After the Workshop (17 page)

What I had once loved—going to hear writers read from their new books—now depressed the shit out of me. But it wasn’t only the authors who brought despair to my life. It was the audience, too. Too often, week after week, I saw the exact same people, most of whom never bought a book; they came only because it was something to do. And they always asked the same inane questions: “Do you have a writing routine?” Or, “Do you think, now that people spend so much time on the Internet, that pretty soon no one will be reading actual books anymore?” One man stood up during the Q&A and asked if anyone had an antacid. He was a homeless man who’d wandered in from the cold, and during the middle of the reading, his acid reflux had kicked in, causing him to burp loudly and pound his chest with the side of his fist. Bookstores were the new bus stations, a place where people with no discernible plan (or, in some instances, without a place to live) ended up to pass the time. The ways in which the fiction readings themselves could quickly sour were innumerable. What was worse than nobody showing up, which sometimes happened, was only one person showing up; the author, unsure of
what to do, would awkwardly read to that one person. For this, publishers paid thousands of dollars, forking over money for airfare, meals, hotels, and incidentals. They paid for
me
, for Christ’s sake.

What publishers fail to realize is that many writers are social outcasts, or introverted and pathologically shy, and that sending them on the road, shuttling them from city to city to meet with small and large groups who show up for reasons that usually have nothing to do with the author, is a unique kind of torture, not only for the author but often for the rest of us as well. It is the rare author who also possesses celebrity-caliber mojo. Regrettably, during all my years of media escorting, I never met the new Truman Capote or Flannery O’Connor or Tennessee Williams.

My job was to reassure the author that the event went well or to make excuses for the poor attendance. “I think the women’s volleyball team is in the playoffs,” I might have offered. Or: “Gallagher’s doing stand-up at the student union right now, even as we speak.” On one occasion, the store had failed to list the event on its calendar, and no one showed up—not even Crazy Ted, whom I probably would have invited in to fill a chair, had I seen him. The author was Maureen Schiffman, and she wept on the short walk back to the hotel. I offered to take her out for dinner and drinks, and though food and alcohol didn’t entirely snuff out the sense of humiliation she had felt, it at least mollified her enough that she thanked me for salvaging what was quickly becoming the most depressing day of her professional writing life. That night I realized that I wasn’t overpaid for my services, as I had always believed. I meant far more to these people than a taxi driver would ever have, and I was, in ways both small and large, earning every dollar of it.

When S. S. and I tromped into the bookstore, I spied Tate standing near the back wall, in front of the gay and lesbian section, holding a manuscript and studying it. No doubt he was going to read from a
work-in-progress tonight. Most writers read from a tattered copy of their book, sometimes from a bound galley, but Tate was going all old school on us, breaking out new manuscript pages for this occasion. Since I hadn’t run across them in his messenger bag, I could only assume he’d been keeping them folded and tucked inside his vintage service station jacket. When he caught sight of me, his lips tightened, like an aperture, and he quickly turned around, hunching his shoulders.

“Looks like a pleasant chap,” S. S. said.

“You should meet Vince Belecheck,” I said.

S. S. smiled. “Ah, yes. I remember reading a profile of him in
The Times
. ‘Belecheck’s School of Hard Knocks,’ it was called?”

“He went to St. Albans,” I said.

“
No!
”

“And then took a BA from George Washington University.”

“
You lie!
” S. S. said, grinning.

“The guy’s never lifted a hammer in his life,” I said.

“Too bad,” S. S. said, sighing. “I need to buy a miter saw and was hoping to ask him for a recommendation.”

Jerry, the head book buyer, walked up to me and said, “I like you, Jack. But please don’t ever ask to borrow my car again, okay?”

“No problem,” I said.

Jerry looked over at S. S., nodded a curt hello, and started walking away, but then he turned around to take another look at S. S. For his part, S. S. lifted a forefinger to his brow and saluted Jerry.

“Come on,” I said. S. S. and I climbed the stairs to the place where the readings were held, and I led us to two back-row seats.

As it turned out, there were more attendees for Tate’s reading than for most, probably because he fit the bill so perfectly: a New York writer publishing in all the hot glossies and journals; recipient of awards that several members of the Workshop would have stabbed their own
mothers through the heart to have won; often titillatingly portrayed as an anti-establishment writer, out of the loop, even though he had worked at one of the major publishing houses while honing his craft, such as it was.

After Jerry read a perfunctory introduction for Tate, Tate walked behind the podium and pushed his eyeglasses higher up the bridge of his nose. He cleared his throat a few times. He raised his right hand, as though at a Senate hearing, and said, “No, I won’t answer any questions about Scarlett Johansson tonight!” I dimly remembered a rumor that Tate and Scarlett had briefly dated, but based on the silence in the room, I seemed to be the only person who’d heard this. Tate chuckled and said, “Oh, okay, if you insist. But only
after
the reading.” And then Tate read from the manuscript instead of his new novel. With the exception of Vince Belecheck, who sat in the front row and nodded meaningfully at every other sentence, the rest of the audience sat as emotionless as zombies. As was my habit at readings, I didn’t listen. S. S. leaned over and whispered, “It’s like
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
, only set in Hell’s Kitchen.” “Hunh,” I replied. The Q&A afterward was an uneventful series of questions: “How important is ‘place’ to your work?” “What advice do you have for an aspiring writer?” “How did you find your agent?” The only truly awkward moment came when Jerry announced, after the Q&A, that Tate Rinehart would not be signing copies of his rare first novel.

“Just the
first
novel,” Tate clarified. “And
just
the first edition. I’ll sign paperbacks and, of course, subsequent printings of the hardback. Naturally, I’ll sign copies of any of my other books!” He laughed, trying to play down any impression that he might be a snob, but even as he stood there smiling, the audience began filing out. It was clear that no one had brought with them
any
novel of his to get signed, let alone a copy of Tate’s rare Gutenberg, a novel so bad that I had actually ripped
up my copy and fed the pages into a shredder back when I was temping for Rockwell International, a job at which I spent eight hours each day typing in mysterious codes and, for all I knew, launching missiles toward small, sparsely populated countries.

The handful of Workshop students in attendance, along with Vince and Tate, had initiated a movement to go to the Foxhead. I offered the Dynamic Duo a ride, but they insisted upon walking.

“You sure?” I asked.

Vince rolled his eyes at me and walked away. Tate shrugged and followed Vince.

Outside, as S. S. and I sat in the Corolla waiting for it to warm up, we watched Vince holding forth on some topic or another. Vince had taught in the Workshop, off and on over the years (always on an as-needed basis), and he carried himself as the old sage in front of current students. Vince and company took up the entire sidewalk, requiring normal people to walk out into the street, over mounds of snow, to get around them. Vince gestured passionately, hitting the side of one hand against the palm of his other, then raised both arms into the air and clenched his fists. At one point he crouched down and, pouting, peered up as though he were standing in front of an adult who was disciplining him. The students’ laughter was too enthusiastic, and from this distance, unable to hear even a peep over the roaring of my muffler-shy car, I interpreted the fervor of their laughter as a complicated mixture of pity and envy. They wanted what Vince had, but they did not want to be him. It was also clear from my vantage that by playing the role of clown, Vince was trying to usurp whatever attention was being paid to Tate. And it worked well enough that one of the women broke from her clump and hooked arms with Vince, trying to entice him to skip with her. She tugged at his arm several times until he finally pulled her close, bent down, and whispered something into her ear. She leaned back in
mock surprise, hit him with her gloved hand, but then pulled him up against her for the rest of the walk.

I jerked the car into drive and rumbled toward the Foxhead.

“Did you know,” S. S. said, “that you have a cheese grater on your floorboard?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“You wouldn’t be hiding a block of cheese in here, would you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “Tate’s reading—it made me famished. Isn’t that an odd reaction to a selection of self-conscious prose?”

“Would a slice of Paul Revere’s pizza do the trick?”

S. S. cleared his throat. Reciting, he began, “‘Listen, my children, and you shall hear . . . of the midnight ride of Paul Revere . . . on the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five . . . hardly a man is now alive . . . who remembers that famous day and year.’”

“Longfellow,” I said.

“I had to memorize it as a child,” S. S. said. “I hadn’t thought of it in over forty years. Funny how the mind remembers some things but doesn’t remember others.” His voice caught, and he took a deep breath. I was about to ask him if he was okay, but he pointed out the window and said, “You weren’t kidding. A pizza restaurant named Paul Revere’s! I wonder if there’s a pizza restaurant in England called John Locke’s. Somehow I doubt it.”

Inside, we ordered, and then, pizza in hand, stared out Paul Revere’s large plate-glass window and silently chewed our food as Vince, Tate, and their band of merrymakers eventually arrived at the Foxhead on foot.

“‘Himself killing from him keeps what?’” I said at last, crumpling my paper plate and tossing it into the trash.

“You’re not speaking in tongues, are you?” S. S. asked. “I spent two years living in the South. Never again, I told myself.”

“It’s what Tate wrote about me in his notebook,” I said. “Only he wrote it backward. Forward, it says, ‘What keeps him from killing himself?’”

“And you read this,” S. S. said.

“I took his messenger bag while he was busy throwing up.”

“Ah. Always a good time to take what’s not yours.” He chewed the remainder of his pizza thoughtfully. He slid his paper plate into the garbage can, wiped the grease from his hands, and said, “Are you worried that you don’t have an answer?”

“For what?”

“Tate’s question, friend.”

I thought about it. “Maybe,” I said.

We crossed the empty and silent snow-packed street as the traffic light pointlessly turned from green to yellow to red. At the Foxhead, the celebrity writers and their fans took up the two tables nearest the entrance. When Vince saw us, he raised his arms and said, “Yo, yo! We’re over here. What took you girls so long?”

S. S., nodding hello to everyone, grabbed hold of one of the student’s hands and shook it vigorously, even though the poor kid had only been reaching across the aisle for a beer someone was trying to give him.

“We’ll be over there,” I announced, tipping my head toward the pool table. Vince, however, had already turned his attention away, sucked back into flirtatious conversation with the women on either side of him.

S. S. ordered our drinks. I carried them to the back booth, where only this morning I had been enjoying Lucy Rogan’s novel.

“How’s your hand?” I asked.

“Sh-sh,” he said, smiling and rolling his eyes in such a way that I knew he wanted me to listen to the conversation between two women in
the booth behind him. I recognized the women because they had introduced themselves to me a couple of weeks ago when I was escorting the self-proclaimed guru of creative nonfiction, Matthew Klotz. They had come up to me after the reading to ask how I knew him. When I explained to them the nature of our relationship, they quickly lost interest and wandered away, searching for someone with a more intimate connection to the man. Their names were Sally and Helga, and they were MFA students in the Creative Nonfiction program at the University of Iowa, a degree-granting program separate from the Writers’ Workshop, which explained why they were sitting all the way in the rear of the Foxhead and not on Vince’s or Tate’s lap. Helga, who wore her dark hair like a helmet, was in the middle of a story about, as best as I could tell, the night she learned that her maternal grandfather had been a Nazi soldier in Terezín, a concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic.

“It was this transit camp for Jews,” Helga said, “who were going to be taken to Auschwitz. The Nazis put something like fifty thousand Jews there. And, oh yeah, get this: Sigmund Freud’s
sister
died there. And my grandfather, he was one of the soldiers who oversaw the Jews who were forced to turn Terezín into a concentration camp. It’s all so—I don’t know—awful. And I just found out about all of this. The last time I was home!”

Sally said, “You’re so lucky, bitch.”

“I know, I know,” Helga said.

“You write that memoir and throw in all that Nazi stuff,” said Sally, “and I bet you’ll get a six-figure advance.”

“You think?”

“Shit, yeah, girl. At
least
. And you know what else?”

“What?”

“You’ve got the perfect name to write a book like this.
Helga
.”