“Gracie,” I ordered, “get back inside the office and lock the door. Call nine-one-one.”
Gracie skittered behind a row of pallets and disappeared.
Commander Bob Worsham picked up his briefcase and gave me a scowl and a nod. “I shall return,” he said.
“Just get out of my warehouse,” I told him.
“So you admit it is your warehouse?”
“Get out.”
***
I went to the back of the warehouse and opened the office door. There I found not only Gracie but also the amazing Roger Herndon, who looked up from his desk and asked me, “Is he gone yet?”
“So you are here, after all,” I said.
“I was catching up on a little work,” he answered.
“Where were you when I first got to the warehouse, about fifteen minutes ago?”
“I was in the can, I guess.”
“Hiding?”
He gave me a sheepish grin. “Well, Gracie told me some creep was following her, and I thought it might be Worsham. He’s been leaving all kinds of messages on our phone, not to mention about twenty angry letters and a couple of telegrams. He called this morning and left a message saying he was in town. So, uh, when you opened the warehouse door—”
“He wanted to see his books, Roger.”
“Why didn’t you just show him some of yours and get rid of him?”
“Two reasons,” I said. “Number one, those books aren’t his. Number two, the problem’s not mine.”
“Aw shit,” Roger whined. “God damn it. Fucking sailor-boy. Jesus.”
“Relax,” I said. “I got rid of him for now. But if I were you I’d run off another nine thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine copies of Onward Christian Sailors before he comes back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Roger said. “You realize how long that would take, and how much it would cost?”
“But your contract with the man—”
“Says diddly,” Roger said. “It says I’ll publish up to ten thousand copies, as needed to fill orders. There haven’t been any orders. End of story. When he comes back, tell him to read the contract.”
“I’m not telling him a thing,” I said. “You tell him, Roger.”
***
I spent the rest of the afternoon wrapping books, sweeping the warehouse floor, talking to myself, and selling what was left of my soul to the devil. When it was time to go back to my office and pick up Carol, I had come to a number of airtight conclusions:
Roger had done nothing illegal. That was true.
With very little trouble, and that trouble was Gracie’s, he had published a book and had been paid twenty-seven thousand dollars for it.
He had what it took: the machinery and an employee who knew how to operate it.
I was in big trouble financially. So was Carol. So was our business. Carol and the business and I were intertwined. One problem, one solution, one size fits all.
Samuel Welch wanted a book published. A book.
Carol would not like the direction this logic was taking. But even she would admit I was planning nothing illegal. Sneaky, maybe, but that’s business. Strictly legal, strictly business.
And I was doing it for her, right? For Carol? I didn’t want her to have to mortgage her house, right?
Roger and I left the warehouse at the same time. The sun was still high and the parking lot was still hot. We walked together toward our cars. When we got to his, I said, “Roger there’s something we need to talk about.”
Chapter Ten
Carol didn’t like it one bit, but the next day I phoned Samuel Welch and invited him to our office to sign a publishing contract with me. Carol said, “Guy, I just don’t understand you. This Welch guy is going to bail you out of one printer’s bill, but there will be another printer’s bill when we do his book, and how’re we going to pay that one?”
Tell her? No.
“Maybe by that time we will have sold enough copies of Naming Names to cover the bill?” I suggested.
She wrinkled her nose and gave me a “yeah, right.”
“Think about it, Carol. We’re going to be okay for now. Isn’t that okay for now?”
“We’re going to lose our reputation as publishers who care about what we publish. Is that okay for now?”
***
Sam Welch swaggered in fifteen minutes later. He gave Carol his devilish smile and he stunk up the office with expensive cologne. I showed him to the conference table, where he plopped down the manuscript and took a seat. We faced each other across the table, and I laid out the two copies of our contract, one in front of each of us. He took a pen out of his buckskin sport coat and said, “Where do I sign?”
“You’ll probably want to read it first,” I suggested.
“Hell with it,” he said. “Let’s pull the trigger.”
“You realize, Mister Welch—”
“Call me Sam.” He grinned at me. “I told you that already.”
“Sam, listen. This contract says you’ll pay me forty thousand dollars to publish this book. That’s an awful lot of money.”
Sam pulled his checkbook out of his pocket and slapped it down next to the contract. “To you, maybe,” he said. “To me it’s money well spent.”
“But we may not be able to sell enough copies to earn you back even a fraction—”
“Don’t talk numbers, Guy. If we get my agent or my accountant in on this, they’ll tell me I can’t do it. But screw them, know what I mean? I want my book published. Any fool can act. How many people can say they wrote a book, right?”
“But—”
“Listen, Good-Guy. I don’t care if I don’t make a dime off this book. I just want to hold a copy of my own book in my own hands. That’s all I want. That and being published by Guy Mallon Books.”
“I can’t guarantee that you’ll get good reviews,” I continued. “Your book’s controversial, all that gossip, all those poems, and who knows how the critics will react?”
Sam Welch chuckled and said, “Remember The Poisoned Posse? You see that picture?”
“I missed it, I’m afraid.”
“Yeah, well Chuck Champlin of the Los Angeles Times said it was a misbegotten dog and Roger Ebert called it a Grade-B knockoff and The New Yorker said I ought not to be in pictures. All the critics gave me the finger. But you know what I got to say to them, when the dust settled and the smoke cleared and the chips were down? What I got to say to the whole damn world?”
“No, what?” I could see Carol across the room, behind Sam’s back. She was staring at the ceiling, as if there might be a God up there somewhere who could be persuaded to strike us all with lightning.
Sam said, “I told them, ‘I’d like to thank the members of the Academy.’” He grinned. “See what I mean? My book might be a hit, you never can tell. Okay, podnah. Where do I sign?”
***
After he had left, Carol told me, “Well, you did a good job of covering your ass. I hope all those disclaimers were in the contract.”
They weren’t. “Carol,” I said, “I write the contracts, okay?”
“Fine, fine,” she said. “That’s your department.”
“Thank you.”
“In fact, you can have the whole fucking book. You can acquire it, sign it, edit it, design it, typeset it, proofread it, correct it, register it with Books in Print and the Library of Congress, send out advance galleys to the industry journals, you can solicit blurbs from all your literary celebrity friends, you can design the cover and write jacket copy and you can send it to press. When it comes back from the printer, you can meet the truck and unload the whole shipment and stack them God knows where. Then you can write the press release and design the sales brochure, you can call stores and send out review copies, and arrange a party at the Earthling. It’s your baby, Guy. Okay?”
“Okay,” I answered.
“Okay. Oh, and another thing. You can wr
ite the check to pay the printer’s bill when it’s due. And you can figure out how to do that.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
***
So that’s what I did with the rest of the summer. Carol and I had called a truce, the one condition being that we never discuss I Wasn’t Always a Bad Guy, Samuel Welch’s book. I worked hard and I worked solo. Meanwhile, Carol paid the printer for the second printing of Naming Names and continued the good fight of trying to get that book noticed by the world. There wasn’t much going on in the sales and marketing department of our business, and there were very few orders to fill, so she took some time off and stayed home a lot, working in her garden and battling with an overgrown bougainvillea that was threatening to eat us alive. More evenings than not I came home from the office like a hubby from the ’fifties, and Carol would meet me at the door with a kiss. We would have cocktails together, then dinner and a walk in the long, warm evening around our flower-covered neighborhood. We stayed in love because we were both careful not to bring up the one issue that was always on both of our minds. We approached that issue with different worries, of course. Carol worried about the financial future of our company. I worried about my eternal soul.
Meanwhile, Lorraine graduated from Psychiatric Rehab and reentered society on the arm of Fritz Marburger. The Santa Barbara News-Press considered them an item again, and although they maintained separate residences, they also rented a bungalow together at the Biltmore Hotel, where they spent many of their nights during the rest of the summer. Lorraine sent me a letter of apology—not for crapping out on the People article or the “Oprah” show, but for getting me and Carol involved in her embarrassing, ill-conceived dream. Marburger did not communicate with us at all, although we still sent rent checks to Marburger Enterprises for our warehouse space.
Meanwhile Roger Herndon had dozens of books in the works. Gracie’s work load was huge, and every week or so another couple of books were published by Caslon Oldestyle Press. One copy of each book would roll out of the DocuTech machine and Kitty would package it up and send it off to a proud published author somewhere. Roger was collecting well over twenty thou for each one of these titles, and if he kept going at this rate he’d be a millionaire before the end of the year, unless some irate author shot him first.
Meanwhile, I worked away at the same scam on a smaller scale.
I didn’t thoroughly enjoy working on Sam Welch’s book, but it wasn’t that terrible. Well, I take it back; the poetry was terrible. But his life was somewhat interesting. What can I say? Maybe celebrity tell-alls aren’t evil things. Sam left me alone, convinced that I knew what I was doing. Carol left me alone, nowhere near convinced, but we had our truce. I worked at the book steadily, and by September 1, the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, I had prepared the disk according to Gracie’s instructions. It was ready to turn over to Caslon Oldestyle for a DocuTech birth. One book, coming right up, which would cost me nothing. Then more books as needed, if needed, at cost.
It was also time to tell Carol the rest of the story.
“Honey? I’m home.…”
***
She stared at me with wide eyes full of dismay. Tears leaked to her cheeks. Her open mouth trembled. She dropped her martini glass to the redwood deck, where it shattered to smithereens. She turned her back on me and screamed into the bougainvillea, “No! NO!”
I reached out and touched her shoulder and she whirled back to me, slapping my hand away from her face. She looked very old and very young and not like any Carol I’d ever known before.
“Carol, I’m sorry.”
“I thought you were just being stupid, Guy. I had no idea you were being dishonest.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated.
“Guy, I can’t live with this.”
“I know how you feel,” I said. “It’s not easy for me, either.”
“No, listen to me. I can’t live with you. I’ve often doubted your wisdom, but I’ve never doubted your integrity before. Now there’s not even a doubt about it: you’re a cheat. You’re going to have to leave. Out.”
“Out?”
“Get out of my house.”
“But this is where I live,” I stammered. “You’re the one I—”
“Go for a drive,” she told me. “A long drive. Don’t come back till tomorrow morning. I need some time to think.”
She buried her face in her hands and sobbed, then turned back to the bougainvillea and rushed into its spiny embrace. When she turned around her face and arms were bloody. I reached out to her, and she snarled like a Gorgon.
“Out!”
***
I spent that night, Sunday night, at the Schooner Inn, a cheap hotel on Lower State Street. I have always had a fondness for that hotel, ever since I lived there in the late 1970s when I first arrived in Santa Barbara. I was even fonder of Joe’s Cafe, across the street, and that’s where I spent the evening, sitting at the bar and swigging Jim Beam as if it were soda pop.
“Hey, Guy, hiya dune?”
I swiveled on my stool and looked up into the happy, handsome face of Maxwell Black, my favorite cowboy poet. As always, he had a Budweiser bottle in his hand.
“Siddown,” I said, pointing at the stool next to mine. “I have a number of very important things I can’t tell you anything about. Max, can you keep a secret?”
He thought a long time about that one before saying, “Nope. I never have been any good at that.”
“You’re an honest man.”
“Best policy.” He took a pull from his Bud.
I said, “Oh shut up. You make me sick.”
“I make you sick?”
“No, I make me sick.” I climbed down off the barstool and watched Joe’s Cafe whirl all over the universe. “Max,” I said, “would you walk me across the street?”
***
Monday morning I woke up early and ugly. My body felt like my mind, and my mind felt like the inside of a Dumpster. I went downstairs and checked out of the Schooner, then walked down to Esau’s Coffee Shop for breakfast. God, that sun was bright. After breakfast I felt somewhat better, but not good enough to face the worst, so I decided not to go home, I mean to the house I’d called home for years. I also decided not to go to the office for fear Carol would be there. So I went to the warehouse instead. I had something to say to Gracie.
The man I least wanted to see in the entire world was standing there in front of the closed door of the warehouse, his arms crossed across his massive chest. He was dressed less formally this time: tan slacks and a baby blue golf shirt that appeared to be starched. I got out of my car and walked up to him. “Good morning, Commander,” I said.
“I want you to open that door right now, sir,” he replied. “I’ve been waiting here since eight-thirty this morning, and it is now ten-fifteen. Don’t you have a business to run?”
I could have reminded him that it was Labor Day, for Christ’s sake, but I ignored the question and opened the big rolling door, then walked into the warehouse and flipped on the lights, with Commander Worsham following close behind me. He was probably only a foot and a half taller than me, but I felt as if I were being shadowed by a giant.
“I expect you want to have a talk with your publisher,” I said. “Mister Herndon is out of town at present.”
“Don’t give me that crock of bilge water, mister,” Worsham snapped. “You and I are going right back to your office right now and we’re going to sit down and talk business. I’ll do the talking and you’ll do the listening until I tell you to respond. Is that understood, sir? I expect a bit of common courtesy from the people I’m in business with. Common courtesy, honesty, respect. And results. And product. I want to see my books, Mister Herndon. And I want to see them now.”
I scratched my head. “Commander Worsham, you are talking to the wrong man. How do I get you to understand this? My name is Guy Mallon. I am not Roger Herndon. I don’t work for Roger Herndon and you an
d I are not in business together.”
“I’ll not have you try to make a fool of me, mister. I have returned, and I’m here in Santa Barbara to stay until I get satisfaction. I’m here on my boat this time, down in the marina, and I’m staying in Santa Barbara until I get satisfaction. Satisfaction. Is that understood, mister? Get used to that and be prepared to answer to my lawyer.” His face was the color of rhubarb pie.
And my head hurt. And my life was a mess anyway. So I said, “Oh fuck you.”
Commander Worsham stood at attention. “Sir, I will not allow you to take the Lord’s name in vain.”
Sheesh. I turned around and walked away from him, toward the back of the warehouse. I could hear his footsteps behind me. When I got to the poetry area, where the boxes were piled up in freestanding stacks instead of stacked on pallets, I turned to the right and ran to the end of the aisle, where I hid. I was grateful for once that I was short, shorter than the poetry stacks.
The commander was still coming, huffing and puffing.
I switched aisles, then darted down a third. I felt like Cary Grant hiding in the cornfield in North by Northwest. I could lose him in this maze, but for how long? And who was going to save me when he finally got his hands on my throat? Another aisle and then another until I was behind them all, back by the DocuTech. He was marching now, up one aisle and down the next, closer and closer.
“You can run, but you can’t hide, you atheist, you cheater, you midget!”
Well, he had me there, on all three counts. “Okay,” I called. “Just stay where you are, asshole.”
“WHAT DID YOU CALL ME?”
Commander Bob Worsham roared and became an act of God, an earthquake, a calamity. In his fury he must have pushed into a row of poetry, a pile high enough to fall against a pile in the next row, which became three piles as they fell into the next, and the momentum grew all the way as the dominoes fell, with the rumble of a freight train, the force of the ocean, and before I could move out of the way the wall of boxes I was standing behind crashed down on me, knocking me to the floor, where my head bounced on the cement and cartons full of books covered my body.
Vanity Fire Page 8
