Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned (14 page)

twenty

An old friend of mine once told me that when you're writing a novel, it's all downhill once you get past page fifty-seven. Technically speaking, this is not very professional advice. Indeed, it sounds like the kind of thing a person in a mental hospital might tell you. Nonetheless, I was well past page fifty-seven now and it did seem as if the novel was almost inexorably moving toward its climax, conclusion, and resolution. Was it the great American novel? I frankly doubted it. But it wasn't bad. And no author writing a novel is in any position to assess the quality of his own work. Motivation and ambition are worthless to a writer at this stage. If he believes he's accomplishing great art, toiling at some important work, it rarely turns out to be so. The greatest work in art and literature and music in the recent history of man has almost invariably been produced by people who were just trying to pay the rent.

It was now several days since the night of the closing of the Unicorn. I had not seen or heard from Clyde or Fox since that night and I was beginning to wonder if it had been something I'd said or maybe something I'd written. I was rummaging through the pockets of one of my coats possibly looking for my lost childhood when I came upon a folded slip of paper. The coat, I then realized, was the one I'd worn at the wake for the Unicorn. I opened the slip of paper and found a note written on it in a fine, feminine hand. The note read: "For a good time, call 226-3713." The writer had also included a rather crude, childlike drawing of a broken heart. I was not a great detective or even a detective in any sense of the word, but I did not remember meeting any barflies or even any friendly strangers that night at the Unicorn or any recent night anywhere. My heart, I must report, hoped that the missive had been written and placed in my pocket by Clyde. It was certainly possible, and all I had to do was call the number to find out. But for a reason I do not know, it was not as easy as it sounded. Maybe it was my head telling my heart it was time to play a little hard to get. Or maybe I was feeling guilty about writing the novel in the first place, against Clyde's wishes. Or maybe I was feeling unsure of myself, riddled with self-doubt about the merits of my work. I had been wanting for quite a while to view Clyde and Fox not as what they were, but as what they had become: characters in my novel. Were they compelling? Had I developed them effectively? Had I captured them? There was only one way to find out. I decided that it was finally time to let my former agent and my former editor look over the unfinished manuscript.

Normally, it is not a good idea to let anyone peruse an unfinished manuscript or a work in progress. This time, however, I felt the situation was different. For one thing, I hadn't taken a meeting with either my editor or my agent in almost seven years. For all I knew, they both might now reside in that great publishing house in the sky. Also, to be perfectly honest, I was starting to vacillate rather wildly back and forth between self-congratulation and self-doubt. I needed feedback. I needed input. So that afternoon I took the pages I had down to a nearby Kinko's, made two additional copies, and FedExed them respectively to my agent and my editor. I wrote a brief cover note suggesting that it was urgent that I meet with them as soon as possible. As soon as possible is not very fast for most editors and agents. They tend to believe that responding to matters in a timely fashion is a sign of weakness. If I wanted to meet with them anytime soon, it was not a good policy merely to wait by the phone. I was not proud. If necessary, I planned to barrage and badger both their offices until I got their attention. This is a rather tedious, not to say humbling, aspect of being an author, but once you become a best-seller, of course,
you're
the one who tends to believe that responding to matters in a timely fashion is a sign of weakness. In fact, once you get big and powerful enough, almost everything you do becomes a sign of weakness.

Back at the apartment, I felt a sense of fatalistic calm. I had crossed a professional literary Rubicon of sorts. It now no longer mattered what Clyde thought or what Fox thought or possibly even what I thought. People highly placed inside the industry would very soon be weighing in on things. I poured a cup of coffee and sat down at the typewriter but now I found I could not write. My fingers simply would not move across the keys. I was in full holding-pattern mode until I met with the editor and the agent. It is astonishing how little confidence any of us truly has in our own natural abilities—especially those of us who have determined that fate has called upon us to write. And yet, writing's like chopping wood sometimes, they say. Some of the world's worst writers seem often to excel at chopping wood. Some of the best seem to excel only at lying in the gutter and looking at the stars.

That night, in a state of total creative thought interruptus, there was nothing to do but pace the apartment, go out and get drunk, kill myself, check into a mental hospital, or call Clyde, and I quite sensibly opted for the latter. Judging from her note, she was primed for a good time, and anything was better than waiting in a near-death state of suspended animation to see what the agent and editor had to say about my work. It was very similar to handing in to the teacher something you've worked at very diligently. It was kind of sad to think how little we grow emotionally from the way we felt in the fourth grade.

"Is this the number I call for a good time?" I asked, after hearing Clyde's melodic hello.

"Sunshine!" she said, with the pent-up excitement of a small girl. "I'm so glad you called."

"So am I," I gushed idiotically.

"We've had a lot of good times," she said coyly, "but you and

I have never really had
a good time
together. I mean, just the two of us."

I couldn't believe my ears. I couldn't believe how excited I was. I couldn't believe that I suddenly felt like a kid at Christmas.

"The two of us getting together is way overdue," I said.

"I agree, Sunshine."

"Okay. We're on the same wavelength. So is it your place or mine?"

"Mine would be a little difficult. Fox lives here, too, you know. And if I'm not mistaken, he might have a little fit of pique if he caught the two of us between the sheets. What about your place?"

"If you like getting bull-fucked in a basement apartment, it's fine."

"I think we're breaking up."

"I'm not on a cell phone."

"That wasn't what I meant."

There was a silence on the line while we both considered our options. Apparently, I stepped over the line. In a rush of testosterone, in fact, I had very possibly stepped on my dick.

"In a rush of testosterone," I said, "very possibly I've stepped on my dick."

"I like a man who can step on his dick. What I don't like is a man who keeps standing on it."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"Good. Then at least you'll have something on your mind besides the great American novel you were writing."

"Great
Armenian
novel," I said. "And there's no past tense to it. I'm still writing it. In fact, I've already sent copies of the unfinished manuscript to my old editor and my old agent. Later this week I hope to be meeting with both of them."

"Oh, Walter. I want you to write. That's what God, whether you believe in him or not, intended you to do. I just want you to write about something else. Something besides the three of us. What we have is fun and beautiful and real. Relegating us to characters in your novel is like pinning Fox and me to a butterfly board. It will surely destroy what we all have together."

"But Fox
likes
the idea of my writing the novel."

"That's not true. Fox likes you maybe more than you realize, and he wants you to become more of what you are and could be. But he thinks writing about us as characters in a book is very bad karma. He's just too shy to tell you."

"Fox?" I said. "Shy?"

"Maybe you don't know your characters as well as you think you do."

"Look. If it makes you feel better, I can finish the book then change the names to protect the innocent."

"By the time you finish the book, there won't be any innocence left to protect."

"Surely you're being unrealistic and melodramatic."

"Walter, this may surprise you, but I'm a very private person and so is Fox. We've taken you into our lives with open arms. We've taken you into our hearts. I see things you don't see. I see tragedy if you continue along this path. As a fiction writer, you can write about any subject you choose. You're only limited by your imagination, Walter. Walter, you can write about anything under the sun and I sincerely hope you do, but I'm begging you, for all of our sakes, please don't suck the magic and the humanity out of us to sell to the public. Let Fox and me be what we are. Free birds who choose to be in your sky."

"Ask me anything else and I'll do it for you. I've done everything you've asked of me since the day I met you in the bank and I helped you put the dead fish in the vault."

"You didn't
know
it was a fish."

"That's my point. I trusted you."

"And now you betray me."

"I told you. I'll change the names."

"The only change I care about, Walter, is the change I'm seeing in you."

"What the hell are you trying to do? Destroy my career?"

"Even if that were true, it would be a far better thing than to destroy someone's spirit."

Neither of us said anything for a few moments. Neither of us, I suppose, had anything much left to say. Finally Clyde broke the silence.

"So long, Sunshine," she said.

"So long, Clyde," I said as both of us hung up simultaneously.

We had both done many things together, I thought as I stared at the ceiling. Now we were hanging up together. Saying goodbye together. Suddenly, the ceiling looked very lonely and the room seemed very empty. Then, just as suddenly, there came the silver lining: I was now unhappy enough to become a great writer.

twenty-one

Less than a week later, I walked into the midtown office of my agent, Sylvia Lowell, sat down in the chair in front of her desk, and looked out over the city. Sylvia had a lavish, much-sought-after corner office and the only trouble with the view was that it was one of a great number of large office buildings all teeming with agents in corner offices. I looked into Sylvia's cold obsidian eyes and she looked into mine and, I suppose, neither of us much liked what we saw. She was a power agent who represented a large, rather unwieldy stable of many writers, a small handful of whom were highly successful mainstream wood choppers with only narrow, formulaic talents, and the great mass of whom were unsuccessful, unhappy authors who, though most of them were far more talented than the mainstreamers, spent most of their time silently damning Sylvia Lowell. I don't know how much of it was really her fault. After all, I was a man who hadn't written a book in seven years. All I blamed her for was having cold obsidian eyes. The first thing you have to do," she said, "is get rid of that title."

"What's wrong with
The Great Armenian Novel?"
I asked. Everything," said Sylvia Lowell. "For starters, it's too inside. It's a book about a book. There's never a market for that."

"Okay," I said. "I'll change the title. How about
The Cat Who Killed Christ?"

"It's better."

"Well, enough about the title. How'd you like the book?"

Sylvia squinted her eyes slightly, as if she were staring at me through a microscope. I did my best to look like an interesting specimen.

"What happened to you, Walter?" she said at last. "You had so much promise."

I didn't have an answer to that so I didn't give her one. Besides, I didn't know what had happened to me.

"Your first book exhibited such a marvelous economy of words. And the characters practically leaped off the page. And there was a beginning, a middle, and an end. And there was action. Lots of action.
The Rise and Fall of Nothing at All.
Now
there
was a title!"

I waited patiently. It did not bode particularly well that all she'd talked about so far was my previous book. Maybe she was stalling because she hadn't read the pages I'd sent. Of course, you don't have to really read a manuscript to get a sense of it. You just have to know how to read between the lines. Maybe Sylvia had done just that and hadn't loved what she'd read. It was a little like the way George Bernard Shaw had operated in his heyday. He contended that he was such an intuitive genius that he need not actually have to see a play in order to review it. Was it possible that Sylvia Lowell possessed that rare brand of genius? If so, I pondered, why was she an agent?

"I've read what you've sent of
The Great Armenian Novel,"
she said, "and to be quite candid, I'm afraid it is
The Great Armenian Novel."

She let that information sink in for a moment. I took the opportunity to sink a little lower in my chair.

"The book just doesn't work, Walter. It's far too self-conscious, precious, and introspective. It could almost serve as a primer for how
not
to write a novel. The action is jerky and willful and sporadic, what action there is. There isn't enough to sustain the reader's interest. And further, what action there is seems to strain the bounds of credulity. Placing a dead fish in a bank vault? Falsely accusing a psychiatrist of being a pedophile? Springing a large African-American mental patient who thinks he's the king of an imaginary African nation from a mental hospital? This material could be seen as racist, homophobic, politically incorrect, insensitive, and, well, frankly, unrealistic and ludicrous. It's a stretch for anyone reading this book to believe that people really do these things. It's simply not believable."

"I see."

"No, apparently you don't. It's not just the dearth of action that makes this manuscript so wanting. The characters are developed in a very vexing and peculiar fashion. They seem to spring up out of the earth fully formed, like Greek gods. They are not the kind of characters any reader might readily identify with or empathize with or even care about very much. By the way, are the Clyde and the Fox characters real people?"

"I'm not sure."

"When you find out, let me know. In the meantime, remember, Walter, when you impart something to the page, you invariably unmask yourself. This book may tell us more about your character, the author, than it does about the characters about whom you are supposedly writing. I know I may not sound encouraging, but you know, Walter, that it's my policy never to encourage bad writing even by authors who can do better."

"Unless it sells," I muttered.

"What?"

"Unless it sells!" I practically shouted. "As bad writing so often does. And, Sylvia, this manuscript is a
work in progress.
It's only
half
finished. And it is only a novel in the sense that people may perceive it to be fiction. It's really a totally nonfiction account of the lives of three people in New York, one of which happens to be mine."

"I see," said Sylvia Lowell.

"Apparently, you don't," I said, pressing my advantage, trivial or imagined as it may have been. "This is a real story about real people. I can't tell you what happens because it hasn't happened yet, but believe me, it's going to. This is not a mystery or a potboiler or a romance. It falls into the category of the 'unclassifiable.' And the last time I checked, most of the great art and literature of the past century falls into that category as well. If Mozart, Kafka, or Van Gogh were alive today, they'd probably be living in a homeless shelter, which, by the way, is where my next scene takes place."

"Walter, Walter, Walter," said Sylvia Lowell in what sounded like a rather rueful mantra. "I'm not attacking you. Don't forget that I'm on your side. Whatever I tell you is going to sound sugarcoated compared to the way the critics will undoubtedly savage your work. But you're the writer. Write what you want."

"By the way," I said, "did you hear about the writer who came home one day and found that his house had burned down, his wife had been assaulted, and his dog had been killed? He asked the neighbor what had happened and the neighbor told him, 'Your agent came by. He raped your wife, killed your dog, and torched the house.' So the poor writer is in a state of shock, stumbling through the ashes of his house, and all he can say over and over again is 'My agent came by?'"

"Very funny," said Sylvia Lowell, without a hint of mirth. "I think we're through for today, Mr. Snow."

"That wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement for my work."

"Speaking of ringing," she said, "my phone is ringing. Ciao, Walter."

She picked up the phone, began speaking to another client, and I got up and left with the usual bile rising in my throat, a feeling many authors experience after speaking with their agents. Oddly enough, as I left the building, I did not feel entirely discouraged. As Oscar Wilde, another writer who died broke, sick, misunderstood, drunk, unappreciated, and in the lonely rain of a Paris exile, said, "What fire doesn't destroy, it hardens." Sylvia Lowell had been wrong before. In fact, she'd been wrong many times before. If she'd been anything else besides an agent, they'd have shown her the door a long time ago.

I walked the ten blocks over to my editor's office and as I walked my resolve became stronger and my purpose in life became ever more lucid. For better or worse, I was a writer and write I must or my life was surely not sustainable. Love, happiness, satisfaction, peace of mind would all have to take a distant backseat to pushing little words around in various and sundry permutations whilst I prayed to what gods there existed above basement apartments to give me one good line and then to give me another. It was the only sure way to always keep Clyde and Fox close to me. It was the only way I could relate with the rest of the world. It was my chosen method of reminding myself that I was alive.

Steve Samet's office was small, cluttered with books and papers, and it did not give on to any view at all except an ugly, weatherbeaten brick wall. Steve wore a bow tie, an unfashionable, academic-style woolen jacket, and a perpetual cheerful disposition. In fact, he had what I often refer to as a terminal case of irritating Gentile optimism. All good editors are Gentiles; all good agents are Jewish. If you ever find yourself with a Jewish editor and a Gentile agent, you know you're in trouble. Steve also had three cats he liked to discuss incessantly with anyone who had the good grace to listen. Compared to Sylvia, Steve was a veritable cheerleader for the cause. Exactly what the cause was, was an entirely different matter.

"Hey, big guy!" said Steve as I entered his office. "Love what you sent me. It's been a long time. Glad you're getting back on track."

"I never was off track," I said. "In fact, that was the problem. I was standing in the middle of the track and I got run over by a train."

"Love the new stuff," said Steve, as if I hadn't spoken at all. "When can I see some more?"

"Probably about the year 2010."

"Good. Keep it comin'. You really came up with some characters this time around. So vital. So alive. You've got a great imagination, Walter."

"Thanks, Steve."

"We've really got to try to get you on the Letterman show when this book comes out. I think Dave will really like you."

"I'd rather swallow my own vomit than be on that show."

"That's the spirit! What's the title of the book again?"

"The Great Armenian Novel."

"Terrific title! The books'll be jumping off the shelves."

"They'll probably be jumping up people's asses."

"That, too," laughed Steve. "That, too!"

Steve was a real positive thinker. I figured him for a fairly early suicide but you never can tell. He was a company man and his agenda was to sell books for the publisher. It didn't matter to Steve whether the book was a posthumous collection of work by a poet who'd died in the gutter or a slick ghost written autobiography of Cher. He would champion the most vapid tissue of mainstream horseshit if it sold. If not, well, maybe David Letter-man could help.

Steve gave me a hearty handshake and was now adjusting his bow tie, getting ready to go home to his cats. I didn't have any cats. I didn't even have a bow tie. All I had was a half-finished manuscript that my agent thought didn't work and my editor thought would jump off the shelves. Very possibly, I thought to myself as I left the building, they were both right.

Later that night, back at the apartment, I relived the two meetings in my mind. I was always somewhat disillusioned when I left Steve Samet's offrce. The one thing no author needs is an editor who loves his work, especially if it's for the wrong reason. Likewise, it's not the best thing in the world to have an agent who, essentially, dismisses you because you don't kill as many trees as Tom Clancy and whom you'd like to strangle every time you talk to her. When you boiled it all down, an author's only friends were himself and his words. Most authors didn't have much of a life. They couldn't be a Clyde or a Fox if they tried. They basically didn't know how to live. And it wasn't really them I was thinking about. It was me. All I could do was write. And when an author's personal life, pathetic as it may be, begins to spiral downward and disintegrate, it is invariably reflected on the page.