Authors: Tom Grimes
Mentor: A Memoir (6 page)
“But I’m his student.”
“Then be both.”
For me, this was difficult. I was comfortable having drinks with Frank once a week. Deepening our relationship, though, meant I had a greater chance of being rejected by him if I let him down in any way. I couldn’t admit this outright, but I couldn’t conceal my anxiety, either. I’m not good at that. This is why I write. It’s my way of controlling my world and my emotions. I focus on sentences. For several hours a day, nothing else matters. I live inside language. And while I’m often frustrated by writing’s difficulty, I’m also at peace.
So I set aside my novel and concentrated on composing a letter to Frank. Over the course of two days, I revised it twenty times, tossing entire drafts, tinkering with individual words, contemplating punctuation. Like a good passage of prose, the letter’s tone and tempo had to be perfect. I was trying to express a lifetime of insecurity in two hundred words. At the same time, I didn’t want to seem pathetic. I would like to read that letter, all these years later, and, occasionally, I wonder if it’s tucked inside one of Frank’s books, although I doubt it survived. Frank wasn’t sentimental. I can’t re-create precisely what I wrote, but here’s the gist of the letter:
Frank,I don’t quite know what to say about your invitation, other than thanks. I have to admit, though, I’m not sure where the line between teacher and friend lies, and I don’t want to appear too eager to cross it, or too indifferent not to cross it. I also don’t want to complicate my writing or your reading of my novel. Your critical voice already dominates my thoughts as I write. And while it would be one thing for my work to disappoint you as a teacher, it would be another matter to disappoint you as a friend. I hope you understand my confusion. Please don’t interpret it as a lack of gratitude. What I feel is the exact opposite. If I didn’t, I never would have written this letter.Sincerely,Tom
When I laid the sealed envelope containing the letter in Frank’s office mailbox, a momentary peace flooded my heart. It evaporated before I reached the mailroom door.
I thought Frank might call once he read the letter, but he didn’t. Jody said, “It’s fine, don’t worry. The man has a life that doesn’t revolve entirely around you.” I wrote with my office door open, anyway, so I could hear the telephone ring. Then my concentration collapsed and the sentences I managed to write required endless revision. After five days, I’d advanced the novel by a single page.
Frank didn’t say anything until we were once again at the Mill, alone at a table. He didn’t lean forward, as if he were about to speak to me in confidence, but he did look at me directly when he said, “Listen, I read your letter, and I understand. But here’s the deal. You can think I’m the biggest prick in the world and it won’t affect how you write your novel. The work’s strong enough to find its own direction. So this other stuff ”—he waved one hand over the table, as if dispersing a puff of cigarette smoke—“don’t worry about it. Do what you need to do. Otherwise, you’ll make yourself crazy. You follow?”
“Yes.”
We never watched a World Series game together. The French filmmaker had left town unexpectedly. Shortly afterward, November arrived, and by the time we left workshop each week the temperature was in the forties, or lower. So I began to ride to the Mill with Frank. And if we happened to stand at the bar for an hour, oblivious to everyone else, I didn’t fret about it. We’d become friends, which surprised no one but me.
A week later, Frank spotted me outside his office. “Come in and shut the door,” he told me. I did. Then I sat across from him and slouched in the armchair I’d come to think of as mine. My compulsion to sit erect had faded. “How would you like to travel with the Mets?” he said.
“The baseball team?”
“Who else?”
During a flight to New York, Frank had been seated beside a man who dropped his pen. When Frank leaned down to retrieve it, he noticed the chapter of his novel published by
GQ
in the man’s open briefcase. Its pages had been torn out of the magazine and stapled together. After sitting up and returning the pen, Frank said, “I’m Frank Conroy. I wrote the pages in your briefcase.”
GQ
in the man’s open briefcase. Its pages had been torn out of the magazine and stapled together. After sitting up and returning the pen, Frank said, “I’m Frank Conroy. I wrote the pages in your briefcase.”
Frank told stories about his adventures in the same excited voice as the boy he’d described in
Stop-Time
. It was as if he still couldn’t believe his good fortune.
Stop-Time
. It was as if he still couldn’t believe his good fortune.
“Then I found out who
he
was,” Frank said. “Frank Cashen, the general manager of the Mets! Look, he even gave me this.” Frank handed me a dark blue pen with the Mets orange logo printed on it. “And guess what? He’s a
big
reader. I’m talking about good stuff, not shit. Hey, let’s face it, he was reading me!” Frank laughed. He always laughed when he congratulated himself. It was his way of saying, I pulled off another trick! And nobody caught me! “Then I told him about you. If you want to spend time with the team for research, call.” Frank handed me Mr. Cashen’s card. “Ask for Jean.”
he
was,” Frank said. “Frank Cashen, the general manager of the Mets! Look, he even gave me this.” Frank handed me a dark blue pen with the Mets orange logo printed on it. “And guess what? He’s a
big
reader. I’m talking about good stuff, not shit. Hey, let’s face it, he was reading me!” Frank laughed. He always laughed when he congratulated himself. It was his way of saying, I pulled off another trick! And nobody caught me! “Then I told him about you. If you want to spend time with the team for research, call.” Frank handed me Mr. Cashen’s card. “Ask for Jean.”
“You’re serious?”
“I sent him fifty pages of your book. He said they reminded him of early Richard Ford.”
At the time, I hadn’t read the “early” Richard Ford, but I was struck by the precision of Mr. Cashen’s compliment. How many people would divide a writer’s career like that?
“You can fly to Florida in March,” Frank said, “during spring training. And if you need money to cover the trip, let me know and we’ll work something out. You can pay it back after you sell your book”—something he never doubted would happen, although I did. “Come on, let’s go grab lunch.”
Generally, Frank preferred to eat lunch alone, before heading home to work on
Body & Soul
. He liked the act’s mind-cleansing solitude. There couldn’t be any other reason, given that most of Iowa City’s restaurants served awful food. But a drugstore with 1940s décor had survived. Eight immovable metal stools topped with padded leather cushions faced a lunch counter manned by a soda jerk and a short-order cook, each of whom wore a white paper hat. They whipped up vanilla milkshakes and chocolate malteds, toasted grilled-cheese sandwiches, constructed BLTs, heated Campbell’s soup, and scooped ice cream from round containers before slathering it with hot fudge. “You can get a cup of soup, half a sandwich, and a shake for a dollar ninety-nine!” Frank said. But the drugstore was his private space.
Body & Soul
was set during World War II, so he may have felt a special connection to the place, and we never ate there together. Instead, he took me to diners where he could get a hamburger. I can’t remember him ordering anything else. Frank ignored warnings about high cholesterol, got drunk nightly, and couldn’t write without a cigarette. Sometimes, he even hastily announced a workshop break so he could sneak into his office and smoke a Marlboro. “Have you noticed,” he once said in class, “that characters portrayed as creeps are always cigarette fiends? We’re regressing toward Puritanical hysteria. It’s insane.”
Body & Soul
. He liked the act’s mind-cleansing solitude. There couldn’t be any other reason, given that most of Iowa City’s restaurants served awful food. But a drugstore with 1940s décor had survived. Eight immovable metal stools topped with padded leather cushions faced a lunch counter manned by a soda jerk and a short-order cook, each of whom wore a white paper hat. They whipped up vanilla milkshakes and chocolate malteds, toasted grilled-cheese sandwiches, constructed BLTs, heated Campbell’s soup, and scooped ice cream from round containers before slathering it with hot fudge. “You can get a cup of soup, half a sandwich, and a shake for a dollar ninety-nine!” Frank said. But the drugstore was his private space.
Body & Soul
was set during World War II, so he may have felt a special connection to the place, and we never ate there together. Instead, he took me to diners where he could get a hamburger. I can’t remember him ordering anything else. Frank ignored warnings about high cholesterol, got drunk nightly, and couldn’t write without a cigarette. Sometimes, he even hastily announced a workshop break so he could sneak into his office and smoke a Marlboro. “Have you noticed,” he once said in class, “that characters portrayed as creeps are always cigarette fiends? We’re regressing toward Puritanical hysteria. It’s insane.”
I called Jean and made plans to spend a week in Florida and a week in New York with the Mets. Around that time, I submitted my novel’s second chapter for workshop and it escaped the thrashing the first one had received. Some of my classmates actually liked it, and the initial sentence, “I come from nowhere and everywhere” resonated with Charlie, who understood that my subject wasn’t baseball, it was America. Other than Frank and Jody, he was the only person I trusted to read my work.
One evening near the end of the semester, Jody and I were washing the dinner dishes when we noticed something odd happening outside the kitchen window. At first, we were puzzled. Then we recognized what the white flakes swirling in the wind were. And, as if we were little kids again, we stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the snow fall.
CHAPTER FIVE
L
ike me, Frank didn’t compose his first drafts using a typewriter. From what he told me and I later saw, I learned that wrote in a long, narrow, somewhat dim room on the second floor of his house. He would sit on a twin bed with several pillows pressed against the bed’s headboard to support his back, pull up his knees, and rest a legal pad on his thighs. His handwriting fit easily between the lines of a page, and when he revised sentences he blacked out words with a Magic Marker, then substituted new words written in letters so minute as to be indecipherable. Beside his right hip rested an ashtray, a lighter, and a pack of cigarettes. Because of his confidence, he wrote with a ballpoint pen and composed
Body & Soul
slowly, his prose never more than two drafts from perfection. Initially, a paragraph would take shape, but it would often falter after two lines. A second attempt would produce a longer passage, one imbued with direction, a clear meaning, narrative continuity, and dramatic momentum. He would listen to it repeatedly, judging its tone, assessing its tempo, and decide that several weak phrases would be improved by further revision and others would be jettisoned altogether. A third draft built upon the previous drafts’ strengths. And then, like a photographer delicately adjusting his lens, Frank would alter a few critical punctuation marks, invert a clause, and remove an ellipsis, until he believed that a striking clarity would resonate in a reader’s mind. After three hours, he would set aside his pad and pen, collect his cigarettes and lighter, walk downstairs, past the grand piano in his living room and into the kitchen. There, he’d find his wife, Maggie; their son, Tim; a cold beer; and a shot of whiskey waiting for him. And the novel’s world would vanish until the following day.
ike me, Frank didn’t compose his first drafts using a typewriter. From what he told me and I later saw, I learned that wrote in a long, narrow, somewhat dim room on the second floor of his house. He would sit on a twin bed with several pillows pressed against the bed’s headboard to support his back, pull up his knees, and rest a legal pad on his thighs. His handwriting fit easily between the lines of a page, and when he revised sentences he blacked out words with a Magic Marker, then substituted new words written in letters so minute as to be indecipherable. Beside his right hip rested an ashtray, a lighter, and a pack of cigarettes. Because of his confidence, he wrote with a ballpoint pen and composed
Body & Soul
slowly, his prose never more than two drafts from perfection. Initially, a paragraph would take shape, but it would often falter after two lines. A second attempt would produce a longer passage, one imbued with direction, a clear meaning, narrative continuity, and dramatic momentum. He would listen to it repeatedly, judging its tone, assessing its tempo, and decide that several weak phrases would be improved by further revision and others would be jettisoned altogether. A third draft built upon the previous drafts’ strengths. And then, like a photographer delicately adjusting his lens, Frank would alter a few critical punctuation marks, invert a clause, and remove an ellipsis, until he believed that a striking clarity would resonate in a reader’s mind. After three hours, he would set aside his pad and pen, collect his cigarettes and lighter, walk downstairs, past the grand piano in his living room and into the kitchen. There, he’d find his wife, Maggie; their son, Tim; a cold beer; and a shot of whiskey waiting for him. And the novel’s world would vanish until the following day.
When I began Book Two of my novel in December, something odd happened. Rather than being lucid, my thoughts were imprecise. Words stubbornly resisted being linked to one another to form intelligible sentences. Paragraphs seemed endless and muddled, and the work exhausted me. Every day, I left the page with a sense of defeat rather than minor satisfaction. Soon a mild but persistent anxiety spread from my nerves to my abdomen. A circular, golf-ball-sized area burned inside my stomach where my rib cage parted. Antacids relieved the pain, although not entirely, and the persistent irritation added to my lack of focus and my fear that I wouldn’t be able to finish the novel. What if I’d created complications of such idiotic magnitude that I couldn’t extricate my characters from them? How would I sustain the story’s momentum and yet make its plotlines converge seamlessly? Was the book too difficult to write because I was sick? Or was I sick because the book was too difficult to write? I didn’t know.
So I made an appointment to see a gastroenterologist at the university hospital. He had black hair and the part on the left side of his head resembled a white candlestick. His glasses made him look slightly adolescent, giving me the impression that he’d gone directly from high school to performing surgeries. As instructed, I removed my sweater, flannel shirt, and thermal undershirt—it was now winter—and lay on his examination table. Then his dry, chubby fingertips pressed my stomach in various locations, so deeply at times that they seemed to touch my spine. He asked me to sit up, told me I was likely fine, but suggested having a peek at my intestines with an endoscope just to be sure. The morning of the procedure, I was not allowed to eat or drink. At the hospital, I wore an open-backed gown and lay sideways on a gurney, facing a television monitor that allowed me to see the progress of the scope. I declined a sedative because I didn’t want to be groggy for the rest of the day. The gastroenterologist patted my shoulder with one latex-gloved hand and said, “Try to relax.” Then he shoved a scope the length of a fishing rod down my throat. I gagged, and while a nurse held my head in place, I made sounds like air and water being sucked down a drain. An instant later, I saw the scope crawling through my stomach like a worm. Its glass eye illuminated the channels of my intestines and produced a grainy black-and-white image on the monitor. “I’m seeing nothing,” he said, “No Barrett’s esophagus, no ulcers, no abdominal perforation.” He twisted the rod’s handle clockwise, hummed a little ditty, turned the rod counterclockwise, and then, with magician-like quickness, retracted the scope. I closed my mouth and stopped choking as I was wheeled into a recovery room. Twenty minutes later, he appeared and said, “You’re fine.” I found the news disappointing. Since he’d discovered nothing, the pain had to be psychological, existential, or, quite possibly, literary.
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