defense, which inspired Brett to write a song (not about me). Finding this reference, an academic coup, was apparently pure luck: Her brothers were old-school punk fans.

  While it was hard for me to see anything much in this pattern except that I had odd friends, a lot of extra time, and no stable housing, to Leticia (that was her name, the Argentinean girl) this made me a significant “unimportant” figure. She’d written an article about me, she said, for a key journal, and I was already very popular in intellectual and artistic circles in Buenos Aires, as, she was sure, in New York.

  “Not so much,” I said. “You’d be surprised.”

  She frowned at this. “Perhaps they don’t understand what you’re trying to do.”

  “Perhaps,” I agreed, hoping that when she arrived in New York she’d finally help me understand—perhaps while cradling my head in her lap, stroking my burning forehead with her long, cool, tapered fingers and whispering in her warm, soothing accent—just what, for all these years, I’ve actually been trying to do.

  Leticia arrived a week later. I’d shaved by then and spent the rest of my time in my room, doing sit-ups and other painful exercises that the Internet said would trim my midriff and harden up my core. We met at a Chinese place downtown, where they sit you at gigantic round tables with strangers and plop your food on a lazy susan in the middle, like eating on a carousel. A round family of four bears—dad, mom, bro, and sis—chewed spareribs in silence and stared unabashedly at our meeting/ date.

  In person Leticia was lighter: Her hair was still black, but her eyes were now a chestnut brown shot with gold. Her skin was very fair, paler than mine and freckled. I was surprised. The Latinas I knew had darker complexions.

  “Yes, I am from the South America, but it is far south, even below your south. So far south that we are upside down from you, everything is opposite, and it is winter.”

  She swabbed her pancake with plum sauce and deftly added several slices of pinkish duck before folding it all into a slim envelope with those long violinist fingers. They were so long they seemed to have an extra knuckle, and they wavered as she talked, writing in elegant script.

  “Well, I hope that now that you’ve met me, you’re not still sorry I’m alive.”

  “No, not at all!” She furrowed her long forehead. “It is still very good for my thesis; plus you are a very sympathetic man who I am pleasured to meet.”

  “Thanks.” It was, I had already noticed, part of her charm that she had no sense of humor at all, at least not in English. She would have made a great straight-lady back in the golden age of cinema, with her unflappable seriousness and black-on-white beauty. Still, thinking that I was at least getting somewhere, I licked the duck sauce from my fingers, rotated the shrimp, which were floating dangerously close to the bear family, an
d drew, from a plastic Duane Reade bag, my piece of resistance.

  “I brought you something. A surprise,” I said, laying the frayed and rubber-banded cardboard box between us. “This is my novel. No one else has read the whole thing.” Not for lack of trying, I could have added, but having finally found a real fan, I decided not to let the legions of rejecting agents, publishers, teachers, and girlfriends cloud her sunnier southern judgment. Who knows? Perhaps in the land of Cortázar, where poets filled fútbol stadiums and public insurance paid for psychoanalysis, readers would be brave enough to understand my tragically experimental novel, Psoriasis.

  She paused. While her narrowed fingertips tapped her beautifully greasy lower lip, she stared at the box without touching it. “Mmmm . . . no. I think I will not.” She picked her sticks back up and chose another shrimp. “It is outside of my scope of research for you. Plus”—and here she smiled a little—“what if I don’t like? It is a bit of when you imagine kissing someone and then it tastes bad, no?”

  “No. I mean yes.” I chuckled lightly and slid the box back into the bag, just as the lazy susan slid beyond my reach. She snatched the last shrimp resting on the little island of spicy salt. I settled for the remains of broccoli and washed it down with a tiny cup of dark and bitter tea. With both my literary and romantic aspirations dashed, I found myself at a loss for conversation.

  “You know,” I said, “my friend wrote a novel that takes place in Buenos Aires.”

  “Yes? Who is this?”

  “Her name’s Rivka Galchen.”

  She reached out and gripped my wrist, as if I were steadying her on a boat, or she were heading down some stairs, in high heels, a little drunk, after midnight. “Rivka Galchen the Canadian writer?”

  “Yes . . . I suppose so. She lives here, though, in New York.”

  “But she is a very famous one! You really know her well?”

  “Yes, yes, we are very close friends,” I elaborated, seizing on this new impressive connection and hoping she’d touch me again. “We talk all the time.” I felt like I was lying, although I was not, a common hazard when one is just generally full of shit. So I kept rambling on, tossing out random facts (Did you know she went to medical school? Her hair is dark and long like yours!), as if trying to convince her of something there was no reasonable reason to doubt, except for my own dubious motives. The check arrived, and Leticia didn’t budge. I would have guessed it was the interviewer’s pleasure, but perhaps not on her side of the world. I put down all the money I had. Smiling, she escorted me out.