by Zev Chafets
“Just that,” Wolfowitz said smoothly. “I’m sure as you get to know the business, you’ll see the value of a good relationship with a publisher like Gothic.”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand,” said Tommy, his eyes drawn back to the number on the paper.
Wolfowitz arranged his face in a friendly smile. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll get my money’s worth.”
There were many ways that Wolfowitz could have killed Mack Green’s career, but he opted for slow strangulation. He brought out Light Years the same week that Norman Mailer and John Updike published their new novels, guaranteeing it secondary reviews. He allowed the PR department to do a slovenly job, booking Mack on second-rate shows and locking him into a long, pointless book tour. And he discreetly hinted to several friendly journalists that the book, if not exactly a turkey, was not the masterpiece Mack’s fans had expected. Predictably, the bad word-of-mouth and Gothic’s indifferent effort made an impression. The bookstore chains, for example, halved their initial orders. Wolfowitz made sure this fact leaked out, along with a rumor, which he strenuously denied, that Gothic was thinking about canceling the second half of Green’s contract.
Despite Wolfowitz’s assurance that the recession was to blame, Mack was taken aback by the poor showing of Light Years. Outwardly he maintained his usual self-confidence, but he had never experienced failure before and he didn’t quite know what to make of it. For months he did little but hang around the Tiger, drinking too much and trying to get up the energy to write.
A year or so after the Light Years debacle, Mack met Wolfowitz for lunch at Antonelli’s. “I’ve got some great news,” he said. “I started work on the new book, Three to Get Ready. It’s about three buddies who go off to Vietnam, come back to their hometown and kill the members of the draft board one by one. What do you think?”
“A murder mystery?”
“Come on, Stealth, since when do I write mysteries?” Mack demanded. “It’s a Mack Green novel. I’ve got ten thousand words already and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. You’re going to make back what you lost on the last one and then some. I’ll send over what I’ve got, let you take a look at it. Maybe you can come up with some brilliant marketing ideas.”
“I can’t wait to get my hands on it,” said Wolfowitz.
When the uncompleted manuscript arrived, Wolfowitz saw that Mack was right—it was terrific, funny and scary at the same time, full of improbable characters and vividly written scenes. He put it in his desk drawer and waited three days for Green to call.
“You read it?” he demanded in an exuberant tone.
“Yes,” said Wolfowitz flatly. “I did.”
“Well?”
Wolfowitz let the question hang in the air for a long moment and then cleared his throat. “I, ah, think we might have a problem. I’m no literary expert, you know that better than anybody, but the thing just doesn’t seem to flow. It’s kind of ponderous.”
“Ponderous? That’s not one of your words. Did you show it to somebody by any chance?”
“To tell you the truth,” lied Wolfowitz, “I did show it to a couple of people and they thought—”
“That it’s ponderous?”
“Fuck it, Mack, they don’t have to be right, you know—”
“Who’d you show it to?”
“I’d rather not say. They’re at other houses and I don’t want to embarrass anybody.”
“You showed my manuscript to editors from other houses? What are you, looking for someone to take it off your hands?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Wolfowitz in a tone of transparent insincerity.
“Ponderous,” repeated Green, tasting the ugly word in his mouth and feeling a frozen sliver of self-doubt in his stomach.
“You want my advice, forget it,” said Wolfowitz. “Hell, you were writing bestsellers when these guys were screwing coeds.”
“Yeah, maybe. Let me take another look, see if I can lighten it up a little.”
“It might not be a bad idea,” said Wolfowitz. He hung up and rubbed his hands together with genuine satisfaction. The old Mack Green wouldn’t have worried about the opinion of a hundred editors.
It took six years, fourteen drafts and a hundred and ten cases of Jack Daniels for Mack to finish Three to Get Ready, and by that time both his manuscript and his personal life were a mess. He married—and quickly divorced—a bulemic fashion model named Sippy Downes who fleeced him in the settlement. To pay his bills he took on magazine assignments which he often failed to complete. At a small college in New Jersey he was laughed off the podium when he showed up drunk.
Wolfowitz followed the breakdown of Mack’s private life with pleasure, but his real satisfaction came with the savage reception accorded Three to Get Ready. The Times review, written by Walter T. Horton, now a Gothic author himself, called it “an oddly tentative and flat work, full of uninteresting characters in dull situations.… A bitter disappointment for those of us who have been waiting anxiously for Green to return to form. If Three to Get Ready is any indication, it may be a long wait indeed.”
With reviews like this, Wolfowitz didn’t need to do much to ensure the commercial failure of Three to Get Ready. When the bookstores began returning copies, he summoned Tommy Russo.
“We’ve got a total fiasco on our hands,” he said.
“I know it,” said Tommy. “The good news is, Mack’s working on something really special. He’ll rebuild his career, I guarantee you.”
“Not at Gothic, he won’t,” said Wolfowitz. “Floutie told me not to spend another cent on him. I’m sorry, Tommy, but he’s finished here.”
By this time Tommy Russo had learned a good deal about his profession. He knew, for example, that Wolfowitz, recently promoted to editor in chief, had a special relationship with Harlan Fassbinder and didn’t take orders from Floutie. He knew that Gothic’s decision to drop Mack would make it hard to find him another major publisher for decent money. And he knew it would be stupid to damage his own relationship with Stealth Wolfowitz by finding out too much about what really happened to Mack’s last two novels.
“Jeez, I’m sorry about this,” Tommy said to Mack over drinks at the Flying Tiger. “I don’t care what the critics say, I still think it was a hell of a book.”
“Yeah, well,” said Mack, draining a bourbon. For once he seemed discouraged.
“You’re having a bad run,” said Tommy. “Your luck will change. Just keep writing, and when you’ve got something, let me know.”
“I will,” Mack promised, but he didn’t. Instead he went to Ireland for ten months, spent most of his time in the taverns of Dublin, came back to New York and resumed his routine. From time to time he roused himself sufficiently to start on a new novel, but he never got past the first chapter. Once in a while he freelanced a piece for Sports Illustrated. Mostly, though, he spent his time drinking and socializing and pretending, to himself and the rest of the world, that he was only resting until his next big project. When the literary ladies of the Midwest asked him why he wasn’t working, he smiled his charming smile and said, “I’m just waiting for a great idea.”
Wolfowitz followed the demise of Mack’s career with a satisfaction tinged with sorrow. His campaign had been too easy and ended too soon; like many a successful general, he missed his vanquished enemy. Sometimes at night, lying next to a lightly snoring Louise, he put himself to sleep thinking of new ways to destroy Mack Green novels.
And then Tommy Russo had come along with the proposal for Mack’s suicide book. Wolfowitz wasn’t a religious man but he believed in fate, and he saw its hand in Mack’s rejuvenation. He was being given one more shot, one last chance to even the score with the friend who had betrayed and humiliated him. He thought of old man Stanislaw and smiled. It was the time Wolfowitz had been waiting for—final payback time.
Eight
The first stop on Mack’s suicide tour was the Flying Tiger. It wasn’t yet noon and the place was empty except for
a neighborhood alkie named Beth Ellen, who drank vodka martinis with her cat perched on her lap, and a bald, seedy-looking beer drinker in a cheap brown suit who sat staring at the change on the bar in front of him.
“Double Jack Daniels on the rocks,” Mack said.
Otto looked at his watch. “Not a Bloody Mary?”
“This is a celebration,” said Mack. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Can James Brown do the boogaloo?”
“Yeah.” Mack laughed. “Okay, I just sold a new book to Stealth Wolfowitz. A fictional suicide diary.”
“Great,” said Otto. “Good for you.”
“Now all I’ve got to do is write the thing. Listen, Otto, remember the other day, when I asked you what you’d do if you had a million bucks and a year to spend it?”
The bartender nodded.
“Well, supposing the reason you only had a year was because you were going to kill yourself at the end of it. What then?”
Otto frowned. “I wouldn’t decide to kill myself,” he said. “No way.”
“Okay, let me put it this way way—what do you think I’d do?”
Otto shook his head. “I’ve been serving drinks to writers for a long time, Mack, and to tell you the truth, I never know what any of you might do. Remember Benson? He had a sex-change operation for Christ’s sake, and wrote about that. To me that’s worse than killing yourself any day.”
“Benson was gay to start with.”
“There’s plenty of homos don’t get their dick cut off,” said Otto. “Anyway, my point is that you can’t compare what I’d do with what you might. I’ve got a wife and two kids to think about. I’m happy.”
“And I’m not?”
Otto shrugged. “You’re in here socking away double bourbons in the middle of the morning and talking about suicide—”
“Fiction,” said Mack. “A fictional diary.”
“Shit, I wish somebody’d make me an offer like that,” said the bald guy in the brown suit at the end of the bar. Otto glared at him and he quickly added, “I wasn’t eavesdropping, I just heard.”
“Okay, suppose somebody did. What would you do?” asked Mack.
“Buy me some pussy, that’s what,” said the guy in a country twang, Kentucky or Tennessee Mack guessed. He tentatively slid his glass and a loose pile of change in Mack’s direction; close enough for him to see that the man’s eyes were bloodshot and there was gray crud on his jacket. “Hell, you could prob’ly fuck Gina Lollobrigida for a million bucks. My name’s Fred Mart, by the way.”
Green shook the man’s clammy hand. “Wouldn’t you be afraid to go through with it?”
Mart shook his head, “Nossir. In the service I saw some guys die horrible, all shot up with their guts spilling out, just begging for one in the head. I said to myself right then, Fred, when the time comes, make it easy on yourself.”
“Right,” said Mack, encouragingly. “Make it easy. I see what you mean.”
“Or let’s say you’ve got a terminal disease, brain cancer, maybe. You ever been in a cancer ward? Shit, it’ll make you want to vomit your damn heart out.”
“Can’t say that I have,” said Mack, delighted by the ghoulish character. He reminded him of the tattooed man at the bar who had inspired Bragging Rights. Meeting Mart was a good omen; the gods of fiction were once again smiling on him.
“The thing I think about is, how would you do it?” Mart said in a far-off voice. “Shoot yourself? I read once that most guys use a gun. Most of your female suicides, they take pills. There’s your difference.”
“You could jump off a building,” said Green. “Or cut your wrists in the bathtub.”
“Jesus, Mack, this is sick,” said Otto, looking disgusted.
“You know, a lot of people who cut their wrists don’t die,” said Mart, ignoring the interruption. He slid another seat closer, and his voice grew lower, confidential. “The mistake they make, see, is they cut crossways. How you do it is, you cut lengthwise. That way, the blood flows out nice and smooth.” He ran his finger up the inside of his arm to demonstrate.
“Interesting,” said Mack. He was concentrating hard, making certain he’d remember the details of the conversation. This guy was going in the novel, no question about it.
“I had a brother-in-law kill himself, that’s how come I know so much about this. Know how he did it? He set in the car with the motor running and the garage door closed. My sister found him out there cold as a Popsicle. He wrote in his note that he did it for love.” Mart laughed and Mack smelled his rancid breath. “He had a look in his eye, same as yours,” he said.
“You’re a freak,” said Otto. “Why don’t you go drink your beer someplace else.”
“Take this,” Mart said in an urgent whisper, handing Mack a dog-eared business card. “You decide to do it, call me, okay?”
“I’m not going to kill myself, I’m just writing a book about a guy who does.”
Mart looked at Mack with feverish, disbelieving eyes. “Just call me,” he said. “All’s I want to do is watch.”
Mack walked home from the Tiger feeling refreshed and reassured. He picked up a Times at the kiosk near his apartment and a coffee to go from the Greek on the corner, fished his mail out of the box and glanced at it in the elevator. As usual it consisted mostly of flyers for Chinese restaurants, utility bills and a warning from Time magazine that if he didn’t renew his subscription they’d keep on warning him. He almost overlooked a plain white envelope at the bottom of the stack. It had a handwritten name on the upper left-hand corner which he didn’t recognize, and a return address that he did: Oriole, Michigan. Mack couldn’t imagine who might be writing to him from his hometown.
He let himself in the cramped apartment, plopped down on the tattered couch, ripped open the envelope and found a printed invitation: “The Class of 67 cordially invites YOU to attend our (can you believe it?!) 25th Reunion on Saturday, November 28th, Thanksgiving Day Weekend—at the Oriole Country Club. Featuring sixties rock, nineties nostalgia and lots of old friends. Please RSVP care of: Carla Meyerhoff (Stallings) by September 15 and don’t forget to SAVE THE DATE!”
Mack sat staring at the invitation. It had been twenty years since he had been in Oriole, ten since he had been in contact with anyone there. And yet now, on the verge of setting out on his imaginary last year, he had received this invitation to come home. It was another omen—going home, he realized, was exactly what someone who was really going to kill himself might do.
Mack dialed Tommy Russo’s number but got no answer. Feeling the need to share his excitement, he thumbed through his worn address book, but there was no one he wanted to talk to. Instead, he poured himself a tumbler of Jack Daniels, switched on a Yankees game, stretched out on the couch and let the voice of Phil Rizzuto lull him gently to sleep. Just before dropping off he briefly wondered why Tommy’s answering machine hadn’t picked up.
Nine
Tommy Russo’s machine wasn’t on because Herman Reggie had switched it off. That way, his colleague, a four-foot six-inch, two hundred-and-fifteen-pound midget named Afterbirth Anderson, could work undisturbed. The work consisted of hurling Tommy Russo all over his apartment while Herman watched.
Strictly speaking there was no reason for Herman Reggie to be there—he had seen the midget in action before and he had total confidence in his ability. But he appreciated artistry. Afterbirth would toss Tommy Russo around for exactly five minutes and, by the time he was through, Russo would be under the impression that he had narrowly escaped death. In fact, the session would leave him with little more than broken furniture, some fairly mild bruises and a severely damaged ego. Full-sized men found it humiliating to be kicked around by a midget, which is why Herman Reggie, who believed in psychology, employed Afterbirth. He had others—a woman karate expert from Salt Lake City, an old guy named Referee who smacked people with a cane, and a one-armed man with an extra-powerful grip who specialized in snapping people’s fingers—but Afterbirth was his favorite c
ollector. Aside from the blow to their male pride, many deadbeats, he had observed, had a real phobia about midgets. It was a prejudice Reggie deplored. He considered his clients’ encounters with Afterbirth to be a lesson in tolerance as well as an effective form of debt collection.
Herman looked closely and saw that Tommy was finally ready for a serious conversation. “That will be enough,” he told the midget in a suave, well-modulated tone. “Unless,” he said to Russo, “you want to continue?”
“Fuck,” mumbled Tommy through bleeding lips. His chest was heaving as he fell to the floor, retching on his white Berberweave carpet. Afterbirth watched impassively, bouncing on his fat toes while Herman, porkpie hat still perched on his massive round head, clucked sympathetically.
“Would you like a glass of water?” he asked. “Afterbirth, give Mr. Russo some water, please.”
“Piss on him, you mean?”
“No, just regular tap water. Unless there’s some Perrier in the refrigerator. Do you have Perrier?”
“Fuck,” Tommy groaned. He felt like he had a broken rib.
“I guess not,” said Herman Reggie. “Well, if you change your mind, let me know. In the meantime, let’s talk business. You owe me some money.”
“There was no reason to do this,” said Tommy resentfully. He waved at his apartment, where fifty thousand dollars’ worth of interior decoration lay in ruins. “You know I’d have come up with it.”
“Probably,” Herman agreed softly, “but I’m trying to make a point. I want you to see that I’m an enigmatic man. For example, you don’t know how old I am—you probably couldn’t guess within a decade. You don’t know if Reggie is my real name. For that matter, you don’t know what ethnic group I hail from. That’s very rare in my profession.”
“Who the fuck cares,” said Tommy, cautiously regaining his attitude.
“Ah, you’d be surprised,” said Herman. “In the movies, for example, bookies always have an ethnic identity. Italians, no offense, are brutal. Jews are devious, Puerto Ricans are violent and so on.”