The Last American Martyr (3 page)

“Yeah … Tom, I’d like that,” I said, and I truly meant it.

He then put his palm up, spread his fingers, and punctuated some of his words as he spoke.

“Fine, then. I’ll only give you one chapter at a time. I’d like to do it that way for two reasons, number one, you’ll
have to
stop over and visit me from time to time—to return them and pick up more. The second reason is I’m in no way finished yet. I’ve still got, probably, a few months’ worth of work ahead of me. What do you say? Does that sound OK?”

By now my curiosity had gotten the best of me. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the manuscript. But I had to be honest. “Sure,” I said, “I’d like that, very much. But like you said, if I feel like I’m going places I don’t belong, I’ll have to stop.”

“Fair enough. That’s fandamtastic, Jake! Hell, you might even find a few of the punctuation errors my editor is always chiding me about. If you do, I’d appreciate you circling them for me. You just might save me some of her good-natured heat.”

Nodding my head in agreement, trying to appear capable, I didn’t say anything.

“Yep, I know what you’re thinking, Jake. People do think that anyone who’s won the award is some sort of demigod. I don’t know about all the rest of them, but I put my socks on each morning the same way everybody else does. Hell, I barely got through high school English, that’s why my punctuation is only so-so. Of course, in all fairness to myself, I never was in that English class all that often.”

Tom then jerked his thumb toward the narrow hallway and said, “Just like everyone else, I also straddle the toilet most mornings. Being so regular may be an achievement for somebody my age,” he said, chuckling again, “but besides that, all I am is a simple man who’s made some relevant observations and shed light on them in a simple book. That’s it! I’m nothing more.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve got a feeling there’s a bit more to you than that.”

“I don’t know, maybe a bit more. Maybe the one small gift I was born with is an elevated degree of insightfulness. Someone, whose name now slips me, once did say, ‘There’s very little difference in the way most men think but that small difference can be huge.’ Maybe he was on to something.”

Tom drained the last of his beer, gently lowered Solace to the carpet, and said, “Wait here just a minute. I’ll get the first chapter.”

A few minutes later, as he walked me to my jeep, Tom Soles said, “Remember, if you begin to read anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, anything at all, just stop there and return the manuscript. I’ll understand. And do me one more favor, if you would. Please don’t tell anybody, not a soul, that my name is Thomas Soles.”

I assured him I wouldn’t and cranked up the engine. Then, as I went to put her in reverse, he leaned into the open window and said in a weary, yet relieved tone, “Thank you so much for doing this, Jake. You don’t know how badly I wanted somebody to read this in case…in case something unforeseen happens to me.”  

Chapter 4

While negotiating the ruts and bumps on Split Branch Road, I kept stealing glances at the paper-clipped pages lying on the mail shelf beside me. It was a Saturday, and I knew darned well I’d never be able to wait till lunchtime Monday to dig into them.

So that night, after my wife, Sigrid, and the boys fell asleep, I grabbed my robe and tip-toed downstairs to the workshop. I threw a single log in the stove and settled into one of the two old upholstered chairs I keep down there for when my pals come over. Of course, I read every page of chapter one. From then on, for the next five months, I couldn’t wait for Saturdays to roll around. Tom had said, at the very outset, he only wanted me to read one chapter a week. I wasn’t going to push it. Maybe that in itself was an intended lesson for me. Maybe my new friend was teaching me the meaning of patience. I don’t know, but I do know I learned an awful lot from his writings. The deeper I got into this manuscript the more I wanted to read on. Each paragraph
demanded
that I go onto the next. What follows here is verbatim what I read. You’ll notice it had no title—Thomas Soles hadn’t yet come up with one.

Had I, an unemployed doorman, never written that book, my life wouldn’t have taken such a harrowing turn. Had it not sold so well, I wouldn’t have needed to be on the lam like I have for so many months now. But I did write my book, and I’ll pay for that until the last shovel of cold dirt is dumped over my grave. What’s done is done. I can’t undo a thing, even if I wanted to. On the other side of the coin, the words I strung together did have at least one positive effect. They seem to have broadened the entire world’s perception of selfishness and greed. Many called my plainly-written book, a “revelator.” Others were livid over the messages in its pages.

My thoughts about the unfair distribution of wealth in societies everywhere created a fiery uproar from pole to pole. There were massive marches and demonstrations in 17 different countries. From America to Zimbabwe, folks young and old turned out in astounding numbers. Their marching footsteps caused the entire planet to tremor. Class systems everywhere were suddenly being questioned, and in many places challenged. All this because of the thoughts I, a previously unpublished author, scrawled into Spiral notebooks at a Formica table in my Queens, New York tenement.

For two long years, I sat in that kitchen, staring out the window, searching for inspiration beyond the fire escape and all the sad brown buildings. Somehow, uncertain as I was, I did finish the book, and it was published. A year after that everything changed. It doesn’t happen often, the odds are miniscule, but every once in a while a small person rises from the depths of obscurity and manages to shake the entire world. It happened in 2008 when I, dressed in a secondhand Goodwill suit, stepped onto the worldwide stage in Stockholm, Sweden and accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. People everywhere were astounded that a first time author could be awarded such an honor, but the Nobel Committee felt that the book’s world-wide impact was undeniable and unprecedented.

Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the inventor of dynamite who founded the prize, might have exploded in his casket that day had he known who the prize went to. The gold medal with his face on it, the diploma bearing a citation, and a million dollars went to me, Thomas Soles, a plain-speaking man who had railed against the very same system that made Nobel a very wealthy man.

Just like Alfred Nobel, I didn’t have any secondary education. Well, actually, I did manage to complete two night courses at Queens College. After that, the Draft Board changed my plans. I wanted to go nights for one more term. At that point I’d have had enough credits to attend the city-funded New York college fulltime, tuition free. All I would have had to come up with was the cost of books. But, as it had been all my young life, the answer was a resounding NO. I spent the next 23 months in the U.S. Army, half that time in Viet Nam. I was in the infantry but have no desire to talk about that. As a matter of fact, I
need
not to talk about it.

After being discharged from the military in 1971, my money problems didn’t get a whole lot better until thirty-six years later when my revolutionary book was picked up by a major publisher. Then things really changed. Money started coming at me from all directions.

A year later, to the blare of trumpets and the flash of cameras, I received a standing ovation at the Swedish Academy along with a check for a million dollars. One would have thought I’d be on easy street after that, but not me. Just as I’d done the previous year with my burgeoning book royalties, I planned to keep very little of the award money. Almost all of it would go to needy charities, again. All I wanted was
enough
. As a matter of fact, the title of the book that won me the Nobel Prize was
Enough is Enough
. Unfortunately, not everybody who read it agreed with the title or anything on its pages. At the very top of the system I had criticized, there were some extremely powerful people, concerned people, who were very, very upset.

Thirty-one thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean, American Airlines flight 1402 was less than an hour from landing at Kennedy Airport. Pulling my uncertain eyes from the quivering wing outside the three-layered acrylic window, I said to my wife, Elaina, “Those drinks we had in London are helping, but I still don’t like it.”

“I must have told you fifty times, it’s no big thing. You were so upset…for nothing.”

“Just the same, if it was for anything less than the award, I wouldn’t be up here.”

“All right, Tom, we’re almost home,” Elaina said, closing her Newsweek, returning it to the pouch on the seat in front of her. After brushing one of her long black hairs from her jeans, she straightened up in her seat, looked past me at the clear blue October sky outside the window and said, “We need to talk about the money, you know.”

“Aw come on, Elaina, not that. You know how I feel about that. I don’t want to talk about it now, not here on a plane full of strangers.”

“This isn’t going away, Tom. Not this time. We’ve got to talk. I promised I wouldn’t say another word about it until we left Stockholm, and I didn’t. I didn’t want to ruin everything.”

Then she paused for a moment. Her perturbed look lost its edge and she failed to fight back a small smile. “Look Tom…OK…you know I’m still pinching myself. I can’t believe you’ve actually won The Nobel Prize. Every time I think about it, I get goose bumps. Things like that just don’t happen to people like us. All those uncertain hours, days, and months you spent in the kitchen writing your book…you didn’t even think it would get published.”

With that Elaina’s eyes glazed over. She glanced at her neatly polished fingernails and sniffled. Then she turned back to me, cleared her throat, and changed the tone of her whisper again.

“Look, you’ve already given more than a million dollars in royalties to Greenpeace, Amnesty International, the ACLU, and all the rest. What about us? We’re still in the same run-down apartment you grew up in. I’m still nursing forty-five hours a week at Queens General. We don’t even have ten thousand dollars in the bank. This is lunacy!”

I said nothing. I didn’t see anything either—even though my eyes were trained straight ahead, above dozens of heads, toward the front of the plane.

Elaina dropped her head, rotated it slowly a few times and sighed. With her glistening black hair now draping both sides of her face, she assessed the plain gold band that had been on her finger for thirty-three years. Then she slowly turned to me.

“No, Tom,” she said, “I
insist
we talk about it now. I have to talk about it now.”

“Elaina, please … don’t start threatening to leave me again. You know that’s something neither of us has ever done, no matter how angry we might have gotten. We’ve always cared too much for each other to talk such nonsense.”

Taking her small hand in mine, we assessed each other’s eyes. We both saw deep concern, but I saw something else. I saw she was dead serious, and I certainly didn’t like it. Elaina and I had always seen eye-to-eye on almost everything.

Then, suddenly, we both jerked our gazes away. She pulled her hand from mine. We both grabbed our armrests, and I said, “Holy shit!”

The plane had dropped what seemed like twenty feet in a fraction of a second. The aluminum airliner bucked and shimmied, kicked and bounced violently. It was like riding in the belly of a huge, airborne, rodeo bronco. Passengers gasped. A few yelped. There was as much concern in Elaina’s face and eyes as there was in mine. Had our seatbelts not been buckled, everybody onboard would have bounced off the ceiling or worse.

A few seconds and more than a hundred panicky thoughts later, the pilot righted the aircraft. Immediately the captain announced that everything was fine, they had just hit an air pocket. I reached for a cigarette but forced myself to dismiss the idea. The fuselage had filled with hyper-nervous chatter as heads snapped in various directions. It was a long few minutes before everybody finally settled down.

Elaina pulled the collar of her burgundy turtleneck away from her throat as if it would help her breath easier. She let out a deep breath, turned to me while I scoured the ocean far below and said, “Look at me, Tom. I’ve got to ask you something.”

“Yeah, sorry, I was just thinking about something.”

“I know, but it didn’t happen. We’re still up here, thank God.”

Then she changed the tone of her whisper and demanded, “Tell me right here and now, what do you plan on doing with the award money? That’s it, I want to know.”

“Look, hon. You know what I want to do with it. We can hold on to a little more this time, if you want, but I’m giving it to people who need it more than we do, Habitat for Humanity.”

Her face winced, as if I’d rammed a hardened steel blade into her breast and twisted it.

“You just don’t care enough about us anymore, do you, about
me
?” She pulled her eyes from me, clasped her hands behind her neck, rolled her eyes to the overhead luggage rack and said, “I’m leaving you, Tom, tomorrow. You can stay in our rundown apartment while you build homes for total strangers, but I’m getting out. You’ve turned your back on me once too often.”

“How can you say that? What’s happened to you? What’s happened to the Elaina who marched with me in D.C. all those times? Where’s the girl, the woman, who demonstrated at Columbia and all those other schools? Where’s the willful person who vowed at Woodstock to fight to her death against an unjust establishment? Geez,” I paused for a moment, bobbing my head ever so slightly. Then looking around to be sure nobody could hear I said, “Look, hon, we
cannot
talk about this now. It’s absolutely crazy to be whispering away our marriage up here in a plane full of people. Please, let’s wait till we get home.”

“OK, Tom, I’ll wait, but we’re going to resolve this as soon as we get there, one way or another.”

Elaina then reached for the Newsweek, and I slumped into deep thought.