by Matt Witten
"You should give us money, you Hollywood sellout," Antoinette Carlson shot back with a petulant toss of her long dreadlocks, but then softened it with a smile. She was looking flamboyant as always in her dreads and African nationalist earrings.
Antoinette was a video producer/director who, so far as I could tell, had never actually produced or directed any videos. However, that minor detail didn't prevent her from receiving an astonishing amount of grant money from all kinds of sources. Once you get onto the grant circuit you can ride that wave for quite a while, and if you're lucky, ease on from there to a cushy teaching job.
As soon as Antoinette sat down, a pale young guy named Steve Something-or-Other scurried over to make sure he got a seat right beside her. Something-or-Other absolutely idolized Antoinette, maybe because she had so much exuberant vitality and he had so little. She was also a good six inches taller than he was, and they made an odd but sweet pair: the Queen of Sheba and her faithful Caucasian sidekick.
Something-or-Other had been rewriting the same eighty-page novella for the past two years. Having once labored for almost that long on a hopelessly uncommercial screenplay about elderly Cambodians in a garment factory, I was tempted to identify with him. But the fact that he had a rather large trust fund made me keep my empathy for Mr. Novella to myself.
Sitting down next to him was a folk musician with a long, droopy, hairy face named Mike Pardou. Pardou's biggest claim to fame was that he played the spoons on a Jim Kweskin Jug Band album thirty-some years ago, back in the fabled 60s. His other claim to fame was that he once had a torrid affair with Maria Muldaur—or so he said. Every time he got high, he'd start singing her hit song "Midnight at the Oasis," and burst into tears.
Behind Mr. Novella and the King of Spoons came Bonnie, who gave me one of her killer hugs before heading over to join the others. She seemed to have acquired several new muscles on her neck since I saw her this morning. Was I sexist for thinking all those huge muscles of hers were starting to make her look a little weird? "If you want to make money," she informed me, "you better invest in my boxing video now before it's too late. I've got investors lining up."
George Hosey, the last artist in the flock, stroked his white goatee, pointed a finger at me, and declared sternly, "Uncle Sam, and Aunt Bonnie, want you."
They all erupted into huge gales of laughter at Hosey's sally, acting punchy as hell. Hosey was a retired chemist from Finch Pruyn who grew a mustache and long white goatee just for kicks, and suddenly everyone started telling him he was the spitting image of Uncle Sam. It's true, he was. So now he went around playing Uncle Sam at parades and conventions.
I saw his act once and hated it. I may not be the fairest critic, because I think patriotism is for the birds and the fascists, but it sure looked to me like the only artistic talent the guy had going for him was his facial hair. Nevertheless, Hosey was making more money doing his inane routine than he ever made as senior vice president of research and development.
I tried to shake these negative thoughts out of my mind and just enjoy the happy mood at the table. Even Mike Pardou, who usually looked about as cheerful as a dead basset hound, was smiling and beating an upbeat rhythm with a couple of soup spoons.
"So how about you guys?" I kidded them. "Did you give yourselves any grants?"
I have a long-standing knack for putting my foot in my mouth. I meant it as lighthearted teasing, but instantly everyone at their table stopped laughing and beating their spoons, and fell silent.
Theoretically it's a great idea, giving local communities the power to decide which of their artists to support. But there's a flaw. The grant panelists are often artists themselves, applying for the same grants they're giving out. When this happens, the interested party is supposed to leave the room while his or her application is discussed, but obviously there's great potential for conflict of interest.
Gretchen broke the uncomfortable silence, declaring stiffly, "Some of them did receive grants, but of course we followed all the proper procedures, and—"
"I know, Gretchen, I was just kidding."
But everyone was still glowering at me. Fortunately Gretchen stepped in again and changed the subject. "Interesting way of working you've got there," she said, pointing at the plethora of notebooks, flattened milk cartons, and toilet paper piled high on the table in front of me.
"Actually, this stuff isn't mine. It's Donald Penn's life work," I said, eager to keep the social ball rolling.
Instead, the social ball screeched to a complete halt. If before I had put my foot in my mouth, this time I'd put my whole leg in. As for their mouths, they were all hanging open.
Bonnie was the first to speak. "Really," she said, treating me to one of her piercing looks.
"Huh," said Ersatz Uncle Sam, scratching at his mustache.
"How interesting," Pardou said, then started playing the spoons with an angry vigor, off on some emotional tangent of his own.
"Yeah," drawled Novella Man. He wasn't a great conversationalist, but small verbal tasks like this he could handle.
"Well, well," Gretchen intoned. I waited for her to say more, but all she said was, once again, "Well, well."
And then they all went back to their coffee and soup-sipping and studiously ignored me.
Somehow, I wasn't sure how, I had ruined their party.
6
I stuffed Penn’s notebooks and assorted junk back into my pack and headed out of Madeline's back room, waving good-bye to my fellow artists. I must say, they didn't act like they'd miss me much. Why had they all reacted with such distaste when I showed them Penn’s magnum opus? You'd think I was showing them John Wayne Bobbitt videos or photographs of Jesse Helms or something.
Madeline was gone from the front room when I came through, but Rob was still there, working behind the counter with Marcie.
Marcie. Don't get me started. May God have mercy, Marcie was a young woman that I simply could not look at without picturing her naked. It wasn't just the long blond hair and the low-cut dresses—well, okay, maybe it was just the long blond hair and the low-cut dresses.
No, there was something else, too. A sly gleam in her eyes that made you suspect she was picturing you naked. A smoky scent that snaked across the room and pulled you forward like some primeval mating call. I'm usually very olfactorily challenged, but Marcie sure brought out the nose in me.
She smiled as I came in from the back room. I ducked my head and smiled back vaguely, without looking at her straight on. I get embarrassed when gorgeous women can see on my face that I'd love to go to bed with them.
I'm happily married with two great children. But still. For six months, ever since that three hundred K gave me both freedom and a midlife crisis simultaneously, I'd been wondering if I would suddenly start doing something totally out of character, like going scuba diving, or becoming a born-again Christian, or sleeping around. So far I hadn't. But I knew that, unchained from the constant demands of eight hours a day at the computer, anything was possible.
And since anything was possible, I carefully avoided Marcie's sparkling eyes as I walked past her. But Rob stopped me. "So how's The Penn's stuff? Any good?"
"It's, uh..." I hesitated.
Should I tell the truth? But that would turn the dead man into a laughingstock—and what right did I have to do that? Penn had trusted me. "It's... extremely interesting," I said.
"No shit?"
"Absolutely no shit. I mean, wow." I pumped my fist with fake enthusiasm.
Rob laughed and high-fived me, looking every bit as excited as I was pretending to be. "Far fuckin' out! Hurray for my man Penn!" I just stood there smiling nervously, bobbing my head up and down. "So what did the guy write about?" Rob continued.
"Man, what didn't he write about? I'll give you the whole scoop after I finish reading."
"Okay, dude, but hurry up. We gotta turn his stuff into an exhibit already, get rid of all this crap," Rob said, waving at the pointillist monstrosities on the walls.
It was hard to answer her with my tongue hanging out.
"Seriously," Rob broke in, "Madeline gave it the okay. And since we want to hold the memorial on Sunday, and we'd like to have The Penn's stuff up on the wall by then, we'll even do the work. You know, read it and decide what to put up."
Sure, I could just picture it. A hundred different versions of that frigging preface lining the walls. What a horrible mockery of a man's life.
"I'll think about it," I lied, and got the hell out of there.
But even after I made it outside, Marcie's scent stayed with me—so much so that when Judy Demarest waved to me, I felt guilty. Besides being the editor of the Daily Saratogian, Judy is also my wife's best buddy and my children's favorite babysitter. "Hey, Judy, how's it going?" I chirped.
"Big story." Judy always spoke in short clipped phrases, trying to sound like a tough, hard-boiled editor. But anyone who knew about her babysitting prowess, as well as her passionate involvement in the Literacy Volunteers of Saratoga—she was their chief fundraiser and chairperson of their executive board—knew that in reality Judy had only been boiled for three minutes, at most. "Guy stole forty-six cans of whipped cream from Price Chopper. Sniffed the gas to get high."
"Well now, that is a big story. Definitely page one."
She shrugged. "Best we got so far. Unless you have something better."
I started to give her a return shrug, but then my shoulders froze. I did have something better.
A hundred versions of that preface on Madeline's walls would be grotesque... but how about publishing just one version in the Daily Saratogian?
And then, boom, it finally hit me. That's what this is all about. This is why Donald Penn threw me his key!
He knew his heart was attacking him and he sensed he was about to die. So with his last living breath and his last desperate lurch toward my feet, he was begging me to please for God's sake get him published. Because like myself and every other poor sucker of a writer who ever picked up a pen or sat down at a keyboard, he believed that if he was published, he would never really die.
He'd be immortal.
If I could get Judy to go for it, Donald Penn would finally, after thirty long hard years of writing, become what he had always dreamed of: a real honest to God published writer. Right there in the same ballpark with Shakespeare and all the rest of the big guys.
No wonder Penn came to me when he was dying. I was undoubtedly his best contact in the publishing world. Hell, his only contact.
His only hope.
Nervously, my breath getting shallow, I asked Judy if she'd like to publish an excerpt of Penn's work. I offered her exclusive first rights, trying to make it sound like I was doing her a big favor.
To my astonishment, she jumped at the chance. "Sure. Let's do it," she agreed.
I was so thrilled and relieved at how easy it had been, I could hardly hear her as she continued on. I was flashing back to the first time I was published (a "Letter to the Editor" for McGovern in my high school paper).
"After all," Judy was saying, "man was a celeb. They even gave him free coffee at City Hall every morning."
I tried to act casual, afraid that if I jumped up and down with joy Judy might get second thoughts. "Free coffee, huh? I didn't know that."
"Sure, Mayor's orders. Cup of Ethiopian."
Weird. "You have any idea why he was so into Ethiopian?"
"Maybe he owned stock. So when you gonna get me Penn's stuff?"
As soon as I can cut and paste together a couple of pages that don't sound like the man was totally insane. "As soon as I can. He wrote so much terrific material, I'll have to, you know, pick out the best."
"Just give me the whole shebang. I'm the editor, I'll edit."
First Rob, now Judy. Nice of everyone to be so darn helpful. But no way was I going to let Judy Demarest find out that Penn's entire oeuvre consisted of ten trillion versions of a one-page preface. Two pages at most. "No, the handwriting's, like, totally illegible."
"Not for me. Why I became an editor. Never yet met handwriting I couldn't handle."
I smiled but held my ground. "Thanks, I'm happy to just do it myself."
"Look, it'll be quicker if I do it. Guy died two days ago, I gotta get this in the paper by Sunday at the latest."
"I'll give it to you before then."
Judy argued for a while longer, but finally shrugged her shoulders and gave up.
"So," she said, "guy was a diamond in the rough, huh?"
I gave a knowing nod.
"You could say that," I answered.
7
"You did what?!" Andrea screeched, her voice rising. It was several hours later. The kids were in the backyard playing while Andrea and I fixed dinner; I hoped they couldn't hear us fighting. "You robbed a safety-deposit vault? Isn't that, like, a federal crime?"
"Honey, I had to. It was the only way I could get in." I'd already decided to leave out the part about the scree-eeks, so I added, "There was no risk at all. I was in and out of there in about two seconds."
Andrea pointed a chopping knife at me. "What is the matter with you? You're wacko! You hardly even knew this guy, and now you risk going to jail for him?!"
I kept right on setting the table, playing nonchalant. "I'm telling you, it was no big deal. Besides, even if they caught me, they wouldn't have done anything—"
Andrea grabbed the plates out of my hand and stared me down. "Don't you ever do something like that again without talking to me first! You've got a wife and two kids, you can't act like this!"
I sighed. "Okay, okay, don't worry. No more funny stuff."
"There's nothing funny about it."
Dinner that night was a decidedly tense experience. Even the eggplant parmesan, usually one of my faves, tasted flavorless somehow. Babe Ruth spent the entire meal loudly complaining that in his T-ball league, you're not allowed to get doubles or triples or homers, only singles. "I could get a homer every time, if they let me!" he declared.
It's true: The Babe is a darn good little baseball player. We're happy about that, because he's shown signs of being intellectually gifted—he can already add and subtract better than most politicians—and we figure the baseball playing will help keep him well balanced. Also, he seems to have inherited some of my sensitive artiste tendencies, and exercise is the best way for guys like us to mellow out.
But Andrea and I weren't in the mood to talk baseball with the Babe that night. On top of being angry at me, Andrea got mad at Gretzky for his hockey-players-don't-make-peepee routine, which was showing no signs of abating. Meanwhile, I was still preoccupied with how I was going to put together a good version of The Penn's preface for the newspaper.
So later that night, as I set Penn's magnum opus down on my bedside table and lay back in bed watching Andrea undress, I still felt a residue of our earlier quarrel. Which was unfortunate, because lying back in bed watching Andrea undress was usually one of my favorite pastimes. To hell with Marcie. Like Paul Newman says, Why go out for hamburger when you can have steak at home? Right now Andrea was shaking her hair free from her barrette. I began to get that old familiar tightening in my thighs.
The Sultan of Swat and the Great One were sound asleep in their room, and maybe Andrea and I could make up with some good loving. I held out my arms for Andrea to slide into. But she sat down on the edge of the bed, looking fretful.
"We've got to do something about this, we really do," she said.
"I got it all squared away,” I reassured her.
She stared at me blankly. "What?"
"I picked out the best three versions of the preface I could find. I'll edit them together, then give it to Judy tomorrow."
Andrea impatiently tossed her underwear to the floor, and I tingled all over. To hell with Marcie. Definitely.
"I was talking about Gretz
ky," Andrea said. "He was whiny all afternoon, and I'm sure it's because he was holding in his peepee. That can't be healthy, going a whole eight hours without peeing."
"Maybe this is just some kind of stage they go through," I said hopefully.
"Babe Ruth never went through it."
"Well, look at the bright side. At least Gretzky doesn't walk in his sleep. Speaking of which, did you put the newspaper down?" Two weeks ago, Babe Ruth sleepwalked right into the middle of a seriously X-rated scene in our bedroom. Ever since then we've been putting crumpled newspaper in front of our bedroom door at night, so we'll get advance warning before the Babe stumbles in and makes it a kinky threesome.
Andrea sighed. "The newspaper's downstairs. I forgot about it." She turned away from me in the bed. "I have to get final grades in tomorrow. I'm really tired."
"Don't worry, gorgeous," I said softly, then bent down and licked the back of her knee. "I'll take care of it."
And I did.
"Jacob. Jacob," my wife said.
Andrea and I were sitting in a crowded library auditorium, listening to Steve Something-or-Other read from his novella. After fifteen minutes of this torture, I still had no clue what the cursed thing was about, except he used the word "ubiquitous" a lot. Everyone around me was asleep. I wished I was, too.
"Hey, Jacob," Andrea repeated.
"Shh," I whispered.
Now Antoinette Carlson, looking stunning in a green, yellow, and black dashiki, came onstage and began lecturing about the future of video in this country. As she explained it, video's future depended on increased government funding for artists with true integrity and vision.
Artists like herself.
The audience applauded. Then Andrea shook my shoulder. "It's your turn to get up."
Everyone turned around. I was supposed to go onstage and pontificate about "Is Art Possible in Hollywood?" or some such topic.
"Hell, no, I won't go," I mumbled.
"Come on. What if Babe Ruth bumps into something?"
