Flagged Victor (21 page)

When I returned to the table, Rivers was flipping through my new book.

Have you ever known a famous man before he became famous? he asked, reading the first line.

Have you read it? I asked.

I read the
Reader’s Digest
version, he answered.

I tried to hide my surprise. Would any real writer read a
Reader’s Digest
book? It seemed a kind of sacrilege.

Who’s got time to read Wouk? he asked me. Minor writer, bloated as hell. You can get the vital stuff in condensed version and save your time for Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Conrad. Same with William Styron. Everyone raves about
Sophie’s Choice
like it’s the great novel we’ve all been waiting for. And I agree, it is a powerful story with terrific characterization, but it’s flatulently told. Saul Bellow, same bullshit. Have you read
Humboldt’s Gift?
Fantastic novella, seven hundred pages long. Don’t get me started on
Augie March.
If you’re going to write a great novel, it has to be great all the way through. It can’t be lined with layers of fat just to heft it onto the impressive shelf.

No, I agreed. That wasn’t the way to true greatness.

What does your father do? he asked.

I adjusted to the change in direction.

He works at a bank.

Doing what?

Some kind of district manager stuff. I shrugged.

I knew what my father did but I did not want to sound conceited or elitist. I shouldn’t have worried with Rivers. Elite, superior, successful—those were okay by him.

So is that what you do in the summer then—work at a bank?

I could have choked on a fry. Had Rivers and my father become co-conspirators?

Not this year, I said, and when Rivers nodded approvingly, I felt brave enough to elaborate. I’m pulling rickshaw.

Rickshaw? You mean, around Halifax? Up those hills?

Yes.

Rivers snorted. Do you wear a toga?

Ha ha, I said.

You can make money doing that?

Like waitering. Good days, bad days.

How much?

Jesus, was he my father? Enough, I said.

Well, I suppose you might get a good story or two out of it.

I nodded. That’s what I was thinking.

Work has to do one of two things. Either it has to pay the bills and give you enough cushion to write, or it has to give you good experiences that give you stuff to write about.

I waited. He had switched to guru mode, and I was comfortable with my role.

Take teaching. I’m tenure track, have a decent salary, and the course load is light enough to give me time to write, meaning on balance it’s a good job. But it provides me nothing in terms of material.

Nothing? I was surprised. I figured all those people you meet, the social situations.

Rivers dismissed my suggestions. Nothing about it is real. And worse, try grading all that writing and see how much juice you have left for your own. The job takes more than it gives. Marginally supportive at best.

But teaching, don’t you hone your understanding of craft and technique?

For a few years, after that nothing. You can’t imagine the drain. Now, take journalism. Sounds good in theory. You get paid to write, research, investigate, and interview, all valuable skills, but it’s the wrong kind of writing, and the research, investigation, and interview work gets ground up and processed like innards to make cheap hot dogs and nutritionless articles. Plus the pay is terrible.

There’s always crime, I said.

Rivers nodded. Police work can be fantastic from the story perspective. The money, not so good. Unless you’re willing to work a lot of overtime, which cuts into your writing time. And it’s dangerous.

Didn’t Nietzsche say we need to live life dangerously?

And Flaubert said live like a bourgeois to be violent and original in your work.

This, from Rivers, was surprising.

Maybe I should rob banks, I offered.

I think you should be a medical doctor, Rivers said, ignoring my attempt at humour.

It took me a moment to understand him.

I have a friend who’s in family practice. Makes eighty Gs a year working part-time. Gets to know the intimate secrets of a lot of people. The downside is the seven to ten years you put into the education. But if you’ve got the stamina, you’re still young when your sentence is over. You walk out a free man with a lot of loot.

I nodded thoughtfully, as if he’d struck a chord. I had no more interest in medicine than I had in banking.

But I didn’t ask you here to talk about that. I have a proposition.
Transassination
comes out in the fall, and I’m going on sabbatical. I’m going to write my next novel with that break. I’m a third of the way through, and it’s really amazing. Something that will blow Bellow and Styron off their bar stools. I’d like to try you out as my apprentice this summer.

Apprentice?

Three days a week. Minimum wage. You’ll file, make copies, pay bills, do my laundry, and learn more about writing than you could in a graduate program at Iowa.

Oh, I said. I had no better answer. I was surprised by the idea that washing Rivers’s socks and paying his electric bills would somehow make me a better writer.

Well, think about it, Rivers said, sensing my hesitation.

We finished lunch. I offered to pay. He didn’t dissuade me. I felt self-consciously like a big man, peeling off a twenty. I tried to thank him again for the offer when we shook hands at the door, but his dark brow had furrowed and he was irritated by
the crutches and he swung his way out onto the sidewalk like a deranged vet.

Part
of my hesitation, part of the reason I didn’t call him immediately that evening and beg to be reconsidered (for a position I hadn’t actually turned down), was because of my father. I’d established the plan for rickshaw work with such conviction that any deviation would immediately undercut my entire argument and make me seem flighty and whimsical. In other words, I feared my father’s disapproval more than I feared missing an opportunity to work with someone who could, potentially, be the next Bellow, perhaps even the next Dostoevsky.

But my summer of lightness did not start off well.

A snow squall struck that Sunday morning, laying four inches of white on the streets. It was a rare, though not unheard of, happening, and it struck most people with humour, even as it devastated the rickshaw industry. Ha ha.

I sat around for another week, and felt the weight of unmet expectations. Each glance from my father confirmed his disappointment. I should have been employed at the bank. Rickshaw was a colossal waste. In desperation, I called Rivers a week after Leah had called me, hoping to get on board as his writing apprentice. I connected only with his answering machine and that Islamic call to prayer and the voice asking me to leave a message for Sinbad the sailor.

My hell eased by that Friday, when the snow had melted away. The sun showed up on Saturday morning, and by Sunday, I was outfitted with my rickshaw kit.

I got my first paid ride late Thursday afternoon, nineteen and a half hours into my new career.

A pair of seniors wanted to go from the harbour front to the Old Spaghetti Factory. I didn’t know where the Old Spaghetti Factory was, so halfway through the ride, I needed to stop and ask for directions, and ended up going twice as far as necessary. When we arrived at our destination, the old couple asked me how much, and since I had forgotten to set a price beforehand, I resorted to a trick Chris recommended, suggesting they pay me what they liked. I should have guessed that seniors heading to the reduced price dinner wouldn’t be filled with largesse.

There
was not much camaraderie at the shed, either. Chris had sung its praises as a man cave of ease and debauchery, but to me, at least at first, it lacked all mirth. It was situated below an old abandoned hotel and served, officially, as our storage space for rickshaws and gym bags, plus dispatch office. The immediate enclosure gave way to a cavernous space in back filled with treasure and mystery. The midden was extraordinary. There were countless boxes and old bottles and several chandeliers and dozens of broken chairs, bed frames, and dining tables. Broken rickshaws and collapsed couches served as our furniture. Old paintings in wooden frames offered targets for randomly thrown objects.

Everyone was in a foul mood that week. There were nine of us on Dan’s crew in total, though only myself and two others worked those first few days. Chris didn’t bother to show up at all. He tried to convince me that it was worthless to venture
out before the weather warmed, especially given our secret pile of loot, but I didn’t have the stones to lie around the house another week. So I endured the sullen hostility of my new colleagues who knew each other, and knew Chris, but didn’t give a fuck about me.

Saturday afternoon, Chris finally arrived, the last of the boys to show for work, winning some kind of prize for being the laziest bastard in the process. It was hotter than hell all of a sudden, as if we’d gone from full winter to full summer overnight. No one else wore suntan lotion—in fact, Chris used baby oil to build a faster tan—so I didn’t either. As a result, I was sunburned and dehydrated by five o’clock. That’s when I got my first real fare.

Two young women. I learned later that Chris steered them to me. Naturally, as they boarded, I assumed the ride would conclude in some kind of three-way. The girls played it up. Giddy and flirtatious, they ordered a trip to the top of Citadel Hill, the fortress that overlooks the city.

I launched into the journey hopefully, but soon realized what a fool I’d been. The vertical climb was brutal. My heart pounded beyond all safe limits and hot drool began to run freely from my mouth. I pulled off on a side street and bent over as if to tie a shoelace, then couldn’t lift my head again, and sank to one knee. My customers stepped out and approached me with concern. It turned out one was in nursing school. She took my pulse and forced me to sit on the curb despite weak protests, mercifully suggesting that I’d be all right as long as I took it easy for a while. I didn’t care if I died at that moment, I only wanted to be alone. Her friend pushed a twenty into my hand. I was
too shaky to even grip the paper. After they’d gone, I walked weakly across the street to a takeout pizza joint and bought a Gatorade. Then I went back to my rickshaw, still parked where I’d dropped the handles, and sat in it, comforted by the plush seat that hugged me like a blanket.

The first one always gets you, Chris said later.

You got to pop your cherry the hard way, a co-worker named Tim seconded. My first ride I puked on the sidewalk right next to the Shipyard.

They were right. The pain eased up after that, and the work became more fun, though I didn’t make much money. I got a fare or two a night, earning twenty or thirty dollars tops. But I always remembered to pry a roll of twenties and tens out of my pocket and drop it onto the coffee table or kitchen counter at home as proof of my day’s success. The money, of course, came from the stash below the stairs, and its steady accumulation above ground, like mushrooms popping up from a submerged fungal mass, was my way of laundering dirty funds. Instead of working our asses off, most nights we drank beer in the shed for the first four or five hours. Someone rigged up a broken rickshaw so that it was tipped back and we filled it with ice every night to keep our beer cold. Pleasantly wasted, we’d head out around eleven or twelve and park in front of a hopping bar or late-night donair and pizza joint, waiting for female fares. We refused to haul men, unless they were part of a couple.

I never once got laid working rickshaw that summer, but for Chris, it was a near weekly event. At times, I wondered if my sole purpose as Chris’s partner in crime was to provide cover for him in case Susan showed up. She worked at a nearby restaurant,
so this happened frequently, three or four nights a week. I got good at lying to her. I told her he’d just snagged a long fare and to call him the next morning, or that he’d twisted his ankle and was at the hospital, or that the Billy Club had called and asked him to fill in for a shift. I didn’t really care if she believed me or if the alibis held up. Maybe that disdain was the secret to being convincing. No matter how outlandish my story, she merely put her hands on her hips, looked around as if to see if he were actually hiding behind some pile of boxes, and nodded. All right, see you later.

I was usually drunk, and that made me indifferent to the emotional needs of others. Besides, part of me gained a smidgen of satisfaction whenever Susan’s needs were thwarted. If only she’d chosen me.

The
episodes of Chris’s cheating never failed to be entertaining to the rest of us. He was good about letting us in on the stories. He did not treat women poorly, as many successful philanderers do. In fact, Chris always seemed genuinely moved by some special quality of beauty or uniqueness in each one.

He never slept too late at an apartment or house when he had made a conquest. He always tried to be home before Susan called in the morning, so as to take her out for breakfast or coffee. As a matter of principle, he also tried to have sex with Susan as soon as possible afterwards. It was a kind of cleansing ritual, a way of proving that she was the one who mattered. I’m not sure Susan would have understood, but I’m not sure she wouldn’t have understood either.

I can’t fully account for his success. He was not that much better looking than the rest of us. He was not as witty as me or as charming. But he seemed to have something that women wanted. None of the encounters became serious or steady. He was, in his way, totally committed to Susan. I would say that it was merely impossible for him to stop, but that would imply he had any desire to stop. He didn’t. He saw no contradictions. He was utterly light.

My only accomplishments that summer were physical. I got into better shape. I became hard and developed stamina. I began to take myself seriously as a physical force. I got pleasantly buzzed on beer each evening, and hammered down highballs each night. At least once a week, I said something so belligerent and offensive to some passing shmuck that a fight ensued. Only two or three times did Chris have to come to my rescue.