and I don’t know that I’ve ever been more scared than that moment I doubted something I had always been so certain of. Prior to that moment in that chair in front of that screen, I’d never once considered that I might not become a successful author. Not that I thought it was anything so overstated as my destiny, but I had never for a moment doubted that if I just worked hard enough and put in the proper amount of time to tell the stories I wanted to tell, I would be successful.
And not just successful in the sense of publishing a handful of novels, either—perhaps it was because Jo Rowling and her bespectacled hero had prompted my realization of my own vocation, but writing novels and becoming a mega-bestselling billionaire author had always, in my head, gone hand in hand. Even to the point that, as an undergraduate in college, my plan had been that I would sell my novel by the time I graduated and could, rather than enter the workforce, instead go out on a massive, multi-venue and international author tour in support of said novel.
Obviously, we see how that worked out for me.
Which may have been the prompt for that moment of sitting there, in front of that screen, and realizing, for the very first time since I had closed Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, that there was no guarantee any story I wrote would go anywhere. I could write all my life, I realized, and never sell a book. Never find a reader.
This is, I think, where I’m supposed to tell you that I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and allowed that next word to come. That I typed it, and then I typed the next one, too, and the next one again, because that’s what I was supposed to do, right? That's what separates the novelists from the hobbyists; no matter what, no matter when, no matter how, when the going gets tough, the tough write it down, and I'm supposed to tell you that when it came right down to it, when I faced that moment, I stared it down and said—
yes yes I said yes I will yes—
and I kept writing.
But I didn’t.
I’m not proud of that. In fact, if I’m to be honest, I am embarrassed to say that instead, I closed my laptop, set it back on my piano-bench desk, and walked away. I am ashamed to admit that, when the going got tough, I walked away.
I left my bedroom and crossed the hallway of my crummy little apartment, where floorboards I could see between groaned beneath my feet, into my kitchen. I figured I would grab something to eat, read a magazine or watch some television, get my mind off writing, off my job at the New Yorker, off being in the City, off living for an hour or so, but I opened the fridge to discover pretty much nothing in it: a six-pack of Corona, half a lime, and a packet of chocolate-frosted donuts. I decided to order some Thai instead, and I speed-dialed the local place as I popped a Corona. I finished that six-pack alone that night while I ate my chicken panang, watched bad network reality television, and surfed Internet porn.
***
The following morning, I woke up with a tongue so alien I had difficulty enunciating to my supervisor that I would be unable to report to work (now, years later, is the first moment I’ve ever wondered if they called in a temp to replace me for the day). In fact, I ended up calling out the following morning, as well. I remember those being a dark couple of days, though not in the sense of daylight and brightness; outside, November glittered even if it didn’t do so warmly. Rather, I spent those couple of days venturing into Midtown to skim the bargain CD racks while I considered what I wanted to do from there, and all the while I did so I tried to determine whether writing truly was a part of it.
I had always thought it was, but where, I thought, had it gotten me? I was far enough beyond college I should have begun to think about an actual career, and I was realizing there was no guarantee writing would be part of it, which made me wonder if I really cared to devote so much time and energy to it. I could see doing so for something that would offer some reward, but I realized I no longer knew, and hadn’t ever, that writing would.
I returned to work on a Thursday, and I asked my supervisor, who had a perfect head of salt-and-pepper hair and called me ‘sport,’ if I might have a moment of his time. He agreed to fit me in during his lunch, and so, while he chowed down on a chicken teriyaki salad from the lunch place around the corner, I asked him if he thought there might be a place for me on staff. I told him I had thoroughly enjoyed my time there, and really, I wasn’t asking for a position I hadn’t already fulfilled for nearly a year by then.
He listened carefully while I made my case, then told me that it might be a problem if only because of the budget. My position, apparently, took funds from a budget for freelancers and temporary workers; that money was separate from human resources and payroll. “Which means that it would have to go to board approval to allocate the necessary resources. I won’t say it’s unlikely, sport, only that it would require some budgetary juggling the board might be reluctant to attempt. You know how the board is,” he told me.
I’m sure I probably nodded even though I actually hadn’t a clue how the board was.
As it turned out, the board was composed of a group of individuals who were good at having meetings but somewhat worse at keeping track of their finances. When my supervisor brought it up to them, rather than realizing they had a dedicated worker already on their staff, they realized instead they had a freelance contract employee whose paycheck pulled from a fund they had forgotten existed. The sudden discovery of my presence caused a minor kerfuffle among the board and its members, and a week before Thanksgiving, the not-so-delicate task of revealing that our company was freezing the fund they used to pay my salary fell to my supervisor. He told me the board regretted the decision, but it could no longer keep me on, and then he handed me the bottle of Scotch he’d already bought me for Christmas.
As severance packages go, it’s more than some contract employees get.
***
So there I was, out of work and uncertain about both what to do and how. Luckily, knowing that the holidays were coming up (which meant both travel and presents), I’d saved enough to pay my rent through the upcoming January. Unluckily, that meant I had pretty much cleaned out my savings, so I called my temp agency to find out if I couldn’t pick up a few short-term assignments. Being that it was the middle of November, though, the job pickings were slim and far between while most companies slowed for the holidays. My contact at the agency assured me that there should be more openings come January, and in the meantime, why not take a couple of weeks off? Hadn’t I mentioned I was working on a novel? Why not finish it?
Not something I particularly cared to be reminded of. Why not indeed. Mainly because I hadn’t actually written anything since the moment I’d seen all that work as nothing more than words; I had signed up for direct deposit when I started temping, so I hadn’t even had to endorse a check. I won’t say the well was dry, because after all I still had ideas, for the novel I was then working on and for several others besides, but rather I was wondering if the water was still any good, and that wasn’t conducive to getting anyfuckingthing done whatsoever. I’ve always been the sort who refrains from doing anything until I just can’t hold back anymore, and I didn’t have that feeling with writing right then, that feeling that I wanted to, that I had to. I had always thought there was something perfectly Zen about a blank page, all that white, all that possibility, but I had also always believed that the intention to disturb such perfection came with responsibility. When it came down to it, I thought those pages were better off blank than with my random words spewed onto them.
So I did what any self-respecting creator of something should do at precisely such a moment: I high-tailed it out of Dodge. One can only make so many pointless treks into midtown, shopping for used CDs you can’t actually afford anyway, and it was already too chilly to relax in Central Park. So I told my agency I’d be unavailable for a couple of weeks, and I hopped on a Greyhound home the week before Thanksgiving.
That was when the trouble really started.
Chapter Four, in which the trouble really starts, and which intro
duces a gun above a mantle, figuratively if not literally
Thanksgiving Eve, I saw Veronica at a Foolish gig, and we made plans to get coffee that Saturday at the local Barnes & Noble in the only strip-mall complex for miles, a classic-casual outing that on occasion flirts with being more than it is, date-wise, but never actually manages it. I don’t know what you’d call the fringe collar of the black suede coat she wore when she showed up, but it looked like short strands of fine, grey yarn all around her neck, which only brought out her green-blue eyes, lending to them the gravity of an imminent thunderstorm and all the ferocity of lightning. But still she smiled, and it made her float.
I don’t remember much about that conversation, but I’m sure it was like any conversation Veronica and I have ever had—long, digressing discussions of classes and life and movies and music, lyrics and dialogue. I’m sure it wasn’t long before conversation came back around to me and what I was doing, and when it did . . . well, it all just came out in one long, stream-of-consciousness soliloquy Kerouac would have needed Benzedrine and toilet-roll typing paper to keep speed with. I told her about how writing had ground down, how I just didn’t know if I had the juice left to say much of anything worthwhile, and that, at the worst possible time, when I thought about devoting my energy to something else, that was when there didn’t seem anything else to devote that energy to.
“So what’re you doing?” she asked.
I told her I’d paid rent through January. I told her I’d tried to find other ways to occupy my time, but Manhattan was expensive, and without a regular gig my financial resources were limited at best and running on fumes at worst.
“So what’re you going to do, then?”
And I stopped, because I had to admit, I didn’t have a damned clue. A few months, hell, a few weeks before, I would have had an answer ready even if that answer probably would have lacked any real specificity: “What am I going to do? Ah, I dunno. I’ll figure something out. Always do, right?”
Right then, though, I discovered I couldn’t find the confidence for words like that. I shrugged. “I don’t—you know, I don’t actually know. I’m trying to pretend I can make the best of it, really, but I don’t have a clue what the best of it is,” I told her as I pushed my waxed-plastic cup away. Talking about everything had made me restless.
“You want to get out of here?”
I tried to chuckle. “I’m probably not the best company at the moment, am I?”
“No, it’s not that,” she reached forward, squeezing my forearm. “It’s just—you seem anxious, and I figured sitting here, in the middle of a bookstore, glugging down caffeine while the loudspeakers play Christmas carols . . . makes you want to jump out of your own skin, doesn’t it?”
“That obvious, huh?”
“So I was just thinking, we’ve been sitting here, and we drank our coffee and all, so why not take a walk? Get out of the mall, away from crazy shoppers and discount crap?”
Never hesitated: Veronica was right that I damned near wanted to jump out of my own skin, and probably the only reason I didn’t was I knew that I would only become a very confused skeleton still completely uncertain about what to do next. So we left the bookstore, into bracing cold and the kind of near-on winter world you feel like a brick to the nose. The mall itself was big enough, but just like everywhere else, various retail stores and chain eateries had sprung up all around it: Target and BestBuy, Outback and Red Lobster. Nothing ever actually closed, just changed: the Ground Round gave way to some generic Western-BBQ themed family joint, and the Olive Garden had once been a TGI Fridays. Veronica and I headed away from there, and just around the corner, the blatant store-lights gave way to a mom-and-pop diner and a few plazas we both knew well because we’d grown up only a few towns over.
We didn’t talk much as we walked. By then, I was used to walking in Manhattan, block after block of tall buildings more spectacular than you ever imagined, life on not just the most enormous scale possible but also in time-lapse—a New York minute passes like a by-rushing subway train. I got preoccupied by how startlingly different it was where I’d grown up. I spent a lot of time shuttling—between Manhattan and home, between home and Foolish gigs—but so rarely did I venture much beyond the routine of certain pre-set routes that I realized, as I walked with Veronica, how much I had forgotten about where I grew up. When you live in Manhattan, you can forget the frustrated strip malls and desperate shopping plazas of suburbs. Manhattan is so fast and so . . . well, itself, really, that you can easily forget not only that the rest of the world has problems but even that it exists.
I realized, then, that Veronica had said something, but I’d been so preoccupied I hadn’t caught it. “Huh?”
“I think I’ve got change coming.”
“What?”
“I offered you a penny for your thoughts.”
“Oh. Sorry. Just thinking about how different it is down here. Compared to Manhattan, I mean. As obvious thoughts go, way up there, so you probably actually deserve a refund.”
“You like Manhattan?”
“It’s—,” I said, but I broke off. Because I realized, then, I didn’t know how to finish that thought. Manhattan doesn’t just transcend any adjective you can think of so much as it laughs them off with a self-awareness somehow divorced from either arrogance or hubris. Manhattan isn’t proud if only because it’s so busy doing other things it rarely stops to bask in how completely awesome it is. “It’s New York,” I finally settled on.
“Well, yes, that is true. But that’s not what I asked.”
“It’s hard to say. It’s like Manhattan exists beyond liking it or not liking it. Like Shakespeare.”
“Well, except that one is a major metropolis and the other wrote plays—.”
“No, I mean it’s a bit beyond liking or not liking it. You can call a play like Titus Andronicus weak when you compare it with Hamlet, sure, but it’s still Titus, and it still has beheadings and action and all the brilliant stuff Shakespeare managed to pull off later. I remember I never actually used to get Shakespeare until I got to sophomore year and took one of those random lit survey courses, and we got to King Lear. My professor asked me to read one of the early speeches, either Edmund or Edward or Edgar, whatever, but I started to read it like I’d always read Shakespeare, and he stopped me to say I was hitting the linebreaks too hard, and then he suggested another way, and suddenly Shakespeare was an epiphany. Suddenly I got it. And I think that’s what Manhattan’s like. It’s not good or bad or you like it or don’t; it’s something you either get or you don’t. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with not getting it, but if you do, well, it’s fucking Manhattan, isn’t it?”
“And you get it?”
Leave it to Veronica to ask that sort of question. I could pontificate and bloviate all I wanted, but she’d nail it in a go, just like always. “Mostly, I think, yeah, I do. There are moments it’s exhausting, but mostly it’s Manhattan, and mostly it’s the kind of awesome that’s hard to cope with.” We rounded the corner and found ourselves on a sidewalk, walking down the street with a row of houses on one side and a park opposite. Up ahead, we were coming up on a strip plaza with a Blockbuster and a Wawa convenience store. “I heard this story, once, about this town whose citizens had this brilliant idea to use lightning for power. So it did what any normal town wanting to use lightning would do—.”
“Installed a lightning rod.”
“No, this giant reactor. Kinda thing that could absorb, like, a go-jillion watts.”
“I guess that’s one way to go.”
“This town sank millions into this absorption-reactor thing that could handle trillions of watts, like more energy than is generated by ten or twenty atomic bombs, and then it basically said, okay, now all we need is a good storm. And along comes a storm. And you know what happened?”
“Something suitably ironic, I hope. Otherwise it’s not that interesting a story.”
“The reactor blew. And not like it just sh
orted out, I mean, went off like the devil in a church in a crowded room. Just the one little strike of lightning, and the reactor just explodes. Like, they build it strong enough to withstand a nuclear damned blast, and a flash of lightning, and puuf,” I waved my hand to emphasize the sound.
“So, what, Manhattan’s so amazing it blows out your awesome receptors?”
I remember thinking, right then, that I wasn’t surprised she had put it together like that. Sure, the story was only tangentially related (and arguably not very good at that), and even as I told it I planned to pull it all together in major revelation, but I distinctly remember thinking, “Of course she got it right away. She’s Veronica.”
I know that continues to paint her as some outlandish ideal, but what would be the point otherwise? Maybe she’s not; maybe her eyes have a little more brown in them than green; maybe her smile is a little crooked; hell, maybe she twists at the mirror to eye with chagrin her hips, her waist, her thighs, lamenting genetics and that most recent beer she didn’t need, but that’s not the point, is it? When you meet someone like Veronica, all that gets cast straight out of your head. You don’t mean it, and you don’t realize it, certainly, but I know that if you don’t know the feeling, you’ve probably never been in love, because in love does that to you. Being in love is like living in Manhattan; it blows the same awesome receptors, and like mason jars attempting to restrain lightning, reason and logic and rational thought do their best impersonations of fireworks, zing-pow into the night and the darkness, a calm but rushing whistle bursting into Roman candle brilliance and hyperkinetic light-crackles.
“Yeah,” I told her. “Pretty much that exactly.”
“So maybe you just need a bigger reactor.”
“What?”
“You said it was exhausting. So maybe you need a bigger reactor to hold all that awesome.”
Meets Girl: A Novel Page 3
