After the Workshop (25 page)

I stopped next to the city park.

“Get out,” I said.

“What?”

“Get the fuck out of my car.”

Vince said, “If I didn’t feel like absolute shit right now, I’d offer to kick your ass.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s keep that offer open.”

“What offer?”

“The offer to kick my ass. I invite you to try,” I said. “Now, get out of my car.”

Vince swung open the door and, like someone fresh out of surgery, eased himself out of the car. Grimacing, he leaned down and said, “The only reason your story was in
The New Yorker
and
Best American
was because Gordon Grimes owed you money. Everyone knows that. No one thinks otherwise.” He smiled and said, “Except maybe
you
.” With the car door gaping open, Vince Belecheck walked slowly away, leaving behind him a trail of ghostly boot prints across a park of virgin snow.

I
LEARNED TO TYPE on an old manual typewriter, a machine that was as heavy as an engine block. It had belonged to my mother, who’d dreamed of becoming a journalist. Her marriage to my father and then her pregnancy with me pretty much put an end to those and a host of other dreams. When I showed an interest in writing early on in grade school, my mother unearthed the cast-iron beast from the back of a closet, dusted it off, and bought a dozen new ribbons for me. I typed on it for nine years, until my high school graduation when my parents gave me a brand-new electric typewriter, this despite typewriters being only a few short years from being put on the endangered species list, joining record players and, a few years later, VCRs in landfills across the country.

These days, everyone writes on razor-thin laptops. (Hell, teenage girls in Japan
text message
entire novels.) Only the oldest of writers I escorted still faxed their editors from the hotel. The younger writers—and even some not so young—maintained lengthy blogs about their writing lives. If a writer didn’t have a blog, he or she was being blogged about, often viciously, usually by wannabe writers who wielded their blogs like swords. Part of the appeal of being a writer was the anonymity, but the Internet had pretty much ruined that. Almost always when
I read blogs by young fiction writers whose work I admired, I ended up feeling embarrassed for the writer. Frequently, they revealed too much personal information, or they felt compelled to share all their opinions. There appeared to be no filter between what popped into their heads and what showed up on their blogs, and I wanted to beg them to reconsider being so public, but instead of dropping emails to them, I simply never read their books again.

A year ago, after a late night at the Foxhead, I made the mistake of pulling up a blog dedicated solely to rejections from literary magazines. The site was called “Rejections Are My Heartbreak and Misery,” and each entry was about rigged contests or impersonal notes from agents who’d turned down the blogger’s novel or the cruel wording of submission guidelines. One blog entry that I had drunkenly stumbled onto happened to be about MFA programs, a subject that brought the loons out of their closets by the dozens. Finally, they could rationalize their own lack of success by accusing publishers and writers of being part of a secret cabal, like Yale’s Skull and Bones, that refused to let in anyone who didn’t know the secret MFA handshake. The comments on the blog came pouring in, one after the other, the sentiment being that MFA’ers were coddled, that they didn’t know the real world, that they were handed book contracts and cushy teaching appointments upon graduation, that they came from privileged backgrounds. The words “Ivory Tower” appeared again and again. Although I couldn’t argue that my own publications
weren’t
born of dubious circumstances, I foolishly decided to weigh in, letting everyone know that I had an MFA, from Iowa no less, and although most of my colleagues had come from backgrounds with money, I certainly hadn’t. Furthermore, only a few of my classmates had received cushy teaching appointments after earning their diplomas; the vast majority pieced together work any way they could. Lastly, only a modest percentage of my classmates had published
books after graduation, and of those who did, only two had managed to achieve the kind of reputation where someone, somewhere, might actually have heard of him or her.

“You’re all so paranoid,” I wrote. And then, for lack of a better closing, I wrote, “Good grief!”

I entered my comment, waited a few minutes, and refreshed the page. A man whose
nom de blog
was “Oscar Wilde and Crazy” responded to my comment with one word: “Bullshit.”

I wrote back, “Bullshit?”

“I should kick your ass,” Oscar Wilde and Crazy wrote. “You have an MFA from Iowa and you dare come here and chastise us? You’re an asshole. Furthermore, I don’t believe most of what you’ve written.”

The anonymous blogger, who was known only as RAMHAM (the acronym for the blog’s name), moderated the comments with such speed that it was only natural to assume that this person had nothing of import going on in his or her life.

“Now, now,” RAMHAM wrote. “No name calling. Keep it civil.”

“Are you kidding me?” I wrote back to Oscar. “Why the hell would I be making any of this up? Who the fuck are you?”

“I know your kind,” Oscar wrote. “I live in Cedar Rapids. I see you Iowa snobs all the time. You think your shit doesn’t stink. You walk around town like you own the goddamned place. You disgust me. I should drive down there and pummel you, just for fun, you pussy.”

“Now, now,” RAMHAM chimed back in. “Remember what I told you.”

Even though it was true that many students in the Workshop did, in fact, think their shit didn’t stink, and one did often get the sense that they walked the streets like kings and queens besieged by peasants, Oscar’s attack was weirdly personal, and I’d had just enough to drink to call his bluff.

“All right, you son of a bitch,” I wrote. “You know the Hawk-I truck stop in Coralville? Just off I-80? You want to meet me there in forty-five minutes? I’ll be sitting in a booth—waiting!”

“Let’s keep the discourse at a higher level, okay?” RAMHAM added. “No one likes being called a son of a bitch.”

This time, after I sent my comment, there was no immediate reply from Oscar Wilde and Crazy. I refreshed my screen a dozen times before he finally logged in another message: “I’ll be there,” he wrote.

It was summer. The husks of dead locusts littered the sidewalks, and each time I took a step, they crunched under my feet. By the time I reached my car, the bottoms of my shoes were covered with dozens of translucent wings. I saw them all along the shoes’ margins as I tried to insert my key into the door.

“Shit,” I said when I dropped my keys for the second time. I shouldn’t have been driving in the condition I was in, but what could I do? I had challenged a man to a fight, and I was going to show up as I’d promised! The fact that I had challenged this man over the comments section of a blog dedicated to rejections from literary magazines didn’t matter.

I drove cautiously, fully aware that I was way over the legal limit. I drove past a cop parked with his headlights off in a grocery store parking lot. I drove past a state patrol car cunningly hidden up one of the I-80 exit ramps, waiting like a ninja in the dark. When I finally made it to the truck stop in Coralville, I did so without incident.

I knew it would be a while before Oscar Wilde and Crazy showed up, if he showed up at all. Cedar Rapids was a good thirty minutes away. It was possible he wouldn’t come at all. The longer I sat at the booth sipping my Diet Coke, the sleepier I became. I took stock of each person entering, but it was obvious, from the moment they stepped foot inside, what their intentions were. Most were drunk college kids. Some
were actual truck drivers. A security guard sat on a revolving stool and chatted up a waitress.

Eventually, I broke down and ordered pancakes, eggs, and bacon. The meal started to bring the absurdity of the night into sharp and disconcerting focus. What if the man did show up? Where would we fight? Near the gas pumps? In a ditch alongside the interstate? And what would we tell the security guard?
Don’t mind us; we just have a difference of opinion about MFA programs.

The waitress had already brought my bill. As I speared the last stack of syrup-soaked pancakes with my fork, an older man walked in wearing a gray cardigan sweater, a T-shirt, and old wool slacks. Even at three in the morning, it had to have been ninety degrees outside, and yet I swore I saw a shiver pass through the man as he stood there looking around. He wore wire-frame glasses and had the sort of unkempt graying mustache that collected food scraps. He also wore a baseball cap, the kind that people had custom-made with words along the hat’s brim, composed of iron-on felt letters, usually to announce their name to the world. At first I thought the word the old man had chosen for his hat was OW!—a funny thing to see across someone’s forehead, as though calling attention to a chronic headache—but then I saw the letters for what they really were: Oscar Wilde’s initials. The exclamation point was there to emphasize his enthusiasm for the writer.

“Oh, no,” I said.

As if to call me out into the open, he unbuttoned his cardigan and took it off. On his T-shirt was the famous Oscar Wilde quote, “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” He had to have been between sixty and seventy, almost as old as my father. Each time he blinked, his red-rimmed eyes looked as though they might fill with tears.

“Can I help you?” the security guard asked.

“Just waitin’ for someone,” Oscar Wilde and Crazy said.

“It’s open seating this time of night,” the guard said. “Have a seat, if you like.”

The old man walked over to the counter and sat down. The one time we made eye contact, I quickly looked down at my bill and started fishing money out of my pocket.

What did this man think he was going to do? Did he really come down here to fight me? Was showing up a matter of pride for him, or was he indeed crazy?

I left money on the table. The waitress swooped in quickly to collect it, fearful, I’m sure, that I might have been trying to leave without paying—a problem of epidemic proportion in college towns.

On my way out, Oscar glared at me, so I nodded toward him. I was almost free, reaching for the door handle, when Oscar said, “You him?”

I stopped, took a breath. I turned around. “I’m sorry?”

“You him?” he asked.

I gave the security guard a look that said,
Is this guy nuts?
I shrugged. “Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m not
him
.”

I opened the door and stepped outside. The air was suffocating. Three bats circled one of the preposterously high lights that illuminated the parking lot. A hundred different genera of bugs crawled along the restaurant’s windows, drawn to the brightness inside. I was shaking by the time I reached my car. I felt like vomiting. When I peered back at the restaurant, I saw that Oscar was still watching me, so I turned quickly away.

The next day there was a message from him on the blog: “Where were you, you asshole? I was there last night, but you weren’t. As I suspected, you’re a chickenshit mama’s boy. Don’t ever come to this site again, you hack with an MFA.”

“Now, now,” RAMHAM posted a few seconds later. “You know the rules.”

I didn’t ever return to the site. In fact, I quit reading any blog that had to do with writing.

I was certain, however, that the blogosphere would all be abuzz once the
Times
article ran about Vanessa’s memoir being a sack of lies. Back at my apartment, I took one of my two copies of her book and plopped down on my couch to read it. S. S. wasn’t there, and all was quiet in the apartment across the hall. This was the first time in over two days that I’d experienced what felt like honest-to-goodness downtime. And it felt great. It felt
right
, unlike the past forty-eight hours, during which my life seemed as though it had belonged to any stranger passing through town who made claim to it.

I opened Vanessa’s book to page one.

The outhouse is usually a place for solitude
, it began.

I clapped the book shut. The publicity materials actually had the gall to compare the book to Richard Wright’s
Black Boy
and Elie Wiesel’s
Night
, one memoir about racism in the South, the other about the Holocaust. Did publicists have no shame? Or were these the books that Vanessa herself had compared her own crap to when she pitched the book to her agent?

“Jesus,” I said.

It was the sort of sentence that made one want to burn the book and then shower under scalding water. I opened it again, forcing myself beyond the first sentence, though it took several pages before I forgave Vanessa. Her prose was overwrought, with so many clauses piling on top of one another that the main clause often suffocated under the weight of its subordinates. The prose was probably supposed to be stream-of-consciousness, but it read like someone who was getting paid by the
word, the way old pulp writers would add six adjectives when one good one would have done the trick. Even Lucy Rogan, with her adverb-burdened sentences, wrote prose that was more terse and precise.

A few things I learned from the first hundred pages of Vanessa’s book: Her brother was named Jedediah after their grandfather, an Amish man who hailed from Shipshewana, Indiana. (We knew now that she made up having a brother, which naturally called into question the Amish grandfather as well as any familial connections to Shipshewana.) Where I kept expecting titillating scenes between herself and her brother, I received instead lengthy lectures on the Amish: their ethnicity (Swiss-German), their history, their religious practices, their separation from the outside world, their lifestyle and culture, their dress, their education, even their portrayal in popular entertainment, such as the Harrison Ford movie
Witness
and, more disturbingly, the Farrelly brothers’ movie
Kingpin
.