After the Workshop (8 page)

“Have you ever read Clive Darling?” I asked Tate now through my ski mask to break the silence.

“A little too fussy for my tastes,” Tate said. “A little too . . .
British
.”

“A word to the wise . . .” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Don’t offend the man,” I said. I pointed to George’s. “We’re here!”

Once inside George’s, I peeled off my ski mask. My hair, alive with static electricity, stood on end. I tried patting it down, but each time my hand came near my head, my hair crackled and rose even higher, so I gave up.

“Tate!” someone yelled from the back of the bar. It was Vince Belecheck wearing an insulated jumpsuit, industrial-brown and of the variety that pole climbers for the electric company would wear in the winter. I half-expected to find a hard hat resting on the table, but no luck.

Tate and Vince hugged and shook hands, the way old army buddies would, although they had met only once, for a photo shoot in New York for a now-defunct magazine’s coronation of America’s best male writers. (There was some quirky and idiotic stipulation attached. The writers had to be over a certain height or under a certain weight. I no longer recalled the magazine’s criterion, even though it had been trumpeted on the cover.) It had been a big deal, though, this particular issue of the magazine, catapulting a few relative unknowns into the literary limelight, earning them six-figure advances for their next books.

After a few fake arm punches on Vince’s part, along with sly allusions to the bacchanalia that followed the photo shoot, including money well spent at the Pussycat Lounge (“
Duuuuuude
,” Vince kept saying, pointing at Tate and laughing. “
Duuuuuude
”), Tate and Vince finally sat in a booth across from each other.

“Oh, yeah,” Tate said. “This is Jack Sheahan.”

Vince regarded me with a studied mixture of superiority, pity, and disdain. “Hey,” Vince said. “Have a seat, buddy.” I slipped in next to Tate, who made a show of moving over.

Tate said, “Jack here says you two were in the Workshop together?”

Vince raised his eyebrows. I told him which class we’d shared. I even recalled one of the stories he’d turned in, the one about the racist roofer who accidentally tarred himself and then fell off the roof, landing on a torn feather bed lying next to a Dumpster.

Tate’s eyes widened. “Whoa! That’s a
great
fucking story, Vince. Whatever happened to it? You publish it anywhere?”

Vince shrugged. “Nah. I was writing a lot of allegorical and symbolic stories back in the day.”

“Well, you should
definitely
pull that one back out,” Tate said.

Vince perked up. “You think?” He frowned and nodded. “Maybe I will.
I
always liked it.” Vince looked over at me now. “I
do
remember you now,” he said. “You didn’t like that story, did you?”

“I honestly can’t remember,” I said.

“Weren’t you the one who had all kinds of logic problems with it?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Logic,” Tate said derisively and snorted. “Imagine García Márquez in a workshop!” He rolled his eyes.

Vince sniffed. He scrunched up his lips, playing the role of tough guy to perfection. “You published a story in
The New Yorker
, didn’t you?”

“A long time ago,” I said. “Yeah.”

“What’re you up to these days?” he asked. “Working on anything?”

“A novel,” I said. “I’m taking my time.”

“Attaboy,” Vince said. “You want to hit the first one out of the park, don’t you? Well, good for you. Me? I just write ’em as they come to me. I don’t have the leisure of waiting for the muse. Don’t get me wrong. I wish I did.” He leaned over the table and slapped my shoulder. “Win one for the team. Make us proud.”

The waitress came up, and Vince ordered two beers and two shots.

“You’re driving, right?” he said to me. “Otherwise . . .” He turned his attention to Tate. “So, man, tell me what you’ve been up to? You sold film rights to
The Duke of Battery Park
, didn’t you? Is it in development?”

Tate shook his head. “They’re having casting issues. One producer wanted Brad Pitt; another wanted Tobey Maguire. Personally, I’d like
to see someone like Vincent Gallo in that role. Or maybe a theater guy. Someone from off-Broadway. Or off-off-Broadway.”

“It’s your book, bro,” Vince said. “You should put your foot down. You know what I’m saying? If you don’t, they’ll cast Jim Carrey or Eddie Murphy in the role, and
then
how’re you gonna live with yourself?”

“I know, I know.”

Vince said, “You know what? We should write a screenplay together.”

When the drinks came, Vince and Tate downed their shots, and Tate said, “A collaboration. Absolutely!” For the next hour, Vince and Tate hammered out a blow-by-blow plot treatment in which a bricklayer, through a series of unrealistic and clichéd contrivances, trades places with a New York club-goer and all-around hipster.

“I mean,
that’s
what movies are all about,” Vince said. “Opposites. Think about it.
Pretty Woman. Sixteen Candles. Planet of the Apes.
They’re all about opposites.”

“The ‘other,’” Tate said, raising his hands and making rabbit ears.

Vince, lost in thought, nodded.

“Imagine the New York hipster trying to fit in with all these brick-layers!” Tate exclaimed.

“Or the bricklayer going clubbing!” Vince countered, nodding. “This is gold, bro. Pure fucking gold.” At Vince’s insistence, the two men high-fived.

“I need to take a dump,” I said. “I’ll be at the Dairy Queen. Cleaner toilets over there. Anyone need anything?”

Vince and Tate, their reverie interrupted, glared at me without saying a word.

“Everyone’s good?” I asked, sliding out of the booth. “No Dilly Bar? No Snickers Blizzard? No Moolatte?”

“Bring us some fries,” Vince said. “You got an expense account, right?”

I nodded.

Vince said, “One large fry.”

“Tate?” I said.

Without looking at me, he shook his head.

I snaked my way out of the bar, trudged next door to the Laundromat, and called M. Cat. I let his phone ring twenty times before I hung up. Either he didn’t own an answering machine or it was so full of messages from Lauren Castle that it had ceased to work. I considered checking my own messages, but I wasn’t up to wading through the muck of Lauren’s accusations and pleas.

I walked over to DQ and ordered a large fry from a pocky white teenager who was trying to look like an inner-city gang-banger. His pants were twice his size, and his Dairy Queen visor was turned sideways.

“We all outta fries,” the kid said. “You want O. rings?”

“What are those?”

“
Onion
rings, homes,” he said, sighing.

“Sure. Give me the onion rings.” As the kid dumped two handfuls of onion rings into the grease basket, I told him the plot of Vince and Tate’s movie. “Would you go see a movie with that plot?” I asked.

“Sounds like it sucks ass,” the kid said. “I mean, who wants to see a movie about a bricklayer?”

“I could actually see a good movie about a bricklayer,” I said. “My point is, the
plot
. You’ve seen it before, right?”

“Maybe
you
have,” the kid said. “
I
haven’t. A movie about a bricklayer and some hip-hop artist? Nuh-uh.”

“A
hipster
,” I corrected. “Not a hip-hop artist.”

“What is this?” the kid asked. “One of those surveys? Yo, I don’t do surveys. They collect all kinds of information about you that they can use against you later.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like
what
? What planet you from, homes? In-fo-
may
-shun.
Personal
information. Hel-
lo
? You ever heard of identity theft? You ever heard of phone scams?” He handed me the bag with the onion rings in them. “Who did you say you were again?”

“Nobody,” I said, opening the door to leave, the bell tinkling over my head. “I’m nobody.”

“Nuh-uh,” he said, shaking his head. “You somebody.”

I
HAD LANDED THE job of media escort because the guy who had it prior to me (a writer named Max Kellogg who’d graduated from the Workshop a full ten years before I did) got drunk one winter night, drove through a guard rail, and drowned in the Iowa River. Witnesses said his car sank like a stone. When the police fished him out, they found inside his car an itinerary for Joyce Carol Oates’s upcoming visit to town and an unfinished novel manuscript with Max Kellogg’s name on it. The police labeled the cause of death an accident, but I knew without a doubt that it was his damned unfinished novel that had killed him.

It was the owner of the bookstore, Bobby Dunn, who hooked me up with this job, calling me only a day after the police had found Max Kellogg’s body. He’d warned me about the publicists (“By and large, a bunch of rich daddy’s girls that went to Sarah Lawrence and Vassar,” he’d said. “A hundred bucks says not a one of them could even find Iowa on a map”), but when he told me how much money I could make, I didn’t hesitate. It sounded easy. Too easy. And, by and large, it
was
a cushy job. But then there were days like this one when everything went wrong.

Armed with onion rings, I stepped back inside George’s. Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” radiated from the jukebox. It didn’t
matter what bar you went into in Iowa City, sooner or later “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” came on. My theory was that most people who played it didn’t actually like Pink Floyd; they played it to get as much bang for their buck as possible. The song lasted damned near fourteen minutes, depending on the version. These same people were also likely to play Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like I Do,” Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” Don McLean’s “American Pie,” and the Doors’ “The End,” all of which, running back to back, lasted almost an hour. And if you found a jukebox that played five songs for a buck, you were way ahead of the game. I knew all too well that this could have been my life if I hadn’t taken the media escort job: sidled up to a bar at midday while mentally calculating the lengths of songs, the amount of beer I was likely to consume, and the sum total of loose bills and pocket change piled in front of me—the alcoholic’s calculus. And I might have had it all figured out perfectly, how to stretch the night out until last call—that is, until I ordered that first shot of rail whiskey and threw all of my calculations irreversibly out of whack.

In addition to the freshly drained shot glasses and beer bottles on Vince and Tate’s table, two women were now sitting with them. They were laughing at something either Vince or Tate had said, and Tate’s hair looked slightly mussed and his glasses crooked. When I was in the Workshop, the only groupies were mentally unstable men who showed up in town without warning and pitched tents in the visiting writers’ back yards, intending to share with them their latest Vietnam opus with the hope of getting it published. These days, the groupies were closer to what I had fantasized about when I was twelve years old and considered becoming a rock star. The funny thing was that the new groupies and the old ones shared the same endgame: They, too, wanted book contracts, except these days the contracts would be for their victim memoirs, or they wanted to be included in the
Best New Voices
anthology, or
they wanted a tenure-track teaching position on either the East or West Coasts. And where the old groupies usually ended up spending a night in jail for trespassing, the new ones spent it in the writer’s bed, hoping by daybreak that their hard, feverish work had not been all for naught. Shortcuts to fame: Everyone wanted one.

There was no room for me to sit down in the booth, so I stood at the end of the table and, forcing a smile, peered down at the revelers.

Vince said, “Girls? This is Jack. He’s Tate’s escort. Jack? These are the girls.”

The women regarded me with suspicion. Was I a male prostitute? Was Tate gay?

“
Vince
,” I said softly. “Come on, man.”

Vince looked up at me, genuinely confused. “What?”

“Me and you,” I said, “we were classmates. There’s no need for that.”

Tate said, “Oh, hey, Jack. Vince said he could take me to my hotel tonight.” He looked at Vince for reassurance.

“Yeah, yeah,” Vince said. “No prob.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“We’re what . . . three blocks away? Yeah, I think I can handle that.”

“But go ahead and bill my publisher for the night,” Tate said. “I mean, I dragged you out here and everything.”

“Alrighty,” I said. “I’ll do that.” I tossed the bag of onion rings to the center of the table and said, “Oh yeah. I almost forgot. They all outta fries.”

W
HEN I GOT back to my apartment, I pounded on M. Cat’s door, but I couldn’t hear anything inside and finally gave up. My answering machine blinked a few dozen times before pausing and blinking a few dozen more times. I removed my phone from its charger and carried it to the couch, considering giving Lauren Castle a late-night update, but then thought better of it and turned on CNN instead. After ten minutes of listening to Anderson Cooper, I fell sound asleep.

The next time I woke up, it was two in the morning. I picked up the remote and turned off the TV. Too tired to drag myself to bed, I tried fluffing a spongy foam sofa pillow. Curling up without any blankets, I drifted into an uncomfortable slumber.

The phone, clutched in my hand, started ringing just after three in the morning.

“Jack?” a voice said.

“Yeah?” I sat up but kept the lights off and my eyes shut. “Who is this?”

“I’m not sure if you remember me. It’s S. S. Pitzer.”

S. S. Pitzer was a famous writer who had, after writing twelve critically acclaimed books in twelve years, disappeared after his last novel,
Winter’s Ghosts
, became his first
New York Times
best seller. I had
escorted him ten years ago, shortly after I had taken this job;
Winter’s Ghosts
had just come out in paperback. Once the tour was over, he disappeared.
Poof
, and he was gone. Neither his agent nor his editor claimed to know where he was, and although his estranged wife hadn’t seen him either, she had told the press that she still received monthly checks drawn from a secret account in the Bahamas. The odds of S. S. Pitzer calling me in the middle of the night were at best one-in-ten-thousand, and I almost hung up, but there was something about the tenor of the man’s voice that made me stay on the line to hear him out.