by Steve Hely
This school didn’t let me off the hook, though. There was in fact a conspiracy-minded subset that suggested the only reason I was on TV instead of, say, Alice Munro, was that the corporate types knew I wouldn’t say anything too “smart” that would seem condescending to loyal TV viewers.
• The Tarslaw-Is-a-Postmodern-Imp School, expressed on Slate by “Book Girl” Meg Bierst: Pete Tarslaw’s interview on last night’s episode of the ABC newsmagazine Dispatch is already becoming literary legend. Critics have leapt over themselves to denounce Tarslaw’s supposed “cynicism.”
They’re wrong. It’s true, Tarslaw’s honesty—about his writing methods, his disdain for readers, his fellow authors—was shocking. But that was exactly the point. Tarslaw is what the literary world has been waiting for: a genuine prankster. His responses were exactly what inane questions deserve: subtle jokes that pierce the ludicrous bubble of hype that surrounds young authors. Tarslaw is nothing less than the Borat of popular fiction.
She had to undercut it at the end by saying It’s a pity Tarslaw isn’t as interesting as a writer as he is as an interview subject. But still.
Unfortunately the first school seemed to be winning. Controversy Stage Four commenced.
4. Press contact
Seven hours or so, that’s how long it must take for a reporter to have coffee, eat a bagel, cruise the Internet, come across a story, decide to pursue it, and get someone’s cell phone number, because around four I got the first of a barrage of calls.
Back home by then, cooling off, I answered, and a woman identified herself as a reporter for Fox News. That’s who was first, and they deserve the credit. The reporter was also smart enough to play it off like she was on my side.
“This whole thing is crazy, huh? How do you feel about all these writers attacking you?” She said writers like a fifteen-year-old says parents.
Instinctively, I deployed the Pawson Method.
“Uh … [cough] … you know … [breathing sound, rising to a high pitch veering on sob, then dropping down, as though I’m courageously keeping together] … before I talk about this … I think I have to go home for a while.”
It didn’t work as well on reporters as it did on professors. She kept at me, so I mumbled, “I’m so sorry,” and hung up.
After a series of UNKNOWN NUMBERs, I answered one of David Borer’s calls.
“Dude, this is not good. Not good. I’m getting calls—it’s like a sinking submarine here! Damage control, dude, damage control.”
“Really? I mean, it was just an interview.”
“Dude, they’re talking lawyers over here. Okay? Lawyers! They’re drafting you an apology.”
“Apology for what? Everything I said was true.”
“This is coming from the top down. I have no control over this. This is beyond me—we’re on like a corporate level now. They’re making calls. You might have to apologize to Oprah.”
“What’d I do to her?”
“She’s just—that’s who you apologize to.”
Why were people so angry at me? Just because of a TV interview where I told the truth? So I’d written a bullshit novel and fessed up to Tinsley Honig—who cares?
Jealousy was part of it. Would-be writers who in their private fantasies imagined themselves issuing real, meaningful, literary pronouncements to Tinsley Honig were furious that I’d gotten the chance and blown it.
If this had played out like a standard controversy, we would’ve entered stage five, Apology, followed by the sixth and final stage, Editorial Closure, where the opinionated weigh in on what the whole business tells us about contemporary mores.
But there’s a way to complicate a controversy—to knock it off course and send it into more unpredictable terrain. It’s this: start making money for somebody.
The next morning, back at Kinko’s, I followed a whim and checked out a different Web site—the only Web site that really matters.
Amazon. And there I was taking off.
A few days before, sales of The Tornado Ashes Club had been ranked in the 16,000s. But now, suddenly, I was hovering around number 63.
Borer called again. But I heard no more talk of damage control. I heard about containment strategies.
By that afternoon, there was no more talk of apologies. There was talk of statements.
It wasn’t that people had stopped piling on. Back at Kinko’s, I read a post on Josh Holt Cready’s own blog, where he said, “Peter [sic] Tarslaw may have written. But he is not a writer. He knows nothing of writing. Of what that means. Of what that demands.”
That night, on NPR, they were doing a story about the whole thing. They’d been one of the calls I’d dodged, but they managed to get a quote from Preston Brooks himself. “I don’t watch much television. And I don’t know this Tars-loo fellow. I suspect he’s a young man and like most young men he’s got more mouth than sense. That’s forgivable. But writers are a kind of monk. We ought to treat each other like monks. This fellow didn’t treat me very well, it sounds like. And that’s no way for an honest writer to treat anyone.”
Of course! I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it sooner! I’d started a literary feud!
I would be back on the bestseller list. Tenure was guaranteed! And someplace great, too! What university wouldn’t want a genuine Controversial Literary Figure striding around their campus? And women! Women would love me for the same reason they send marriage proposals to serial killers! I’d been misunderstood! But without killing anybody!
Borer and the lawyers and publicists down at Ortolan must’ve got it, too.
“Dude, we figured out the response. First move: Malta Book Festival. Not a big-deal thing, but Preston Brooks is gonna be there. You and him, on a panel, answering questions, exchanging ideas, squaring off.”
“Preston Brooks.”
“The man himself. Just the two of you. Honestly, right now what we’re thinking, just between us? Egg this thing on. Keep it going. I don’t understand it, you don’t understand it, Lucy—Lucy, do you understand it?”
She got on the line: “No.”
“Nobody understands these things. But it’s moving books. Moving books is good. Go down there. And, honestly, we had an apology, we had a statement, but we talked about it. You should just cut loose.”
“Go to Malta and cut loose.”
“Yup—no, wait. Marfa. Marfa, Texas. It’s a town in Texas.”
Marfa, Texas. I looked at a map. Way out there, West Texas. Me and Preston Brooks. An Old West literary showdown.
20
Egg-strewn plates clattered across the countertops. The jingle song of ice in glasses and the cascade of coffee into mugs, the “Good morning, Ida!”s and “See the game?”s and “Charles, don’t play with that!” all melding together into a symphony of the ordinary. A diner. America. Ordinary morning. A place called Al’s, just a mile from a cemetery, a tree-lined mile down Archer Avenue. And up above it all, the moon, where mankind had just planted its feet.
And at one table, a group of women. Looked like just back from church, dressed in their finest.
Perhaps, if the waitress had taken the time to guess, she would’ve known what they were. Where they were coming from. A funeral. A flag. Twenty years of funerals. Hugs. Tearstained letters. Private joys. Phone calls in the night. A waitress can always guess.
But if she did, she said nothing. She set the plates down. Said, “Enjoy, ladies.”
Myra looked at hers. Watched the saffron current from the eggs that ran beneath the bridge of bacon.
And at the side of the plate, an apple slice. When Myra looked at it, danced it about her plate with a fork, it resembled another slice, a slice of map and jungle and shore that clung to the edge of Asia.
Eat, said Helena, leaning in. Eat, Myra. You have to.
I will, said Myra. I will.
I like this place, said Nellie, its a good, quiet place. She spoke with gratitude from beneath the brow of her church hat, her crown, the gleam illuminating he
r mahogany skin.
Food is a comfort, said Ruth, in that way Ruth had of saying what you felt, saying what was most true. Food is a comfort, she said, and bless God for that. If only for that.
Myra looked up at them. Friends, too, she said. Friends, too.
They looked back at her, one to the other. One to the other.
They looked back at the newest widow. And said nothing. There was no need.
Myra turned back to her plate, back to the runny eggs, the bridge of bacon. And that apple slice. The thin slice that looked so much like the place she’d never seen. The slice of earth and sorrow and bravery where her husband had fallen to the earth. And gone back to the earth.
The slice called Vietnam.
—excerpt from The Widows’ Breakfast by Preston Brooks (Copyright © 2008 Penguin Press, reprinted with permission)
The Frito Chili Cheese Crunch Hungr-Buster is a cheeseburger covered with a thick lump of chili speckled with Fritos. It is a slop of beef, all of it ground and slick, many stages of processing away from actual steers. It is a French joke of what Americans eat and an American joke of what Texans eat.
That’s what I ordered at the Dairy Queen in Marfa at four in the afternoon. I corralled the whole mess in my hands as orange, unnatural oils pressed out against my fingers.
This was warrior food. Combat food. Ass-kicking food.
Marfa is an interesting place. To get there, you fly to El Paso, which at first appears joyless—brown and dismal like a discarded cardboard box. But then you look across the river at the Mexican city of Juarez. A distant glimpse of that place is enough to make you want to plant grateful roses on the graves of El Paso’s civic leaders.
Then you drive south for three hours across West Texas. Out in the open country, you pass a number of interesting things. Gullies and ravines and mesas and buttes. Rusted ranch gates and sunken houses with the roofs caved in. Cisterns set against the sage. Shadows moving along ridges. Moonish pock-marked landscapes. All that western stuff.
You may see, as I did, an eighteen-wheeler with a bumper sticker that reads GOD MADE TEXAS TO GIVE TRUCKERS SOMETHING TO DO, which is clever if theologically unsound.
On that road south, flanked by dry and empty ranches, you’ll start to pass Border Patrol vans, with cheery green-and-white stripes that can lull you out of thinking about the ominous practicalities and complex geopolitics at work.
Then there’s Marfa itself, which looks like “Friday Night Lights”-ville. I feel comfortable deploying the word windswept to describe it. There’s a deserted quality; it looks the way towns probably will after the apocalypse, the way towns in movies look right before people realize there are zombies there.
The sign for the abandoned fifties Holiday Inn is faded into such perfectly retro elegance that you wonder if some hipster didn’t invent it for an album cover. Above the wide streets there’s a big water tower with MARFA written in block letters. An ornate courthouse presides over an empty square. Every few hours a freight train rattles through with its whistle set on maximum loneliness.
Marfa is famous for its Mystery Lights, dancing sky orbs that appear at night. It turns out these are just reflections of car headlights, but everyone treats them like they’re the visions of Lourdes.
But the place has also become an artistic oasis. There’s an old cavalry barracks where they kept German POWs during World War II. A conceptual artist bought and turned it into an art museum called the Chinati Foundation. He was the kind of guy who left the original signs in German on the wall. This museum lures a certain smileless European crowd, as well as feature writers for The New York Times. Nearby, bleak store-fronts are being converted to minimalist galleries at an alarming rate. Marfa has the twin pillars of an artistic oasis: a good bookstore and a public radio station. The town has a bona fide, probably made-up, literary origin story, too. Marfa was named by the wife of a railroad baron in the 1880s, when railroad barons and their wives filled in maps on whims. She’d just finished reading the newly published The Brothers Karamazov, and she named this particular dot on the map after the servant character.
I’ve never read The Brothers Karamazov. I hear good things. It’s a testament to the higher values of the 1880s that that’s what a railroad baron’s wife would read back then. These days, railroad barons’ wives probably read Preston Brooks. But the point is, it’s a perfect town for a literary festival.
More important, it was perfect ground for me.
In Marfa furrow-faced ranchers share space with exiled intellectuals. Texas cattlemen, the most no-bullshit people in the world, find common ground with hipsters so fed up with popular culture that they’ve moved to the desert.
Both those crowds should’ve agreed with me over Preston Brooks. Rancher types know bullshit when they see it. And intellectual types could enjoy the postmodern stunt of my writing a bullshit popular book.
I ate at Dairy Queen, because Dairy Queen is the people’s food. And (in my admittedly confused logic) I was about to become the people’s champion.
When my career as a novelist began, my ambitions were simple: to learn the con, make money, impress women, and get out. I’d sought to emulate Preston. But now the bizarre turns and strange travels of my past few months, and the electrifying controversy of the past week, had sped me into a new and grander role. Like it or not, what I’d done had come to stand for something grander—people were still sorting out exactly what. But this much was clear: no longer was I just another writer.
Tomorrow I’d destroy Preston.
I’d reveal him for what he was. With his prepackaged folkisms and his plaid shirt and his silver beard, he’d try to hoodwink readers as he had so many times before. But I’d be there! I’d call him on his bullshit! He’d sit there, quivering and exposed. It was going to be awesome.
To prep, I’d bought a copy of The Widows’ Breakfast, and I flipped through it as I ate. It was as ridiculous as I’d hoped: brave children at funerals, tender female friendships, snow falling on proud brows: A lustrous yearning from across the years … The bugler’s adagio sounded above the grave… . The seasoned hands danced across her shoulders … Memory shifted and slid away like snow settling on the side of a sun-cooked mountain.
I felt ready.
Now, I don’t want to start any legal trouble with Dairy Queen. So let me stress here that correlation does not equal causation. It could’ve been the travel, it could’ve been something else I ate that day. I’m not accusing Dairy Queen or any of its subsidiaries of anything untoward. The girl behind the counter was wearing those clear plastic gloves, so I know basic sanitary practice was observed.
But the fact is that about an hour after I finished my Hungr-Buster, I began to feel very unpleasant.
Back at the Thunderbird Hotel I rolled around on the bed for a while. Then I lay on the calfskin rug on the floor and tried to massage my cramping stomach muscles into some kind of calm. I put a wet washcloth on my guts. It didn’t work.
There were people in town for the book festival, reporters, too, I suspected. I’d planned on spending the evening winning a few of them over with personal-charm offensives over Shiner Bocks and Lucinda Williams, things on which all strata could agree.
But that was out of the question now. I knocked myself out with some Nyquil.
It was about ten when his voice woke me up. I knew it from the cadence, the crackle, though it was too faint to make out any words. He must’ve been out across the black gravel parking lot, by the fire pit. His curt laugh carried in the night air, and I could picture him as he must’ve been: arms crossed in a sweater, dispensing aphorisms for a semicircle of fawning admirers.
Preston Brooks, through the door, yards away. And though I fell back asleep, my sleep was bothered by alarming half dreams that appeared and vanished: Preston in a tank driving over a doghouse. A tiny me lost in his beard like a hiker in a forest. Preston eating Hungr-Buster after Hungr-Buster through a mouth in his forehead. Unsettling stuff, such that in the morning I was kind
of a wreck.
But I’m not trying to make excuses.
The Arena
At the Marfa Book Company, the shelves were parted to the sides and the gap was filled by rows of folding chairs. A simple wooden table with two microphones, two glasses, and a single pitcher of water was set at the front.
The Audience
They were settling in by the time I got there. And they were from both categories. There were the pale and small-armed. But there were also broad-shouldered women with arms that looked like they’d been used for lifting grain sacks. Real Texans and exiled smarts. And combinations: in the front row a muscular older man, the kind of guy who maybe writes poetry but is still proud of his ability to drywall a house, leaned over to his thick-calved lady companion and said, “This should be interesting.” There were several people typing on laptops.
To calm myself I scanned the audience and picked my target. She had sort of off-blonde hair, and in a tan skirt she was overdressed for the morning, which I liked. She was young but she wore on her face a semitired expression, as though she’d been exhausted by complicated and passionate love affairs, and she tossed back water from a plastic bottle she held with a sexy limpness.
Pregame
Preston wasn’t there when I arrived. I cursed myself for showing up too early. Good power move on his part to make me arrive first.
The moderator, Ted, some kind of local radio guy, knew me by sight. He was a younger guy who looked like he ate a lot of crap that he knew he shouldn’t. He came over, shook my hand. He thanked me for coming down.
“I really think this is going to be a fruitful discussion,” he said. Then, excited, he said, “and feel free to cut loose as much as you want. I told Preston the same thing—I’m not gonna step in. We’ll see where the conversation takes us.”
He led me to the table and sat me down. I saw that in the back of the room they were setting up a camera.
“I’m sure you don’t mind—we’re taping this, show it on the community station.”
