After the Workshop (2 page)

My swift rise began when the director of the famous and often-maligned Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a man named Gordon Grimes, awarded me a much-coveted Teaching-Writing Fellowship. The TWIF, as it’s called, was a plum appointment given only to the most promising writers in the program, and much to my own surprise, I had been deemed one of them. A month later, my short story “The Self-Adhesive Postage Stamp” appeared in
The New Yorker
. The following year, as I was finishing my thesis, that same story was reprinted in the most prestigious anthology,
The Best American Short Stories
. Success on that scale altered the way I came into contact with the world around me: Walking
felt like floating, street lamps buzzed extra bright, and every song drifting through the open window of an apartment or automobile became the soundtrack to my life. I was twenty-four years old. The world—the publishing world, at least—was mine for the taking!

But then an odd thing happened. I never published another word.

I stayed in Iowa City after graduation and worked on my novel. I worked feverishly on it those first few years after the Workshop, maintaining the single-minded focus of a bee in a hive. On those rare nights when I would sneak away from my novel and go to the Foxhead, I was surprised to learn that the new students recognized my name when I wrote it on the chalkboard wait list for the pool table. (In full disclosure, I would write my entire name on the board—Jack Hercules Sheahan—and although it sometimes took an entire game of eight-ball before the student made the connection, we became fast friends once the tumblers of who I was and where I had published clicked into place.)

“Hey, you wrote ‘The Self-Adhesive Postage Stamp,’ didn’t you? Dude. I friggin’
love
that story. You turned the civil-service-job short story on its
ear
. On its friggin’
ear
!”

I had even fallen into bed, on two separate occasions, with Workshop women who wanted to sleep with someone whose work had appeared in a magazine they themselves hoped one day to publish in. One of the women lived in a dingy apartment about to be condemned, composing poetry on an electric typewriter that sat atop a stack of stolen milk crates while she sat cross-legged on a dubiously stained sofa purchased at Goodwill. (I later learned that she had gone to Berkeley as an undergrad and received a hefty monthly allowance from her trust fund, though you wouldn’t have guessed it from some of her poems with titles like “Scabs” or “My Mother’s Pimp” or “Chemo Dreams.” Her name is Pauline Frost. Maybe you’ve heard of her.)

But my celebrity—small and dismal as it was—was short-lived. Five short years after I had graduated, no one knew who I was; no one had heard of my story “The Self-Adhesive Postage Stamp”; and if the occasion arose to tell a fresh-faced Workshop student my name and casually mention my publication, they regarded me with suspicion, as if I were making it all up—a crazy local trying to infiltrate and taint their exclusive little circle of talent and promise. What I realize now but didn’t—
couldn’t
—grasp back then was that my peak had come when the complimentary copies of
Best American Short Stories
arrived in the mail. I ripped open the padded envelope before I could get back inside my apartment, just so that I could see my story reprinted alongside acknowledged masters of the form. And that was my peak right there: holding that book open and staring down at a series of artistically strung-together words that had sprung from some elusive part of my own brain.

Twelve years after I had graduated from the Workshop, I was still living in Iowa City. I had become friends with the Foxhead’s regulars over the years—non-writers who grudgingly suffered the Workshop students whenever they burst through the front door and talked loudly (always loudly) about Jonathan Franzen or Mary Gaitskill or drunkenly scribbled Barry Hannah quotes on the bathroom walls. These men (all the regulars were men) used to ask me how my novel was coming along, but eventually they forgot that I had been working on one—that, or they knew deep-down the sad truth: I had given up my dreams, as they had given up theirs. I knew that Joey, who always sat near the pay phone as if he were expecting a call that never came, had once played guitar in a pretty good local band; and that Sand Man, who took a stool at the corner of the bar for a bird’s-eye view of the pool table, had won a few major eight-ball tournaments in Vegas in the early 1970s; and that Larry McFeeley, who lived on a steady diet of Slim Jims and Hot Tamales, had been a weight lifter of Olympic caliber, breaking the state’s high school
records for both the clean-and-jerk and the snatch. “It happens to the best of us,” they might have told me if I’d asked them how someone so promising could fall so far—but I never mentioned the novel again, and they quit asking. We all just silently, mercifully, let it go.

I
T WASN’T OFTEN that two authors came to town on the same day, but if could juggle it, I would agree to pick up both of them, and that’s how this story begins: On a gray snow-promising day in early December, I took on two such jobs when I should have taken only the one.

The first author scheduled to arrive that morning was Vanessa Roberts. Her niche was the quasi-literary novel, mostly ones about child abuse, and she had just published her first memoir,
The Outhouse
, a hundred-and-twelve-page tale of how she and her younger brother fondled each other for the first time while visiting relatives who lived in a house with no indoor plumbing. The press release, which I quickly flipped through at the Cedar Rapids Airport while waiting for her plane to land, described
The Outhouse
as both “shocking” and “explosive.” I opened the book, looking for the dirty parts, but then quickly shut it when a priest walked up next to me, also waiting for a passenger to arrive.

“Father,” I said and smiled.

He glanced over at me, frowned, then looked back up to the monitor that gave arrival estimates. Even though I was a lapsed Catholic, I still felt inexplicable twinges of guilt and reverence around priests and nuns. I also felt the desire to start confessing my sins, something I hadn’t
done since my eighth-grade confirmation, which was the last time I had stepped foot inside a church—any church. I wanted to ask him if he thought there was any relationship between the implosion of my career and my cavalier attitude toward God, but when I turned back to inquire what parish he presided over, I realized that he wasn’t a priest at all. He was just an old guy wearing a white turtleneck underneath a dark sport jacket.

He looked over at me and said, “Is there a problem?”

“No problem,” I said. I walked closer to the security guard who kept people from entering the gate area, a man so large he looked like he might have had trouble tying his shoes, let alone chasing down someone with ill intent. I glanced over my shoulder at the man in the white turtleneck and sport jacket; he was still staring at me. Lately, I’d begun mistaking words and phrases when I saw them, mostly on street signs or billboards. At a quick glance I might think “No Stopping” said “No Groping,” or “Watch Out: Bump Ahead” said “Watch Out: Bum Ahead.” Only on a second, more discerning look would I see the words for what they were. But today was the first time I had mistaken a person for someone other than who he was, and I feared that I was in the early stages of some horrific disease, like the villagers in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
who, suffering from mass amnesia, begin hanging signs on things, like cows, to remind themselves of what they were looking at.

A plane started deboarding, so I held Vanessa Roberts’s book in front of my chest—her cue that I was her media escort. One thing I had learned: Never rely on an author photo. If it hasn’t been Photoshopped to death, it’s probably twenty years old. One time, I stood waiting with the book held up, looking for a sexy, woodsy woman in her late twenties to amble up to me, and I became increasingly irritated when a heavy-set, middle-aged woman eating an enormous cookie stepped in front
of me and blocked my view. She finally lowered her cookie and said, “Should we get my bags or what?” “Oh,” I said, “hello!” and when she smirked at me I could see, if only fleetingly, the younger, spunky woman inside the older one, and how the woman standing in front of me had decided, at some critical juncture, to just let herself go. She was wearing sweatpants that day, and her hair stood on end. Cookie crumbs dotted a stained T-shirt that advertised the Bermuda Triangle Writers Conference.

Another time, I chased a black man across the airport, thinking that he had failed to see me holding up his book, but when I caught up to him and tapped him on the shoulder, asking if he was indeed the book’s author, even going so far as to show the author photo to him and point at it, he said, in a good-natured way, “If I say yes, do I win something?” Before walking away, he laughed and shook his head, muttering something under his breath that I couldn’t hear. I didn’t blame him, and as a guy who prided himself as being sensitive to racial issues, I was mortified that I had followed the wrong man across the airport.

So I had quit looking at author photos altogether. I read the press material, and I skimmed the book, but I refused to be led astray.

A woman holding a baby approached me. The baby, still red-faced and wrinkled, looked fresh out of the womb. It was, to the best of my recollection, the smallest human I’d ever seen before.

“Vanessa Roberts,” she said. “I’d shake your hand, but . . .” She held up the infant to prove that her hands were full. “Oh, hey, could you take the baby for a minute?” she asked.

I’d recently had a nightmare in which a stranger handed me her baby and I accidentally dropped it. As dreams went, this one landed somewhere between forgetting my locker combination and falling off a cliff: a classic anxiety dream, the subconscious flotsam of a chronic worrier. Fortunately, I jumped awake before the baby hit the floor.

I took Vanessa’s baby. I cooed, but the baby seemed barely sentient. I made a face, poking out my bottom lip and widening my eyes, but the baby simply moved arms and legs back and forth, like a toppled-over insect.

Vanessa set down various bags, purses, and satchels, rummaged through a few of them, then pulled out a bottle and handed it to me. After picking up all her detritus, slinging some of the bags over a shoulder, she hitched her pants and straightened her blouse, then motioned for me, by wiggling her fingers, to give back her child.

“Here,” she said, annoyed. “I’ll hold; you can feed.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“The nipple goes in the mouth,” she said impatiently, and I must have turned red, thinking about the author’s memoir—naked siblings fondling each other in an outhouse—because she said, “Forget it,” and jerked the bottle from me, doing the task herself. “Where’s baggage claim?” she asked. “I checked the baby seat.”

I pointed to my left, and off we went.

W
ITH ONLY TWO exceptions, the authors I picked up never asked me if I was a writer, and I never brought it up. It was no different with Vanessa Roberts, who sat in the backseat without putting on her seatbelt and then fell sound asleep while the baby, belted in place like an astronaut about to be blasted into outer space, looked around wide-eyed.

I hit a bump, and my muffler fell off. Vanessa woke up and asked me what that noise was.

“What noise?” I asked. I saw cars in my rearview mirror swerving to avoid running over the muffler, but then a semi-trailer flattened it, sending debris bouncing toward the side of the road.

“And that smell?” she asked. She coughed a few times. “What’s
that
?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t smell anything.”

The exhaust fumes were burning my eyes, but I admitted nothing.
We’re almost there
, I thought.
Just a few more miles to go
.

The baby started wailing. Vanessa, coughing, rubbed her own eyes. “Now, now,” she said to her child. “Everything’s okay.” To me, she said, “What’s wrong with this car?”

“Nothing’s wrong with this car,” I lied. “The pavement’s ridged along this stretch. That’s the noise you’re hearing. What you’re smelling is an old milk truck with an oil problem. It sped by us while you were napping.”

“Dammit,” Vanessa said.

“What?”

“I lost something.” She rummaged through her bags. “It must have fallen out in the overhead bin.” She shut her eyes. “
Shit!
”

Vanessa was silent the rest of the way to the hotel. I zipped into the semicircle and killed the engine as hotel guests stopped to stare at me and my loud car. I needed to work fast—the next author pickup was in an hour—so I carried the baby to the sidewalk.

“Does she stay in the chair, or do you want to carry her?”

“
He
.
Him.
”

“What?”

“The baby is a boy,” she said.

“Oh.
Him
, then,” I said and smiled. I set his chair on the sidewalk. I looked down and said, “Hey, li’l guy. How ya doin’?”

The baby started bawling.

“Look,” she said, “I need a favor.” She pulled a Montblanc pen and a leather-bound journal from her purse and started writing. Maybe this was what I had needed to get me through my writing slump—a $200 pen and a pad of paper sheathed in the skin of some exotic or unlikely animal, like a bobcat or a hedgehog. Maybe the cause of my creative impotence lay in the fact that I had used black Bics and legal pads purchased in bulk at Office Depot.

Vanessa tore the sheet from her journal and handed it to me. What she’d written was a product name, but the words meant nothing. They looked foreign or made up.

“I need you to get that for me,” she said. “Bill it to my publisher.”

“Where do I find it?”

“The drugstore,” she said.

I nodded. I glanced at my watch, worried about my next author pickup. “When do you need this?”

She looked down at her howling, pinch-faced baby and said, “As soon as possible.”