Rock Wagram

by William Saroyan

  “You’re like a son to me,” Paul Key said.

  “I wasn’t much of a son to my father,” Rock said. “Take it easy.”

  “I know you’ve been drinking,” Paul Key said. “I mean, for a couple of months, but don’t you think I have, too?”

  “Don’t want me to be like a son to you,” Rock said.

  “I had a talk with Myra Clewes night before last,” Paul said. “Did you read Patrick Kerry’s play?”

  “I read it,” Rock said.

  “I’m sure you think it’s a good play.”

  “Have you?” Rock said.

  “Have I what, Rock?”

  “Have you been drinking a lot for a couple of months?”

  “Yes, I have,” Paul said.

  “I thought so,” Rock said, “because you think you’re my father, and you’re sure I think the play’s a good play, and so on and so forth. You must be drunk.”

  “I’m not a mean drunk, at any rate,” Paul said.

  “I didn’t mean to be mean,” Rock said. “I ate too much for supper. I met most of my family again for the first time in years. The supper’s made me sleepy, the family’s made me ashamed. It’s made me want to get married and have a family of my own, the last resort of the failure. Being sleepy and ashamed, I probably seem mean, but I don’t mean to be mean. Tell me your story and I’ll tell you mine.”

  “What story, Rock?”

  “You didn’t fly here to tell me you think you’re my father,” Rock said. “You didn’t fly here to tell Schwartz he could sit down with the new Armenian hoodlums of the town and play poker, either. That was nice of you, but you didn’t fly here to be nice to your sister’s fat son. Her fine son, I might add. As fine a son as I ever heard about. A finer son than I’ve ever been. A real son, a true son. So what’s your story, Paul?”

  “I’m glad we’re here in your home town, in the saloon I found you in, Rock,” Paul Key said. “This is my story. I can tell it to you. Here at Fat Aram’s. I couldn’t tell it to anybody else anywhere else. I wrote the play Myra Clewes asked you to read, The Indestructibles. I’ve been writing since I was a kid. Everything I ever wrote seemed to be sicker than anything in this world has a right to be. Except this play. Over there at that bar seven or eight years ago I stood waiting for you to stop talking to your pals and give me a drink. I wrote the play the way you talked that day. I wrote it swiftly and easily, as if it wasn’t myself writing it. It was no trouble at all. I felt glad every minute I was writing it. I sent it to New York and had it typed. When it came back I read it, and couldn’t believe I had written it. I looked at other things I had written to see if they were at all like it. They weren’t. They were sick, and the play wasn’t. What are you smiling about, Rock?”

  “Am I smiling?” Rock said.

  “Yes,” Paul said. “What’s it about? Is something the matter with the play?”

  “Go ahead with the story,” Rock said.

  “What’s the matter with the play?” Paul said. “There isn’t any more to the story if something’s the matter with the play. Is something the matter with it?”

  “No. Go ahead.”

  “Is it a good play?”

  “Yes. Go ahead.”

  “Would you have liked to have written it?” Paul said.

  “It didn’t occur to me to wonder,” Rock said, “but yes, I would.”

  “Do you see yourself in it?”

  “I see myself in everything I read.”

  “Rock,” Paul said, “only Myra Clewes knows I wrote that play. Myra Clewes, and yourself. Vida doesn’t know. A man can do things like that. I had expected to hear from Myra that you were crazy about the play. When she said you had read it but didn’t want to appear in it, I didn’t know what to think. I thought you thought it was no good, and if you did, that was too bad for me.”

  “Why?” Rock said.

  “Why?” Paul said. “A man’s only got so long. I haven’t got forever. That play is my life. Why shouldn’t you know I’m dying? I’m dying, Rock. I’m scared to death. I’m sixty, Rock, but that isn’t why I’m dying. I’ve had three heart attacks in seven years, but that isn’t why I’m dying, either. I’m dying because until I wrote this play I knew in my heart that I was a lie. A whole lie. A man can be a lie only so long. If the play is what I think it is, I know I’ve stopped being a lie. I know I’ve stopped dying, and so it won’t matter any more that I am actually dying. It won’t scare me any more. You saw what happened between my nephew and myself a few minutes ago. That was because I’d written that play. That was because I believed I had stopped dying and could therefore stop killing.”

  “It’s a remarkable play, there’s no doubt about that,” Rock said.

  “Nobody’s ever written anything like it, have they?” Paul said. “The English never did, the Russians never did, the Germans, the Italians, the French, the Scandinavians, the Americans. None of their best playwrights ever wrote one like that one, did they, Rock?”

  “No,” Rock said. “It’s a new thing, the first of its kind, maybe the last.”

  “Is it great?” Paul said.

  “In a new way, it is,” Rock said. “In a truer way, it is.”

  “Then, how does it happen you didn’t get excited about it?” Paul said.

  “I don’t get excited,” Rock said.

  “Didn’t you tell Myra anything?”

  “I told her I thought it would be a good play to see on the boards. I told her I thought it would fail.”

  “Why? Why do you think it’ll fail?”

  “It’s new,” Rock said. “It’s true, and most people in the theatre are neither, and don’t know how to become either. They’ll only make it seem bad. It will only make people uncomfortable.”

  “Did you tell her these things?” Paul said.

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you, Rock?”

  “I didn’t think I needed to,” Rock said. “I didn’t know you had written it. I thought Patrick Kerry had. I didn’t know you were out here dying of anxiety. I just thought it was a play that seemed great that I couldn’t do anything about.”

  “Aren’t you astonished that I wrote it?”

  “It never occurred to me that you could find time to write.”

  “Do you remember when I was asking you questions that first time at Romanoff’s and you said you liked to read and write?” Paul said. “It never occurred to me, either, that you could find time to do anything except hang around, the way I had seen you hanging around this saloon, standing behind that bar, telling stories to the boys. I was astonished. Now that you know I wrote it, aren’t you astonished that it’s the kind of play it is?”

  “I’m not astonished,” Rock said. “I’m glad, because it’s the kind of play that should have gotten itself written at last. I’m glad you wrote it, because I happen to know you. Any more to the story?”

  “That’s it,” Paul said, “except for the details. I’ve told you my story. You tell me yours.”

  “I’d like the war to be over,” Rock said, “so I won’t have to go into the Army.”

  “Anything else?” Paul said.

  “No.”

  “Can we talk about this?”

  “I’m comfortable,” Rock said. “The girl is bringing us drinks whenever we want them. Schwartz and my cousin are in the poker game. I’ll be going back to get in after a while. We can talk.”

  “The war isn’t going to be a short war,” Paul said.

  “I know,” Rock said.

  “Being a Private in any Army is no fun for any man.”

  “I know,” Rock said.

  “One day is a long time for the kind of man I am, and the kind you are,” Paul said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “A year is a very long time.”

  “Very.”

  “Two or three years are long enough to change a man, or finish him.”

  “Most likely.”

  “What do you want to do, Rock?”

  “I want
the war to be over.”

  “It won’t be over for two or three or four or five years, Rock.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want it to be over.”

  “A lot of people who think they’re in good physical shape actually aren’t,” Paul said. “I don’t know why you don’t let a first-rate physician give you a complete check-up.”

  “I’ve had my physical and I’m O.K.,” Rock said. “I saw the others who had their physicals at the same time and were classified O.K., and I know I’m certainly as O.K. as they are. If a first-rate physician gave me a complete check-up and discovered that I wasn’t O.K., I know he would also be able to discover that every man in the Army isn’t O.K., if they or he or friends of theirs or his wanted him to go to the trouble. I’ve heard what the boys are doing. I don’t blame them. Besides, they are going to help sell War Bonds, and entertain, and things like that. I wouldn’t do any of those things.”

  “Do you want to kill yourself?” Paul said.

  “I don’t believe in killing,” Rock said, “but I will not do anything to keep myself from being as apt to be killed as any of the others who are unable to do anything to keep themselves from being apt to be killed by the war. Don’t be unhappy. It’s a good play, and you’re not dying any more. Myra may find somebody to direct it who will make it come across the stage as simply and effectively as it came across the page when I read it. I want to get back to the poker game now.”

  “I’d like to get in the game, too,” Paul said.

  They got up and began to walk back to the hotel, neither father nor son, nor brother, nor friend, but accidents which had happened to meet by accident, and by accident had continued to meet, to tell one another the unfolding of the accidental story, something winking in each of them, knowing the story was enormously meaningless, unfortunate, depressing, and something to be instantly forgotten.

  Is it a world that dies in a man when a man dies, a world he never knew, never understood, never improved, never inhabited? Is a man, inside his small sack of skin, a whole world once he has fearlessly come out of the womb, fearlessly accepted his head, fearlessly accepted his schedule, winking fearlessly as he goes? Is a man a whirling dervish in his own whirling world and desert? Is he a man or a world? Is he good or is he bad? Is he true or is he false? After he has fearlessly stepped forward among the multitudes of his kind, is he fearlessly among friends and unalone, or is he fearlessly among enemies, incurably alone, but forever innocent, and forever indestructible? After he has fearlessly seized his woman and fearlessly loved her, loving mother and father, daughter and son, has he come to meaning? Or is this also nothing? After he has fearlessly loved life, world, beauty, and truth, is a man any closer to anything good than he ever was, than he was in the winking womb?

  “Rock,” Paul Key said as they walked fearlessly back to the hotel, each of them fearlessly drunk, fearlessly friendless, a world fearlessly dying in each of them. “Rock,” he said, “I don’t like what’s happening.”

  “You don’t like what’s happening to the play?” Rock said. “Is that it?”

  “Not to the play,” Paul said. “To everything. To everybody. Something’s the matter. I thought you’d do the play, first in New York, then in films, for the whole world to see. Something’s the matter that I don’t like that’s so nearly not the matter that I believe it could be quickly stopped if something could be quickly done that had nothing the matter with it.”

  “You’re drunk,” Rock said. “A big man in a small body drunk, stumbling around trying to stop dying. The dying’s not to be stopped. It’s not to be stopped by not liking what’s happening to anything. I had my shoes shined in this Shoe Shine Parlor. I sat in that second chair there.”

  “What’s that mean, Rock?”

  “It means the Parlor’s still there,” Rock said. “The chair’s still there. My feet have grown. I’m wearing another pair of shoes. The man who shined my shoes is dead. I was eleven or twelve. It doesn’t mean anything. Why do you want it to mean something?”

  “Everything means something,” Paul said. “You had your shoes shined. What about it?”

  “He shined them for me,” Rock said. “I sat there and he shined them. Shines were a dime then. A dime was a dime then. I gave him a quarter.”

  “What about it, Rock?”

  “He’s dead,” Rock said. “The Parlor’s still there, the chair’s still there. I’d just had a haircut, too, and my ears were cool. The way I felt, anything could happen.”

  “What happened?” Paul said.

  “Anything,” Rock said.

  “How about now?” Paul said. “Can anything still happen now?”

  “No,” Rock said, “because he’s dead. Something can happen, but not anything. Anything’s happened already.”

  “What can happen, Rock?”

  “The play can be produced,” Rock said. “You can sit there on the opening night, all alone in your seat, all alone in your clothes, all alone in your head and hide, and hang your head and try to hide because the play is there, it is the play for them, but they don’t want it. So they’re not there, only you are there, and you had your shoes shined long ago. Everything in this miserable town is mine. Everything I see here now I saw here long ago. Look over there. Look across the street there. At the corner there. My father stood there watching me talk to the two street girls the night we fought and he busted my nose. I know that corner. I remember him standing there, burning with Armenian anger, burning with his own Vagramian anger, because his son, whom he’d believed was himself again, did not love him, did not respect him enough to obey him, to obey his anger, to stay away from street corners and street girls. I see him standing there still. He wasn’t much older than I am now. But he was mistaken about himself, about his son, and about the girls. We were talking about better things than I have ever found people anywhere to talk to about.”

  “What things, Rock?”

  “We were talking about the accidents that had happened to each of us,” Rock said, “each accident small and unimportant, sometimes amusing and pleasant, and how out of these accidents each of us had come to that corner, that evening, in this town. We were talking about the fun we’d had having our accidents and about the fun we were going to have having more of them, because they were on their way to the S.P. Depot, to go to San Francisco, and we had stood on the corner and talked a couple of times before and laughed and knew we’d never do that again, never have another chance to stand there and talk to one another about nothing in particular again, and I never saw them again. He was wrong about them. He was wrong. He was wrong about himself and myself. My father’s all over this town. He couldn’t stand it, but he couldn’t go anywhere else, either, for he had to be where his family was, his people, where he could write what he had to write and know his people would read it. He wrote and they read. The play will be performed, and you will see it. One of your sons will stop someplace in Beverly Hills some night, outside Romanoff’s maybe, or outside the William Morris Agency, and remember that you and he had been there once together, that you’d worked hard all your life at work you hated but did because you were mistaken about yourself and about him, and that you wrote all the time but didn’t like what you wrote and didn’t let your wife, his own mother, know that you wrote, and then after a whole lifetime of being mistaken about everything, you wrote a play in which you weren’t mistaken at last, and it was performed and nothing happened, and there he is, your son, a man of thirty or thirty-five himself now, himself mistaken about himself and about his wife and his son and his daughter, and there’s Romanoff’s, or there’s the William Morris Agency, and that’s all it came to. Why couldn’t you have been a tailor?”

  “A tailor, Rock?” Paul said. “Why should I be a tailor? My father was a tailor.”

  “Didn’t he want you to be a tailor, too?”

  “Yes, but he was mistaken, too,” Paul said. “He didn’t understand that he should
never have been a tailor.”

  “What should he have been?” Rock said.

  “He should have been a clown,” Paul said. “He was even smaller and uglier than I am, but I never saw him when he wasn’t laughing in his eyes or moving his arms and legs in a way to amuse God. It was an accident that he was a tailor, just as it was an accident that you stood on the corner and talked to the girls about accidents, but it was no accident that I got into the world of ideas. I did that, Rock. I decided to do it, Rock, and I did it.”

  “You shit,” Rock said. “You decided to do it, and you did it! That was an accident, too. It was an accident you wrote the play, too. It was an accident you met Vida, an accident she saw you weren’t ugly, an accident you saw that she saw, an accident you loved one another and had kids. If you’d been a tailor, you wouldn’t have come into Fat Aram’s, and by now I would have had a vineyard and three or four kids. Accidentally the vineyard and accidentally the kids, and accidentally I’d be the same man I am, bored the same as I am, and unwilling to trade places with anybody in the world, the same as I am. I’ll tell what Jews and Armenians have in common.”

  “What, Rock?”

  “Fathers,” Rock said. “They have mothers in common, too, but the way they have fathers in common is the way that comes to something accidentally. Of course he was a clown, and there was never a series of accidents by which you could ever forget it, and none by which your son shall ever forget what you were accidentally.”

  “I was a man who worked hard, and loved his wife and kids,” Paul said.

  “That’s not what he’ll remember,” Rock said. “He’ll remember that you were small and ugly and knew it, but the handsomest and swiftest man he ever saw. My father was mad. I suppose his father was, too. My mother’s father was, at any rate. We have fathers in common. We’re fathers ourselves the minute we’re born. We get over being sons quicker than any other people in the world. Our sons do, too. We fix our fathers, and our sons fix us. That’s the reason we’re intelligent. That’s the reason we know so much more about everything than other people do without needing to go to the trouble of studying anything. We have fathers in common, and we’re fathers at birth because we want enough of us to be around to receive the accidents, just in case an assortment or series of them is going to happen to somebody some day that is going to make a difference. You’ll see the play, but your son, or both of them, won’t know, even if they see it, any more about what it is—a new thing, a true thing—than the sons of strangers. It may even turn out to be a joke they will be able to laugh at. Shall we go up and get in the game?”