by Rob Roberge
You don’t really talk much until one day before class when you have a cigarette together. She later tells you that she’d already smoked one before class, but when she saw you, she went out to have another as an excuse to talk. It’s immediately clear how smart she is. You say something that makes her laugh and you flood with happiness at the mere wonder that she might be enjoying your company. You start off as friends and quickly become close friends. You want to be with her, but she’s in a long-distance relationship with this guy Mickey, who’s down in Southern California. Between really enjoying your time with Gayle and the dreadful situation at your place, you end up sleeping on her couch nearly every night for a month, while she sleeps in the bed in her loft. You do end up fucking twice, but afterward, she says she’s trying monogamy for the first time with Mickey, so you stop sleeping together. The first time you fuck, it starts because you are holding each other on the couch, watching the Robert Towne movie Tequila Sunrise, and one of you mentions how terrible it is, and a second later you are kissing.
You leave Humboldt after only two and a half months because you are already flunking out of school and you’re going to have trouble staying sober, trees or no trees. You don’t want her to see who you are when you drink. You and Gayle will spend more than two years talking long distance. Talking about sex and literary theory and what’s going on in your lives. She’s the first woman who doesn’t make you feel embarrassed when you admit to submissive desires. The hours disappear without a pause in your conversations. When you are living in Amherst, you often call her at midnight and you’re still on the phone when the sun comes up. Your phone bills cost more than your rent.
Before you leave Humboldt you start drinking again. Slowly and moderately at first, but a week after you start, you black out behind the wheel and drive your car into a ditch off Highway 101. You wake up at dawn surrounded by the thickest fog you have ever seen. Your car is still running. The CD player is still playing. Jonathan Richman’s “Government Center.” The last thing you remember is leaving a bar in Eureka. You are lucky a cop didn’t see you in the ditch. You are much luckier you didn’t kill someone. You shake with fear and self-hatred. You are no different from someone who did kill someone driving drunk. You are only luckier.
What you are capable of scares the shit out of you. And then there are the things you’re not capable of right now. Like grad school. You are drinking. You know you need to get the hell out of there before you destroy the one good thing you’ve found at Humboldt—your friendship with Gayle.
In a stroke of what qualifies as luck at this point in your life, your grandmother Ament has died. Her house is filled with fifty years of garbage that your father has no desire to deal with. You ask him what he’s going to do with all her junk.
“Burn it to the fucking ground if you can figure out a way the cops and your mother won’t know,” he says.
You end up cutting a deal with him where you get to live for free in your grandmother’s disgusting house in exchange for cleaning it. Half a century of garbage. Ten-year-old frozen fish your long-dead grandfather had caught. Mice and rats, some dead and flattened, and their dried shit all over everything. A smell you will never forget. A series of your grandmother’s cigarette burns in the wood floor from years of passing out drunk in front of her TV.
The house has only two paths: one from the back door to the fridge and another from her TV chair to the bathroom—shit piled over your head on either side as you walk and stumble along. Flies swarm like in scenes from The Amityville Horror. The house has a dirt-floor basement with mushrooms growing in the dirt and about fifty birdhouses your grandfather made to regain his motor skills after his stroke. You use the birdhouses as firewood. You drink the cases of odd wines he made over the years—apple wine from his orchard. Pear wine. Dandelion wine. They are all noxious. But they are alcohol.
The path to the fridge where you can keep the off-brand beer and gin you can afford is already cleared for you. And you know a Percocet dealer not far away. Things, examined in a certain light, are looking up.
—
2000: You have just handed your film agent your fifth script in a row, which is an awful lot like the play that made her want to represent you in the first place.
“You write so indie,” she tells you. “They’re awfully edgy.” She’s behind her desk. You are across from her in a ridiculously comfortable chair. Her assistant brings you coffee. In the film business, you learn, they often treat you very well while they are treating you like shit.
Your agent says, “Everything you’re giving me is a hard sell at best.”
You think about how good edgy and raw once sounded coming out of her mouth. “Well, I mean…this is kind of what I do,” you say. “What I write.” You want to ask her why she took you on as a client if your voice was a “hard sell.” Your dreams of money are shriveling the more she speaks. You think you’ll be stuck at your shitty job editing technical manuals forever.
“I thought you’d have found more of the formula by now.” She has, since your second script, been giving you scripts of produced movies to review as reference for your own material. Some are things you think you might be able to write. Most are for movies where aliens invade and blow the absolute shit out of everything on the planet before they lose their war with humanity. You have nothing against those movies, but it’s obvious that you have to love movies where shit blows up if you are going to write a good movie where shit blows up. It’s just not you.
You say, “I thought you liked my play.”
“Oh, honey. I still want to work with you, but you need to start thinking differently.”
You sit closer to the edge of the comfortable chair. Even before you say it, you hate yourself, call yourself a chickenshit whore, but you still ask, “How should I think?”
She sighs. “What you need to ask yourself is, What would Ed Norton look cool doing for two hours?” She leans forward and claps once. “And write that.”
You think Ed Norton would look plenty cool in your indie, edgy, raw hard sells. You don’t say anything.
Your agent, though you already sense that you will not be calling her that after you walk out the door today, says, “Okay. Let’s look at it this way. Let’s say you’re the hottest new shit on the block. You just came out of Sundance with your first film and everyone’s dying for a piece of you. You can call whatever shot you want. Make any movie you choose.” She pauses. “What’s your dream project?”
You say, “The Johnny Eck story.”
She asks who Johnny Eck is and you tell her.
“Pick another one,” she says.
“The Lobster Boy story.”
“What the fuck is that?” she says. It’s the first time ever that she hasn’t sounded gentle and condescendingly kind.
You tell her the Lobster Boy story.
She shakes her head. “What actor is going to want to play a lobster? A fucking half man?”
“Johnny Depp,” you say.
“Fine,” she says. “Where do we go when Johnny Depp says no?”
“Johnny Depp won’t say no,” you tell her.
This is your last day with a film agent. You have decided that you have written your last script. Or perhaps everyone else decided that for you.
—
2004: You are teaching at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, which can attract some crazy people. Generally, you like crazy people. You are a crazy person. Doctors have tagged the label on you more than once. You’ve grabbed the bus at the stop closest to the hospital, having forgotten to take off your seventy-two-hour observational plastic wristband ID.
One of your students is Karl, who has worked in several cities in Europe. He tells you he was a coke-dealing bartender in Copenhagen, where he brags of logging a Mick Jagger–esque number of sexual conquests over the years. He was later a coke-dealing bartender in a hip joint in Paris, with the same results. You listen. You’re no one to judge in such matters. He seems almost like a parody
of the person you used to be, and you feel bad for him.
The first night of class, he arrives before anyone else, about six foot four, middle-aged, a very good-looking, if weathered, guy. He looks like someone who’d be chain-smoking in a Truffaut film with Jeanne Moreau. He’d be much more attractive if not for the absurd leather pants (black, which is fine, piped with bright red, which is not), leather jacket, and an M&M red motorcycle helmet that loudly announces his refusal to age gracefully.
Poking you in the chest, he announces in some vague European accent: “I drove a Ducati across the fucking country to work with you!”
You’ve published a few stories in some literary journals, but only one has appeared online, and is therefore the most widely distributed of your work. So, you figure, maybe he’s read that story, or—even weirder and better—this guy has tracked down and read and loved all your stories in obscure literary magazines.
You bask in the glory of this moment. You mentally forgive him the poke in the chest. You replay his vague, European voice in your head: I drove a Ducati across the fucking country to work with you!
“Really?” you say.
He waves dismissively. “You, or someone like you.”
The class filters in. Eight out of the nine other people in the workshop are women. Normally you might not notice this, but—right away—it’s clear that Karl is not just creepy but creepy in a very male way. The vibe in the class is unusually tense from the get-go. Everyone, except for the one other guy, seems uneasy around Karl.
The class is structured so that each student has their work critiqued by the class once or twice. But, as the professor, you read and comment on every piece they write. You have them write one story a week. Karl has signed up to be critiqued just once—the ninth week—so you are the only one to have seen his writing.
Every single one of Karl’s stories is a first-person narrative about a guy who has bounced around several European cities. Who was a coke-dealing bartender in Copenhagen. Who drove a Ducati and wore leather pants.
This Karl-esque narrator, though, has another enduring trait that never fails to show up on the page: He wants to fuck his brother’s fourteen-year-old daughter. In every story the narrator visits his brother in Paris and finds creepy ways to be around his niece and, when his niece is not there, he—again, in every story—slinks into her room and goes through her things and sniffs her panties.
It is difficult to read this week after week. You wish you had his brother’s phone number. But it is a writing class—a creative exercise—and you wouldn’t, ugly as the work is, want to censor a writer’s material. You approach Karl’s work with caution, offering some praise but pointing out the whole niece thing could really offend readers. You hope to get through to Karl more about what he might be doing than about what he’s writing.
Week nine arrives. The class where Karl’s work is discussed.
Even before the class starts, the ashen faces of the other students—who have read Karl’s story in preparation—let you know you’re in for a tough night. Three women haven’t shown up. The rest look either angry or shell-shocked. You extend the banter at the start of class as long as you can—delay tactics that eventually stall out because no one is in the mood for playful small talk.
It’s finally time to talk about Karl’s story. No one has a response. Usually you try to get class started by getting out of the way a little—letting the students set the tone for the discussion and only starting to jump in (and, as is your manic habit, rarely shut up) about halfway into a critique, unless there’s an issue of craft or a total lull in the room. And this sort of silence is starting to make that “total lull” seem positively raucous.
You don’t have many rules in class. You try to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive, when you work with writers. But there is one rule: With any first-person narrative, the group is not to mistake the author for the narrator. There are important reasons for this rule—narrative persona and the author NOT being the same. Issues of biographical criticism are problematic for workshops, especially fiction workshops, where some writers want the privacy that fiction affords. And a bunch of other reasons influenced both by a concern for people’s feelings and by narrative theory.
So for instance, you ask them to say “On page seven, when the narrator goes to Trader Joe’s” instead of “On page seven, when you go to Trader Joe’s.” And so on.
Finally, a very brave and understandably troubled young writer speaks. She’s maybe twenty-five and frighteningly talented—you hope the class doesn’t scar her and cost the world a fine writer.
She says, “On page three, where the narrator…uhmm. Well, where the narrator…well, when the narrator’s brother and sister-in-law…well, the whole family, really, are gone…the narrator goes into his niece’s room and…” She pauses for a very long time. “Well, I guess I’m trying to say I was troubled when the narrator…went into his niece’s room and…well, sniffed her underwear.”
Karl looks over at her, then around the circle, smiling widely. He waves up and down and then starts pounding on the table and shouts, “THAT IS ME!”
No one speaks. You try to save the situation. To turn this into a “teachable moment” or something.
You say you agree with the student. “How about anyone else? Did any other readers feel troubled by that scene?”
Arms shoot up.
Karl says, “You don’t understand what is happening? I am sniffing her panties!”
“No,” you say. “We’re following the action. We understand what is happening in the story.” You go on to explain that a forty-year-old uncle making a trip to his brother’s house solely for the purpose of trying to fuck his fourteen-year-old niece might, well, offend readers. And that the panty-sniffing scene is pretty much in the same boat, as scenes go. That the reader might be so offended that they wouldn’t read a word beyond that scene.
You start to talk about other narratives that assault their audience’s sensibilities—by writers who, of course, meant to assault their audience’s sensibilities. You hope this part, at least, might be useful to the rest of the class.
Karl says, “What the fuck is fucking offensive here?”
Another student says, “I’m not going to dignify this story by talking about it.”
It strikes you that not only is she right but she should probably be running the class.
You look around at the blank faces. “Why don’t we take a break?”
After the break, you are down to only four students. You send people home early, more exhausted by that one hour than any full four-hour class you’ve ever taught. You sprint to a bathroom on the other side of the building and hide for fifteen minutes at an alternate exit in hopes that Karl is not waiting to talk with you. You make it to your car safely, and you tell yourself, over and over, that there is only one week in the semester left.
The last night of class, it’s just you, Karl, and the other guy.
After you call the class early, Karl grabs his motorcycle helmet and says, “So how do I get a fucking script sold? I could take these stories and make them like Die Hard.”
You think about a Die Hard with Bruce Willis as an incestuous panty-sniffing pedophile. “You’d have to take a screenwriting class. I have no idea how to sell scripts.”
You make some awkward comment about getting back to your car and you start walking.
Karl asks if you want a smoke. You tell him thanks, but you quit.
A drink?
Sadly, the same answer.
“I have some blow that will keep us up until next week.”
The thought of “us” being up until next week scares you much more than the idea of getting high for the first time in a decade.
You don’t get offered drugs much anymore. And he’s not someone you want to be huddled on a couch over a table with but, still, you’re glad he hasn’t tested your not-so-iron-at-times will with, say, morphine. If something more appealing were offered in a moment of your wea
kness, who knows? Any good opiate could have you dumb enough to ride cross-country with Karl if he kept you stocked. You say, “I wish I could, but I can’t do that anymore.”
“It’s Merck. You ever had it?”
Merck cocaine. A dentist across from one of your apartments in Boston used to sell it to you and your roommates, along with a tank of nitrous oxide that got replaced with a new full tank every week. Pharmaceutical-grade cocaine that could make even an opiate addict who didn’t like uppers salivate. Clean, incredibly good cocaine, with no speed cut in so you wouldn’t chew your gums for ten hours. Fluffy like the way heaven’s clouds are depicted in children’s books.
“Thanks,” you say. “I’d love to, Karl. But those days are over.”
“Your fucking wife, right?”
This is not the reason. Though you can’t imagine Gayle would be too happy to hear you were on a weeklong blow bender with the panty-sniffing guy you’ve been telling her about for nine weeks. Gayle didn’t really know the old you. She’s never, for instance, had to bail you out of jail. Or take you to the hospital. She hasn’t seen you actually hang out with a guy like Karl just because he had drugs.
You realize you miss drugs a lot more than you miss who and what you used to be when you were on them.
Both of you stand there a while longer with, clearly, nothing left to say. You are so quiet that you’re sure if you were still in the classroom, you could hear the click of the second hand on the clock. Karl seems sad in a way you feel somehow responsible for, though you have no idea what you could or should have done. Part of you—a large part—thinks, Fuck him. He’s a truly disgusting creep who fucked up the class. A small part of you thinks, Well, he’s still human and he seems so raw in his need for company tonight, it hurts to be around him.