Love Me (24 page)

Tony walked over to the railing and looked down through the leaves of the elm tree to the street and spat a big gob and watched it land and turned to me and said, “I’d like
The New Yorker
to print one of Poppa’s poems. It would mean a lot to him. If they don’t like that one, he’s got a lot of others. I suppose that, as publisher, I could give the order, but I’d rather they printed it of their own free will because they wanted to. Could you take care of it for me?”

I said that the magazine doesn’t print light verse anymore. Only serious poetry.

“What are you saying? My poppa is a joke? Huh?”

I said that I didn’t consider his poppa a joke, not in the slightest, and that
if it were up to me personally
and so forth. I told him that I had no sway with the editors. None. I was deadwood around there. Nobody would listen to me for two minutes.

“You go out with Shawn on his boat.”

“He likes me to come along because I’m such a nothing, he isn’t embarrassed to get shit-faced and say what he thinks. Some guys can only confide in their valet. That doesn’t mean he takes my advice about poetry.”

“So what would it cost you to put in a good word for my old man? If you’re a nobody, you got nothing to lose.”

“Let me think about it,” I said.

“Poppa doesn’t only write poetry. He writes fiction, reviews, whatever you want.”

“Send it to the poetry editor, Alice Quinn,” I said. “She would be the person to speak to.”

“I ain’t talking to her. I’m talking to you.” Tony was standing very close to me right now and his left arm was around me, sort of massaging my back. He was smiling a ferocious smile. He handed me two more of Poppa’s poems. One was about snowflakes and the other about fall leaves.
O what a sight is this, the maple tree so tall / Its red and yellow leaves come suddenly in fall—

“Let me think about it,” I said.

“What’s there to think about? Either you’re a stand-up guy or you’re a dirty louse. Take your choice.”

“It’s not that simple,” I said. “I can show these to them and they’ll probably just reject them.”

He shook his head as if I were a small child who was persisting in saying that two and three is six.

“You don’t understand. This is Poppa. My poppa. He wants to have a poem in
The New Fucking Yorker
magazine before he up and croaks. You get it?”

I said that I understood that part perfectly. But I am not the person to speak to about it.

“You are the one I am speaking to,” he said. “You are the one standing there and I am the one over here with the words coming out of his mouth.”

“I wish it were so simple,” I said.

“It is exactly that simple,” he said. “Either you’re my friend or you’re dead meat, and I guess you just made your choice, asshole.”

He left without saying good-bye.

That evening, a city inspector came and looked at my terrace and found sixteen violations of code involving hoses and faucets and electrical wiring and wrote up $9,400 in tickets and another inspector came and flushed my toilets and said they would all have to be replaced.

I saw Trillin at the office and mentioned my meeting with Tony and he said, “You didn’t tip your doorman enough for Christmas. Otherwise he’d have told Crossandotti that you’d gone to New Jersey for the weekend.”

“What do I do now?”

He pondered this for a moment, the Trillin eyebrows rose and fell, and leaned in and whispered, “St. Paul is a safe place. You might need to be there for a while.”

I hustled around the corner to the Tradesmen’s & Mechanics’ Library and sat at a table in the rear, facing the door, waiting for Tony. Nobody had ever been gunned down before for rejecting a poem, I would be the first.

And then Tony walks in. I swear the guy has lookouts on every corner.

“I’m gonna give you a second chance,” he says. “I got a package that needs to get to Chicago. How about you take it to Chicago for me?”

“What is it?” I said.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Okay. I don’t want to know. How big is it?”

He said it was about the size of curtain rods.

“I don’t want to know what it is,” I said. “I want to think it’s curtain rods.”

“It’s curtain rods, all right. Trust me.”

“I mean, I don’t ever want to know. Never. Cocaine or heroin or whatever it is. Promise you’ll never tell me.”

“It’s nothing illegal, but whether it is or not, I won’t tell you,” he said.

“Thank you.”

He said it was a package for a friend of his and the friend did not trust the mails. That’s why he needed a personal courier.

Fine. I could carry a package, I said. “But it’s not curtain rods. Give me some credit. I’m not an idiot. Just tell me it’s not heroin.”

“It’s not heroin. No way. Let’s stick with curtain rods. That’s all you need to know.”

“Oh my God.” I stood up and walked to the circulation desk. The librarian looked up from her table where she was typing cards for the card file. “I used to be a writer,” I said, “and now I’m a drug courier. My boyhood ambition. To write for
The New Yorker
and be a mule hauling heroin on a plane. Do me a favor. If you see my mug on the front page of the
Daily News,
don’t think ill of me. Okay?”

She laughed.

This happens when you’re a humorist. You tell the truth and people laugh at you.

Tony clapped a hand on my shoulder. “It’s legal,” he said. “I swear. Hey! Do I look like a drug dealer? Huh? Do I?”

He didn‘t, actually. He looked more like an assassin. So I said, “Okay, okay, but don’t tell me what’s in there because I don’t ever want to know. Even if I beg you to. Not even a hint. I do not want to know.”

He made the motion of zipping his mouth, locking it, and throwing away the key.

He gave me the box of curtain rods and a plane ticket and I took the C train to my apartment to get my shaving kit and I left the curtain rods on the train. I swear it’s the truth. Dumb as it sounds, that’s just what I went and did. I walked in the front door of the Bel Noir and the moment the doorman said, “Afternoon, Mr. Wyler,” I clapped my hand to my forehead and thought of the curtain rods riding north to the Bronx. My fingerprints on the box.

No curtain rods in that box. Too heavy. I figured it was a high-powered rifle with a scope. Some maniac would get it and sit in his kitchen window and pick off a couple dozen innocent people and terrorize the city and the box would be found and it would be curtains for me.

I looked at the telephone and asked myself if I was going to call 911 and tell the cops, “There’s a rifle in a long cardboard box on the C train.” I thought a long time and didn’t get a clear answer to that question.

Mr. Shawn sent me a note:

He took me out to a steak house for dinner and we had the 36-ounce rib eyes and a couple of double Scotch and sodas. “You got to buck yourself up. Get back to the basics, kid,” said Mr. Shawn. “For my money, that means Alaska. You fly into Anchorage and get a bush pilot to fly you out in a float plane and drop you off on a lake with no name, where there’s nobody within a hundred miles, and you spend a month there, fishing, sleeping, thinking, killing mosquitoes, and about the time you forget what day it is, you hear the plane coming back to pick you up. You return to New York a new man. You’ll be the man you were before you got lost.”

“I am too fragile to go to the wilderness. I can’t bear loneliness anymore. I want to go back to Minnesota.”

All through my twenties and thirties, I had trudged along the literary ridgeline, enduring blizzards and gray days and ice storms, and New York was my reward for all that suffering, a place where you don a tuxedo and starched shirt and go dancing at the Rainbow Room on a revolving floor with a big orchestra and a girl singer and a boy singer doing Gershwin and Porter, and a nice lobster dinner and baked Alaska, and if it’s cold and snowing outside, well, you just tell your limo driver to wait for you under the marquee on 49th Street and you jump in the backseat and speed home.

I had zero interest in seeing Alaska, but Mr. Shawn thought I should go, and when I saw the messages Tony Crossandotti was leaving for me, I thought maybe I should, too.

I had sent the poem to Alice Quinn but she was in the south of France. I faxed the poem over there. No answer. I phoned her and left messages. I called Philip Levine, John Hollander. I called W. S. Merwin and begged him to talk to her. I begged Mr. Shawn to print the poem.

“Don’t come crying to me,” he said. “Deal with it yourself.”

“I don’t know how, I’m from Minnesota. We have no Mafia there.”

“He’s a bully. If you run from him, he’ll walk all over you. Stand up to him. Look him in the eye and tell him to go fuck himself. And be prepared to sock him in the nose. That’s the only way to handle it. Didn’t your father teach you anything?”

I pointed out that my father was a golfer and a Republican who never hit anybody or used rough language of that sort. He hired goons to do it for him.

No word from Alice Quinn. Trillin was in Kansas City, accepting a Brotherhood Award from B‘nai B’rith. Powers was on Maui, vacationing with money he’d gotten from the Guggenheim Foundation, the lucky stiff. Salinger was at a men’s conference, with Robert Bly, speaking on “The Bitch Goddess and How to Fight Her with Fire & Water & Word.”

Finally, Tony painted a message on my door, in red letters: I DO NOT FORGET.

Time to go to Alaska.

Mr. Shawn had put it to me straight. “I don’t want you to turn into a stylist like White and devote your life to painting Easter eggs. Him and Strunk have screwed up more writers than gin and Scotch combined. You take that Elements of Style too seriously and you’ll get so you spend three days trying to write a simple thank-you note and you’ll wind up buying a nickel-plated .38 and robbing newsboys out of sheer frustration.

“Damn it, be assertive. There is an I in
writing
—two of ‘em in fact. Put your foot down on the gas and shoot the yellow light and get where you’re going. Don’t sit and go nuts weighing the alternatives. Get out there in the Alaska wilderness and climb those mountains and look at death and spit in its eye. Don’t you come back here and write some fitful 1,500-word showpiece of puissant sensibility and irony and couth, some half-assed feuilleton. Sit your butt down in a one-room shack with a paper and pencil and a bottle of rock ’n’ rye and write your damn heart out and come back here with 100,000 words and none of them modifiers and I’ll print the whole damn thing, and if the gentlemen at the Century Club don’t like it, let them stamp their slippers and shake their wattles. You understand me, boy?”

So I flew to Seattle and sat in the airport and a girl sat down next to me. Her name was Alana, her blond hair was drawn back in a sort of Parker House roll and her high cheekbones were flush with vitality and her lips were broad and full. I didn’t want her to be attracted to me but she was. And, as it turned out, she was seated next to me on the plane to Juneau. “I can’t talk to you,” I said. “I’m writing for The New Yorker, I have to focus on my experiences so I can write.” She practically fainted when I said
The New Yorker.
Her bedroom back in Malibu was decorated with magazine covers, she said. “I’d love to be an experience someone writes about in
The New Yorker,”
she remarked. I said that I was already in a relationship, one that begins with the letter M, and had no interest in fooling around. “Life doesn’t always turn out according to plan,” she said.