by Ted Heller
When I realized I had no paper to print on, I hobbled back downstairs and told the desk guy I needed paper and saw hail the size of grapes pelting the windows in the lobby. I was given forty sheets of hotel stationery: the paper wasn’t the right size and wasn’t blank on both sides but it was all I had, and when I went back upstairs I took a long pull from my bottle of whiskey. I put the paper in the printer and pushed PRINT but the paper got jammed. I fished it out, tried again. Another jam. Another pull. I tried to print again and a page came out, but it was illegible. Aha! I believed I knew what the problem was and I adjusted a few things and pressed PRINT again. Two pages glided out as gracefully as a champion pairs dancing team taking to the ice, and then my phone rang.
“I’m afraid, sir,” it was the guy at the desk telling me, “that we were not able to get you a taxi due to the weather.”
“And you’re telling me this now?!” I yelled. Forty-five minutes to the reading.
I slammed the phone down. I’d have to walk to the Creaky Lank or whatever it was called. And I’d have to start out in a few minutes. I selected twenty pages to print and began to change clothing. I was gazing at the now grape-jelly-colored bruise on my thigh when I heard a violent thwacking noise . . . it was my printer choking on twenty pages of paper all at once.
It wasn’t going to work.
I’d have to, I now realized, recite Chapter One of Book I of the Trilogy and I changed, secreted what was left of the whiskey into mouth and into my new parka, and got going. What I’m going to read now, I would announce, was something that I originally wrote here in London many years ago and have returned to London to write again. I hope you like it.
I limped through the dark and deserted frigid streets and arrived only ten minutes late. By the time I got there my bottle was empty. And so, pretty much, was the Leaky Crank.
Things now begin to take an unfortunate turn.
I approached the tall, thin blond bartender, who told me in an offhand manner that he was Nigel, and I ordered a Scotch and told him I was Frank Dixon. Neither relieved, overjoyed, nor interested to hear this, he said, “Yes, so?” I told him that I was here to read my book. He poured the Scotch, looked at me and said, “So where’s your book then? . . . Start reading!” He assumed, I could tell, that I was going to just open up a book and start reading to myself.
It wasn’t your classic London pub, it was more like a student lounge in a community college. Large, dumpy chairs and couches, wobbly wooden coffee tables and side tables, floppy chenille pillows, stained dhurries on the floor, posters for plays that had closed ten years ago. The jukebox was on, and there were only six people present, four men and two women, not including the staff (Nigel and his barmaid, a slatternly, raven-haired woman). One of the patrons resembled Frank Lloyd Wright at his most imperious looking—he had the Telegraph on his lap and was murmuring to himself. It wasn’t a promising picture.
“No, I have a public reading to do here,” I said to Nigel. “Didn’t Penelope from Norwich Cairn call to arrange this?” He summoned over Moira, the raven-haired slattern, and they chatted, then he came back to me and said, “There was a call like that, but we’re not really so keen on that sort of booky stuff here.”
“I came to London strictly for this reading,” I lied. “They told me they put a rather large advert in some paper called The Pavement?”
At his table Frank Lloyd Wright, probing his ear with a long, slender finger but still able to listen in, let out a guffaw that readjusted the ice in my tumbler.
“The Pivement?” Nigel echoed incredulously. “That’s a newspaper for homeless people!”
Well, the homeless read too, I wanted to tell Nigel. Instead I pointed to the patrons and said, “For all we know, these people could be here to hear me read.”
“Who, them?” he said, pouring me another drink. “No, they’re always here.”
Moira chimed in good-naturedly: “Oh, Nige, let ’im read ’is book!”
I said, “I’ll read but do I have to pay for my drinks?” He shook his head and I said, “Then can I have another?” He poured and I said, “Can you at least turn off the music for this?”
Why did this have to happen to me? Why did I ever want to be a writer? Not only was I a battering ram, I was also the wall the thing was battering. The best thing that could have ever happened to me would have been if I’d just failed outright. Or better yet, I should never have committed one word to paper. This perverse desire of mine to matter was destroying me.
Moira got up in front of everyone, brushed her black hair back with her hand, clanked a pint glass with a knife and said, “Awright, everybody, we got a real special guest here tonight who flew all the way from Amerryca just to read. ’is name is . . . What’s your name again?”
I stammered out my name, and the door opened and a couple, all bundled up, blew in. Moira said to them, “Jeff! Anna! Are you ’ere for the reading?” and Anna answered, “What reading?”
I staggered over to a patch of dimly lit space between two couches. Moira said to Nigel, “Nige, turn the music OFF!”
“What I’m going to read now,” I announced in a Dewars-mellowed tone, “was something that I originally wrote here in London many years ago and have returned to London to write again. I hope you like it.” Frank Lloyd blurrily folded his Telegraph and clasped his long hands on his table.
“I hope I like it too!” another man sitting by himself said to a chuckle or two.
“Ohhh, Trev!” Frank Lloyd moaned to him. “Will you please shut up for once in your godforsaken insufferable life! Everyone is so bloody tired of it!”
The Clanky Reek Pub was whirling. But I began . . .
“Things were very bad then but still we carried on. Time is a . . .”
It didn’t sound right.
I said, “Let me try that again.” I thought a beat and then said, “Then things were still very bad but we carried on. Time is a funny thing . . .” That didn’t sound right either.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, opened them and began again.
“We then carried things on very bad but . . . No. The very things we carried then were still but bad. A funny thing is time . . .”
I had the undivided attention of everyone except for Moira, who was vigorously polishing a side table. It was time to move on to the next sentence, which was . . . which was . . .
There was a second sentence—it was out there somewhere, I’d written it, it did exist—but it wasn’t coming to me. (Ironically, it had something to do with the quirky nature of time and memory.) It quickly occurred to me that I could just segue into the first sentence of Book 2 of the Trilogy and I did so, but lost the thread right in the middle of it, whereupon I remembered the second part of the first sentence of Book 3, so I cut and pasted them together to form one whole unlovely unit. My mind racing, I dashed to a fine sentence I’d remembered earlier in the day in the park and said it aloud: “And then I saw famous Round Pond for the first time, which was just that, a round fucking pond.” After that, nothing came to me. Not a syllable. “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” by Dusty Springfield came on—to that I could remember all the words—and had this been a Hugh Grant or Colin Firth romantic comedy I would have begun singing along and everybody would have joined in and adored me. Roll credits.
“And that,” I announced sheepishly to all present, “is as far as I’ve gotten. But . . . but when I finish it I would love to come back to London and read it to you.”
There was a smattering of applause from everyone, led by Moira, who’d tucked her rag and Lemon Pledge into her armpits just so she could clap.
I went back to the bar, ordered another drink and sunk my head into my hands.
Oh, Lonnie Beale, why hath I forsaken thee?
“This one,” Nigel said, “I’m afraid I’ve got to charge you for.”
I drank it and reeled to the door to leave. Had I not been drinking, I think I still would have been reeling. Outside, the ground was frozen and the
night was silver, ghostly, and daunting. As I gazed into this Shackletonian bleakness, Frank Lloyd Wright called out: “When you finish your book, I’ll be sure to buy a copy.”
I believe he really meant it.
The next morning I limped down to a hospital on Royal Hospital Road, where I was X-rayed, given thirty ultra-powerful prescription painkillers, and told I had a “savagely deep” thigh bruise and a “horribly brutal” hairline fracture.
I didn’t go to the library that day. I stayed inside my room and grooved on the awesome opiate high. I don’t know if the pills were supposed to kill the pain or simply make me not care about it. In the end, I don’t know which one happened.
Tomorrow my mistress was coming!
I nodded out with a bag of ice over my leg, and when I woke up I thought I’d urinated in the bed and was appalled. When I realized it was merely the melted ice, I took two more pills.
The snow and ice outside were melting. The temperature had risen to a balmy thirty-eight degrees.
Coated with sweat I crawled out of bed around dinnertime and went online and Googled “Odense Book Fair” and found there indeed was such a thing and that Greg Nolan had been in attendance . . . three months ago. Then I looked up Nuts on Amazon U.K. It had only been out two weeks but was, at that minute, ranked twelfth. “An engaging and thoroughly ferocious read,” the Observer called it. Poker Book Lover, from Wigan, had given it three stars and said: “I would have given this book five stars but Gerald Waverly comes across as so despicable, scheming and heartless that, in the end, I felt let down. Is there really scum like this out there? He makes Bernie Madoff look like Mother Teresa.”
Amazon itself weighed in:
AMAZON.CO.UK REVIEW
In his riveting memoir, Gerald Waverly, a self-professed “scheming sociopath, morally bankrupt confidence man, irredeemable oenophile and pathological liar” describes with bracing, nearly toxic wit how he used every devious trick in the book to win unfathomable amounts of money playing poker online. “I am the sort of nasty chap,” he warns us, “who when a woman tells me she recently got engaged, thinks of slicing her finger off for the ring.” Not for the squeamish, Waverly lets fall not one droplet of sweetness or sentiment. “These people weren’t people,” he writes of his marks, “they were suckers, fools, bank accounts waiting to be emptied.” And empty them he does. Going to hysterically elaborate lengths to cultivate friendships in order to destroy them, using an hilarious assortment of guises and tactics, the pitiless Waverly (he informs us he has a first at Cambridge in physics) confesses that the only tricks “I would not stoop to defraud another player were the ones that I had not yet thought of, and those were few.” By the end, Waverly ends up a millionaire, but it is he whose moral bank account has been emptied. Whether he realizes this or not is conveniently never mentioned.
It took me about three minutes of poking around to find out who Gerald Waverly’s editor was: Greg Nolan at Norwich Cairn.
I went into the Galaxy. But not to play. I found Second Gunman, who’d just won, he told me, $3K from Bjorn 2 Win in one hand, and I told him where I was and why. I found Kiss My Ace and told him that the other day Boca Barbie had been looking for him. “She found me,” he said.
I took three pills that evening, only two more than the recommended dose, and fell into a long fantasy/dream: I was at a fabulous PEN pool party at an exclusive resort in St. Barts; my date was Artsy Painter Gal, and all the writers, artists, and VIPs loved her. Richard Ford, Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, Gary Shteyngart, and the rest of them were there, drinking and lingering around the starlit pool and talking books, art, politics, and book contracts. Near a trellised wall Adam Gopnik and Anäis Nin were making out, and cavorting near the diving board were a naked Sal Rushdie and a naked Marty Amis and also naked James Frey and his naked date . . . who was the one and only Lilly! He was wheeling her around in a red wheelbarrow in the rain, and even though she was dead she was the life of the party. Damien Hirst came over and shook her hand and she thanked him for doing such a marvelous job preserving her. You finally made it, Chip, APG said to me. Great job. The Mitch Alboms were there; not Mitch Albom and a wife, but Mitch Albom and his very own deceased self, a sportswriter angel who’d descended from Heaven just for this shindig. Jonathan Franzen traipsed over with a blonde under each arm, and they had an Oprah Book Club sticker on each nipple. Great job, Frank, he said to me. Great job. Safran Foer or Dave Eggers came over and started talking in tiny footnotes that appeared at his ankles. He told me1. . . . I asked him, Huh? What do you mean? and he said2 . . . and walked away. Then James Frey wheeled Lilly over to me and she said to me, Did you hear about Jill Conway’s new book? (For a mangy, pathetic crackwhore who’d committed suicide, she didn’t look half-bad.) No, Lilly, I said to her, I haven’t. It’s another book about food, she told me. The book actually eats itself page by page as you read it! It’s going to turn postmodernism on its stomach. Molly Bloom, naked on a chaise longue and sipping a melting margarita, said to me, Yes, Frank, great job, yes, Frank, great job, great job, yes. I asked Artsy, What have I done? Why is everyone saying great job? and she smiled and said, This is your book party! You’re the guest of honor! Your poker memoir got published! “But I didn’t write a poker memoir!” I tried to say but couldn’t. Suddenly the party was over, and workers were sweeping up bottles, glasses, other orgiastic detritus, and all the scattered footnotes into dustpans, and I snapped out of it in my sweatsoaked sheets and it was Saturday morning in London and in a few hours the real Artsy Painter Gal would be landing at Heathrow.
It was all a big misunderstanding. That’s what it was.
I ate my half a scone, then gathered my possessions, including my notebooks and new laptop and printer, and moved into the double room, which had a nice view of lively Brompton Road. I took a shower—and I badly needed one after the previous clammy day.
By noon APG hadn’t shown up and I began to panic, but only just a bit. Planes were landing at Heathrow but there were many long delays.
At four I went to the Galaxy to see if she’d sent me an e-mail saying she’d changed her mind. There was no such e-mail.
Afraid to leave the room in case she showed up and found me absent, I didn’t even get my usual portion of rice that night. I just stayed in the room. Although I did start eating British candies from the hallway vending machine at regular half-hour intervals.
The phone rang at eight fifteen and I ran to pick it up. Darling, I expected to hear APG say breathlessly, there was a terrible foul-up with the flight and I’m in Cardiff now but will be in your arms in two hours. But it was a man’s voice on the other end: his name was Jean-Luc and he was calling from Gordon Ramsay’s and wondering why my party of two hadn’t shown up for dinner. “Because my party died today!” I said before I hung up on him.
I stayed in the room the next day and paced and paced and finally at noon took three more pills. At three the phone rang and it was someone from the River Café calling to confirm my reservation for two that night. “We’ll be there,” I promised her.
Outside the street was bustling and sunny even though all of London was turning into black, crystally mire. The Great Thaw. It was Sunday afternoon and people were out and shopping and slogging through what looked like ankle-high caviar.
I went online. There was no e-mail. I kept going online. Nothing.
Had Mr. Artsy Painter Gal found out about our assignation and thwarted the whole thing? Most of me hoped it was true: I longed to be with my loving wife in our comfortable home and wished I’d never set this absurd tryst up.
Two more pills and a few hours later I went onto the Galaxy, and there she was at a table in High, nonchalantly playing with four other people. She had just raked in $5,500—the cost of a first-class round trip airfare from L.A. to London—with a full boat, Queens full of 9s.
I stayed out in the ether and didn’t play.
Chip Zero: NH.
Artsy Painter Gal: Thnx.
Chip Zero:
Can you meet me at a PT asap?
Artsy Painter Gal: You know I’d follow you anywhere, baby!
A minute later it was just Artsy as the Icy Blonde and me as the Big Man at a table.
Chip Zero: So, uh, where are you?
Artsy Painter Gal: You know where I am.
Chip Zero: Where?
Artsy Painter Gal: I’m in London! With you!
Chip Zero [looking around and not seeing her anywhere in London]: You are?
Artsy Painter Gal: Yep. Where are YOU?
Chip Zero: I’m in London too. When did you get here?!
Artsy Painter Gal: At 9 a.m. yesterday just like I said I would, baby.
Chip Zero: What room are you in?
Artsy Painter Gal: I’m in your room of course!
WTF?!?! Was she in the single room that I’d abandoned a few hours before?
Chip Zero: I’m in Room 325 now.
Artsy Painter Gal: So am I. I’m with you, baby.
Chip Zero: I’m in London. I’m in Room 325. I’m here at the Royal Brompton Hotel. It’s Sunday. I’m here.
Artsy Painter Gal: And I’m with you. And it’s 80 degrees and sunny out, baby. And Mr. Artsy Painter Gal is with the kids in L.A. and Mrs. Chip Zero is doing whatever.
Chip Zero: Uh-huh. And?
Artsy Painter Gal: And we had a wonderful dinner at Gordon Ramsay’s last night and you and I made love all night and we walked all around today and went shopping. We cuddled tight in the room and tonight we’re going out to dinner again and we’ll do it all day and all night, baby. And tomorrow I’m going to paint while you write.
I had to quickly decide: do I take the moral high road here and make her think I was in New York after all and hadn’t really come to London and wasn’t in room 325 at the Royal Brompton and had not ever seriously believed we were actually going to commit adultery, or do I take the ignoble subterranean route and let her know where I am and plunge her face into a toilet bowl of guilt and reproach and flush the bowl over and over again? Do I just let her have it? I could, I realized, simply play her game, the talking-dirty-in-the-present-tense fantasy game, and say something like, “Yes, last night was wonderful, darling. You’re with me now and I’m kissing you and holding you tight, lover.” I’d definitely be saving face if I did that.