Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (8 page)

A television actor once told me, “Beauty is all in the chin line.” Maybe so. But I knew as that day bore on that ugliness must have a good deal to do with eye sockets. Mine were going from light brown to deep grey, my eyes receding all the while. Eldon took Evelyn and Zeke to the bus, while I backed my truck under the window and commenced to clean our apartment. I was really sorry to see her go. She had the largest capacity for hope of any woman I’ve ever met living in the real world. Even more than Bunny.

At 2:15 when I was sure Banks was in his second class (he teaches like many, the same thing twice; this is known in the department as mileage), teaching the tattered gothic remnants of grotesque Dick III and giving each student an acute awareness of his or her own potential mediocrity, I stole up to school, truck full of junk, and into the teaching associates’ office. Susette Bedd, the croquet coquette, was on duty, tweezing her eyebrows. “Hi, how’s Banks?” She gave me a very serious “Oh You.” look and held the tweezer up like a knife. “Careful, Babe,” I said, “one of those beautiful eyebrows is anchored by the brain, you know.” I continued over to my desk and started throwing my junk into the fishing creel I’d brought. I cleaned out all the drawers, leaving the lint and paper clips, and then made the mistake of taking down my Lon Chaney poster. This is the sign by which the alert Wesson came to know I was in withdrawal.

“Listen, Honey.” I said to the secretary, leaning dangerously close, dropping my phone number on her desk. “When my last two students bring in their papers and leave them on that desk over there,” I pointed, “the one that used to be mine, please call me and let me know, okay.”

“Cram it.”

“I elect not to, dear.” I cried, emptying the ashtray into her “Yield” sign coffee cup. “I am a marginal character, and need support and the appropriate phone calls to be kept in check.” I cleared a small portion of her desk with my forearm to seal the deal.

When she called two days later a great deal of the drastic measure, all-night confidence had evaporated somehow, I’d paid the rent and slept a little, for instance, but still I had Mexican resolves.

The freshman writing course I had conducted had used the environment as an issue, and the two papers I found on my desk (Susette Chickenheart was out) were: “Junk as Sculpture: Recycling Art” and “Seven Practical Methods Whereby Institutions Could Save Water in Urinals and Toilets”. The second paper was accompanied by seven large, startling photographs of toilets with timers, levels, bricks, master switches, and one overhead shot of the bowl and its glistening vortex, mid-flush. Amazing. The renewal of the intellectual brain bank transpires continually.

Also I found a note from Wesson:

Wesson’s desk was across the gang office from mine and was decorated with an oriental tablecloth. A mobile of cardboard eyes hung directly over it, and he had a poster slapped on the ceiling: “Not to choose is to choose,” it said straight down at me. I decided not to leave Wesson a message, this being perhaps the last time I’d see him. My watch read a futuristic 4:30, and so I hustled over to the Hub and found Wesson addressing himself vigorously to a baked apple with whipping cream.

“You should have stayed for the last reel the other night.”

“Are you kidding? And get arrested and have that on my permanent record, which is where it goes, you know.” He stabbed the apple. “Want one of these?”

“No, thanks, What’s up Wesson?”

“Listen Lawrence, you’re making a mistake.”

“Larry, Wesson; and I know it.”

“No you don’t. Look, you only have a semester and a half to go, and you can cop your degree, which, I might remind you, is eminently more negotiable than this rumored wild-ass scheme to chase Mexican women and write some trivia. I mean it.”

“I know, Wesson.”

“No you don’t, Lawrence, that’s why I’m telling you. You Fitzgerald guys are all alike: emotionally unfit to coach girls’ Softball, ready to reach out for absurdity at any moment.”

“Right.” Being told I’m like everybody else is one of a dozen ideas, like the concept of snowmobiles, that simply won’t go into my head.

“I’m not kidding. Listen to me, Lawrence. I am not kidding. You leave now, and you’ll have nothing to sell, nothing in the bank. Look,” he calmed down a little, was going to be coldly logical for a moment, “you are bound to failure right now, for these reasons.” Wesson held up his hands, intent upon gesturing with his fingers now.

“Thanks, Jeff, this is going to be easier for me to comprehend.”

“One, you have no experiences to write about. You are young and stupid.” (That last word had trouble getting into my ears.) “Two. You are not Fitzgerald. You will not be him, and you should not chase him. Three. You’re a failer, Lawrence, one who fails. I mean it. Wait. Teach. Do research. Why I’ll let you help me work on this thing on Chaucer I’m doing.”

“Gee, Wesson, really?”

“Sure.” Then he saw my face. “Okay, fine, I’d just thought I’d offer some advice. It’s your life.”

“I’ll send you a postcard.”

“Don’t bother.”

I turned in the grades for the last two papers, the student who wrote the plumbing paper bringing down a straight A, and I motored south. South, falling out of the bottom of Salt Lake into Provo, Payson, Nephi. In a precedent-setting move I did something that ran contrary to my immediate impulse, and did not stop and see Zeke and Evelyn, but drove on to Richfield. I ate breakfast there at a place that boasted the largest Jim Beam bottle collection in the state. The owner had them lined along shelves near the ceiling. Bottles, permanently cast in ceramic facsimiles of golfers, blue geese, and hunting dogs, celebrated hundreds of centennials. Things go glimmering, Fitzgerald had said. I ate a composite dish known as eggs in the basket, and wondered what they were doing back at the old school.

Driving, as I’ve implied elsewhere, is inspiration for me, all that stuff whizzing right out of perspective and past your ears, creating change, or the illusion of change, which for me is the same. The sound of the slipping wind in the ill-fitting wing window being the whisper of freedom. The radio broadcast, the stockman’s outlook, beef and cattle prices, then Glenna Royanne sang, “Married at the Rodeo,” as I swung wide to pass three buxom cowgirls in flowered shirts, their sky blue levis snug in their ponies waving saddles.

Driving hard, I outstripped even the swiftest primeval griefs and I dropped down through the state like a steel ball in a pinball machine, bouncing a few times off the lit bumpers for the bonus score. South on Route 89. Gunnison, Salina, Richfield, Joseph. The Big Rock Candy Mountain, another story entirely, looking like the world’s saccharine reserves. I expected to come next to the Valley of Rotten Teeth. South.

Outside of Orderville, a onetime fundamentalist Mormon community, there was a dinosaur skeleton guarding a pile of rocks. On the other side of town a ten-foot stack of deer antlers stood like a massive tumbleweed, intricate as balled haywire. South.

I crossed the muddy Sevier River seven times before seeing the “K” that indicated Kanab. It is said to be the most crooked river in the world, and farmers line the banks with the flattened bodies of old cars to prevent the river from meandering their fields into a series of loopy oxbows. I’d fished the Sevier. It was only good in April, and a person could take some good size Browns, but then the farmers started irrigating and it was all mud and carp. All the good fishing in Utah is high, in the east.

North of Kanab my truck was halted by forty blue-uniformed cavalry as they walked their horses across the road. On the side of a nearby trailer were the words:
ED TURNER PRESENTS “THE SUNDOWN BRIGADE”—A TURNER-FOSTER PICTURE.
The Indians, looking bored, stood by their horses, waiting, in the afternoon.

I passed Fredonia and the mill where Evelyn’s husband was killed. The smoke from the immense saw-dust burner drifted across the road, and I ascended into the Kaibab. The broad cut of the Colorado. The Gap. Flagstaff. The
RITA H. QUAKENBUSH REALTOR
sign. The fifty-foot Paul Bunyan advertising a restaurant. Then the descent from the pines to the desert, to darkness, to the horizontal network of neon that is Phoenix.

I stopped for coffee at a place aside the Black Canyon Highway called “The Roadrunner.” The waitress made me eat a fresh chocolate doughnut. I was trying not to be lonely.

The sun came up on the desert the way it must at sea. The first rays horizontal, only a few mountains around coming straight up surprising themselves in the flatness, looking like battleships armed with cacti. This light glanced the verdant desert first as I raced past Why, Arizona, where I resolved to stop if I ever returned. Permit me, though this isn’t a digression, to follow the adamant whips and traces of retrospect and add: I’d be back walking the interrogative streets of Why within a week. Oh facts.

Then I was south of
the
border; I continued the seventy miles to Penasco where I’d been one spring vacation with some guys who knew me in the dorms, that is to say, whoremongers. Penasco smells like salt, shrimp, and diesel exhaust. The shipyards looked like a Brontosaurus skeleton exhibition. I drove out on the cushion of sandy road to the nooked community of Cholla Bay and rented a small house on Pelican Point. It overlooked the ocean, the Gulf of California, a blue-green expanse that extended west to Baja, California, and the ocean came and went at its own will despite the gigantic boulders that sat ominous and smooth as big eggs in front of the house. Stopping my truck like that in another country, I knew it would be at least a few days, possibly weeks until the old raw troubles caught up, and now all I had was writing, one of the finest cottage industries, and one of the finest cottages.

Writers’ block is not really so much massive cerebral shutdown, as it is a toxic belief in all the bad things people have ever said about you. It is daunting, yes, at points you even want to write letters to all the skeptics in your past congratulating them on their amazing insight, but the gumption, what a fine word, won’t even come to write the letters, postcards, let alone get out the stamps and envelopes. So sure, I was struck by a certain amount of this morbid inertia as I sat in front of the typewriter. I thought back to Royal, Wesson, even DeLathaway, that guide. By the time I had left school, I hadn’t had much in the bank, emotionally speaking; it wasn’t bankruptcy, mind you, simply abject, despondent poverty. At low moments I suspected I heard the transcontinental laughter that Wesson thought he started by ridiculing my writing plans. Lenore filled my head. Gary. What I needed, thinking in Garylike drugstore terms, was relief, even temporary relief. I listened to the tide; I put the coffee on. I think I came to understand why several of my fellow countrymen had turned and fled, in the only avowal they would ever make, to drugs. I listened to the tide. I put the coffee on. I smoked Salems. I straightened my desk, ran to turn off the overboiled coffee.

I started four times in two days, using the breaks to escape to the rocks and fling an assortment of the most unlikely, gaudy steel and plastic lures onto mussel snags, pretending all the time that this actually had some relationship to stream fishing which is a lot to pretend. Stream fishing had made me whole more than once and would again. I hated losing those lures in this gulf. When the tide would go out, I’d rush onto the furthest slick stone and flop about in the foam searching for glimpses of the fluorescent orange gimmicks. I never found a one.

Then the fifth start took, and nine hours later I had a long chapter. It meant more in terms of momentum than storyline. The next day I worked all day, and was feeling so good about our universe and the fatigued exhilaration it offers, that I only got up from the machine occasionally to stride around the room raising my arms and roaring like a lion.