Big Bad Love (14 page)

We are returning your novel not because it is not publishable, but because the market at this time is not amenable to novels about drunk pulpwood haulers and rednecks and deer hunting. Our comments relate more to its marketability than to its publishability, and even though this novel is hilarious in many places and extremely well-written with a good plot, real characters, refreshing dialogue, beautiful descriptions and no typographical or spelling errors, we don't feel confident that we could place it for you. We would, however, be delighted to read anything else you have written or will write in the future.

It was signed by some asshole. I didn't read his name. I rolled a piece of paper into the machine and wrote my own letter. It said:

You, sir, are an ignorant man. How the fuck do you know it won't sell if you don't try to sell it? And do you think I can just shit another one on five minutes' notice? I worked on this cocksucker for two years. You got any idea what that takes out of a man? You like to play God with all of us out here, is that it? You kept my manuscript for three months and didn't even send it around. Here I was thinking the whole time that maybe somebody was thinking about buying it. I wish I had you down here. I'd whip your ass. I'd stomp a mud hole in your ass and walk it dry.
You turd head. I hope you lose your job. You're not worth a fuck at it anyway. I hope your wife gives you the clap. I wish I had your job and you had mine. How'd you like to paint a few houses while it's a hundred degrees? I can tell you it's not any fun. I hope you get run over by a taxi cab on your way home. And then die after about a month of agonizing pain.

I rolled the letter up and read it. I thought it was pretty good. It expressed my feelings exactly. It made me feel a whole lot better. I read it twice and then I took it out of the machine and tore it up and threw it away. Then I started working on my story.

At four a. m. I was still working on it. I liked working in the middle of the night. There wasn't any noise anywhere. You didn't have to think about anything but what you had right in front of you.

I finished the story, read it, then addressed an envelope and stuck a few stamps on it and put the story inside it and carried it out the door, down the driveway to the mailbox. I knew it would go off for a while and then probably come back with a marvelous note on the rejection slip.

I was knocking, had been knocking for years, but it was taking a long time for them to let me in.

I went back inside, turned off the lights, and went to bed. Alone.

Lots of friends came by to see me. One of them was Raoul. Raoul had been in the crop-duster business and had made a fortune by flying in a load of marijuana to Jackson, Tennessee, one night. He had cousins in Caracas. He had plenty of money, and now he was trying to write. He wrote poetry mostly, and wanted me to read it. The night he came over he had three or four poems. He also had a lot of beer with him. I was glad to see him. I wasn't so glad to see his poems.

“Hey, Barlow, I've got some new poems,” he said.

He'd caught me at the typewriter, in the act itself, which, of course, was almost sacred to me.

“I'm kind of busy, Raoul. I'm trying to write.”

“Oh, come on, man, I brought you some beer. Sit down and read these poems.”

I hated to have to mess with him, but I was almost out of beer.

“The only way I'll read them is if you leave me some beer, Raoul. I'm trying to write.”

“Hey, man, take all the beer you want. You understand this shit, Barlow. Read these poems. Tell me what you think about them.”

Raoul sat on the couch and I started looking at his poems.

“I've got some women we can pick up later, Barlow.”

“Great, Raoul.”

The first poem was about a bullfighter. There was a lot of blood and sand in it. There was a lot of death in the afternoon. The bullfighter was a candyass, though; he couldn't
face the bulls. Finally he ran from one and got a horn rammed up his ass and had to have a colectomy. And then he just stayed on a cot in a cantina for the rest of his life, sucking on a tequila bottle.

“This poem sucks, Raoul.” I laid it aside and picked up the next one. “I think it'd be a lot better if you tried to make a short story out of it.”

“I know, man, I know. I don't know the prose, though, man, I don't know the
prose!”

The next poem was about a garbageman who tried to smell the roses in life every day. And as bad as it was, Raoul had his finger on something. He was touching the hurt in people, trying to. For that I gave him an A.

“Listen, Raoul, you're a good guy. You've got some humanity in you even if you did put a lot of dope on the streets of Jackson, Tennessee.”

“It was just a one-time thing, man.”

“Listen, Raoul, none of that shit matters. If you want to write, you've got to shut yourself up in a room and write.”

“I've been thinking about doing that, man.”

I got one of his beers and looked at the next poem. It was called “Viva Vanetti.” It was about a Mafia hit man who weighed four hundred pounds and was nicknamed the “Salsa Sausage.” He went around killing people by submerging their heads in vats of pizza dough.

“This one sucks, too, Raoul.”

“Read the next one, man.”

“How can you write good stuff one minute and such crappy stuff the next?”

“I don't know, man. It just comes to me.”

I swore for a little bit and then picked up the last poem. It started off hot. The narrator was screaming things about lost pussy, and alleycats rutting behind garbage cans. It had the heat of a summer night in the city in it. It had people on dope, switchblades, and cops who slapped the hell out of people and screamed in their faces. It had people trapped on fire escapes and gorillas loose from the zoo. It had everything in it. I was a little pissed that I hadn't written it. It was A-OK.

“It's great, Raoul. Son of a bitch is great. It'll be published.”

I didn't tell him that might take ten or fifteen years.

“No shit, man? No
shit?”

“I don't know how you did it,” I said. “You ought to try writing some stories.”

Raoul got up and started walking around the room.

“Wow, man,” he said. “Wow!”

“Let's go get the women, Raoul,” I said. I was ready for the women.

“Oh, shit, man, we can't go get the women now! I've got to go home and type up a clean copy of that poem. I've got to get that poem in the mail, man!”

Then he rushed right out the door. Then he rushed right back in and snatched the poem out of my hands.

“Thanks a million, Barlow! I'll never forget you for this!”

I drank four or five more of his beers and thought about the unfairness of everything. A guy like Raoul could make one big score and have it dicked for the rest of his life. But poetry was a hobby for him. It wasn't life and death for him. All he wanted was to see his name in a magazine. He wouldn't
starve for his art. I was down to thirty-two dollars, and about to starve for mine.

I started writing another story.

My
mother
came to see me. I'd had about four beers that afternoon. I knew she was going to lay a lot of stuff on me that I didn't want to hear.

“How are you doing?” she said.

“I'm doing all right.”

“Have you seen the children?”

“Not lately.”

“Well, what are you going to
do?”

I wanted to reach for a beer but I'd been raised not to drink in front of my mother.

“What else? I'm going to keep writing.”

“After all it's cost you.”

“Right.”

“After you've lost your whole family over it.”

“Wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to stop now, would it?”

She started crying. I knew she would. I went ahead and got the beer. She was probably thinking How did I ever raise this cold-blooded child?

I sat down with her.

“Look, Mama, I can't help it that I want to do this. It's not even a matter of wanting to. I
have
to. I can't live without it.”

“Well, how are you going to live? You don't even have a job.”

I looked out the window.

“I work when I need the money. I paint a house once in a while. I work for a while and then I write for a while. I'm okay. Don't worry about me.”

“It's my grandchildren I worry about. How are you going to pay your child support? When are you going to get to see them?”

“I guess I'll see them when she lets me. Have you seen them?”

“Yes.”

“What did they say?”

“They wanted to know when you were coming home.”

Then she started crying again.

I hadn't made love in about sixty-four days, which is not an easy thing after you've been married and used to getting it whenever you want it. I didn't know many women and had great difficulty communicating with them. Most of the women I did know were friends of my ex-wife or wives of my friends. I was never able to tell women just exactly what I thought about womanhood in general, what wonderful things I thought women were. I had composed several poems about women that I had not submitted to any of the literary quarterlies, but basically they sang the praises of legs and breasts and long hair and painted toenails, red lips and nipples. Once in a while I would take these poems out and read them and then put them away again.

I missed my children. They were big holes torn out of my life. I knew that I had torn a big hole out of their lives. I hoped that their mother would have the good sense to marry a good man who would take care of them and give them a home, educations, food, love. I knew there'd never be a reconciliation. Their mother didn't want it, and I didn't want it. Our children and our parents were probably the only ones who wanted it. I only had one life, and I'd be damned if I'd live it in a way that would make me unhappy and please somebody else. I had already lived that kind of life, too much of it already.

The money ran out and I knew I'd have to go back to work. I knew also that my ex-wife's lawyer would soon be dunning me for an alimony payment which I didn't have. I considered full-time employment for about fifteen seconds, and then realized that since I had made the choice to be sorry, I wanted to be sorry full-time.

I went back to painting houses. I painted houses in Oxford, in Taylor, in Toccopola, in Dogtown. I wore paint-spattered clothes and let my hair and beard grow out. I wrote at night, with beer in the cooler on the floor next to the desk. All of my stories came back in. I bought a small postage scale and weighed my own envelopes to the penny and mailed them back out. Nothing, nothing. Nobody wanted my work. Sometimes I wrote all night and staggered out the door the next morning to paint houses. I painted houses for twenty-three
days straight and then took the money and retired again. I hit the grocery store first. Forty pounds of leg quarters that I could fry and keep cold in the fridge. Salami and baloney. Cheese. Chili and hot dogs. I got a few brown steaks that were already frozen, perfectly good cheap meat. The rest of the cart I filled up with beer and cigarettes.

They were good days. I slept late and got up and read the newspaper and made coffee and breakfast, then sat down and started writing. Stories, nothing but stories. The last novel had taken me two years, and I wasn't ready to commit to that kind of time again right away. I could write a story in two days, revise it in a couple of hours, and be ready to start another one. I wrote through the afternoons, stopped for a while to fix something for supper, then went back to writing again. There was nothing I could do but keep going. I had already made all my decisions.

I thought she looked bad when I saw her. She was coming into a bar with some other people just as I was going out. She saw me and she stopped, so I had to stop, too. The people with her spoke briefly, friends of ours, friends of hers, ex-friends of mine, evidently. People who had been to our house and eaten with us and shared our wine and music. Or maybe they just wanted to get out of the way. I didn't blame them. The end hadn't been nice. The end had been nasty. Nasty people and nasty words and phrases and nastiness to make you go puke in the gutter. Me, her: both of us.

I didn't ask where the kids were. I didn't want to seem accusatory. I didn't want to seem drunk, but I was. I'd been in there for four hours. I was on my way to try and weave my key into the ignition. Everything that might be said would be forgotten the next morning. Just a black hole with her somewhere standing in it, a picture of her face to rock to sleep against your pillow.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

“You leaving?”

“Me? Well, yeah, I think so. What you up to?”

“Oh, nothing. Just out here looking for somebody to fuck. Right?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, I am. Fucking everybody I can. You know how that goes, trying to fuck everybody you can.”

I didn't say anything, so she went on by herself.

“Yeah, I'm trying to get enough together to have a gangbang about midnight if I can. If I can find enough of them still sober enough to fuck. A lot of men have that problem, you know. Start drinking beer about nine o'clock in the morning and drink all day and then have a bad case of the limpdick about dark.”

“You doing okay?” I said.

“Nah. Ain't getting enough dick. This one of your hangouts, huh?”

“I come here sometimes.”

“I bet there's some real sluts in here. It must be.”

“You seem to be in here.”

“Yeah, I just got here, though.”

“Where's the kids?”

“None of your fucking business. Where's my money?”

“What money?”