Collected Fictions

by Gordon Lish

  So pay attention.

  This is serious.

  This is between you and me.

  Fuck the publisher.

  Don't worry about the publisher.

  I'll worry about the publisher.

  Leave it to me to deal with the publisher.

  You just worry about getting me the information.

  About me in 1954 in Miami Retreat.

  Also, I need to know what you think about you waiting for me in a bed.

  You think it's easy for me to ask?

  How many people would come right out and ask?

  You any idea of what it must mean for me to ask?

  I mean, it must mean I am just as worse off now as than at that time I was or at least as bad.

  Listen, I just had this thought.

  You know what a near-death experience is?

  It's life.

  No shit.

  So what's this worth, a smart thing like this?

  It's pretty good, a smart thing like this.

  So there's more where it came from, es vero?

  Do us both a favor and write the people publishing this book. Tell them you are waiting for Gordon Lish to come lie down with you in your bed. Or for him to let you come lie down with him for him in his. Then guess who won't have to depend anymore on him sitting himself down in this chair anymore to keep himself feeling rescued from himself.

  But all in bad faith.

  P. S. I'm adding this on as a P. S.

  The same goes for White Plains.

  Think in terms of the year of 1954 and of the year of 1955 as far as also the place in White Plains. Which for your information was what I was all set to call this book, but then they started acting like they were going to sue me for it and then the next thing was it was the whole United States.

  Anyway, don't forget my bed.

  WARBIRD

  REASON CALLING THIS WARBIRD IS because somebody on the phone with me today thought I was saying warbird when I was saying something else. But reason am writing anything to be called anything is because there's this debt I think I am developing to this fellow Jon Cone, who has a magazine he calls World Letter. How I got myself into this thing with this Jon Cone and with this World Letter of his is not going to be possible for me to catch you up on because all I can seem to get the drift of is of me once trying to put one over on him and then of him figuring out that what I was once trying to do vis-à-vis him was exactly what I was actually trying to do vis-à-vis him and then of his—you know, of this Jon Cone's—writing me a letter to me about it and of him saying to me so—like, hey, you fucking bullshit artist, come on, man, okay?

  So the thing I did today was pick up the phone today to call Jon Cone to try and pull some more wool over Jon Cone's eyes, figuring if I don't call but instead of calling write a letter to Jon Cone and give Jon Cone something from me in writing to him, then he might get this kind of a lawful like armlock on me and later on like come back at me with it and crush me with it in the law courts like I'm some type of schnook or some thing.

  So I called.

  No letter.

  Didn't write.

  Didn't get it down there in the old black-and-white.

  But got the wrong number, it looks like.

  Got a person who answered like this.

  "Hello?"

  And I said is Jon Cone there.

  And the person said, "What?"

  And I said Mr. Cone, is there a Mr. Cone there.

  And the person said, "Who are you looking for?"

  And I said I am looking for the editor of the magazine called World Letter, okay? I said is this the magazine called that? I said because this is the telephone number which I am right this minute reading off of Mr. Cone's stationery to me.

  And the person said, "I'm sorry, but there is nothing like any of that here."

  And I said I just want to make sure you're telling me there is no World Letter and no Jon Cone there. So I said can I be positive that this is what you are saying to me—nothing like World Letter there, nothing neither like a Jon Cone there?

  And the person on the phone said, "What kind of a shitbird are you?" The person on the phone said, "So is this what is calling me on the telephone, some kind of a shitbird on the telephone?"

  That was the conversation to the extent that I am going to trouble myself to try and sit here and, you know, and begin to make any effort to establish it for you as a structure for you.

  But, right, right, nobody said warbird, that's the facts of it, no warbird was actually said anywhere.

  Just said all of that warbird stuff about warbird because I thought, you know, you might, as a title, go for it. So then you can see how after it was set up for us as the title of this, how then, how the next thing you know, how then it led to some other things about warbird right there in the first sentence of this right after there was warbird in the title of it.

  Man, look at it, will you just look at it?—it's a downward spiral, this is, isn't it?

  All this downward spiral of it.

  You try to make it up to people, you get set to make it up to people, and then the next thing you know, there is this terrible spiral downward with them on account of the fact that you are always starting to spiral downward with people, and then once you start the downward spiral with them, it is all going to keep on going downward like this—namely, in like a definite downward spiral downward.

  If only things weren't always so downward like this!

  If only things were not rigged to always keep going spiraling so downward like this!

  Everything wrongward and downish.

  This Jon Cone and me, how come we could not have, the two of us, how come we could not have sailed right off of here up out from here at the outset from here to anywhere terrific?

  Maybe soared right on up out from here—and then up some more upward from here, and then some more upward after that—and then, after that, ever upward from that—sailing—soaring—ever upward.

  Terrifically.

  Or upwardly.

  And not like the way it really always is.

  Which is like a letter you take a chance and go post to them like a warbird to them instead of feather back and get fluttered from the motherfucking world.

  THREE JEWS ON THE WAY HOME FROM A CLASS

  WE TOOK A TAXI.

  Then call it a cab.

  Fine, we took a taxicab. Don't tell me they weren't as Jewish as I am as Jewish, the two of them, the pair of them, in the back seat with me in the taxicab with me. We would have taken a subway, except who wanted to get killed? They kill Jews on subways. This has been the practice here for ever so long. It must be plain, then, that the others had never been on a subway, for if they had been, then how could they have got into a taxicab with me the night of my class Wednesday last? How indeed could have done they? Look, I think I have a concussion. My head, I believe it to have been concussed—at 84th Street and Park—where the taxicab I and my students were riding in collided with the planet Mars. Or with, lesserly, the moon. Or more probably upon the fenestration of a legion of marching Christians, it felt like. We were smashed. Firetrucks show up. Ambulances show up. The sidewalks are thronged (is this permissable, thronged?)—were athrong with cheering horses. Hordes, one imagines oneself to have said. Hey, if I have a head injury, if any of this evinces (evinces?) the vince of a head injury, then don't cry for me, Babylon! Nor Bayonne. They took us away on boards. Aboard boards. In the emergency room, the hue and cry was as follows: "These are Jews!" But a doctor cameth and applied salves. I was healed. My students were healed. He said, "You be the people of interpretation, yes?" There was acknowledgment. This was curative. He said, "Cab crashes phalanx of unclean, correctomento?" Acknowledgement—but in the nodding off of it of, hear something clink. Within. Take the fellow by the buttonhole, expressing to him alarm, saying, "My, you know, my head." "Ah," the man says, brightening, "you be bashed in it in, no?" "But my brain," I opine, "my brain, what of its concourse now?" T
here is smiling. My students, the nurses, the firemen, the administrators—Ma and Pa—they smileth and smilen. "We were three Jews on the way home from a class!" I allow, stressing the titular aspects of the matter. The telephone rings. The telephone is ringing. Everybody answers. "Hello," it states. "Duffy's Tavern," it states. "Duffy's not here," it states. "John Oakes speaking." "John!" I say. "Oh, God—thank God, thank Jesus, it's John!" I say. I say, "John, Jesus pal, there's been an efficiency, okay? We hit something. The tenses are changing. We were promising uptown and we hit something and now all the tenses are changing. Can you, you know, in your heart, can you possibly maybe make anything out of this for me as a person?" It states, "Like one fellow to another? Like one victim to another? Like one aspect to another? You mean like as in humanitarianly-wise?" But I had to hang up. Everybody was dying. It was like it had all of it—the pay-off—been postponed or something, but now—look out!—the gist was up. Except for me, of course. Except for me and for the one true, the one verdanto, church, of course.

  Now it was just the twain of us.

  "Guardimente!" I snarleth.

  "Go ahead!" I chasteneth.

  "Make your move!" I, with ligament, chirg.

  PRACTICE

  COUPLE OF THINGS ON MY MIND.

  Not on it so much as near it. At, you might say, the margins of it. Or is it sidelines? Off there, then, at the fringes, you might say—this thing of thinking somebody once said to me something about some woman I know—but which woman, which woman?—having consorted with another woman. Or currently consorting with ditto. So crazy, this is all so crazy—because what further of info can I furnish anybody?—none, none!—I having no knowledge of anything save of the tidbit—well, it's hardly that, hardly a tidbit in the sense of its being anything toothsome, I reckon—save for the snippet, then, which I just gave you. But now to give you the other thing that's there at these reaches of what?—of this mouldering slag-scape of mine—out there where it all turns all to rubble and is getting ready for it to any instant drop off into the great basin of gone and beyond—it's, this other thing, this thing this guy tells me where he's sitting somewhere making small talk somewhere with this other guy somewhere and this other guy somewhere says to him, "But look at this, look at this," whipping out his wallet and going fingering around in it and plucking free from it this tiny pic which he's got in there which is of a woman's feet on what looks to him—we're speaking now, when I say him, about this guy who is saying all of this to me—which looks to him as if the woman is standing on a bathroom floor—tiles and so forth, sort of bathroom-floor-looking tiles and so forth—not that there is any woman, because there is no woman, what there is is just these gorgeous feet of hers, there's just these really perfect feet of hers—top-notch feet in this top-notch relation to the floor, or so this guy is saying to this other guy of mine, saying check it, will you, check it out, won't you, this gorgeously perfect contact between these gorgeously perfect feet of hers, and, you know, the floor. So my guy, this guy who is telling me this, this guy says to me that he says to this other guy, that he says to the pic-exhibiting guy, that he says to him, "Some feet, uh?" So my guy, he then, this my guy of mine, he then says to me that he says to this pic-exhibiting guy, "Hey, you don't see feet like these feet every day of the week, right?" Says to me he says to this pic-exhibiting guy, "Hey, I can certainly see what you're getting at, showing me, hey, the way these feet of whoever's sort of really achieve real contact and all with the floor and all, am I right?" So that's the thing—so that's all I have—that's, I mean, the second thing I thought I had—but what do I have? Because I don't know, one, who either of these guys is or, two, who's the woman whose feet they are that are there in the pic, and, three, is it her bathroom the woman is standing bare-footed in—I'd like to say naked-footed in if you don't mind my saying it—is it her bathroom the woman is standing naked-footed in, and, four, zaniest of all, or actually most alluring of all, was it, was the pic a pic taken of just the feet or was what the guy who's talking to me looking at when the other guy is showing him the pic, is it a pic somebody took scissors to to reduce it, to minimalize it, to make a minum of it right down to the, you know, to the absolute footmost crux of it?

  So that's it—unless by now it any longer isn't.

  Since what refinement is ever finished?

  LIFE OF THE WRITER, DEATH OF THE WRITTEN-UPON

  FORSOOK ONE NAME FOR ANOTHER.

  Onomatological revisionism?

  You bet your ass.

  An open-and-shut case.

  Well, such a flight the poor devil was in, as we all would do well to be in, from the ghastly inferences so readily alleged from the given conditions—alack, from the complete repertoire of grotesqueries in unimprovably flagrant potentiality among, well, life forms.

  Both real and fanciful.

  But which of us had not harkened to lamp-lit accounts of destinies so remorselessly awful that only nature herself, the bitch—man's mischief we'll get to in a jiffy—might have bothered to contrive them?

  Yet, mark you, it was one of the homemade malignities—what else but the matinal transformation Kafka's opportunism had made notorious?—that he pegged so unthinkable as to be hurtling toward him with all certitude and good speed.

  There was therefore nothing for it but that our fellow must outflank sleep if to elude the ensuing event of waking up as other than that which he was.

  It was this, then—it was dodging the embrace of Morpheus—that he besought himself to do by a not unfantastic labor of the will. You see what I'm saying? Hard work.

  No, no one has the patience to sit here and make up for you from whole cloth some simpering constellation of causes. Who the hell knows why anyone does what anyone does? Or even how you can say there is incontestably someone.

  Look, the story's this—a reader, a name-changer, has got himself stuck on a sappy vision of ruin. But, hey, don't you know the only reason that I am the one sitting here involved in this is that I am the one sitting here writing this?

  YEAH, YEAH, BUT DON'T KID YOURSELF—doing never again what has hitherto never not been done—no shit, it's really hard.

  Hard for anyone, but harder by far for someone whose list of accomplishments might have come to no more than his otherwise having been a good sleeper.

  Here's the man's mother.

  Listen to the man's mother.

  "‘Geh schlafen,' I would say to the child.

  "I would say to the child, ‘Schnukeli, geh schlafen, for God's sake, willst du?'

  "And like you had knocked the creature senseless with a brick, lo and behold, a woman's son was asleep."

  Please, who could have anything against sleep as such?

  It was not slumber the fellow opposed but slumber's routine career into a renewal of consciousness, please God it should only issue, if this it must, into a species of metamorphosis no worse than the Ovidian nor more vulnerable than the shell-less.

  What, then, were the days of his life adding up to—save that the only activity he had excelled at he must now, to escape anticipations too fearful to rehearse, abandon or else?

  Oi gevalt!

  No wonder it was a swollen prostate all this worry produced in him—for so engorged from fretful inward clutchings was our person that he took to keeping a night jar near to the couch upon which one would be made to stand firm against the colossus of one's fatigue.

  He was ready, then.

  And he would read.

  Read the Germans—though, by Thor, read no faux Kraut on the model of the aforementioned.

  Schiller?

  Why not Schilling?

  No, Schelling!

  Bestimmt, Schelling!

  Then on to the whole Frankfurt crowd when fiction, as it will, had quite worn itself snivelingly out.

  Scared too silly not to be unyielding, the chap read as if his life depended upon it, an invincible drowsiness deforming the sense he would make even of the umlaut. Heaven help him, book in hand, our man's diminuendo consp
ired to stretch him out on said furnishing in the throes of making something out of anything, the exhaustion in him transmuting all meagerness into a muchness, the sublime meanwhile erupting out of itself in illimitable abundance. Oh, jeepers, everything read was to him everything—and betokened, in the man's demented constructions of the evidence, tokens of the exorbitant, the ordinary reasserting its rule only when, bladder flaring, our victim felt himself required to roll onto his side, to let fall the book, to take up in its place the night jar, and thereupon to poke his hose well enough into it in order that the excruciation of his being emptied of the promised efflux might begin.

  And by what means, you ask, were all and sundry possessed of the news of these behaviors?

  Skip it.

  Never was there a one—dreadful thing, nasty thing!—to distribute more widely word of his humiliations.

  Nor was it not unknown how the widow who rented rooms to him entered them punctually on the occasion of their tenant's having from their precinct removed himself, the better to translate his endeavors abroad into revenue-bearing gestures, the lady's agenda consisting in her lavishing upon the interior of the disgusting vessel a further episode of covert flushing, there having been present—egad!—to this worthy's nose sufficient of notice to have sent her on the errand.

  ("How dare the creep pee in Tante Lorelei's cruet!")

  Need we state, however, that what was paid to her by him who occupied the premises for the privilege that he might do so was a sum satisfactory in its magnitude to subdue the extremes of her annoyance? Too, to inspire in such as herself such esteem of her net advantage that the return of the now soundly washed object to the site where its owner conceived of it as hidden was never, as a domestic courtesy, neglected.

  Ach!

  Returned, yes, but never once, once returned, dried entirely of that which had been introduced into it—the cruet, Tante Lorelei's cruet!—to render it good and washed and torrentially rinsed.

  Hmm.

  All vermin please note.