“What are you studying besides hack writing?” he asked.
“Not much.”
“This thing I teach, it’s nothing, Greta. It’s an appreciation class: How to recognize crime fiction when you see it.”
“Are you urging me to drop out?”
“I’m urging you to take more classes.”
“I’m leaving, going home to my parents who are less boring than you are tonight. Thanks.”
“No. Thank you.”
“No, thank you.”
“No, thank you…”
This thing between us, whatever it was, went on for a few months. I spent hours driving out to his house in the middle of nowhere to drink cheap beer and make love. Class time was about Lee Todd’s dead career and the rules of crime fiction. Our personal time was direct, simple, without rules and without plans.
I can’t say how long we might have lasted if I’d quit the class—or if I’d never turned in the required short story for my final grade. Maybe he would have become bored and asked me to leave, or maybe I would have wandered away. We were doomed regardless but who knows when it would have ended, or under what circumstances. Here’s how it actually ended.
A quarter of our class credit depended on the one and only story we had to turn in, a week before the semester ended. Lee Todd didn’t believe in leading group critiques. The idea of handing out copies of a student’s story to everyone in the class and having a discussion about it made him laugh and cough and laugh again.
“The blind leading the blind in a mud wrestling match,” is how he described students analyzing one another’s stories. “Writers are jerks, even amateur ones. Everybody wants to win. Everybody wants to be the best one, the prize pig. And none of you know what you’re talking about. That’s why a group critique gets vicious. It gets ugly. Feelings get hurt. People cry and call their parents and somebody gets fired—and it ain’t gonna be me. Nope. You’ll hand in your lousy amateur story to me, the only authority in the room. I’ll meet with each of you privately, to give you the bad news about how terrible it is.”
We all laughed. Because I guess each of us expected to be the exception to the rule, even me, with no experience other than basic composition and a few essays in high school. I thought I was smart enough to absorb all of the rules and examples and then crank out a convincing story.
I based my narrative on what I’d gleaned from the recommended reading, including Lee Todd’s books. I followed his advice obsessively. I avoided as many clichés as I could recognize. I mined the stories of famous writers for clever plot twists and what I thought were sterling conventions and startling moments of truth. I revised and revised. I revised so much, even my parents noticed and began to think I was taking an interest in something.
“I always knew you’d end up being a writer,” my mom said one day and shook her head as if to say, “Oh well.”
I had no idea where she came up with that pronouncement. In time, her words would haunt me like a wicked refrain. I would hear them mocking me after I moved to Seattle, after I failed to get published, after Eve judged my words and found them inadequate. I would begin to wonder why I’d ever wanted to write fiction of any kind. Maybe I only wanted to prove I could do what my teacher did, better than he had done it.
“Greta, your appointment is at 11:15,” Lee Todd said. He was calling off each student’s name in class and setting his office hours for the next two days. I waited until we broke for the afternoon before approaching his desk.
“We could just talk about my story at your house,” I told him and shrugged. The prospect of hearing my first critique should have sent ice water through my veins but it didn’t. That’s how ignorant and confident I was.
“I have office hours scheduled,” Lee Todd said. “So we’ll meet here.”
“It’s really okay,” I said, still not getting it. “I don’t mind.” Here I attempted what I later knew to be a mortifying parody of adult casualness. “You’re a pro, the setting won’t matter.” I winked.
His eyes held mine with a sharpness I hadn’t seen before.
“No,” he told me. “It does matter. This is about your grade. 11:15 and don’t be late. The next person’s slot is 11:45.”
The pivot, the way he slouched away, told me not to follow. I figured he wanted to separate his personal and professional lives. I was vain enough to wonder if he had trouble concentrating when we were together at his house.
On the morning of my critique I wore the same silk camisole I’d worn to visit him at home the first time. I was imagining things might take a turn. He might cancel his critique of the other students for the day. The world was dancing in a vast cosmic circle around little me, with my faded jeans and spaghetti straps and messy hair.
I slumped in the chair before his office desk. He cleared his throat.
“Let’s start with what I think are your strengths,” he said. I nodded and settled in for an extensive speech. “You’ve got the basics down, nothing wrong with that. Your grammar, syntax, your grasp of literary conventions: not a problem.”
“Well, that’s good,” I said lightheartedly. I smiled and he didn’t.
“The thing about fiction,” he said. “And I don’t care what genre we’re talking, whether it’s mainstream, or sci-fi, or porn, to be convincing you’ve got to feel the urge to write it, right down in your gut.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. I lowered my chin. I was wearing a sly grin and probably seemed drunk.
“You have to know with every fucking fiber of your being that this is who you are and what you have to do. Otherwise, it’s nothing but an exercise.” He folded his hands on the desk between us.
“Okay,” I said. “But isn’t this an exercise? An assignment, to learn to write crime fiction?”
He sighed. He seemed to consider his words before answering.
“No, not entirely,” he said. “It’s an assignment to see how much you’ve understood about the subject, sure, and as far as that goes you deserve an A. You comprehend what I’ve been saying all semester, and nobody in the class puts more effort into it. You’ve read the equivalent of a master’s program in crime fiction, Greta.”
The inkling began at the base of my spine. A squiggle, a nerve-spasm, an awareness of bad news riding in from some place far away, heading right for me with a mallet in its hand.
“It’s no tragedy, not being able to write fiction. Most of the people in this class can’t write a story to save their lives. My aim is to demonstrate the difficulty, you see, to make students appreciate what real writers do.”
“Why?” I asked.
“To create a demand, an appreciation, for the kind of book I like. But you’re smarter than most of these other students, Greta. You might not have the soul to create fiction, but I think you could become a first class book reviewer someday, if you keep going.” He said this in a tone of kindness rather than the admiration I craved.
At this point some people would have said thanks and left the office. Other people would have flung a book at his head. Here’s what I did. I stared him in the eye and asked, with as little emotion as possible, “What the living fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m offering you an honest response, given all of my experience and expertise…”
“You’re a book reviewer. And a teacher,” I said, trying to make it sound insulting.
“If you want more extensive notes, although I don’t think they’ll help…”
“Like what?”
His shoulders drooped. He licked his dry lips.
“Okay,” he said. He picked up my story gingerly as though having to consider it for another minute might kill him. And I think, in some sense, maybe it did. “Okay. You’ve introduced sixteen named characters in twenty-two pages. The narrative can’t contain all of these people. Even if it could, the premise doesn’t justify it. The reader’s going to need a chart to keep track of everybody coming and going, it’s like a soap opera…”
“So I have to cut some characters. Big deal.”
He sighed heavily.
“Cutting deadwood won’t fix the problem in this case. Setting aside the extraneous characters, there’s no central, driving force to your story. The pace isn’t slack; it’s non-existent. You’ve employed a mish-mash of styles and devices, and they don’t work together. Maybe all of this could be pulled together into a commentary, or—you know, as much as I hate that kind of thing—a meta-story, if there were enough weight to it. But what you’ve written just doesn’t have the intellectual heft. Now, if it were attempted by one of the top guys in class…”
“Top guys?”
“Brendan or Bret or that other guy, the one with the hair standing on end…?”
“It’s a Mohawk and his name is Bert. Brendan, Bret, and Bert are your top guys? The Three B’s?”
“Three what?” he asked.
“We call them the Three B’s and they sit up front so they can suck up to you. Do you really think those future frats want to write crime fiction? They want a good grade, you asshole.”
“There’s no reason to get hot under the collar,” he said.
“To borrow a cliché.”
“Nothing I tell you today is going to turn you into a writer,” he said. “I can only tell you what I see, based on my experience. I can’t work magic.”
“Go ahead, take out your frustration on me,” I said. My voice began to crack. “You know what? Nothing is going to rejuvenate your talent. Or give you an idea for a novel. No matter how many times you fuck your students!”
This made him snap, ever so gently—silently yet surely. I’d done it. I’d blown up and now he could write me off as a girl. More maddening, he seemed relieved. He was relieved. I was a problem. He wanted me gone.
I grabbed my backpack from the floor and slung it over my shoulder. I’d never expected a high grade based on sex, or so I told myself. I had believed my talent would shine through and impress the hell out of him. Now I knew this would never happen. I knew I wasn’t his best student, or even one of his ‘top guys,’ I was just an average girl he’d fucked for the second half of one semester.
“Greta,” he began. “We can’t all do what we’d like to do.”
“Gretel. You might as well call me Gretel,” I said before I shoved the office door open and walked out of his world.
Oddfellows Hall on 10th Ave between Pine and Pike on a cold December evening, ice puddles cracking underfoot. To the west, on Broadway, laughter and the jingle of sleigh bells on shop doors.
The stairwells in this labyrinthine building have long fascinated me. Each one is wide with blocky wooden banisters. Each seems a little off the mark. With so much square footage and so many wings—rehearsal rooms, artist studios, and performance spaces—it makes sense, a certain uneven amount of settling. But there’s more to this, a mysterious desire on the part of the stairs to keep going infinitely into an unseen level, a floor between floors, a corridor between walls.
How long have you been sitting on the middle step, clasping yourself with both arms, feeling the reverberation of the stairs as each gallery visitor and theatergoer ascends? Deeper into the chambers above a piano thumps and an unseen musician strokes the keys. You’re here to see a new dance performance but you left your friends and walked out. If they ask later you’ll say you have a migraine. Masking rage with illness is your specialty. If you could murder the slender girls on stage, mar the skin glowing from exertion and joy, and escape without punishment, you would do it. Your heart is lean and cruel and hidden.
Your first recital was attended by a famous choreographer who praised your wit and admired the willowy strength of your body in motion; words you accepted as your due, swept aside with a nimble step and a shake of the head. Years later, you marvel at how often the scene has repeated in memory. Your shoulders and knees were trembling when you turned your gaze from that of your idol. You fear the repetition of the cherished moment means you’ve grown old and pathetic. Nothing significant has followed for decades. Slim little accolades of the past have gone threadbare like souvenir programs handled too many times. Your friends urge you to teach; the thought of it is killing you.
Your fingers and ankles ache. Your right knee is in searing pain. Your spine requires constant adjustment. Simply sitting on a flat surface is agony. You are in agony, aren’t you? Waiting on the stairs while half a dozen acts of youthful creation fill the rooms above and around you.
Good. Good.
It would be selfish of me, otherwise, to take your chin in my hand, as I do, and force your gaze down to the mottled back of your hand. It would be unkind to whisper in your ear, as I do, a suggestion for you to follow later, at home, alone.
You envision the straight-backed chair and white silk rope. They conjure a deadly Butoh performance you witnessed in Pioneer Square, the plummeting dancer colliding with brick and earth, followed by the screams of onlookers. You tilted your head back and your eyes followed the hypnotic descent of a coil of white rope cast loose.
You review the recent, broken years, your body no longer able to describe the nature of youth and longing. You’ve considered your options and embraced the most poetic.
I don’t have to plant an idea, only its possible execution. I only confirm what you already know—no one will miss you. And then I must move on. It’s been a brief collaboration but a satisfying one.
Chapter Five
I moved to Seattle in 1991. In keeping with most of my brief life, it was an act of spite.
After I climbed into the aforementioned rank-smelling Gremlin I inherited from my mom’s brother, I zoomed away from my last meeting with Lee Todd Butcher. I imagined him chasing me to the parking lot, calling out as the Gremlin spit gravel at his feet, but he never appeared in the rearview mirror. I drove eighty mph in a residential zone, ran a red light, swerved into a McDonald’s drive-thru line, bought three milkshakes, drank them, and threw up on some shrubbery in the parking lot.
When I got home I shredded and burned the story I’d written for Lee Todd’s class. I donated to Goodwill the crime novels I’d collected. In the subsequent days of misery and boredom, I dropped out of community college and applied for a job at a photocopy center. I wasn’t qualified for anything; Copy-Z paid employees from the first day of training; I put on a nametag and went to work.
The job turned out to be limbo except with no chance at redemption. A fluorescent buzz filled the shop, 800 square feet lined with 50-sorter-bin copiers running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. My starting pay was $4.25 an hour, 32 hours a week (no medical, dental, vacation, or retirement). My boss was named Mary Patty. I never knew if that was her first and middle name or first and last. I didn’t care.
Mary Patty wore a neck brace on the days when she was having her period. A co-worker and I figured out the synchronicity by comparing notes on Mary Patty’s tampon disposal habits. She was thirty-two, skinny enough to be anorexic, and obsessed with her fiancé, a snide creep named Trevor who wasn’t above borrowing money from Mary Patty in front of staff. Trevor had roaming fingers and everybody hated him. He had an undertone too, a thin layer of witch hazel and oil.
The first weeks at Copy-Z were tolerable because I was busy. I learned to run the big machines, standard easy stuff like clearing paper jams, flipping stacks of paper back and forth accordion-style to allow air between the sheets before loading, checking and adding dry toner which was as fine and black as soot. Then I moved on to a few light maintenance maneuvers like replacing filters and readjusting the photoreceptor belt.
After all of these lessons were learned, and as boredom came silently creeping back into my bones, I made a point of memorizing the individual quirks of every machine in the shop. Tiny tricks to keep a job running without placing a service call; stacking books on the midsection to keep the top door snug and prevent the paper backing up, or standing next to the sorter bins to reach in, snatch the first page of the first set and stra
ighten it as it dropped.
At the end of every shift I took a bathroom break. When I blew my nose, the snot came out with black streaks from all the toner in the air. I read in some magazine that the toner was carcinogenic and we should wear a mask at all times but nobody did. Three or four months in, I didn’t notice it any more. The pitch cloud was like the dark ivy crawling up the walls outside. After a while it seemed natural.
I told my parents I was saving money to rent my own place. They repeated the news to their friends. Eight months later I was still living at home, rising at seven a.m. and slugging down enough coffee to carry me until break time, eating lunch (usually a donut and more coffee) with people from work, then driving home and crashing facedown in bed. Wearing the same clothes for two or three days because nobody told me not to.
When people say their job is a grind, most of them have no idea what it’s like to be the handmaiden to a machine cranking out the exact same thing, hour after hour, day after day. They mean they’re bored or they hope to move on to a more challenging or interesting position, in time. The only chance for advancement at Copy-Z was to become an assistant manager at $5.00 an hour and fill in for Mary Patty when she went on vacation. This was a fate to be avoided at any cost, in my estimation. In the short time I earned a non-living at Copy-Z, we had four assistant managers.
Ronan was an obsequious rat. He often followed Mary Patty to the threshold of the women’s toilet to remind her he was ‘at her disposal,’ like a tampon. She fired him and he actually cried. Tears ran down his face and he drooled and whimpered. He was like a character in a movie whose dog has been killed in front of him. Everyone in the shop had to accompany Ronan to his car and sort of tuck him in and fasten his seat belt. After we walked away he sat there alone, weeping, with his forehead against the steering wheel.
I Wish I Was Like You Page 4