After the Workshop (13 page)

The little shit
, I thought.
The little ass-wipe.
What Ross Traveaux had failed to realize—what
most
publicists in New York failed to realize—was that the money I made as a media escort was what kept me afloat from month to month.
Not
receiving payment might result in a warning from the electric company or a disconnected phone. I also knew that they themselves—the behemoth publishing houses—played hardball with the independent bookstores, making it harder and harder for them to survive with so many chain stores opening up only a block or two away. It was all so dismal. And then throw into the mix a shit-heel like Ross Traveaux whose position as head of publicity for said behemoth publisher gave him all the power someone like him needed to feel that he was smarter than he really was.

For days I fumed, fantasizing about a trip to New York in which I waited outside his building with a . . . what? A cream pie to slam into his face? A flaming bag of shit to throw at him? A concealed lead pipe? I would never have gone to New York to confront him, of course, but every time I thought of him over the next year, I felt that there were
unresolved issues between us, and I wanted him to understand, without any ambiguity, that being lucky in life was not the same thing as being intelligent, and that one day the boom would lower for him, if not professionally then personally—and then what? Who would be there to pick him up and dust him off?

And then one night, after a few too many drinks, I Googled him. The first entry that appeared was his obituary, a short piece in
The New York Times
about how he had gone to Spain to help promote the Spanish translation of the house’s number-one-best-selling book, and while in Pamplona, watching the famous running of the bulls, a group of teenage boys, fueled by their hatred of America, pushed Ross out into the street, where he was gored by a bull and then crushed to death by the stampede that followed. He was only thirty-eight.

“Jesus,” I said, reading and re-reading the article. I should have felt some glimmer of retribution, but in truth I felt bad for the guy. I could easily have imagined myself dying absurdly as the victim of a random and unprovoked event. “Poor guy,” I said.

The blogs, however, weren’t nearly as generous. They’d had their own dealings with Ross Traveaux, and more than a few bloggers Photoshopped Ross getting gored up the ass by pasting his head onto a naked and bent-over male and then adding an angry bull ramming him from behind.

After Ross’s untimely death, I had hoped to start getting work again from said behemoth publisher, but apparently he had put me on some kind of interoffice blacklist, and the few emails I sent to publicists offering my services went unanswered. Whatever sympathy I might have had for him evaporated along with whatever extra income I could have been earning if Ross hadn’t gone out of his way to screw me over. But in the end, who among the two of us had come out ahead? Ross Traveaux was dead. I, at least, was still alive.

But now, sitting in the hospital, overheated in my ski mask, I wondered if maybe I should have been a little more patient while waiting for the money they owed me. Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown the tiny pebble of small-claims court at the hulking, multiheaded monster that I knew could eat me for breakfast and then shit me out before the lunch whistle blew.

Through the hospital’s glass doors, I saw Vince and Tate walk by, probably looking for me. Vince stopped once, putting his hand up to his brow scout-style, as if peering into a dense forest, but then they walked on, Tate with his head down, Vince gesturing wildly. I was about to stand up to see where they were going when M. Cat appeared from behind me like a scene from a dream, walking toward the pharmacy and wearing a pair of oven mitts. Did he work in the hospital kitchen? Was there something about M. Cat that I didn’t know? He was crying, I noticed. His eyes were red and he kept sniffling. That’s when I realized that the tips of his ears were taped up, too, making him positively Spock-like in appearance. On closer inspection, I saw that he wasn’t wearing oven mitts, after all. Both of his hands were wrapped in gauze and taped around the seams, like the hands of a burn victim.

I tried catching up to him. I said, “Hey, buddy,” but when he turned around and saw me—a man wearing a ski mask rapidly approaching—he raised his arms into the air and said, “My ATM card is in my wallet. The PIN is 7625. Just don’t hurt me, okay?”

I reached up and pulled off my mask. “It’s
me
,” I said, and M. Cat lowered his arms.

At the sight of me, M. Cat broke down altogether, weeping and holding both hands out for me to look at. “I got frostbite, dude.”

“You’re shitting me,” I said.

“
Look!
” he yelled. “
Look!
” He shook his bandaged hands at me. The receptionist shushed him, and M. Cat wiped his wet face with his
forearm. “How am I supposed to open doors? How am I supposed to take a
piss
? I’m going to need your help.”

“My help doing what?” I asked. “Helping you take a piss?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t know. I . . .”

“This is all your fault, you know,” M. Cat said, leaning toward me. “You’re the one who sent me looking for her.”

This I couldn’t deny: I had.

“Jesus,” I said. “I’m sorry, man. Here. Let’s take a seat, okay? I want you to tell me what happened. Could you do that?”

M. Cat sniffled a few times. When he first tried to speak, he sputtered and buried his face in the crook of his arm, but then he regained his composure and told me the story.

“After you called me,” he said, “I decided to drive to all the hotels and motels around here, asking if anyone had seen Vanessa. I made it out to the Quality Inn and the Travelodge without any trouble, but once I got onto I-80 and started heading to Coralville, the storm really picked up. It was a fucking whiteout, man. I couldn’t see a thing. I kept seeing these big-ass rigs and SUVs off in the ditch, and I started becoming a wreck, so I pulled out my one-hitter and . . .”

I held up my hand. “Whoa! Wait a second. Let me get this straight. You pulled out your one-hitter while you were driving through a blizzard?”

“For my nerves, brother,” M. Cat said. “You don’t know what it was like.” I stared at him until he shrugged and said, “What?”

“I’m just saying, couldn’t you have waited? You’re driving through a fucking blizzard!”

“Until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes,” M. Cat said, “I don’t think you can judge me.” He reached up to scratch his head but stopped when he saw his puffy white hand. “I’ve got an itch,” he said.

“So, what happened?” I asked.

“After you scratch my head,” he said. “It’s driving me crazy.”

“You want me to scratch your head?”

“Please,” he said. I reached up, planted my nails into his scalp, and started to go to work, but M. Cat said, “Ow! Easy, easy. And a little to your left. No, wait:
my
left.”

“How’s that feel?” I asked, and he smiled for the first time, reminding me of how my childhood dog, ZaSu Pitts, would open her mouth when I scratched her, smiling up at me with her black lips.

“Oh, oh,” he said. “That’s good. No, wait. A little higher up. Yes, there, right there. Ohhhhhhhh.”

“Okay,” I said, removing my hand. “Enough. Now tell me what happened.”

“Sure,” he said, and he told me how everything had been fine until he lit the one-hitter, and then he thought he saw something run across the highway—a deer?—and he slammed on the brakes. It was this—his sudden attempt at stopping—that sent the car into a wild tailspin. Assuming a semi-trailer was going to hit him as he spun, M. Cat made peace with God. But, as it turned out, no one was behind him. The car spun off into the ditch, and in a matter of a few minutes, it was entirely covered with snow.

“What I didn’t realize,” he said, “was that I’d missed the Coralville exit by about five miles. I don’t know how the hell that happened.”

“You were lighting a one-hitter,” I reminded him.

“Whatever,” he said. “The point is, I wasn’t anywhere near an exit, and when I climbed out of the car, no one could see me. And I was afraid of getting hit if I stayed too close to the highway, so I started walking what I thought was parallel to the road but far enough away not to get killed by an out-of-control car, but since I had to keep my head down, I was just walking across some fucking cornfield, dude. It was endless.
And I was getting colder. And I kept tripping and falling. Finally, I gave up and stood there.”

“For how long?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Four hours? Five hours? I had no idea where my car was. But then the snow finally stopped coming down, and I saw a light in the distance. A farmhouse. It was there the whole time about three hundred yards away.”

“Shit,” I said.

“No shit,” M. Cat said. “You’re telling
me
. So I walked over there, and it was this old couple, Amish-looking but not Amish. I asked them.”

“If they were Amish?” I asked. “You asked them?”

“Yeah. But they weren’t. He had one of those beards without the mustache. Not a good look, dude. Unless you’re Amish. Anyway, once the roads were plowed, they drove me here. Oh yeah—get this. He’s working on a novel. Seriously. So I gave him your name and address. Thought you could help him out.”

“You didn’t,” I said.

“This dude . . . he saved my
life
,” M. Cat said.

“All right. Okay.”

“Now look at me,” M. Cat said. “I’m screwed. With a capital S.” He sighed; his eyes teared up. He turned to me and said, “I need to pee, bro.”

Staring down into my lap, I nodded, not realizing at first the full import of what he’d said, but when M. Cat didn’t move, I looked back up at him and shook my head. “You’ll need to find someone else to help you. Sorry.”

“You got me into this,” he said.

“I just can’t,” I said. “You don’t understand. I can’t even pee if I’m in a restroom and someone else is waiting outside.”

“That’s a problem,” M. Cat said. “But that’s
your
problem, not mine. I can pee anywhere. Look, bro. Just unzip me once we get inside.” When I didn’t say anything, he looked pleadingly into my eyes and said, “Dude, my back teeth are swimming. I need your help, brother.”

He stood and motioned for me to follow him. I didn’t see any other option in sight, so I followed him to the men’s room, right up to the urinal. Before he knew what I was doing, I reached down and unzipped him as fast as I could.

“There,” I said.

He pawed at his crotch for a few seconds with his bandaged hands. “This ain’t workin’,” he said finally. “I need you to pull me out.”

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.”

“
Dude
,” he said. “This isn’t sexual. It’s urological. It’s
medical
. Don’t think of it as holding my cock,
hombre
. Think of it as helping out someone less able than yourself.”

The first rule of fiction writing is to burrow yourself into the consciousness of the narrator in order to view the world from his or her perspective, so that’s what I did—I put myself in M. Cat’s shoes, and I saw instantly how helpless and vulnerable he must have felt, how difficult it must have been to ask me for help.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay.” I took a deep breath. “Stand up against the urinal,” I said. “Let me get behind you.”

M. Cat obeyed. I reached around and parted his fly. I started to pull the band of his underwear down when a man wearing a suit walked in and saw us. He paused, narrowed his eyes at us, said, “Excuse me,” and then apologized, but on his way out, he said, “You should lock the door, you know,” and then, as the door shut behind him, he said, “For God’s sake! This is a
hospital
.”

“I can’t do it,” I said and let the elastic band snap back into place. “I’ll go get someone.”

“Don’t leave me, man,” M. Cat pleaded, but I was already out the door, rushing to find someone who could take care of him. At the sight of the first nurse, a woman in her late forties who looked as though she’d seen pretty much everything in the line of duty, I said, “There’s a man in the lobby restroom who needs assistance.”

“What kind of assistance?” she asked.

“I really don’t know,” I said, “but he was calling out for help. He looks like a burn victim,” I added. “His hands are wrapped in gauze.”

The nurse looked around her for someone better suited for entering the men’s room, then checked her watched and sighed. “All right. I’ll see what he needs,” she said finally. As soon as I’d successfully handed over the baton of M. Cat’s woes, I put my ski mask back on and left the hospital, heading quickly away. A stranger might have even mistaken me for a man with a clear destination.

W
AS I A terrible person?

This was what I wondered as I tried running through the snow, distancing myself from M. Cat while Tate’s messenger bag banged against my side. A few blocks from the bookstore I finally slowed down, my heart pounding so hard I could hear myself wheeze, an unsettling noise like the crumpling of tinfoil at the tail end of each breath. Once I reached the bookstore, I leaned back against it and placed my hands on my knees. A knock on the window caused me to stand up and turn around. One of the bookstore’s employees—a spiky-haired woman, probably a recent Workshop grad—was standing in the window’s display area. She pointed at the smudges I had left all over the window.

“Sorry!” I yelled, and she resumed building a pyramid out of a hundred shiny copies of Tate’s latest novel. A giant photo of Tate rested on an easel with a blurb from
The Washington Post
superimposed across his forehead: “The face of fiction’s future!” In the photo, he was wearing the very messenger bag that I was now wearing.

I headed into the bookstore, walked upstairs and into the café, and ordered a cinnamon roll and coffee. Before finding a table, I perused the wide selection of literary magazines—
The Rhode Island Review
,
North Carolina Quarterly
,
Kerouac’s Eyes
, and
The Angry Scribbler
. There
were hundreds of magazines out there where thousands of desperate writers sent their work, clamoring for enough pages for their precious short stories or poems, but even in Iowa City, as literate of a city as one is likely to find, the magazines sat gathering dust, slumped against one another like hobos in line at a soup kitchen. I always made a point to pull one out and look it over, but I never recognized anyone anymore, except for Stephen Dixon, whose work appeared in every third magazine on the shelf, and other than examining the quality of the paper, the readability of the font, or the texture of its cover, I never actually read any of the work itself. I might as well have been studying an arrowhead or a piece of primitive pottery.