They weren’t tears of happiness, though he was happy. He hadn’t realized how much he’d given up, the extent to which he’d surrendered his guns. Out of habit, he still sat down to write every morning, but he hadn’t written anything in years, not really. A little thing about desert living for Harper’s, a brief interview for the Sun-Times for an article about local writers, a piece in LA Weekly about dogs (he was for them). For the last year, he’d hardly written a word. He just hadn’t had the heart, couldn’t bear more disappointment, even more confirmation that the world didn’t care about what he had to say. Six books in thirty years, the first five all out of print, nothing to show for it except for all the bad stuff—the mess and poverty and waste and wreckage. Message received. It wasn’t a decision he’d made—he hadn’t thrown his typewriter off a cliff or burned what random pages, yellowing and stained, cluttered his desk. He’d simply stopped working. The scope of his life had narrowed to eking out enough money to feed himself and his dog, keep himself in booze, and pay the power bill. Waking up, going to work, and going to sleep. It was a kind of death.
He blew his nose, and Victor looked up at him quizzically. “That’s right, my lad,” he said, “our ship has come in.”
He hauled the dog up, and they shambled together outside into the mounting June heat. They used the bathroom in tandem, both looking off to the west and the distant highway. Richard filled Victor’s food bowl, which sat in the shadow of the trailer near the door, then went back inside and poured himself a triumphant Gilbey’s and Sprite in the cleanest available glass. He drank it and sat around listless, annoyed by his desire to share the news with someone that didn’t eat their own poop. He found Eileen’s work number written on a torn-off envelope edge, in a pile of scrap paper contained in the plastic fishbowl that served as his Rolodex.
“This is Eileen Kline.” Her voice sounded the same as ever—musical amusement softening an essential clipped erudition. Over the years, the harsh words and unpleasant truths that voice had spoken to him faded from his memory, but the sound of her voice continued to remain instantly familiar to him, like the opening chords of a favorite song.
“Ei, it’s Richard.” There was a pause on her end, during which he tried to remember how long it had been since they’d spoken last. Two years?
“Hi. How are you?”
“I’m good, is this an okay time?”
“It’s fine, I’m just getting my lecture together.” In the decades since they’d been together, Eileen had climbed steadily up the academic ladder and now sat on the top rung surveying her domain. She was one of the two or three world experts in a field called narratology and had recently published an apparently seminal monograph entitled The Hermeneutics of Implied Authorship, information he’d gleaned from periodically googling her name on the library computer. She was also now a Sward Fellow at NYU, which, so he understood, meant she was absolved of ever having to do any actual work again.
“This is the one class you have to teach every decade, right?”
“Yes, that’s right. What’s up?”
Richard sat down on the edge of his shaded bed space, and Victor burrowed behind his feet, hiding from the sunlight encroaching through the window in a widening frame on the floor. He told her about the phone call he’d just received.
“Oh, my God, Richard. Well, that’s just fantastic.”
“Yeah. I thought you’d like to know.”
“Of course.” After a moment, she said, “Wait, are you calling to let me know the good news, or is this supposed to be kind of an ‘I told you so’ moment?”
“I don’t know. Both, probably.”
“Well, listen. I really am happy to hear about it. I’m not sure why you think it’s necessary to somehow rub it in or whatever it is you think you’re doing.”
“I just feel like you never believed in it.” He’d begun fooling around with the memoir when they were still together; she’d habitually referred to the project as The Red Badge of Richard. “You thought I was a failure.”
“No, I didn’t, actually. I was always proud of you. I always thought if you just hung in there, the world would come around, and it looks like maybe I was right.” He started to point out that it hadn’t come out yet, that the world probably still wouldn’t come around, but she went on, “I just didn’t want to be around your toxic self-hatred, constantly dwelling on disappointment.” She sighed. “I’m happy for you, I really am happy. Can’t you leave it at that?”
He paused again, uncertain of what to say. She had an ability like no one else to make him feel like the child he was. He loved and hated it about her. He had hated her for it when they were together and loved it about her in memory ever since. Finally he said, “So, how’s it going for you?”
“Good. Busy. They have me going to some conference in Frankfurt on Thursday. It never ends.”
“That sounds rough.”
“Listen, congratulations again, I mean it. I’m going now. Tell Cindy the good news.”
The phone went dead, and he looked at it. He would not tell Cindy the good news, because she didn’t want to hear good news from him, only occasional reports of minor misfortune—his firings and fuckups and fiascoes, his steady demotion in life since he’d left them twenty years ago. He dropped the phone on the bed and looked at the tiny white hands of the clock on the small stove in the kitchenette: 10:18. The trailer’s air had become stifling, as though superheated by his roiling adolescent sense of need. What did he need? To mark the moment, to celebrate, to hear a sincere word of congratulations. For the tree of his present success to not fall silently in the woods of his past failure.
He put on a pair of paint-stained Dickies and a pit-stained T-shirt and went outside again. His car, an unreliable Ford Reliant, sat on the other side of the trailer, its eczematous clear coat peeling off in the sun. The engine turned after only a couple of tries, and he pulled slowly down the long driveway, which led to a longer access road and finally to the John Wayne. His back sweated on the vinyl seat, and the drink sweated between his legs. He finished it before he got to the highway, tossed the glass out the window into the sand, and pulled into the sporadic traffic, Phoenix-bound.
———
The Tamarack was closed at this hour, and as Richard entered and locked the door, a small and complex frisson of pleasure passed through him. He liked being in the place when it was empty. It was the part of the job he liked the best—the only part he liked, in fact. The place was cool and quiet, and the midday sun slanted in through the grime-tinted windows, illuminating the untold billions of ambient dust and silica and ash particles floating in the air, like a sad little cosmos in miniature. In these moments, the bar, despite its state of long-neglected squalor, had a solemn, almost churchlike feel.
He was also inexpressibly gratified at the thought of never having to work there again. He looked around the room: the bathroom door kicked half off its hinges; the low ceiling festooned with profanity-embossed dollar bills (the ones directly overhead reading KASH KREW and SUCK A FUCK DICK); the rows of dusty bottles behind the bar; the wooden bar top with its deep and uncleanable cracks that filled up with syrupy alcohol like tiny feeding troughs for the bar’s flies (namesake and mascot of the regulars around whose smokes and beer they crawled); the Megatouch machine in the corner that blooped and bleeped all night as though sympathetically mimicking the idiotic babble of drunks at 1:00 a.m. on a Saturday; the loathsome ersatz-fifties jukebox filled with shitty modern rock the owner thought would bring in a younger crowd. Richard had expected to keep working at this place forever, until it closed or he died—growing old with it like a despised but undivorceable spouse.
A magnum of Moët collected dust in the back of the cooler. It had been there since he’d gotten the job four years earlier. He sprang it from its prison, at first justifying the theft by thinking about what an asshole the owner, Stu—who spent almost all his copious free time golfing on the verdant and manicured courses that gulped the city’s scant wate
r supply like sun-sick hounds—was; then by thinking about how the champagne would soon go bad if it wasn’t already; then dispensing with the charade altogether. It was there and he wanted it, that was all. He lifted a champagne flute for good measure.
Outside, he locked the door and dropped his key in the mail slot. He straightened in the tall sunlight, feeling like an inmate released from prison on a surprise parole. The book had sold. He realized he hadn’t called his editor yet or asked how much money he’d be getting, then he realized it didn’t matter: if it was only a hundred dollars, he could take that to Apache Nights and put it all on 27 Red. He drove to the north side of South Mountain and turned up an access road. The road petered out next to a TV antenna station about halfway up the hill, and he parked in the runoff beside a hiking trail, next to a giant NO PARKING sign. He walked slowly up the zigzagging trail, pausing frequently to rest, then left the path and moved through the uneven brush until he found a spot that suited him.
It was a flat patch of sandy scrub, with a huge dark saguaro standing to his left like a terse, disapproving ranch hand watching the town drunk on an epic binge. He looked down the mountain at his adoptive city. From a distance, Phoenix looked like a real place with history and secrets and not the pretend place it was, with everything built five minutes ago, a pastel Disneyland for Republicans and old people and methamphetamine addicts. He uncorked the bottle and turned it up, spilling a frothing mouthful down the front of his shirt. He was embarrassed by his need to commemorate the moment—it suggested there was still a part of him, however small, that remained capable of pride. And, worse, hope. Shouldn’t he have known better than that by now?
Yes, but he couldn’t help it. Ego and its running buddy Sexual Desire were the nightmare guests at Dignity’s party—drunk buffoons that stayed far too late, refused to take polite hints, trashed the place, and insulted their host. The champagne stung his throat as it went down. To hell with it, he thought. To hell with everything. The vast city planing out in front of him didn’t begrudge him his frail vanity. It didn’t care. And on either side of Phoenix, the empty desert seemed like an absolution. It was why, despite the harsh, alien terrain, and his lack of relatives and family history there, he’d stayed for so long. The desert was unforgiving, yet it forgave. Having no memory, what choice did it have?
On the way home, he stopped at a bar, then another one, then possibly a third. He was there for a while, and everything got foggy and smudged. The day outside had somehow darkened without his notice or assent. He squinted up at the bartender, one of those very fat shorn-headed bald guys that grow a goatee in order to create the impression of having an actual face and neck and head rather than just a fleshy head-shaped lump growing out of their collars.
“The book sold,” he told the bartender.
The bartender said, “That’s the third time you told me. Go the fuck home.”
———
As he drove south on the John Wayne Parkway into the desert, the halogen lights of the outer suburbs of Chandler left vapor traces on his stunned retinas. Some kind of animal—a dog or coyote or mountain lion—flashed in his headlights, green eyes ablaze. He jerked the wheel and his head to the right in tandem. There was a tremendous sense of fluid motion, water falling and falling, then hitting bottom with a soft slap.
When he came to, his car was splayed around a concrete overpass piling, the hood buckled and steam escaping with a disgusted sigh. Two cop cars had stopped ahead of him, just past the overpass, their gumballs blinking on and off. In the distance, he heard more sirens. He wanted to tell everyone that he was fine, to go home, not to make a stink about it. He wanted to open the door and jog off into the black maw of the desert. Instead, he sat there with his head on the steering wheel and his nose dripping blood, until something went a-tap-tap-tapping on his window. He looked up to see a penlight and, past that, the face of an unfriendly-looking policeman. The cop tapped the window again, and Richard rolled it down.
The policeman said, “Have you been drinking, sir?”
“The book sold.”
———
The first check, when it arrived, was eighteen thousand and change. He stood in front of his trailer and rubbed his finger over the embossed type. There were three more on the way, a very nice contract for eighty-five thousand, gross, less Stan’s agent fee. Of course, another chunk would immediately go to taxes, but sixty-five thousand, or however much that left, was still a lot of money. Not enough to never work again. Not enough to move to Europe and live out his life as a grappa-swilling letch. Not quite enough to start his own bar, from which he would ban people like himself on sight. Not enough to do lots of things, but enough to not feel like a complete fool for quitting his job, totaling his car, and getting DUIey-Twoey all in the same day.
It was enough, as it turned out, to buy a nearby house in foreclosure, in a superexurban neighborhood called the Bluffs. There was no bluff visible in the landscape, so perhaps the name referred to the cavalier attitude local banks and homeowners had taken toward the adjustable-rate mortgages that subsequently emptied the neighborhood. It turned out they were giving the things away—all you had to do was show up at auction with a roll of quarters and a ballpoint pen. Richard got the house—a fantastically ugly stucco ranch with a porte-cochere and an ornamental chimney—for twenty thousand down and two hundred a month. It was one of two occupied homes on the street, a lonely cul-de-sac that hung out exposed into the scrubby desert like the caboose wagon in a doomed pioneer convoy. At night the coyotes called and responded across miles of empty land. The desolation of the place seemed a drawback to most buyers, hence the price, but Richard loved it. If only, he thought, the other homeowner on the street would default, it would be perfect.
———
The phone rang in his new living room. Groaning up from the La-Z-Boy, he picked his way across the room, covered with trash, books, and unpacked moving boxes. It was more or less the same amount of garbage and unwanted possessions he’d had in the trailer, just spaced out to fill the larger living area. The white, plastic rotary phone lay on the sofa, next to the sliding glass door that opened to the patio. He sat down and hoisted the heavy receiver, like lifting a small dumbbell.
“Yeah.”
“Richard, it’s Stan.”
“Hey.” His attention remained thoroughly commanded by a Dukes of Hazzard episode he’d been watching on the TV; or, more specifically, by Catherine Bach; or, even more specifically, by Catherine Bach’s ass. An earlier spell hovering motionless over his typewriter had culminated in the bold decision to squander the rest of the day. If he wasn’t going to produce anything, it could at least be a choice.
“You there?”
“Oh, yeah.” He turned the volume down.
“I assume you haven’t checked your email lately?”
“Not in the last few months, no.”
“Are you sitting down?”
“Do people actually say that? For future reference, I’m always sitting down.”
Daisy Duke bent over the General Lee, and he candidly imagined himself bent over her back. The exertion alone, to say nothing of the excitement, he decided, would kill him within five seconds. Just before the phone rang, he’d been considering self-abuse, a term that became more and more apt with age. “What?”
“I said the book’s doing great. The reviews are glowing. It has critical mass.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means everyone’s lining up behind it. I’ve seen it happen before.”
“Okay, well. Great.”
“You don’t understand, it’s selling.”
“Really.” Richard clicked off the TV, and over the next twenty minutes, Stan detailed, in loving and exhaustive fashion, what all of this meant. It meant more money. It meant the other books were going to be reprinted in trade paperback. It meant interviews with NPR, the TBR, and a peppering of other acronyms that Richard had never heard of.
“And you know what all
this means.”
“No,” he said.
“Book tour. ASAP. Speaking engagements, some of them paying.”
“Which means flying.”
“No, I was thinking you could ride a camel around everywhere, like one of the wise men.”
“I hate flying.”
“So what? Everybody hates flying. Listen, we’ve been getting calls. There’s real interest. Do you know how rare that is? Usually you’d be screaming at three deaf retirees in the Topeka Books-a-Million. Do you hate money, too?”
Richard did hate money, but he hated not having it more. And the amount of money Stan estimated was startling and had a persuasive quality. It would be enough to see him through another couple of years, maybe even pay off his mortgage. Commerce, Stan said, was a cruel taskmaster. He might never have the chance to cash in like this again. Did he want to go back to bartending? Richard imagined talking to the same stiffs, the same horrible bums who came in and bought their beer with quarters they’d dug out from beneath someone else’s couch cushions. They got drunk and eventually tipped with the only thing they had that was worth giving: their absence from the bar.
“Okay,” he said. “But listen, I drive whenever possible.”
“Have you ever heard of Ambien? Get some.”
———
He hadn’t heard of Ambien, but his foreman friend in Mesa said he could get some, no problem. That they would make flying easy. Over the next month, he became better acquainted with his publicist, Dana, a loud, merry woman he’d had two cursory conversations with months earlier, who suddenly wanted to chat every day. Could he block off three weeks for a tour? He checked his nonexistent calendar, filled with all his nonexistent obligations, and found he could. Great, she said, we’ll kick it off at Spillman College, a money gig. And did he want a student escort?
The Grand Tour Page 6
