Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  Because of this newfound invulnerability I began doing incredibly stupid things. I was brazen, I was brash, I was a bit of a jerk. I regularly got into minor bar skirmishes in the East Village; I attempted to pick up women while they held their husbands’ hands at parties; I once stormed into a kitchen at a restaurant and confronted three knife-wielding cooks because Flatbush Hethuh’s cheeseburger had been done medium well and not medium rare. I did eighty-five in a fifty-five-mph zone, I drank red wine with fish and ate oysters in months without R’s and went swimming within an hour of eating. Why did I do this? Because I could. The Muses had my back! One night I tackled a pickpocket on Third Street and Avenue B and knew he wouldn’t stab me because Erato would lop his hand off in mid-plunge; I bought hard drugs from guys named Julio and Omar and knew they wouldn’t shoot me because Terpsichore wouldn’t allow a bullet to penetrate my skin. One night when a large, tattooed ex-con and I were about to go at it just outside a bar, even as he informed me that he had enjoyed carnal knowledge of my mother for the insultingly low price of $25 and as I, in turn, imparted to him the pertinent information that I, along with all of the male residents of the Bronx, had had our way with his sister in her hindquarters (“I don’t have a sister, faggot!” he yelled at me), I was thinking: He can’t hurt me . . . nothing bad can happen to me until I finish the Trilogy.

  And it worked. Despite the myriad stupid, suicidal things I did, not once did I die in all that time.

  “Why are you doing stuff like this?” Hethuh, exasperated and worried about her boyfriend, asked me the night I tackled the pickpocket. (He wasn’t a pickpocket, it turned out. He was just some dude running.)

  “Because,” I answered her, jutting out my jaw, “I can.”

  Was Beethoven going to suffer a fatal heart attack while working on the third movement of his first symphony? When I was only twenty pages away from the last page of Book I, were Julio and Omar really going to slit my throat with a box cutter because I was five dollars short for three dime bags? That would have been like John Lennon and not Stu Sutcliffe dying in 1962. When he was writing Molly Bloom’s soliloquy I wouldn’t be surprised if Joyce dove in front of trolley cars nightly or chugalugged flaming shots of absinthe. He must have known that he wouldn’t suffer even a sprained toe until he got to the final “Yes” of that book, and here is as good a place as any to say that I’ve always found the “Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914–1921” ending of Ulysses to be about as annoying a thing in literature as exists, even more than that cutesy little flip book of a man falling up into the World Trade Center that David Safran Wallace Foeranzan included in Incredibly Unbearable and Unbearably Unincredible. The final word of the most overrated work in modern literature, then, is not the affirming, inspiring, exultant “Yes,” but is the word “1921,” the year that brought the world widespread labor unrest, race riots, the spread of Bolshevism, the Communist Party in China, Adolph Hitler as the head of the Nazi Party, and the birth of Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh. Perhaps one day the world will see Ulysses for what it is: the First Gimmick Book. A whole day in the life of a man, the man is alienated from his surroundings, he is estranged from everyone he knows, all day long he is betrayed, he tries to reconnect with a child forever lost to him. Face it: Ulysses is 24 except not as exciting.

  When Book I of the Trilogy was finally finished, I bought a copy of Writer’s Market and sent out dozens and dozens of queries and samples of the book to agents and publishers. While I waited (and waited and waited) for positive responses, for any responses, I met someone who knew someone who knew someone whose cousin was a recently hired editor at the prestigious publisher Lakeland & Barker. I asked the first person in that chain to ask the next person and so on to ask if the editor would be interested in reading my book. It had been three months since I’d sent out my original queries and I was getting desperate. It only took a week to find out that Martin Tilford, the editor, would be interested.

  I dropped off all seven-hundred-plus pages of Book I at Lakeland & Barker.

  Later that night I told Hethuh that I needed some time off from her. She had straight black hair and freckles over her entire body but, as she was so tiny, that really didn’t amount to so many freckles. (When I used to drop in on her at work I could barely see her: the blender on the counter where she whirled her health shakes was over her head.) The race was on as to what would happen first: my missing Hethuh and making a desperation booty call, or Martin Tilford getting back to me and telling me he wanted to meet me.

  Against all odds, Martin Tilford won.

  Could I meet Martin, his assistant wanted to know, at Café Quelquechose near Union Square for lunch on Thursday, November 6th, at 1:30 p.m.? I didn’t tell her but I would have met Martin Tilford at Café Rien in the Black Hole of Calcutta for a Ritz cracker with hamster turds on it on Wednesday, March 53rd at 3:30 a.m.

  I called Hethuh, not for booty purposes, but to tell her I had a meeting with an important editor. She was happy for me. Two minutes of that and then an hour of her unfulfilled needs and I regretted making the call.

  I showed up at Quelquechose ten minutes early and had a club soda at the bar. I didn’t yet know what publishing types looked like, but the restaurant was full of them. The gray suits, the battered leather envelopes, the furrowed brows and serious-looking glasses. For every editor sitting at a table, there was a writer with scruffy hair next to him or her, wearing jeans or khaki pants, an oxford shirt and no tie and cheap shoes, and expressing something between a feigned grin and an eternal grimace.

  The front door opened, Martin approached and asked me if I was me and when I answered in the affirmative, we took a seat at a table near a window. He had a hint of a British accent; either he was American and had been educated in England or was English and had been living in America too long. (Or he just could have been an asshole.) Sitting down, I recognized a famous overrated novelist—he is no longer famous, overrated, or alive—who seemed to have put away all by himself the bottle of Merlot sitting on his and his stone cold sober editor’s table.

  “Oh God, how I do so love your book! It’s a masterpiece. It is without question the finest American novel I have read in quite some time.”

  That was what I’d imagined Martin saying to me as soon as we sat down. But instead I got: “Do you know what you want?”

  When I told him I hadn’t decided, he slid a menu over to me.

  “The seared peppercorn tuna here is simply extraordinary,” he said.

  I asked Martin how the hamburger was and he said that it wasn’t as good as the peppercorn tuna.

  Our waitress asked if we were ready to order. Martin ordered the peppercorn tuna and I ordered a hamburger and fries. But then Martin summoned her back and said, “He’ll have the tuna too.” When she left, he winked at me conspiratorially.

  I didn’t argue. How could I when just then he pulled from his battered leather envelope the manila envelope containing Book I?

  “I must ask you . . .” Martin began, “Frank W. Dixon? Any relation?”

  “A great uncle or something.” Who knew? . . . the famous connection might help me.

  “So!” he said. He was about thirty years old, on the deathly pale side, and would be gray before he was forty. His smoke-gray Brooks Brothers suit didn’t fit him too well but with just three more years of free lunches it would probably be two sizes too small. “A trilogy, eh?”

  “I hope so,” I told him. A waiter went by me, holding a plate that held a plump drippy hamburger and fries. It went to the no-longer-living author at the table immediately behind us.

  “Have you started the second part of it?” he asked me. “Book Two?” (He made quotation marks with his fingers and toggled his head when he said that.)

  “Up here I have,” I told him, pointing to my skull. “I’m allowing myself a break.”

  “Ah! A break. A respite. Time off. Rest for the weary, I suppose, eh?”

  He took the seven-hundred-plus pages out of the manila envelope. They
were held together by a rubber band. As he undid the rubber band, hamburger molecules began wafting up my nostrils, making my nosehairs swoon.

  He asked me how I’d heard about him, and I briefly explained I knew someone who knew someone who . . .

  The dead writer behind me bit into his hamburger. I could hear it, I could smell it, but I was also gazing at my title page like a mother watching her daughter in a school play.

  “Wait until you have this tuna. It comes with wasabi mashed potatoes and string beans.”

  “I know. I saw it on the menu.”

  “Well, let’s drink. To seared tuna, mashed potatoes and to trilogies!”

  The wine was good . . . it would have gotten along just swell with a hamburger.

  “So! A trilogy! That’s going to mean a lot of work, Fred. It’s going to mean years and years of toil and struggle and dedication. Are you committed?”

  “Yeah . . . I think I am. And it’s Frank.”

  “Oh yes. Sorry. So you’re ready to hunker down for the long haul? You’re in it to win it?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Have you read the Anthonys, Trollope or Powell?” he asked me. “Proust? Durrell?”

  “No. Those weren’t trilogies, I don’t think.” Well, I knew they weren’t, but I didn’t want to come across as a smarty-pants.

  “At one time, they must have been though. Right? I mean, just after they’d finished book three and hadn’t gotten yet to book four. They were trilogies then, weren’t they?”

  “I suppose they were at that point, yeah.”

  I turned my head and saw that the dead author had only one bite left of his hamburger.

  “Things were very bad then,” Martin said, “but still we carried on.”

  It was strange to hear someone else saying the very first line of my book. Even though it was only a yard away, it was as if the words were pealing through the sky like thunder.

  “That is a classic first line,” he said. “Simply classic.”

  I thanked him.

  “Just a great classic American first sentence. A little bit Bellow, a little bit Hemingway. I suppose one could call it Bellingway-esque. Where did that come to you? How did that come to you?” I was about to answer when suddenly he said, “Look!” and pointed to a waitress walking by us with two plates. “The tuna!”

  I finished my glass of wine and Martin signaled for another glass.

  “Things were very bad then,” he said again, “but still we carried on. Things were very bad. Things were very bad. Things were very bad. We carried on. We carried on. It really draws you in. It has its own peculiar dynamic to it, its own sort of wondrous journey.”

  Just as I was about to tell him about Books II and III, the peppercorn tuna, wasabi mashed potatoes, string beans, and second glass of wine were placed in front of me. Martin looked at it as though it was his birthday cake and there were a hundred candles blazing. Within a few seconds I found out that he was not, like me, one of those gifted repulsive people who are able to eat and engage in conversation at the same time. This was good insofar as I didn’t get to see string bean between his teeth, but was bad insofar as we didn’t talk about the book—or about anything at all—for fifteen minutes. I was so disinterested in my meal that I ate but three small bites of the tuna; the rest I merely cut into tiny pieces and strategically placed in various far-flung arrondissements around the plate, under and over clumps of mashed potato that I had also similarly apportioned.

  A busboy took the plates away. The waitress asked if we wanted coffee and dessert, and Martin looked at his watch and said he didn’t have time.

  “What was I saying?” Martin asked me.

  “You were talking,” I reminded him, “about the first sentence?”

  He pulled the manuscript closer to him, to where his peppercorn tuna had been only moments before, and said: “ ‘Things were very bad then but still we carried on.’ ”

  He looked at me and I nodded. My knees were knocking each other, my stomach was growling for a hamburger, my blood was boiling, but outwardly I was smiling ever so sweetly.

  “Just a classic American first sentence, Fred. So deceptively complex. It really does jar you at first. It jars you, it unnerves you, with ‘very bad,’ then releases you with the tender, warmhearted ‘we carried on.’ This sentence alone is a masterwork of sublime Manichaeism.”

  He pulled out his corporate credit card and signed for the bill.

  “Things were very bad, things were very bad. We carried on. We carried on.”

  While I tried not to bite my lip so hard that it bled, he stood up and carefully—no, not carefully at all—put the title page back in its place, but when he wrapped the rubber band around the manuscript it snapped and the title page crumpled. So he left the title page on the table near the ashtray. Then he shoved the whole thing, now an unfettered and unprotected lumpy mess, back into his leather envelope.

  I followed him outside where he shook my hand and took off down the street. He didn’t even tell me that I’d hear from him again—I didn’t—and I was too brokenhearted and beaten to go back inside and order a hamburger.

  (Not one single agent asked to read the rest of Book I. An editor that I’d sent a query letter to wanted to read a ten-page excerpt, but after I sent it, he vanished into a black hole. This book, I told myself, must be too good.)

  I’m human, all too human. I have biases, prejudices. I have preconceived notions. I do not expect a three-year-old to be able to explain string theory to me. I do not expect a 450-pound woman to be able to run the hundred meters in less than ten seconds. When I walk into a sports bar to watch a football game, I expect there to be more men present than women and I expect these men to behave stupidly. I have, I confess painfully, a few ethnic biases, too, none of which I will give examples of. So try me at the World Court and hang me because I’m a racist, ageist, weightist, sexist Nazi.

  As I waited on the visitors’ side of the baggage claim area at Kennedy Airport on a Thursday afternoon for Second Gunman, I therefore had a preconceived notion of what Johnny Tyronne might look and act like. He would be big, he would be boisterous, he would have reddish blond hair and a fiery glint in the eye, he would fancy his pint, his football, and his birds. He might even have a large moustache. Perhaps I expected John L. Sullivan to get off the plane, find me, and give me a Guinness-tinged hug that would break my backbone in two.

  Second was going to stay on my living room couch until Sunday, then go home. Tomorrow Cynthia was going to visit her mother in West Virginia for a week, so we would not be in her way. The truth is, I didn’t want Second on my living room couch or anywhere in my living room or elsewhere in my apartment, but it’s hard to say no to a foreigner coming to your city, especially one you’ve beaten, all in all, for about $4,000 at poker.

  He had won over $200K in the Galaxy. Couldn’t he have stayed at a hotel?

  It was now an hour after his flight had landed. Maybe, I figured, he was being detained by Homeland Security after a drunken donny­brook with a few customs officials. So who is this guy, Wifey had asked me that morning, soon to occupy our couch and toilet seat? He’s just a friend of mine, I answered. He’s the one, I told her, who first started calling you Wifey as a matter of fact. And for this, she said, he gets to stay in our apartment? I reiterated that he was a friend but then confessed I really didn’t know the man.

  “Chip?” I heard. “Chip feckin’ Zero?!”

  My senses dulled from watching tourists wait for their luggage, I slowly turned around. I was beginning to feel that I, too, had just arrived from a long flight from overseas.

  “Second?”

  “That’s me.”

  I looked at him and immediately felt ashamed. Because he did look a little like John L. Sullivan. He was about six foot three, two hundred and ten or so pounds. He had reddish blond hair, broad shoulders. He had a fiery glint and even a moustache. I felt terrible and ashamed because it meant that some of my ethnic-, gender-, and age-based
prejudices were sometimes based on facts. I had wanted to be wrong and wasn’t.

  Second and I shook hands, talked about his flight, took each other in. He didn’t have much with him, just a beat-up suede jacket, a blue nylon knapsack, a black laptop bag.

  “Chip, it’s good to meet ya.” (It was a bit disconcerting to be called that in person, but as this was my online tag for about twelve hours a day it wasn’t that disconcerting.)

  He looked at me strangely, eyed me up and down. I looked like someone else to him, it seemed. But who?

  We got a taxi and headed toward Manhattan. It was evening now. The whole way home, I could tell, he was examining me and seeing a cartoon character. I didn’t mind because for the last nine months of my life, he’d been a cartoon character to me, too.

  Cynthia was asleep on the couch when we walked in. The TV was off, the lights were on.

  “Is she okay?” Second whispered. “You didn’t kill her, did you?”

  I gently nudged her awake and saw, as she came to, what had put her to sleep.

  Dead on Arrival was on her lap. (After the phone message from Deke Rivers, Cynthia had asked if she could finish reading it. “I don’t remember, though,” she admitted, “where I left off.” I reminded her it was at the second paragraph on page 48.) As she and Johnny made each other’s acquaintance—he called her Wifey to her face, which elicited a smile—I espied that she had made it up to page 61. I wondered what was on page 61 that was so boring that it had knocked her out cold, but then I recalled what Harry Carver had said about DOA: “It’s a lot like reading a close friend’s obituary.”