Famous Writers
I Have Known
A Novel
James
Magnuson
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
Dedication
To the memory of Wendy Weil
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Acknowledgments
Also by James Magnuson
Praise for Famous Writers I Have Known
Copyright
Prologue
MacArthur Federal Prison
December 12, 2002
Sometimes writing a sentence can be harder than serving one. At least that’s what our instructor, Dr. Pajerski, claims. She teaches at the local community college and meets with our writers’ group here at the minimum-security facility a couple times a month. She is on the far side of fifty, with graying hair that comes down to the middle of her back, and favors Indian prints. She has published several stories in quarterlies. I suspect that she wishes our souls were a little more whacked than they are.
Not that we’re a bunch of saints. We have our share of celebrity prisoners in the group—me, of course, as well as a former Secretary of the Treasury who’s found religion during his time here, and Brooks Nickerson, the high-flying mutual fund manager convicted of skimming millions from his clients. The others are pretty much your run-of-the-mill check kiters and drug offenders, though there’s a couple of them you wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley.
Every session three members of the group bring in work to be critiqued. Most of it’s dreck, frankly. The ex–Secretary of the Treasury is writing a novel about Christ’s thirty days in the wilderness with Satan, and Mr. Mutual Fund is halfway through a thriller about Swiss bank accounts. Nobody would dream of getting into Iowa with this crap, but Dr. Pajerski always finds a way to say something good about everything. She goes to the blackboard to lead us through an explanation of Freytag’s triangle, the classic theory of dramatic action. The Secretary of the Treasury, suck-up that he is, takes notes furiously. About half the chuckleheads in the room are nursing erotic fantasies about her, but he’s got it bad.
We sit on tiny chairs donated by some long-defunct elementary school and through the thin walls we can hear the clanging of weights in the gym next door. I’m aware that my presence in the class has made it awkward for Dr. Pajerski from time to time. I told her at the start that she shouldn’t treat me differently than anyone else, but how could she not be aware that I’ve nurtured some of the most brilliant young talents in the country in my time, a far cry from these bush league scribblers?
None of that matters now. Despite all of my fame, the reality is, I’ve still got a lot to learn, and I am amazed at what a struggle it is. I type away nine or ten hours a day. For the others in the group, writing is pretty much a hobby, a pleasant way to pass the time, but for me, it’s a matter of honor. You’ve probably already read a lot of those slanderous articles about me. But there are always two sides to every story, right? There are those in high places who would pay good money to keep my mouth shut about all this, but it’s too late for that. No doubt some of you will pick up this book for its gossip value, to see me take cheap shots at a couple of the biggest names in the literary world. You won’t be disappointed, but I can assure you, my friends, I’m after bigger game than that. For starters, I’m going to have to take you back about five years, to 1997 and one sizzling August day in the Big Apple.
Chapter One
Isat in a pizza joint on Eighth Avenue, fingering the doctored lotto ticket. It was a piece of art, a real Leonardo da Vinci, but it wasn’t going to do me a lot of good if the mark didn’t show with his money. It had been twenty minutes and it was starting to look as if I’d been blown off. Which was not a big surprise, given the way Barry had screwed up the works.
The place smelled of burnt crust and oregano. It was the middle of the afternoon and business was dragging. A bag lady had all her loose change out on one of the tables, moving her grimy dimes around like she was planning D-day. Up front a couple of teenage girls shook garlic on their slices, flirting with the big Rasta man behind the counter while they waited for their cheese to cool.
I sipped at my Sprite and straightened my Golden Gopher tie in the mirror on the far wall. With my Ronald Reagan haircut and my clunky L.L.Bean shoes I couldn’t have looked like more of a rube. Which was the point. My name for the day was Harold. It was my first time in New York. I was here for the Outdoor World Expo to sell some of the handcrafted canoes that me and my Chippewa compadres had made back in Minnesota. Of all the stories I’d made up about myself in my life, I was sort of proud of this one.
A cab had been parked at the curb on the far side of the street for the past five minutes. I figured it had to be Barry, but I just ignored him. If I was waiting, he could wait. A little carbon monoxide might sober him up a bit.
I shoved the lottery ticket back in my shirt pocket and picked up the Daily News. Giuliani was cracking down on the squeegee men and some guy named Bobby Bonilla was playing third for the Mets. There was a big photo of the president wailing away on his saxophone, backing up Bruce Springsteen in Madison Square Garden. I’d been away for a while. After spending the better part of the nineties in the slammer for various escapades, New York felt like a whole other world.
Just as I was turning to the article on Demi Moore and her big comeback, a tap on my shoulder nearly made me jump out of my chair. The mark stood over me, grinning, his gym bag swinging at his side.
“Hey, Joey,” I said, “how you doin’?”
He slid his bag under the table and took the seat opposite me, looking all sly and happy. I should give Barry some credit. When it came to picking a mooch, he had quite the eye. The guy was perfect. The suit must have set him back at least a grand and he was flashing more big rings than Donald Trump. He was weight-lifter muscly, but not tall. Think Tony Danza and knock seventy points off the IQ.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “There was a big line at the bank.”
“They didn’t give you any trouble?”
“No, no trouble.” Up front the girls had disappeared. The Rasta man scraped out the ovens with a long brush while reggae music played on the radio. “So, Harold, you still got the ticket?”
I tapped my shirt pocket. “Right here.”
“You mind if I have another look?”
“No problemo.”
I handed it to him and he ran his thumbs across the smooth surface, brooding. I didn’t like it that he seemed to be thinking so much.
“Can I see the paper?”
“Sure.”
I shoved the Daily News across the table and he flipped it over. The winning numbers were printed across the top of the back page, above the photo of Derek Jeter sliding under the tag at home. Joey lined the ticket up under the numbers in the paper, just to be sure.
“Still look all right?” I said.
“Still does,” he said. “And the best thing about it, it still says one-point-two mill
ion.”
I’ve pulled off a lot of scams in my life, but what I’ve always loved about this one was how simple it was. You go out in the morning, buy a paper, and look up the winning numbers for the day. Then you go into your local luncheonette, buy a lottery ticket, requesting the same numbers.
Legally, those numbers are no longer valid, since they were issued after the public announcement, but if you’ve got a steady hand and know what you’re doing, it shouldn’t take you more than twenty minutes to alter the date so that no one without an X-ray machine and a team of FBI-trained sniffer dogs would be able to tell the difference.
“So where’d you buy this?” he said.
“At the newsstand. In the hotel.”
He turned the ticket over and started reading the fine print. It took him a while. Like I said before, the guy was probably a taco short of a combination plate. Or was he getting cold feet? Light flashed off one of the taxi windows on the far side of the street. My stomach churned. The last thing I needed now was Barry doing something stupid.
“When you checked the paper and saw what you had . . . you must have about had a heart attack.”
“Oh, my goodness,” I said. “I was shaking all over.”
“So what did you do?”
“What did I do? I didn’t know what to do. I went back up to my room. Started throwing pillows around, jumping up and down . . . it was embarrassing. You’ve got to understand, I’ve never won anything, ever, even as a little kid, and this . . . this was a life-changer. I was trying to think, who can I call? But then I realized, I couldn’t call anybody. Because I couldn’t cash it.”
“Well, you could cash it,” Joey said.
I was silent for a second. The bag lady waddled out into the sunshine. The calzones in the glass cases looked like dozing collies. “I could cash it if I wanted to give it all to my wife and her divorce lawyer.”
“I know, Harold, you told me all that, but you’ve got to be exaggerating. They wouldn’t get all of it.”
I rubbed at the grease spot on my Golden Gopher tie. “But I don’t want them to get any of it. The woman sleeps with our choir director for two years, she’s getting the house, the cabin on the lake, half the canoe business . . .”
Joey hunched over the table, idly scratching at the numbers on the ticket. I couldn’t believe it. What a son of a bitch. I grabbed the ticket away from him and waved it in his face.
“I would rather tear it up right now and walk away than let her have one cent of it, you know what I’m saying?”
Joey put a hand up to calm me. “Hey, it’s okay. I was just asking.”
I slipped the ticket back in my pocket. Up front, Rasta Man peered at us through his dreadlocks, jabbing at a mound of dough and then pounding it flat.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know how crazy all this must sound to you. I don’t want to get in trouble. I don’t want you to get in trouble. It’s just that when I saw you and your friend at the bar in the hotel . . .”
“That idiot? He’s no friend of mine. I just met the guy.”
“Whatever. But you seemed like upstanding, respectable people. Maybe it’s too goofy of me to think I could ask a couple of total strangers to solve all my problems, but what do I know about the way the world works? I make canoes for a living. For a month, every time I came home and my wife was on the phone, she’d hang up real quick. I just figured she must have been planning my surprise birthday party . . .”
I started to cry. It’s not something I can pull off all the time, but when I get worked up, I can be convincing—the trembling chin, the moist eyes, a real tear trickling down my cheek.
“Shit,” Joey said. He reached across to put a hand on my arm. “You know what I say? I say screw the bitch! You hear me, Harold? I say screw her!” He took a glance over his shoulder to be sure no one was watching. Rasta Man swung to the music, spinning the pizza dough as if it was a limp Frisbee.
Joey reached into his jacket and pulled out a thick envelope. He offered it to me under the table. I groped for a moment, found his knee, then his hand, then the envelope. It had a nice heft to it. I kept it low and out of sight, checking the contents. It was all hundred-dollar bills, so crisp and new they looked like play money.
“You don’t need to count it,” he said. “It’s all there. Ten thousand dollars. Just what you asked for, right? I’m trusting you with it, Harold.” I wiped away a tear with a knuckle. “The deal is this. You give me the ticket and you wait right here. I saw a pay phone back about a block or so. I’m going to go call these lottery guys, okay? And when I come back, we’re going to get you all set up. We split the money fifty-fifty, just like we agreed. I’ll show you how to open up an account your wife’s never going to find in a million years. How does that sound?”
“It sounds good,” I said.
He put his palm out. I laid the ticket in it. Jimmy Cliff was belting “The Harder They Come” over the radio. Joey slid from his chair and retrieved his gym bag. “And then maybe we’ll go out and buy you a couple of decent ties,” he said.
He gave a thumbs-up to Rasta Man on his way out. I sat for a moment, draining my Sprite, and then pushed to my feet. As I leaned over to shove a buck tip under the napkin dispenser, I spied a flash of something on Joey’s chair. A bunch of quarters and dimes glistened in the bucket seat, spill from his trousers, I figured. There was something else too—a key with a blocky red top and a number etched in the plastic.
It was a locker key and probably useless to anyone who didn’t know where the locker was, but what can I say? I’m a collector. It’s a weakness of mine. I scooped up the coins and the key and shoveled them into my pocket.
I walked to the door of the pizzeria and peered out, making sure the coast was clear. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but women pawing through open bins of clothing.
The cab on the far side of the street edged into traffic and then did a screeching U-ey in front of a city bus. The back door swung open as the taxi skittered to the curb. Head down, I hustled across the sidewalk and hopped in.
I slammed the door shut behind me. Barry hung to one of the straps, looking eager as a puppy.
“So how’d it go?”
“Just fine,” I said. “No thanks to you.”
“What do you mean by that?” Barry was a big man and was scrunched up against the window so he could extend his bad leg.
“I’ll give you three guesses,” I said. The turbaned driver stared at us in the mirror. “Ninety-fifth and Broadway!” I hollered at him.
I’d first met Barry at the Children’s Center on 104th Street in New York when we were twelve. My foster parents had managed to get themselves tossed into jail for welfare fraud and Barry was a runaway the cops had picked up in Port Authority.
In our dormitory, Barry inspired awe. He was red-haired, nearly a foot taller than anyone else, and gave killer Indian rope burns to anyone who tried to buck him. He was the closest thing to a professional criminal any of the rest of us had ever known.
I, on the other hand, was a study in pathos, your basic drowned rat. I was the kind of kid Jesus Christ Himself would have been tempted to pick on. Every day we marched across to Central Park where our counselor, a sullen 260-pound tackle on the Jets taxi squad, would make us run pass patterns. His greatest pleasure in life was seeing if he could drill me in the back of the head with a ninety-mile-an-hour spiral.
My only defense was that I was a world-class liar. If I didn’t have my homework done, I had a story. If I was supposed to go down to Metropolitan Hospital with my dorky social worker to get a battery of shots, I had a story. When the other kids in the dorm ragged me about why no one ever came to see me on visiting days, I made up this tale about how my father was flying secret missions over Russia, but when he came back he was going to take me to live in a big house we owned on the beach on Long Island with its own go-kart track, indoor basketball court, and heated swimming pool. At night, I told them, we let Doberman pinschers out to roam the ground
s, dogs that had their vocal cords cut so in case any robbers tried to break in there would be no warning bark before the dogs attacked. Barry ruled the roost in that dormitory, but he was impressed with my powers of invention.
We flew up Eleventh Avenue, hitting every pothole in sight. Neither of us had said a word for ten blocks.
“This the way you’re going to be all day?” Barry said.
“You blame me?”
“You think you might be getting a little histrionic here, Frankie?”
That was the way he talked. Barry was big on self-improvement. He had one of those calendars where you learn a new word every day. He was always trying to work them into conversation, words like purported and sesquicentennial.
“Histrionic? What do you mean by histrionic? Rule number one, you’re never supposed to drink with the mark. Two, what was this quizzing me about what part of Minnesota was I from?”
“I was just playing with you, man.”
“Hell if you were! You were trying to show me up! It was just your little way of letting me know just how beneath you it all was. All that bullshit about how you had some cousin in Cloquet, and did I know where Cloquet was . . . I don’t know bupkus about Minnesota!” I tugged at the knot of my Golden Gopher tie. “And then, just to top it all off, you go and spill scotch on the man’s shoes.”
“I know. It wasn’t the smoothest.”
“The smoothest? It was a disaster! I know you think we’re supposed to be big time, way too good for these penny-ante operations, but goddamn it, I’m trying to put some cash in our pockets.”
“I take your point,” he said. A dozen cabs wove back and forth in front of us like a school of dolphins. “So you got the money?”
“Yeah. I got the money.”
“You mind me taking a look at it?”
I pulled the envelope out of my back pocket and handed it to him. He held the envelope between his knees, counting the Franklins. “So what’s this?”
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