House of Prayer No. 2 (19 page)

At that moment outside the strip club you sit in your boss's car, and you haven't said what it is you want yet. While you're thinking, a black man comes out of the strip club dressed all in black leather, you'd noticed him in the strip club, mainly because he wouldn't take off his black motorcycle helmet and they'd asked him to leave. He makes a big show of pulling on his black gloves and getting on his big black motorcycle and kicking it started
and loudly revving up the engine, but something engages and the motorcycle gets away from the motorcyclist. Suddenly the black guy is driving his big black motorcycle up onto the hood of some redneck's pristine Trans Am muscle car parked beside him, the motorcyclist putting his front wheel through the redneck's windshield, where it looks permanently stuck. It is one of the most incredible things you have ever seen as the black guy tries to get his motorcycle off the hood of this redneck's car and you and your boss, who has become one of your best friends, are laughing as hard as you will ever laugh in your entire life, and the only thing you want and the one thing you have wanted since is to always be able to laugh that hard again.

YOU KEEP WORKING FOR THE NEWSPAPER
and read books by the Thunderbird pool. You read books and play dominoes with Brian and drink pitchers of beer when the bar is slow. The books these days are short books often with a few short stories. Some days you finish a book after just one pitcher and pass the book to Brian, and you begin to think you could write some stories
at least as well
as that.

So you start writing stories about things you know, stolen boats, busted dope deals, petty murders, strange weather, things you see firsthand in the T-bird Lounge. You send them to
Esquire
, sometimes one a week, and they keep coming back. Sometimes they have notes attached suggesting you rewrite the story, but you never do; you toss them in the trash.

An editor at the magazine, Tom, calls you and says he likes
one of your stories, do you want to work on it with him? Nah, you say, you tell him you'll just send him another one, you don't have time to work on the story, you're on deadline for
Ship of the Week
. Okay, he says, he says he's coming down to the Outer Banks that summer, if you get a break, maybe you can get together. Okay, you say.

When you meet Tom, he tries to tell you how things work. He says if you're serious about writing fiction, you should move to New York. Okay, you say.

Finally you read a book of stories you like, and you close the book, and you're facedown on a chaise lounge by the T-bird pool, and you're looking down at the pretty girl on the back cover, and she is looking back, and you get up and walk into the T-bird Lounge and announce,
Boys, I'm moving to New York City to be a writer!

No one pays any attention to you because you often walk into the T-bird with its dramatically fast-opening pneumatic door with something dramatic or stupid to say. Recently you'd said,
Remember, boys, Abraham Lincoln didn't die in vain, he died in Washington, D.C
.

But they see you quit your newspaper job, which gets you evicted from the penthouse, and you start crashing on their sofas, and Brian the marine biologist bartender's wife wonders for how long when she finds you scavenging their refrigerator one afternoon. Brian says don't microwave anything you find in the freezer, a lot of those are toxic fish specimens. When you mention there's a couple of frozen seagulls in there, he says, yeah, that's another project.

You meet an industrial furniture dealer's mistress at the T-bird, and she leans on her boyfriend to get you a job working for some rough guys carrying Makita drill guns and crystal meth putting together cubicles on military bases on long weekends. You're valuable to them because you can read blueprints and can sort the hundreds of crates coming off the trucks for seventy-two hours without a break.

During a job in Hampton at Fort Monroe you visit the on-site museum where Jefferson Davis was held after the war, the sun dappling a pattern on the ceiling of the upper masonry wall of the cell just as it must have done when Jefferson lay watching it in his bunk all those months considering the Lost Cause.

Your roommate in the cheap motel the company pays for is a black guy who drinks gin in the dawn when he thinks you're asleep. You can hear the tin metal cap spinning off and back on the gin bottle, the sipping in between. God, he looks familiar. For a few days you can't place him. He says you look familiar too. He also says about women,
It all a hole
.

Going out the door one morning, you turn and see him put on his hat, and you say,
You're one of the Blind Boys, aren't you? I remember you from the radio days
. He says he thought you looked familiar when you talked. He says he sometimes used to fill in when his uncle needed him to.
But I ain't blind
, he says.
I see that
, you say, and you all go to work.

IT IS THE WEEK OF YOUR THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY
, and instead of sitting in a wheelchair, you are hitchhiking along Virginia Beach
Boulevard after selling your car. You are moving to New York City to become a writer.

It turns out your New York girlfriend is a swimsuit model who is in videos in store windows on Fifth Avenue. She finds you a place to stay on a futon on a friend's floor in Queens. You call Tom and say,
I'm here, now what?

You and he sit in a bar, and he draws up a list of ways you could possibly become a writer. One thing he puts on the list is a writing class with a guy who is an editor at a publishing house. The class costs two thousand dollars. Tom is not so sure it's a good fit for you, but you think it's kind of like a lottery: you buy in on the chance the editor sees your work and you get published, so you borrow the money from your girlfriend and sign up for the class.

The teacher is named Gordon and he wears khaki shirts and trousers and a military campaign hat. The classes are six hours long and are in a rich lady's apartment. Sometimes Gordon talks for the whole six hours, and he says things about writing you have never heard, like what makes art is the occult, the arbitrary, the unexampled, the uncanny, the passionate, the intractable, the dire, the dangerous. When you stand up to read a story you've written about a storm at sea, after a couple of sentences he tells you to sit down, that you're just writing adventure stories for teenage boys.

Maybe Tom was right, this isn't a good fit for you, so you go see Gordon and tell him you'd like to drop out of the class, and you'd like your money back. He says, No refunds. Okay, you say, just prorate it, and he says, No refunds.

Two thousand dollars is a lot of money, and you're still looking for a job. In your Queens neighborhood is a bar called the
Irish Pony, and even though it's mainly for Irish, you explain to them how the Irish settled the South, and after a while it's okay for you to drink there. The night before St. Patrick's Day you stay in the bar until dawn drinking green beer and doing shots of Irish whiskey. When you head home, it's starting to get light, and you remember you have a ten o'clock job interview. You take a cold shower and put on your cheap grey summer suit and pick up your cheap plastic briefcase and head to the No. 7 train stop. The cold doesn't seem to help sober you up.

When you get into Manhattan, there's a big parade down Fifth Avenue that you have to cross to get to your job interview. The policemen will not let you cross. About a hundred bass drums come down the avenue booming, booming, booming, and the booming feels as if someone is punching you in the gut, and you look around and there's a construction site and you have to stand on tiptoe to throw up green beer and Irish whiskey into a Dumpster. Some construction workers look down and laugh at you and point. You wipe your mouth slime on your suit sleeve and dab at the puke on your tie with a handkerchief, and when there's a break in the parade, you tuck your little plastic briefcase under your arm, and you limp across the avenue the best you can.

Upstairs in an office building you check in with a receptionist who leans away from you when you tell her you're there for your job interview, and you hope you have a breath mint. She tells you to have a seat. The next thing you know two big guys in dark jackets are shaking you awake where you've been curled up asleep in a fetal position on a couch, your little plastic briefcase for a pillow. You think it must be time for your job interview. Instead, they
lift you by your elbows and tell you the interview is over as they bum-rush you out of the office of the business for which you are seeking employment, a public relations firm.

YOU FIND WORK BARTENDING FOR A RESTAURANT
that is hiring people with Southern accents. It's on the West Side Highway. There's a view of the Statue of Liberty across the way.

Things aren't going well for you in the class. You sit on a radiator and glower at Gordon. Two thousand dollars is a lot of money. You decide to write a story for the next class that's a parody of the things the teacher is praising. It's a little story called “Momma Hates Texas.” You tell him you've brought something to read, and when you stand up to read, he doesn't stop you, and you read to the end, and he says you've had a breakthrough!

Whether you want to admit it or not, you have had a breakthrough, and Gordon's class is the place you begin to understand what he means when he says an artist can find salvation in his art. You work hard and he pushes you hard, he becomes an advocate for you. He lets you sit in his office and watch him work, he buys you a brandy downstairs when you need one, and gives you a fleece-lined bombardier's hat during one of the coldest winters on record in New York. He will publish your first short story collection, and in his class you will meet the girl you will marry ten years later and who will bear you three sons. You will miss him keenly when later he says you have abandoned him and he has no use for you.

THE FIRST PIECE OF WRITING
you sell in New York is a true story that happens to you coming home one night from working at the bar. It's about four in the morning, and you're in the bottom of Grand Central waiting for the train back to Queens. You have about two hundred dollars in tips hidden in the storm collar of your old diesel-stained sea coat, the warmest thing you could bring from home to wear in New York City. Three black guys come down the end of the platform, see you, and start to walk toward you. You start walking to the other end of the platform, there's some stairs leading up to a tunnel, but with your legs you know you'll never outrun these guys. When you get to the bottom of the stairs, you turn and there they are, standing around you, and you know what they want. You've never been robbed before. One of the guys reaches out for your arm, and at that moment in the stillness of the station you hear footsteps coming down the tunnel up the stairs. As the footsteps get louder, there's whistling, then singing, a hymn, and you pray to God it's a big Irish cop with a nightstick and a gun, and you see that your three guys hear it and stop and wait to see who it is, and all four of you turn your faces up to the top of the stairs as the footsteps approach and the singing becomes louder.