After the Workshop (5 page)

“Jesus,” I said, and I caught my breath, surprised by the welling up of what I’d assumed were long-snuffed emotions. I might as well have opened up the carton holding the cremated remains of a beloved pet. All the longing to become a writer that I had once felt, all the promise I was told I’d had, came bubbling back to the surface at the sight of my manuscript. “Goddamn it,” I said. I had opened the box to read over what I’d written, but now I couldn’t do it. I shut the box and tossed it onto the coffee table, then reclined on the couch and closed my eyes, falling into a deep and troubled midday sleep.

—JOHN GARDNER

H
ERCULES IS MY real middle name, though I wasn’t named after the son of Zeus, as you might think. Hercules is a city on San Pablo Bay, located between San Francisco and Napa, where my father knocked up my mother.

One summer, when I was nine, before I knew that I had been named after the city in which I had been conceived, my parents planned a trip from Minneapolis, where we lived, to Hercules. It was a big deal to me, this trip. My friends were always going away on vacations. They would come home wearing Mickey Mouse ears or carrying chunks of meteorites from Arizona, their parents suntanned and smiling, but the only trips we ever went on were to the Wisconsin Dells, a few hours to the east, or to the Amana Colonies in Iowa, a few hours to the south. My notion of what a family vacation should have been was based primarily on a short eight-millimeter movie my parents owned. It was a travelogue that featured families driving through tunnels cut out of the trunks of sequoias, brown bears walking right up to their cars and patting their hoods, and couples spreading out elaborate picnics within sight of Niagara Falls.

The first indication that our vacation would not be anything like the one in the movie was when my father realized he’d been using a map so old that one of the roads we were on had been closed for years. I was
in the backseat, counting cows and making a list of license plates from states other than Minnesota, when my father pulled over and said to my mother, “Let me see that map again.”

My mother, who had been reading a romance novel until she started feeling carsick, opened the glove compartment and retrieved the map.

My father said, “Don’t we have one that’s newer than this one?”

Mom said, “Don’t yell, Gus.”

“I’m not yelling,” my father said, raising his voice. “I’m
asking
.”

“This is the only map of Iowa in here,” Mom said.

“Okay then,” Dad said. “That’s all I needed to know.”

By the time we reached the Nebraska state line, I had seen cars with license plates from Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Missouri. I had also seen one lonesome soul from Alaska. I had never seen an Alaska license plate before and couldn’t help bouncing up out of my seat and pointing toward the speeding car.

“Look!” I yelled. “Alaska!”

“Keep it down back there,” Dad said.

Mom shot my father a look, then twisted around in her seat and said, “That’s exciting, honey. Now, write it down.”

Later that night, the temperature dropped, and rain pounded our car. Eventually, the rain turned to ice pellets. I kept thinking we were going to stop at a motel for the night, but my father didn’t like to talk about his plans, and my mother sometimes didn’t know what my father had in mind.

When he finally took an exit ramp in Nebraska for a city named Cozad, my father yelled, “Hold on!” Even as my father spoke, the car slipped off the ramp and into the ditch, landing on its side. My head bounced off the window; my father fell on top of my mother. She let out a soft “oof” as if the air had been knocked out of her, and then she made a moan that scared me until it ended with the word
shit
.

“Everyone okay?” my father asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“I guess,” Mom said. “What the hell happened?”

“Ice,” Dad said. He stood on the passenger-side window and, his feet straddling Mom, opened the driver’s-side door, as if it were a hatch. The glass shattered under his weight. “Great,” he said. To Mom, he said, “Don’t cut yourself. That’s the last thing we need.” He hoisted himself up and out of the car and then helped my mother out. Finally, it was my turn. “Careful,” he said. “It’s slick.” He pulled me out by one arm, yanking it in such a way that caused it to hurt worse than any pain incurred by the actual car accident, but I didn’t say anything.

Dad popped the trunk, which was sideways, and two suitcases fell out. Dad picked up both suitcases and started walking. Pellets of ice hit us, so we walked up the exit ramp with our heads facing down. At the top of the ramp was a sign for a motel: 4.3 MILES, the sign read, with an arrow pointing to the right.

“I can’t walk that far,” Mom whined.

“Quiet,” Dad said. “Just keep on the grass. The road’s too slick.”

“Don’t talk to me that way,” Mom said. “You’re not my boss.”

Dad stopped walking. He looked at me then at Mom. “Let’s not start in here, okay? Not here. Not now.” He turned around and continued walking. I waited to see what Mom was going to do, and when she started following him, I fell in line, trailing a few steps behind her.

It took us over an hour to reach the Do Drop Inn—a horseshoe-shaped motel with a neon sign of a horse rearing up on two legs. The night clerk at the Do Drop was an old woman who had been sleeping in a bed in the small room off to the side until we’d rung the bell and woken her. While my father filled out the form, the woman lit a cigarette, flicking ashes into an ashtray the shape of Nebraska.

“Make of car right here,” she said, tapping the form with a red-painted nail.

“It’s in a ditch,” Dad said. “We walked here.”

Mom and I were starting to shiver, and the old woman nodded. She’d heard worse stories.

We slept that night in a single bed, the three of us together. I slept between my mother and my father, the only time I could remember doing so. The next morning, while my father was out trying to find a service station, my mother took the longest shower I’d ever heard her take. The entire room filled with steam. On one of the windows, I started writing what would be my first short story. It began, “The old man from Alaska found a bear standing in the middle of the road.” Standing on a chair, I filled all three windows with words, starting at the top of each one and writing all the way down to the bottom, and when I finished, I shut the curtains so that I could surprise Mom. When Mom finally came out of the bathroom wearing only a towel, I slowly opened the curtains, like a stagehand revealing the opening act of a play, but the words had already fogged back over. You could sort of see the words, but mostly you couldn’t. For all practical purposes, my entire story had disappeared. I tried telling my mother what I had written, but the story didn’t seem the same. I kept forgetting words and images, and by the time I finished telling her what I could remember, I felt like weeping.

“Now, now,” she said. “Don’t worry. You’ll see another car from Alaska. You will,” she insisted. I tried explaining to her that I wasn’t sad about the car from Alaska, but before I could finish, Mom said, “Look,” and pointed out the window at the tow truck pulling our car. My father was in the passenger seat of the truck, talking to the driver.

“Could you do me a favor, Jack?” Mom asked. “Could you turn around until I say so?”

I did what she asked. I turned around, but there was a mirror in front of me now, and in that mirror I saw the back of Mom and, through the window, Dad sitting in the tow truck. When the tow truck driver
wasn’t looking, my mother opened up her towel and did a little dance, and then she quickly shut the towel. My father smiled. The tow truck driver, looking up again, saw nothing.

“Okay, sweetie,” my mom said. “You can turn back around now. Turn around and wave at Daddy.”

I turned around and waved. Dad winked at me. Two hours later, we were back on I-80 and heading home. A sheet of cardboard covering the broken window ripped free and blew away behind us, causing us to shiver for the rest of the drive. According to my father, we didn’t have enough money to make it all the way to Hercules. In fact, we barely had enough now to make it back to Minneapolis.

“This’ll have to do,” he said, his teeth clacking together. He looked in the rearview mirror, smiled at me, and said, “You can tell all your friends you vacationed in Nebraska. I bet there aren’t a lot of ’em who could make that claim.”

My father nudged my mother, and Mom smiled, pressing herself against my father to keep warm. I didn’t know what was so funny, but I smiled, too. Nebraska, I thought. And I was already imagining all the enviable things I would tell my friends—some of it true, like tipping our car over into a ditch, but most of it, like meeting the old man from Alaska who traveled the country with a retired circus bear, not.

I
PEERED THROUGH THE peephole to see who had woken me by relentlessly pounding on my door. “M. Cat?” I said, quickly unlocking the door and opening it. M. Cat spent most of his days in his apartment across the hall smoking dope by the pound, and only an event of the direst consequences, such as a fire, was likely to rouse him from his sofa. His fraternity buddies had given him his nickname after he’d taken, and failed, the MCATs three times before finally giving up, but all of that was twenty years ago now. These days, M. Cat worked as a bartender at the Deadwood Tavern when he wasn’t home getting baked.

“M. Cat,” I said. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Some chick keeps calling me asking for you,” M. Cat said. “I told her she’s got the wrong number, but she keeps calling and yelling for me to go and get you. This chick is wack, dude.”

I followed M. Cat across the hall and into his dark, pot-reeking lair, picked up his phone, and said, “What?”

“Jack?”

“Yes, it’s Jack. Who’s this?”

“You know who this is,” she said, and I did: It was Lauren Castle, Vanessa’s publicist. “Where have you been? Why aren’t you answering
your phone? Do you have any idea how much trouble I went through to get this number? I finally had to call the police.”

“You’re crossing a line,” I said, trying to remain calm.

“Maybe if you’d get a cell phone,” Lauren said, “I wouldn’t have to call your neighbors.”

M. Cat took a long pull from his bong. Holding smoke in his lungs, making a face of calamitous pain, he reached out and offered the bong to me. I shook my head and mouthed,
No, thanks
.

“So what’s so urgent?” I asked.

“Muffler fixed?”

“Yes,” I lied. “Is that why you called?”

“No. Vanessa’s husband phoned. He’s worried about her. He’s afraid she’s going through postpartum depression right now.”

“And?”

“And he wants you to make sure that nothing happens to the baby.”

I laughed. I said, “She is
not
going through postpartum depression. Would someone going through postpartum depression have me run out and buy her a breast pump?”

M. Cat moved the bong from his mouth, squinting at me, wanting to hear the rest of the story. The combination of the words
breast
and
pump
had piqued his interest.

“I wouldn’t know,” Lauren said. “I hate kids. I would never be in her position in the first place.”

“Vanessa’s fine,” I said. “The baby’s fine.”

“How do you know? Did you deliver the breast pump to her personally? Well? Did you?”

“No,” I said. I shut my eyes. “Okay, okay, okay. I’ll go back to the hotel and check on her.” When I opened my eyes, M. Cat was right in
front of me, waiting for me to wrap it up so that I could fill him in on what was happening.

“Actually,” Lauren said. “Her husband didn’t say ‘postpartum depression.’ What he said was ‘postpartum psychosis.’ Do you want to hear the symptoms?”

“Do I have to?”

“Delusions, hallucinations, sleep disturbances, and obsessive thoughts about the baby. She may also experience rapid mood swings, from depression to irritability to euphoria.”

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“I Googled it,” Lauren said. “Listen up. Don’t let anything happen to her. Do you hear me? Vanessa Roberts has written one of the most important books of this decade.”

“Have you read it?”

“No.”

“I’ll go to the hotel right now,” I said.

“Good,” Lauren said. “Call me back this time. Don’t make me call the police again.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll call you back.” I hung up.

M. Cat, reaching up under his shirt to apply a few swipes of Speed Stick, said, “What’s up with the breast pump, dude?” He hesitated. He unconsciously held the deodorant up to his mouth like a microphone. “What
is
a breast pump?” he asked.

“I’m really sorry about this,” I said, “but she might call again. She’s crazy.” I patted him on the shoulder and returned to my apartment, reluctantly plugging my phone back in.

M
OST WRITERS FLEW into town, gave a reading, signed their books, and flew out early the next morning. The majority were pleasant and unassuming. They appreciated it when I presented them with a bagel and coffee for their trip back to the airport. They never expected anything and often, when they made a modest request, asked if they were inconveniencing me. One of the perks of the job was getting a free copy of the book from the publicist, and most authors graciously signed theirs for me. “With gratitude for making this a pleasant trip” and “Thanks for the lift” were not uncommon sentiments.