How I Became a Famous Novelist (22 page)

As she sat down she shook her head
no
at her sister, who I guess didn’t hear. Two more coughs. A kid in the back who was maybe seventeen stood up.

“My name is Edward. Luke’s rifle, would that be a standard M1 Garand or an M1A1 carbine?”

“Uh . . . the latter.”

No one else had any questions.

Tom Buckley thanked me. There was tempered applause. Under it he leaned in to me and clasped me on the shoulder.

“It’s tough to really craft a scene, really breathe air into the lungs of it, isn’t it?” He said this as though no one had ever meant anything more. “This writing’s a tough craft! Tough set of tools. You gotta get ’em and keep ’em sharpened, all the time.”

THE CLASS

As it happened, it was Marianne’s day to read her latest story in class that afternoon. She intoned it as though it were the Apostles’ Creed.

“She felt the chocolate against her teeth as she heard him splash water from his hands against the cracked tile of the bathroom sink. She knew he would dry them as he always did, against the back corner of the towel, the patch of fabric still firm.”

As Marianne droned on I was really wishing I could’ve skipped this part of the afternoon. If this was what teaching writing was like, I was going to have a very hard time. When she was done, what was I supposed to say? The whole thing was kind of a mess. She was clearly worried about getting every detail right. That’s a stupid and time-consuming way to write.

After our silent ride I’d come to like Marianne. I wanted to tell her, “dude, it’s called fiction—just make something up!” I wanted to wave Pamela McLaughlin’s book at her, and say “people are perfectly happy with this crap! Why are you knocking yourself out getting some detail right about towels?!”

Her story was called “Caramel,” and it was about struggling parents on Hallowe’en who’ve just taken their autistic kid trick-or-treating. They’ve finally gotten him into bed, and they sit at the kitchen table, smoke a joint, and decide to eat his candy. All of it, Milky Ways and M&Ms and Skittles.

Which is not a terrible premise. You could make somebody cry with that premise, easy. But Marianne was insisting on making it a slow evocation of ambiguity or something. Keyword slow.

“Jesus, we get it!” I wanted to tell her. “Is eating the candy some kind of cruel revenge? Is it childish? Is it a tender act of love between the parents? Whatever.”

One guy who was not having my problem was Tom Buckley, at the head of the table. His whole body was spread open, filling his chair. He was listening to her with such focus that he practically sucked words out of her.

“He put the back of his hand against the cold linoleum of the tabletop. She dropped two Milk Duds into his hand. They stared at each other, and then away. Their jaws pulled hard at the caramel.”

Marianne put her story down. Tom Buckley held his pose for a silent minute, just in case there was more listening to do.

“Okay! Thank you, Marianne, for giving us that story. Let’s all take a breath! Then let’s see if we can’t dig out the
meat
of this story. Who’s ready to dig? Pete, how about you?”

The last thing I wanted to do was dig the meat out of anything.

“Well, there’s a real texture here, isn’t there?” I said. “It’s almost . . . tactile.”

I saw a few of the students write
tactile
in their notebooks.

“‘Tactile,’” nodded Tom Buckley. “Let’s hear more about that.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s a quality to the language. You can almost . . . feel this story. You can almost—put it on, like an old sweater.”

Would that stave off these weirdos?

“There’s a comfort to it,” Tom Buckley said. “A familiarity.”

What?
I thought.

“Exactly,” I said.

Different students started to chime in. Easily, at first, but then it ratcheted up. People were damned hard on her. Her prose was called
wooden
and
somnolent
and
irritable
. Someone accused her of being “derivative to the point of plagiarism.” People kept saying they were going to make “prescriptive comments,” and then they’d tell her how she needed to fix everything.

This southern kid named Ethan, who had a chin that curved out far enough from his face to resemble a winking crescent moon, attacked Marianne’s use of the word
vaporous
.

What the hell are you guys talking about?
was what I was thinking.

Not on the story level—the story was crap and they were right to tear it up.

But what was the point of any of this? Let’s say, after a year of polishing and rewrites and edits, this story gets published in
Prairiegrass Review
. Then what, Marianne gets like five hundred bucks? That’s how much America values a great short story. It’s worth less than a PS3.

An hour passed. Still more criticism and comments.

Jesus H., you guys! RELAX!

Finally Tom Buckley ended it all.

“Pete, thank you for joining us and for giving us your comments,” said Tom Buckley. “Anyone who’d like—and Pete, I hope you’ll join us—why don’t we keep the discussion going over an adult beverage or two, down at Cullock’s?”

“Oh I’d love to,” I said. I still wanted to get a job. Maybe not here but in, say, Florida or someplace.

THE DISCUSSION CONTINUES OVER ADULT BEVERAGES

I rode—silently—with Marianne in her pickup truck to Cullock’s.

At one unusually long stoplight I felt I had to say something. “You really—I think you really hit on something with your story.”

“Thanks,” said Marianne, with an air of not-at-all believing me.

At the bar the writers of the Great Plains Program were sequestered in a back room, a square brick polyp attached to the corner of Cullock’s. They huddled over a table already forested with pitchers of Bud. Tom Buckley was pressing his back against the wall and grinning a suspicious grin of wisdom.

Marianne squeezed in, lit a cigarette with one hand and with the other took delivery of a shot of whiskey. She danced it down her throat with shakes of her head, the careless performance of someone who intends to get super drunk. I could hardly blame her.

Ethan had bought her the whiskey—it was his job to do so because his criticisms were voted to be the most devastating of all. That was the tradition, to keep everybody from getting too pissy.

Discussion of Marianne’s story was safely capped, but every conversational line and thread seemed to weave back to writing and authors. These people apparently couldn’t think or talk about anything else. Supertramp would come in from the main bar on the jukebox, and somebody would mention they’d had this tape in junior high, and I’d liven up a little, thinking
maybe we could hang out and talk about Supertramp. But within two redirections everyone would be talking about Alice Munro.

Somebody tossed off Nick Boyle’s name as a derisive adjective.

“Nick Boyle is awesome,” I said into the din. But this seemed only to confuse everyone. Ethan laughed, and another guy looked at me much too long, as though trying to figure out if my statement was some kind of Zen puzzle. So I shifted policy, deciding to drink steadily and hope my silence would be mistaken for wisdom.

Josh Holt Cready came up. Marianne made a scoff and a derisive flutter with her cigarette hand. But then she shot her eyes at Tom Buckley, afraid he might have heard.

Tom Buckley, for his part, said nothing bad about anyone. When he spoke you could feel the table sag as everyone leaned in. He mentioned “Rick Yates” and “Ray Carver” as though reciting the lineup of a championship team from his boyhood.

After a few hours the place thinned out. This was a mystery to me, because where could writing graduate students possibly have to go?

There were only five of us left around the table when Tom Buckley said, “Talking about stories”—we’d been talking about stories—“what’s the
lonesomest
story you ever heard?”

I considered getting up and putting Supertramp back on.

Tom Buckley’s question was to everybody, and he looked around at Ethan, Marianne, and me, defying anyone to try and bore him.

No one rose to the challenge.

“I’ll tell a
lonesome
story. I used to have a friend out in Butte. ’Bout ten years or so ago I got to know him. Out in Butte, that whole area is studded with copper mines. This friend of mine was a miner, a real old-timer by the name of Bill Stubbs. Bill liked his bourbon, and sometimes I’d get a bottle of Early Times, knock on Bill’s door, and say, ‘Bill, why don’t you get us some water and some glasses, and we’ll sit on the porch, and we’ll drink a glass of good bourbon.’ He’d come on out, we’d sit and talk.”

C’mon, dude, save it for
Prairiegrass. It was hurting my face to look interested.

“One night Bill got to telling stories of the mining days. He said once an explosion went off—methane—just as he was coming up. Most of the fellas got out. But one guy—Jack, his name was—got trapped in the mine, caved in. They dug, and they brought cranes in, hoping Jack might have enough air to keep alive. His wife waited there, wringing her hands as they dug.”

At this point I slipped my eyes around the table, not quite sure that this was really happening.
Is this guy for serious?
But they all kept staring at Tom.

“Three days later, they finally dug through. Jack was dead. But they found next to him a count pad and a broken-down pencil. Jack musta known he was finished, and while he was trapped, he wrote a note to his wife, now widow. Started out
Know that I love you
. And there was a message to the kids, too, and some of that. But then the writing trailed off, it grew all scratchy, hard to make out. What Jack had written about was the smell of washed linen. Paragraphs and paragraphs about it.

“The miners, they figured old Jack had kept it together to say a word to his wife and kids but then the gas got to him.
Driven crazy down there, writing in the dark, his mind had just caught hold of something at the end. But Bill told me that the widow couldn’t believe that. She read that note over and over, trying to find something in it, thinking it must be a message, a cry out from just at heaven’s door, I guess. The widow, she started to wash her linens, twice, three times a week. And every time she did, she’d grab neighbors, and tell ’em, ‘I think I’m getting at it. I think I know what Jack was trying to tell me.’ One week she’d say, ‘He was trying to tell me life’s like clean linen.’ Next week she’d say, ‘I finally understand it now, he was asking me to forgive him, it was a message about how we all need to be washed clean before God.’ And the neighbors, they’d just smile and nod and agree. ’Cause what else can you do?”

Tom Buckley finished his story, and took a big sip of beer.

“That was old Bill’s story anyway. Here’s to him.”

What? What the hell was that?
I expected everybody to frantically make excuses and leave. ’Cause, seriously, what a fucking downer! We’re all just trying to drink some beers!

Tom Buckley turned to me, and said, “How about you, Pete? You know any
lonesome
stories?”

Now, if I’d taken a minute to think about it, I could have come up with something terrific, with earthy blue-collar touches.

But Tom Buckley’s eyes made me jumpy. Stupidly, I started with the first thing I thought of. And once I was launched I was committed.

“This one time my mom took me shopping at the mall, I was maybe five or so. I was completely bored, of course. I’d just seen
Empire,
so I was pretending I was Luke Skywalker, and I’d crawl around under the racks of dresses and pretend I was with Yoda in the swamps of Dagobah. Which was awesome. It
was dark and crazy under there. But then suddenly it seemed like a lot of time had passed, and I didn’t know where my mom was, and I looked out, and I couldn’t see her, and I freaked out.”

I drank more beer, which everyone interpreted as a dramatic pause rather than a conclusion.

“Then what happened?”

“Oh, she was just over arguing with the returns lady. She heard me crying and came over.”

Awkward shuffling could be felt around the table. Tom Buckley gracefully ended it by slapping me on the back and announcing, “Being a kid can be lonesome!”

But I knew what I’d done wrong. I’d profaned the evening. These people treated stories like sacraments. They looked sorry for me that I didn’t.

Marianne spoke up. “I had a boyfriend who used to work for the Forest Service. We broke up—long story, different story. Anyway, one time he told me this. The Forest Service used to hire college kids in the summer, to hike out to towers way far out in the woods to watch for forest fires, one guy to a tower. They’d pack up three weeks of food, supplies, and stuff and hike out there. And they’d just sit, with a radio, and call in to the station if they saw anything—lightning strikes, brush fires starting up, whatever. Three weeks later, replacements would hike out to start the new shift, and they’d hike back. Anyways, obviously this job attracted sort of weird guys, loners, philosophers, poets, guys getting over women.

“So, Mike—my boyfriend—told me guys would bring out just libraries of books, chessboards, crossword puzzles, whatever, because they were gonna be sitting, alone, for three weeks. Guys would bring just stacks of paperbacks, like ten Nick Boyle
books. But one summer this guy came in, weighed about a hundred and ten pounds, little pale guy from the East Coast somewhere. And Mike was helping him set up and he asked him what he was bringing with him. And all he was bringing was a copy of
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman. And Mike looked at it, saw how thick it was, and said dude, this book isn’t gonna last you more than two days. You’re gonna go nuts out there. And the guy looked back at him, dead serious, and said, ‘This book could last forever.’ So anyway, Mike figures it’s not his problem to keep this guy entertained, wishes him luck, sends him off.

“But that was the summer they had those freak snowstorms up in the mountains, ’cause of that volcano in Indonesia or whatever. Most of these watchtower guys, they hear about what’s coming over the radio, and they get out of there when the snow first starts falling. And by the second day, the Forest Service is radioing everybody in the towers and telling them you better get back here stat. But this kid, the pale kid, his radio’s out. And he doesn’t get the message. On the third day, it’s just a
blizzard,
and they decide they better go out and get him, but they make it about four miles before the snow is just too bad. They turn back, and they figure he’s just gonna have to wait it out.