We were down on Padre Island. He and I were taking a walk out on the pier at sunset. Ramona had gone back to the hotel room to make phone calls.
The place was a far cry from Jones Beach. There were shitty little waves and way out in the Gulf you could see oil derricks sticking up like the tips of witches’ hats. There were a lot of Mexican fishermen sitting in folding chairs along the railing with bait buckets and long springy rods, and one of the guys was wrestling his hook out of the mouth of a hardhead catfish with a pair of pliers.
“So V.S.,” Rex said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“That night on Cavett. Were you drunk?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I was ripped out of my mind.” I glanced at him. He tapped his cane along the wet planks of the pier, not looking at me. “Listen, Rex, I don’t even know how to say this—”
“You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “It’s over. Ancient history.” Gulls screamed, dropping shells. “You know one thing, though? I don’t think Cavett did a very good job of refereeing the whole thing.”
“I don’t think so either,” I said. “I think he was egging us on. Remember how he would twirl that little pencil of his? And that smirky little smile?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I’m telling you, the guy was a real little Smurf.” Down on the sand below us, an old woman built a sand castle with a couple of grandchildren. “I don’t even remember what we were fighting about.”
“The Pulitzer Prize,” Rex said, as if I were the dumbest man in the world.
“Oh, right. Can you believe that? They give those things to cartoonists!”
I knew that wasn’t exactly a brilliant thing to say as soon as it was out of my mouth. The sun was setting blood-red behind the clouds and some of the fishermen were starting to pack up for the day.
“So did you go to the ceremony?” I asked.
“I did.”
“And how was it?”
“Nice enough. There was a fancy dinner.”
“And did you give a speech?”
“A short one.”
“I’ll bet you handled it well,” I said.
A great shout went up behind us. A teenage boy had caught a stingray that flopped back and forth on the end of his line while his friends ran for cover.
“I should have never filed that lawsuit.”
“I will say, you took a pretty big chunk out of my hide.”
“But, Jesus, some of the things you said about me . . .”
“I know,” I said. “Pretty out of line.”
We’d come to the end of the pier. All along the beach bits of plastic glistened like diamonds and a mattress slid back and forth in the surf.
“Hell,” Rex said, “when you made that remark about catamites? I didn’t even know what they were.”
“I’m not sure I did either,” I said.
He gave me a quick look and then laughed. It wasn’t a big laugh, but it was enough to make me laugh too. Before you knew it, we were both cackling away like what I’d just said was the funniest joke anyone had ever made. Rex roared so hard tears came to his eyes. I honestly thought he might pee in his pants, the way he was stomping around.
We would try to stop, but all we had to do was look at one another and away we’d go again. We might have kept it up forever if a gull hadn’t swooped in and nearly taken our heads off.
I wiped a bit of spittle from the corner of my mouth. “You know that thing I said about making scrapple? I want to apologize for that. I’ll bet it’s damn interesting.”
“It is,” he said.
“You know when you had me on the floor?”
“Yeah?”
“With your hands on my throat? I thought I was a goner. Right there on national television.”
His eyes got all dark. “We made such fools of ourselves.”
“I know.”
“So was I the reason?” His face glowed in the setting sun and his jacket was zipped up to his chin. With his jaw set the way it was, he looked like the Indian chief you used to see on a nickel.
“The reason for what?”
“The reason you stopped writing.”
Through the planks I could see the dirty water rippling in and out. I didn’t speak for several seconds, letting him twist in the wind. “God knows, Rex,” I said. “A lot of things went into it.”
One bit of good news was that my getting Rex the dog turned out to be a stroke of genius. He loved the little mutt. Sometimes Rex would even bring the dog along with us on our trips, and we’d have to pull over at rest stops so it could take a whiz and run around barking at squirrels. Sometimes I’d hear Rex talking to the dog in the backseat and sometimes, when I looked back there, I’d see the dog licking away at his face. According to Ramona, it even slept in the bed with him at night, and in the evenings it would sit in Rex’s lap and let him scratch its belly while they watched Jim Lehrer.
To tell you the truth, it was a nasty little animal. It had foul breath, nipped at your ankles when you weren’t looking, and raised a horrible ruckus every time anybody came in. It got on both women’s nerves, but it really drove the cook crazy. Dranka was the one who had to clean up after it, and when she was around, it would retreat under the table and start growling. God knows what went on between the two of them when the rest of us weren’t there.
I tried to make it up to her as best I could. Whenever I went over to Rex’s for those lousy dinners, I’d try to slip a twenty-dollar bill in her apron pocket. I told her it was just a little appreciation for all she did. It worked pretty well. In our odd way, we were almost becoming friends. One of the basic rules in my profession is that if you’re planning to scam a guy, you don’t want to piss off his cook.
This being famous, honestly, everybody should try it. Basically I’d been despised my whole life, sometimes with good reason, so being revered was quite the eye-opener.
Every afternoon Mildred hobbled up the stairs to bring me my hot chocolate. Every time I showed up at the institute, Anton, the security guard, would rouse himself out of his chair, bowing and scraping like I was the King of England. Nick kept me for a half hour one morning, telling me how Eat Your Wheaties had been his sister’s favorite book. When she was dying of some freaky kidney deal he would go by the hospital and read her a few pages until she went to sleep; they were just three pages from the end when she passed away. By the time Nick finished telling me this, we both had tears in our eyes.
Then, of course, there was Wayne. I’ll admit it, he got pretty annoying, poking his head in my office every couple of hours. The man was deceptive. At first he’d look like he was on the verge of bolting, all sheepish and apologetic, half in the door, half out. “I hope I’m not interrupting,” he’d say, but if you gave him the slightest bit of encouragement, you were stuck for forty-five minutes.
“Is it a little warm in here?” he’d say. “Maybe we should turn down the thermostat.” Or: “We really need to get you a better lamp for that desk.” Or: “How’s that car running?” The guy was in a constant state of anxiety. All he wanted was for me to like him. And I did like him, but Christ Almighty.
The guy was a bundle of nerves and nothing made him jumpier than the reading I was scheduled to give. We must have gone over the details a half dozen times—how long I should read, whether I wanted to take questions or not, what he should say in his opening remarks.
It sounded as if he’d been slaving away on that damn introduction for months, even though our audience was just going to be Rex and the students. The guy would actually get a little teary-eyed when he talked about it, how this was probably going to be the high point of his life, sharing the podium with a genius like me. Meanwhile, all I was worried about was pronouncing all the words right.
About the only one who wasn’t sucking up to me was Ramona.
She usually came by the institute just a couple times a week, but when she did, there was a constant parade of people angling for Schoening
er’s money. Because my office was right next to hers, I got to see them all—Scottish headmasters in kilts, ex-senators with their four-hundred-dollar haircuts, ruddy marine biologists in knitted sweaters, Ivy League librarians in tiny red-framed reading glasses, African tribesmen, mountain climbers with fancy English accents, survivors of atrocities around the globe.
I only caught bits of conversation when they were in the hallway, but I could tell Ramona had a knack for giving people the heave-ho without ever being rude. This was the big leagues. Some of the people were flatterers, others acted like you were supposed to get down on your knees to kiss their rings. Some treated Ramona as if she was their long-lost daughter, others were mysteriously pissed off. There were cacklers, back-slappers, and those who spoke in breathy whispers. Some tried to make it fun. Others used the old trick of acting as if they already had a deal when they didn’t, and became dumbstruck when Ramona had to point it out to them.
I had no idea how many great things there were to be done in the world! And all it took was money! It was a real education for me. Sometimes eavesdropping on all this made me feel like a first-grader who’d never learned his ABCs.
Was I intimidated by the competition? I might have been, except that I had a couple of things going for me that none of them had: not only did I have V. S. Mohle as my sword and shield, but I was the guy who had given Rex his dog.
So how were my classes going? They were pretty dicey, to tell you the truth. With regular coaching from Wayne, I was beginning to pick up some of the creative writing lingo, but there was no way I was going to get it all down in a few short weeks. I was flying by the seat of my pants. The students would be jabbering away about the third person versus the first person and I’d be wondering, where did the second person go? Sometimes when they argued about some literary dispute, my mind would go into a cloud, like it used to when I was in New York and found myself in a subway car where everyone was speaking Cantonese.
I’d been able to coast through September on the exercises Wayne had recommended, plus, of course, my own stories. The kids loved them—all my tales of the Korean grocer chasing us down Broadway with a broom, of our sneaking into movie theaters in Times Square, of how when you’d have a big snow in New York the whole city would shut down and we’d take cookie sheets, cardboard boxes, whatever we could get our hands on, and go sledding in Riverside all day long.
They liked to hear about when I got famous too, about the time Brigitte Bardot showed up unannounced at my island in Maine to plead with me to join her in her crusade to save the world’s endangered species, about Marlon Brando sending me the motorcycle jacket he wore in The Wild Ones for my fortieth birthday, about the night I spent drinking with Little Richard and Ernest Hemingway.
Did the students know about the feud between Rex and me? Of course they did. No one said anything, but you could feel it in the air. I’m sure they were talking among themselves. Why wouldn’t they? Here they were, with ringside seats for the final round of one of the great heavyweight bouts in literary history.
The problem was when their stories came in, because what they turned in weren’t stories. Nothing happened in them. A divorced father buys a Christmas tree for his kids and when he tries to decorate it, the lights won’t work. A Mississippi tractor driver finds an Indian arrowhead while he’s plowing, but it slips out his overalls that night while he’s playing the slots at the casino. A girl visits her father’s grave in the North woods, gets high, has a flat on her way back to her mom’s place, and she doesn’t have a jack. It sure wasn’t Swiss Family Robinson.
The pieces that weren’t tearjerkers were so clever they made your teeth hurt. Nick wrote this thing where Elijah’s in the desert, being fed by ravens, when Elvis Presley shows up in a pink Cadillac, fresh from Vegas, stoned out of his mind on pills and speaking Aramaic.
If reading these suckers was tough, the class discussions were tougher. The rule seemed to be that when your story was being workshopped, you’ve got to sit there and not say a word, while everyone in the room goes around and says any damn thing about it that comes into his head.
They had no end of suggestions. More of the mother. Less of the mother. Turn the mother into an aunt. Change to third person. Use more subordinate clauses. Raise the stakes. Cut the backstory. Fill us in on the narrator’s history. Where they really went nuts, though, was when they caught somebody using a cliché. Apparently it was considered worse than murdering your children. I wasn’t going to mention it, but for my money, these stories could have used a few more clichés. It’s always darkest before the dawn, say, or it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. Something for you to hold on to. Mel had turned in four pages that read like the instructions you fish out of a prescription bottle.
As far as my responses went, I had worked up a couple of good genius expressions. The first was to put my fingers to my temples and screw up my face like I was passing a world-record turd and then, without warning, sit bolt-upright in my chair, bang my forehead with my fist, and shout, “I’ve got it!” The other was to get this faraway look in my eye and let my arm slowly float off the table and start making soft little sounds like a man in touch with the gods.
I had learned a couple of important lessons. I couldn’t get away with merely echoing what the students said, and giving my honest opinion wasn’t the best idea. When I suggested that it would be interesting if LaTasha made her Mississippi tractor driver a woman instead of a man, she looked as me as if I’d been whacked a few too many times with the Dumb Stick. I learned to keep it cryptic.
One of my favorite bits was to flip through a manuscript and randomly pick out a word. “Take a look at page seven,” I would say. “Three lines down. You see the word ‘ploddingly’? You need to go home tonight and spend an hour meditating on exactly what that means and I think the whole story will open up for you.”
They’d made it pretty clear to me from the start that they expected written comments. The idea scared me to death. What I decided to do was to mark up the stories with different-colored pens. I drew arrows and circled paragraphs, slashed Zorro-like Z’s through long passages of dialogue. I added stars and checks of various sizes, tossing in a few question marks when there was room. By the time I finished, some of the pages looked like the freeway maps to downtown L.A.
Nick and Bryn were the first to get the marked-up manuscripts turned back to them. Their eyes got big as pie tins. As they leafed their way through the Technicolored pages, their faces got paler and paler. Bryn quietly slipped her story into her backpack, but Nick finally got up his nerve to say something.
“I’m just curious,” he said, his voice shaking, “about these marks.”
“Oh, you don’t need to worry about that,” I said. “Those are just my reading notes to myself.”
My ace in the hole was just how in awe of me they were, despite my various screwups. It was nice that they would leave little gifts outside my office—a bottle of fine scotch, a handpicked bouquet, a couple of peyote buttons in a hand-carved Mexican box, a slender volume of short stories by some glum-looking loser you’ve never heard of—but what really made it great was the hush when I walked into the room.
I turned out to be so much wittier than I thought I was. My most casual remarks turned out to have hidden depths. I had a dog once when I was a kid and he didn’t look at me with half the admiration these kids did, plus I had to feed the dog. I had an aura and somehow it felt as if I was just getting my due.
The kids were shy around me. It was a couple weeks after Rex and Ramona and I had gotten back from our trip to the coast that Nick finally got up enough nerve to ask the question they were all dying to ask.
“So why did you quit writing?”
The room got quiet real fast. Dominique glared at him and LaTasha looked like she wanted to crawl under the table. Everyone knew what he was asking. He wanted to know about my feud with Schoeninger, but damned if I was going near that one.
�
�No, no, that’s all right.” I pressed my palms together in front of my lips, considering what to do. I could have just refused to answer. But there’s one thing that most people don’t understand about con artists. The key to getting people to show confidence in you is for you to show confidence in them.
I got up from the table and went to close the door. They all stared at me like a nest of young owls. “So why did I quit writing? I can trust you to never repeat this to anyone?”
Around the table they were all nodding and mumbling. I scrutinized them for three or four seconds, then went to the window and gazed out at the parking lot, brooding. I rubbed my hair and finally turned back to face them.
“I suppose, my friends, I quit writing because I got tired of feeling as if I was a fraud. After Eat Your Wheaties came out, my life turned into a three-ring circus. Everyone wanted a piece of me. I was getting invitations to the Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn, Sinatra called to see if he could get me to cut an album with him . . . I didn’t tell you about that? I thought I did. Then I got myself caught up in some real messes. It was madness. I started drinking. I started doing a little drugs.”
How were they taking all this? It was hard to tell. Except for LaTasha, who was sneaking me little sympathetic smiles, no one would look at me. They seemed a little stricken and embarrassed. Mercedes had her head bowed as if she might be praying. Mel kept gritting his teeth and every so often he’d surreptitiously thumb through the copies of his story, checking on the comments the others had made on his manuscript.
“There was no time to write, and even when there was time, I couldn’t focus. I’d work on a single page for hours, and at the end of the day I’d look at it and realize that it was nothing but an imitation of something I’d done five years before. I was turning into a caricature of myself. I’d wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and think, Who is this guy? That’s why I moved to Maine and cut myself off from everyone. I was trying to get in touch with that still, inner voice.”
Famous Writers I Have Known Page 12
