Exile on Kalamazoo Street

by Michael Loyd Gray

I listened to Janis rummage around in the kitchen. Black Kitty finally showed up, fresh from taking a nap upstairs on the bed.

  “Were your ears burning, Black Kitty? We were talking about you.”

  Black Kitty jumped onto the sofa and settled next to me.

  Janis brought the tea and sat on the sofa. Black Kitty rolled over on his back, placed his paws against her leg, and purred.

  “I guess he forgives me for capturing him that day,” she said.

  “He’s thanking you, I suppose.”

  “I’m glad you have him.”

  I studied her face a moment. She was still pretty, still youthful.

  “Are you worried about me, Janis?”

  “No. You seem okay. You look good … healthier. The hair takes some getting used to, but then you always were a bit of a rebel.”

  “A rebel? Was I really?”

  “You didn’t accept things as you heard them, I mean,” she said. “You often went your own way.”

  I leaned back into the sofa, slipped my hands behind my head, and stared up at the ceiling.

  “And then I suppose I lost my way,” I said flatly.

  “Yeah, I suppose you did,” she said, “but that’s no sin. That’s life.”

  I wanted to ask her about her recent divorce, how she had adjusted, but I felt the subject was something to avoid. She was still adjusting to her daughters—my nieces—shuttling back and forth across town between her and her ex, who was a dentist. I had not seen them since exile began. Janis had managed her ex’s dental practice, but now had a job managing another one.

  “How’s work, Janis?”

  She shrugged her shoulders dramatically.

  “It’s going good so far,” she said. “This time I won’t marry the dentist.”

  “Probably a good idea.”

  “He’s too old, anyway,” she said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Oh, absolutely. He’s sixty-four, for goodness’ sake.”

  “Just keep reminding yourself that,” I said.

  We both laughed and sipped tea. It was the first time in years we’d had a relaxed conversation of any depth. The main reason for that, of course, was my drinking and carousing.

  “Do you miss teaching, Bryce?”

  I contemplated that question a moment, recalling a few teaching memories. Student faces were, of course, a blur.

  “Some days I do, yes.”

  “What about writing?” she said.

  “Do I miss it, you mean?”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course,” I said, after staring for a few seconds at the blackened fragments of consumed wood in the fireplace, “but writing’s different than teaching.”

  “How so?”

  “It requires a different energy, I guess.”

  “Do you think you’ll write again, Bryce?”

  It was a good question. No specific answer came to mind and I sipped tea to buy time, but that didn’t really help.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. It didn’t end so well the last time.”

  “But you made good money from writing.”

  I nodded. “Did you read the last one?”

  “Some of it.” She looked down at Black Kitty curled against her. “I didn’t always understand it. Are you too disappointed?”

  I weighed that a moment.

  “Not really. Hell, Janis, I didn’t understand all of it, either.”

  “Goodness, Bryce, you wrote the thing!”

  She smiled and I smiled, too, and I really didn’t feel very bad at all. The book seemed to be far enough out in my wake to finally joke about.

  “Maybe the first two cancel out the last one,” I said.

  “Of course they do. That’s how you should look at it. And you can always write another.”

  I frowned at the notion of starting a new book and stared into the dead fireplace. Maybe writing was not yet far enough in my wake after all. Or maybe I was just too touchy and really needed to get over it.

  “Maybe,” I finally said. “It’s complicated.”

  “You could write about a man who never leaves his house, Bryce.”

  She looked hopeful and I knew she was just trying to be helpful. I studied her face, which didn’t seem to betray judgment and instead looked rather neutral, though she had always been good at disguising her emotions.

  “It’s not like I won’t eventually leave the house, Janis. Staying here has served a purpose.”

  She nodded and put her teacup on a coaster on the coffee table.

  “Well, you can afford it, Bryce.”

  I mulled that concept over for a moment.

  “Do you mean financially, Janis? Or something else?”

  “Financially, I guess. What other consideration would there be?”

  I rubbed Black Kitty behind his ears and he turned back toward me.

  “Oh, how it looks, I suppose,” I said. “Self-imposed exile in a house all winter. People talk about things like that.”

  “It would be different if you were on welfare or something,” she said.

  After a few seconds I said, “In a way, I am.”

  She blinked several times, but didn’t say anything. Then she got up and collected our empty cups and took them into the kitchen. I could hear her run water to rinse them.

  Chapter 10: The Movie People

  My phone almost never rang, which was a good thing. I was usually startled just by the sound of it. And I almost never made calls except to order a pizza from Santorelli’s or to remind Janis of something when she shopped for me. And, of course, Elsa never called. It wasn’t a ‘call first’ kind of thing that we had—whatever it was that we had, which was still a mystery, but a pretty pleasant one. All mysteries should involve a naked 23-year-old woman with a shaved, 23-year-old vulva.

  Elsa would show up unexpectedly from time to time, with no pattern to the time-to-time part of it, and we always ended up in bed for an afternoon or an entire night. Sometimes days went by between sudden visits—she always knew where she could find me—and I was okay with that. It helped lessen any notion I might have of a relationship with or responsibility for her.

  On this day, amid fleeting thoughts of Elsa’s mercurial unpredictability and her 23-year-old, shaved vulva, the phone rang. Black Kitty was keeping my feet warm as I reread Tender is the Night on the sofa. In the background I played the Stones’ album, Let it Bleed. The phone seemed louder than it should, insistent. Perhaps the overall quiet in the house—just the occasional metallic clicking when the heat came on—made the ringing of the phone seem too loud, out of proportion to its usefulness. I actually moved too slowly to answer it, and it stopped, but as I sat back down on the sofa it rang again, and that made me curious to know who was so persistent and why.

  The caller was my agent—former agent?—Mavis Thompson of Mavis Thompson and Associates Literary Agency, of the Pretentious Nation of New York City. I assumed she was my former agent because we had not talked in quite some time, and because I had not written a damn thing in an even longer time, and of course, the last book had been a stinker, regardless of how Paul tried to spin it. The last book was the one I gave Rev. Mortensen. He’d handled it like a turd suddenly dropped in his hand. I figured his opinion of me could surely not drop any lower, but there was always that chance and one could hope.

  So, in the midst of exile in a Midwestern burg desperately waiting for winter to really get off its fat ass and leave—I assumed the burg was desperate but I could not be sure since I was in exile—a call had come in from New York.

  The big old goddamn apple.

  The freaking center of the freaking universe.

  A legend in its own mind.

  Civilization.

  I had spent time in New York when I was actually writing books that made sense … and money. I was not fond of the place. Midwesterners aren’t born with the automatic notion that everyone else lives in the wrong place. But New York had some terrific bars—that little Irish basemen
t across from the art museum. Whiskey River had flowed through it like Niagara Falls. All the bartenders in that bar knew me well.

  “Mavis Thompson,” I said into the phone. “I’m surprised you still have my number. And that you would call it.”

  “I had to look for it, Bryce. I won’t kid you. I found it on the wall of the ladies room, where you must have scrawled it.”

  “Probably a fan, Mavis.”

  “You keep believing that, Bryce.”

  “And perception becomes reality, Mavis.”

  “In your dreams. So … how long has it been?”

  “A couple years, at least. Should we try and calculate it?”

  “Any interest in that, Bryce?”

  “None whatsoever. How the hell are you, Mavis?”

  “Busy, but good. Hanging by my fingernails, as always.”

  “And how’s New Damn York, Mavis? Still there, is it?”

  “Right outside the window,” she said. “Shall I open it so you can hear the city?”

  “How cold is it?”

  “It’s not warm.”

  “Fuck the window, Mavis. Fuck New York, too.”

  “I see you still have affection for us, Bryce. And that impressive writer’s vocabulary.”

  “Once a writer, always a fool, Mavis.”

  “Sounds clever … and familiar,” she said. “Wasn’t that a jacket blurb for your last novel?”

  “Of course. I believe Hemingway wrote it. Or maybe it was Faulkner. Or Fitzgerald. Or Virginia Woolf. Or J.K. Rowling, since she’s actually alive.”

  “And selling books.”

  “Book are supposed to sell, Mavis?”

  “That’s the theory, anyway,” she said. “Rowling’s do.”

  “But enough of the pleasantries,” I said.

  “Are you doing stand-up comedy these days, Bryce?”

  “Sit down comedy. I do it right here from my sofa.”

  “Convenient.”

  Mavis and I had always had a blunt relationship, yet we understood that the barking was always far worse than the biting. Sort of a necessary ice-breaking. She was a tough New York City bird.

  “What are you reading these days, Bryce?”

  “Right now, Tender is the Night.”

  “Fitzgerald? That’s ambitious.”

  “Could you sell Tender now, Mavis?”

  “Iffy, my friend. I suspect we’d need to get some Opus Dei conspirators mucking about in it.”

  “I could get on that right away for you, Mavis, if you like. Fitzgerald isn’t likely to complain.”

  “That’s why I’m calling.”

  “To have me fuck up a great novel?”

  “You can do that if you want, but I’m calling to see if you’re interested in writing a screenplay.”

  “Really?”

  “Go figure,” she said. “There are still people who remember you.”

  “Two or three, I suppose. “

  “Be optimistic, Bryce. It might actually be up to four or five now.

  “I don’t think I can count that high.”

  Then it’s good you’re not a mathematician,” she said. “So, does a screenplay interest you?”

  “Well, I’m not doing anything.”

  “What are you doing Bryce? Still teaching?”

  “I took a hiatus.”

  “I see,” she said. “To have more time for drinking?”

  “I took a break from that, too.”

  “Just a break?”

  “More than that,” I said. “A divorce. A pox on its house and all that.”

  “Good for you. Sounds promising. But what are you doing to stay busy?”

  “I’ve exiled myself in my house for the winter.”

  “That would make a good first line for a novel,” she said. “You still have the Bryce Carter touch.”

  “Except it’s true,” I said. “I haven’t stepped foot outside since after Christmas.”

  “Jesus, Bryce. You don’t look like Howard Hughes, do you?”

  “Not at all. I shower daily and even wash behind my ears.”

  “Just you in the house alone?”

  “I have a cat. Black Kitty.”

  “That’s his name?” she said. “And here I was thinking you’re still a writer.”

  “Tell me about this screenplay, Mavis.”

  “Well, hard as it is to believe, there are people who still remember you and even like you—no doubt the dwindling few who caught you on the days when you waited until afternoon to start drinking. There was even an article in The Times about your first two books. I can’t explain it, but you still have fans—at least three of them. “

  “You said I was up to four or five now.”

  That’s the people who might remember you, Bryce. The fan club is surely even smaller. Anyway, a producer friend of mine wants to know if you can write a screenplay based on a novel.”

  “I was in The Times?”

  “Buried inside, a short piece, nostalgic, a little pathetic, but yeah.”

  “Send me a copy. And what novel are we talking about, War and Peace?”

  “Cute, Bryce.”

  “Is it something I’ve heard of?”

  “You have intimate knowledge of it.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Your last one.”

  “Fuck me,” I said softly.

  * * *

  A couple hours later, I called Mavis back to make sure I hadn’t been dreaming, mildly delusional, or too gullible because she’d been merely playing a prank.

  “Are you really sober, Bryce?”

  “Yes. Nary a drop all winter.”

  “Nary? Who uses ‘nary’ anymore?”

  “Maybe it’s in Fitzgerald somewhere. If not, I’ll pencil it into my copy of Tender.”

  “That’s how you keep busy these days?”

  I thought briefly of Elsa—certainly that was how I kept busy some days, and I hoped to be busy with that some more.

  “These days I don’t worry about keeping busy. I worry about the day I step outside my house again.”

  “Do you?”

  “I certainly wonder about it,” I said. “Mostly I worry about where the world has gone since I’ve been away from it.”

  “Really?”

  “No. Only when I watch TV. Or hear Republicans talk.”

  “Do a good job with the screenplay, Bryce, and maybe you can start writing reality TV show scripts.”

  “They have scripts?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “What do you know, Mavis?”

  She didn’t say anything for a few seconds.

  “I know that Fitzgerald was wrong about no second acts in America,” she said. “It happens all the time.”

  * * *

  The first and last thing to know about my third novel, Reflections, is that it was so bad it circled the sun three times, reached the speed of light, fell singed to earth, and magically became good in the way that the film Road House is so bad it somehow became good and a cult classic.

  I wouldn’t call Reflections a cult classic—nobody would—though it wouldn’t surprise me if some tiny absurd cult somewhere, say in the wilds of rural Oregon, used it as their Bible. Or at least tore pages out for toilet paper … unless of course it was an anti-toilet paper cult. Or an anti-shitty novel cult.

  The second thing to know is that Reflections is a self-indulgent mess by a self-indulgent drunk.

  A drunk who was still capable of obtaining ink by the barrel.

  Reflections avoids plot, mixes stream of consciousness with sudden passages of experimental prose that Joyce could have whacked off to, and it’s a 500-page leviathan that lurches finally into incoherence about a man searching for his soul.

  And he never did find it.

  Perhaps he didn’t even have one.

  Or know where to look.

  At the time, the writer certainly didn’t.

  And mercifully he ran out of gas on page 500.

  Ran out
of booze, maybe.

  Hard to remember.

  It got published only because I still had a name that could be traded on.

  I guess it’s the literary version of “Revolution 9” by The Beatles.

  While Ulysses is genius to millions, Reflections is genius to four or five people, apparently, including some dipshit producer from LA who figured the only thing wrong with it is that it’s a story better put on screen than the page, and that it’s really a concept that can only work if it’s built around just the right actor. That way it might become a cinematic tour de force, the way Road House somehow exploited the talents of Patrick Swayze as Dalton the unlikely and diminutive Zen bouncer.

  In short, a stinker on the screen, too.

  But perhaps bad enough to become the next Road House.

  And who better to write the screenplay than the idiot who created the novel?

  The theory, as Mavis explained it, was that I might be counted on to make the screenplay as incoherent as the novel, which is what the producer was shooting for. An actual experienced screenwriter in Hollywood might instead turn Reflections into something coherent and plot-driven, which would ruin the whole idea of taking a cinematic dump and hoping the audience would call it art featuring a big name star.

  They were counting on me to fail.

  And I would be well paid for it, too.

  “So, Mavis,” I said by phone the next day, “My appeal to Hollywood is that I wrote a shitty book?”

  “Shitty’s not the word they used, Bryce.”

  “What word did they use?”

  “Crap,” she said. “Pure crap. I think mindless drivel was mentioned, too.”

  “But that’s what they like about it, right?”

  “Absolutely, Bryce. They said they couldn’t be more pleased with how bad it is.”

  “And they’re counting on me to make the screenplay pure crap, too, right?”

  “They’ve got their fingers and toes crossed that you’ll fuck it up royally.”

  “Wow, zero expectations. And for good money.”

  “No, Bryce, they’re paying good money because they actually have sky high expectations. The bar’s actually set pretty high here, my friend.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have to avoid coherence,” she said. “They even suggested you write it while drunk, but I told them you were on the wagon.”

  “What did they say to that?”