The Book of Joe (2 page)

“Okay, then,” Cindy finally says. “So, we'll see you tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” I say.

As if it happens all the time.

two

I left Bush Falls when I graduated high school and haven't been back since.

There's never been any compelling reason to visit my hometown, and about a million reasons to stay away. My father still lives there, for one, in the four-bedroom colonial where I spent the first eighteen years of my life, and it's been many years since we had any use for each other. Every year, usually around Thanksgiving, Brad calls, inviting me to come stay with him and Cindy, have turkey with the family. But I know he just likes to take the opportunity to feel noble. This is Brad, after all, my older brother by four years, who once sent me to the emergency room by jokingly bearing down on me in our father's weather-beaten Grand Am soon after he'd gotten his driver's license, as I stood innocently shooting hoops in our front yard. The car didn't stop quite where he'd planned, and I ended up with a broken wrist and a separated shoulder, which wasn't what I'd planned either. Later, he claimed that I'd darted out in front of the car without any warning. Whether or not my father believed him was irrelevant, because there was a big game against Fairfield the following night and Bush Falls was counting on Brad to lead the Cougars one game closer to a second state championship. My father would have thought it unseemly to punish the town hero.

Meet the family.

My mother, Linda, was a manic-depressive, diagnosed too late, who gracelessly killed herself by jumping into the Bush River Falls and drowning when I was twelve years old. I can sometimes remember her as she was before the onslaught of her insanity and the subsequent barrage of antidepressants that failed to ease the pain as they slowly choked the vitality out of her—a tall, soft-spoken woman with smiling eyes and an impish grin that always made you feel like you were in on some private joke together. When she kissed me good night, she called me Jo Jo Bear. Her laugh was infectious; her frequent tears a vexing mystery. Brad, my father, and I bobbed violently in the thrashing wake of her suicide, utterly incapable of relating to one another without her gentle feminine presence to corral us.

Ultimately, Brad and my dad found a common ground in basketball. Brad was a star forward for the Bush Falls Cougars, and in Bush Falls you could aspire to nothing greater. He led the Cougars to two state championship titles, breaking a busload of scoring records along the way. He fucked many cheerleaders. That was pretty much all there was to Brad back then, fucking and basketball. Not bad work if you could get it. But I couldn't, and thus Brad could not relate to me but simply viewed me with a mixture of bemused pity and disdain. As far as I was concerned, Brad was a moron, shallow and one-dimensional, and I wanted nothing more than to be him. My father, Arthur, had been a somewhat less spectacular player for the Cougars himself, and he never missed one of Brad's games, home or away. Afterward, they would discuss plays, relive highlights, and watch the UConn games.

If it isn't painfully obvious yet, I never made the team.

Our tragically diminished household had no use for an increasingly cynical kid with a spastic crossover dribble and no outside shot, and I grew to despise the exclusive nature of their devotion to the Cougars and all things basketball. The question of who was responsible for setting in motion this cycle of alienation and resentment is your classic chicken-or-the-egg conundrum, but either way the gulf between us continued to widen, and if my father ever attempted the daredevil feat of crossing it, his efforts were so minuscule as to be invisible from my side of the chasm. Brad was awarded an athletic scholarship to the University of Connecticut and left for college the same year I entered Bush Falls High as a freshman, leaving my father and me alone to fill the inexorable silence that gripped our house in a stranglehold.

I never planned on going back to Bush Falls; that much is obvious. Otherwise, I never would have written a novel that trashed everyone there so thoroughly. The truth is, though, I never actually believed I'd get it published. So I wrote a book about my hometown, about Carly and Sammy and Wayne and the terrible events of my senior year, liberated by the notion that it would never see the light of day. Then Owen Hobbs called me one evening and told me that it was “fucking brilliant.” Not too many people can pull off using expressions like that. Owen can, because Owen is fucking brilliant.

Statistically speaking, it's damn near impossible to write a best-seller. It's also remarkably difficult to piss off an entire town. Overachiever that I am, I managed to accomplish both feats in one fell swoop. When it comes to alienation, I'm something of a prodigy.

So I never planned on going back to Bush Falls. But I never planned on my father having a massive stroke, either, as he played in his Senior Alumni Basketball League in the high school gym late one Friday night. According to Cindy, he'd been standing about three feet to the left of the top of the key, in what he called his sweet spot. He never missed from there. He went up for a jump shot and came down unconscious, sprawled out on the glossy hardwood floor. All the eyewitnesses, ex-jocks in varying states of decline, will forever after make a big deal out of the fact that the shot was good. Like that makes a fucking bit of difference. Sweet spot indeed.

three

I hang up with Cindy and instantly feel the need to call someone. This is all too enormous to contemplate on my own, in the frazzled aftermath of my shattered slumber. My father is near death, and I'll be returning to Bush Falls after seventeen years. I hoist the telephone to my ear and draw a complete blank. Who the hell do I think I'm calling?

Determined to end my cycle of meaningless relationships, I've been experimenting with celibacy for the last six months, and, after a few false starts, I seem to have finally gotten the hang of it. This makes me two things: horny and pathetic. On any given day I might feel one or the other, but as I lie in the dark, nonplussed and alone in the vast, barren acreage of my king-sized bed, an optimistic purchase if there ever was one, it's pathetic by a country mile.

I try to think of a friend to call, and am appalled when I can't come up with any that aren't in some way linked to me professionally. After
Bush Falls
hit the best-seller list, I quit my job and moved from my one-bedroom walk-up on Amsterdam to a three-bedroom co-op on Central Park West, and the metamorphosis from an aspiring writer to a successful one seems to have somehow left me friendless. It's all an indirect but no less acute manifestation of my fuck-you money.

That's what Owen calls it. The advance was one thing: seventy-five thousand, less his fifteen percent, of course, and then another thirty-eight percent or so to taxes. That left me with just under forty thousand dollars, which was certainly nothing to sneeze at, but hardly what could be classified as fuck-you money.

“Oprah no longer picks books,” Owen told me one day shortly after the publication of
Bush Falls
as we sat in his office, brainstorming. “On the bright side, though, she never would have picked yours anyway. It has no long-suffering women, overachieving cripples, or epic journeys to a new spiritual consciousness.” This hardly came as a shock to me. Frankly, I was still reeling from the surprise that they'd published the book at all, let alone paid me a seventy-five-thousand-dollar advance. “So what are we going to do to sell this book?” Owen said with a frown.

“Book tour?” I said.

“You're not a name.”

“Advertising?”

“Same problem.”

“So how does one become a name?”

“By selling many books.”

“Okay. And how do we do that?”

Owen frowned at me from behind his desk. “Oprah.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “People sold books before there was Oprah.”

He nodded absently, lost in thought. “I have an idea,” he said.

Owen arranged for Paperbacks Plus, Bush Falls's local bookstore, to receive a large quantity of first editions at no charge. He then sent one of his clients, who also happened to be a staff writer for the
New York Times,
to Bush Falls to seek out some of the people portrayed in the book and interview them. The resulting article, “A Town Exposed,” combined with Owen's incessant badgering, was enough to get someone at the Book Review to pay attention, and
Bush Falls
received a full-page write-up the following Sunday. The
Times
review was all Owen needed to launch his publicity machine. Within a month my little novel had been written up in
People, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire,
and a slew of other major magazines.
Bush Falls
made its first best-seller list about three months after it hit the bookshelves, and there was suddenly a dramatic increase in the number of digits in my royalty checks. When we found out we'd made the list, Owen actually jumped up onto his hand-carved Chinese cherrywood desk and danced a crazy little Owen jig. Then he flew off to Frankfurt and sold the European rights collectively for $250,000, and then went out to L.A., where he sold the film rights to Universal for five times that, and through it all the royalty checks continued to gain weight. Six months later, still on the list, I was sitting on more money than I could have expected to make in a lifetime of working in brand marketing, which is what I used to do before I got a life.

“You now officially have your fuck-you money,” Owen announced gleefully over steaks at Peter Luger's. He'd transformed the reporting of my monthly sales figures into a casual dinner ceremony compliments of the agency, although if you did the math, I was the one who really paid. But I chose not to think of it that way, because it was fun to be important, to be a major breadwinner for the agency. Also, as I said before, I don't have very many friends.

“My fuck-you money,” I repeated.

“You bet,” Owen said, sipping at his wine. He's somewhat overweight at thirty-one, with stringy blond hair and a ruddy, freckled complexion. Exceptionally literate and flamboyantly aggressive, he's fast becoming one of the most influential agents in the industry. Something about his full, grinning lips, his baby face, and the way his fat bulges forcefully against the constraints of his expensive, custom shirts all contribute to a subliminal impression of secret, nihilistic excess. A Roman emperor between orgies.

“What, exactly, is fuck-you money?” I asked him.

He picked up two fries, dipped them into his ketchup mound, and tossed them into his mouth, their twin ends protruding briefly from his lips like the legs of the expendable cast member being devoured by a Spielberg dinosaur. “It's money,” he told me between noisy, sloshing chews, “that allows you to say fuck you to anyone: your boss, your family, ex-girlfriends, whoever. Anyone you ever had to take shit from because you depended on them. You're your own dog now. You don't need anyone anymore.”

I looked across the table at him. “So I break even.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nobody needs me, either.”

Owen made a mock sad face at that, then grinned wickedly and said,
“I
need you.”

         

He was right about the money. It's purchased me my new apartment, my new Mercedes convertible—a CLK 430 Cabriolet—and its obscenely expensive parking spot, a ridiculously large home entertainment center, and an assortment of other predictable extravagances. And I was right about no one's needing me, a fact I usually manage to avoid with an elaborate array of scrupulously employed defense mechanisms. But confronted with the prospect of seeing my father and Brad again, and returning to Bush Falls after almost seventeen years, smoke and mirrors will no longer protect me from what I've really known all along: that I'm pretty much alone in the world. Me and my fuck-you money.

Have I mentioned my penchant for self-pity? It's part of my charm.

I roll slowly out of bed, feeling twice my age, pull on a T-shirt, and pad down the hall for a late-night snack of cinnamon toast and POWERade. There's no avoiding the imminent onslaught of my hangover, but I've recently discovered, in an enterprise born either of desperation or an abundance of free time, that POWERade laced with liquid Tylenol effectively softens the blow. I'm not looking forward to morning, but still, it seems a long way off. I turn on my absurdly large flat-screen television and watch an Australian dude hopped up on caffeine dive into a swamp with two large crocodiles, ostensibly to demonstrate the proper way this sort of thing should be done. Shortly after three
A.M.,
my nerves jangling from the electrolyte rush of my hangover cocktail, I say screw it and call Owen. I figure I owe him fifteen percent of my sleepless night.

four

All roads lead back to Bush Falls.

I'm not speaking metaphorically. Just about every highway leaving the island of Manhattan to the north can get you there. You can take the Harlem River Drive to the Cross Bronx Expressway, which becomes the New England Thruway, and ride that all the way up to Bush Falls. Or you can take the Henry Hudson Parkway to the Saw Mill to the Cross County to the Hutchinson River Parkway, then get on the Merritt Parkway, which winds its way in a serpentine trail through the southern half of Connecticut. From the Merritt you pick up I-91, which will take you all the way out to Hartford and just past it to the Falls: more highways, less traffic. Or you can combine the two routes by taking the Merritt and then switching to the Thruway via the I-287 interchange. Despite this veritable smorgasbord of highways, I haven't once, in the last seventeen years, seen fit to take any of them to Bush Falls.

I sit behind the wheel of my silver Mercedes the next morning, idling at the curb just outside the Kinney garage where it's usually parked, paralyzed by indecision concerning which route to take for the two-and-a-half-hour drive. It's a clear, room temperature morning, but the discerning eye will note a visible diminishment of exposed flesh on the women on their way to work. Summer is over, and I can't recall its even having arrived. I'm stalling again. I don't want to go. My father hasn't ever been there for me. Why should I now have to be there for him? It's not like he'll notice me anyway, what with him being in a coma and all.

But I know I'll go, for the same reason Brad calls me every year with halfhearted invitations to various holiday meals. Because that's what you do. When you have a younger brother living on his own in Manhattan, you call him around the holidays, bursting with artificial familiarity and contrived bonhomie. And when your father has a life-threatening stroke in his sweet spot, you shelve seventeen years of bad blood and drive out to be there. Not to necessarily help, or even offer support, but simply because it's where you belong. Blood will separate, if need be, but its call is primordial, and it won't be refused.

The Motorola V.60 mounted on my dashboard rings and I flip it open, activating the car's speakerphone. “Hello?”

“Misogynist!”

Natalie.

“You're a petty, whining, self-absorbed schmuck without a clue how to love or be loved. You'll never understand what it means to care for another person more than you care for yourself, and you'll die miserable and alone!”

I want to tell her that I'm miserable and alone now, but she's already hung up.

“You have a nice day too,” I say softly, affectionately even, and, with a final, epic sigh, throw the car into drive and turn onto Ninety-sixth Street, toward the West Side Highway. It's a safe bet your world has gone to shit when an angry phone call from a bipolar ex-girlfriend will probably be the high point of your day.

It's nine-thirty
A.M.,
still theoretically rush hour, but I'll be driving north, against traffic. Keeping one eye on the road, I reach absently into the messy heap of CDs scattered on the seat beside me, an eclectic assortment symptomatic of a vague and misguided effort to transcend my actual age. It's not necessarily that I'm afraid of aging; I just refuse to do it alone. And so, at thirty-four, I'm listening to Everclear, Blink 182, Dashboard Confessional, Foo Fighters, and a host of other contemporary stuff. My audio Rogaine. I've somehow managed to beat the odds and keep a full head of hair, but that's really beside the point. We're all going bald somewhere.

Besides, I come from the eighties, a neon, hair-sprayed decade from which very little music made it out alive. When was the last time you heard Men at Work, Thompson Twins, or Alphaville on a mainstream radio station? The music from my youth has aged poorly and is now like a joke out of context. You had to be there.

And yet my fingers continue to dig, past No Doubt and Ben Folds, until they locate an old copy of Springsteen's
Born to Run.
There are some things that do transcend time and age, and the Boss is one of them. I slide the CD in, and it instantly takes me back, in that way only music can, to my bedroom in Bush Falls, where I wore out the record on the Fisher stereo I'd gotten as an eighth-grade graduation gift from my father. That was about nine months after my mother died, and he was still handing out consolation prizes. The stereo had been his grand finale, and soon after that he retreated permanently to his den to get drunk nightly in the company of his old high school basketball trophies, leaving the house only for work and Cougars games.

As I drive through the tolls in Riverdale, I dial Owen's office number. His anal-retentive secretary, Stuart, answers in a crisp, officious voice. “Owen Hobbs's office.”

“Can I have Owen, please?”

“Mr. Hobbs is in a meeting right now,” he says automatically. “May I ask who's calling?”

“It's Joe Goffman.”

“Oh, Mr. Goffman!” Stuart gushes, suddenly the epitome of warmth and graciousness. “How have you been? I didn't recognize your voice.”

“That's because we rarely speak.” Stuart is a typically arrogant gatekeeper, a self-important poseur Owen keeps around for the sheer amusement of it, and while I usually relish the way he can be instantly transformed into a shameless sycophant where I'm concerned, today I'm not in the mood. “Please tell him it's me.”

“Of course,” Stuart says, and I can tell he's miffed. “Everything okay?”

“Peachy.”

The hold music is “Band on the Run,” and Paul McCartney's voice comes pouring through my speakerphone with surprising clarity, clashing with the Springsteen on my stereo. I turn off the Springsteen at the same instant that Owen's scratchy voice replaces McCartney's, and thus we avoid a historical duet. “Hey, Joe.” He sounds hoarse and groggy, which is at least partially my fault, since I kept him on the phone until close to five this morning.

“Sorry about last night. I hope I wasn't interrupting anything,” I say, although with Owen you're almost always interrupting something. The man keeps his social life hopping with a frenetic, almost desperate intensity. It's as if he's worried that if he took one night off, the wild circus of his life would pull up stakes and leave town without him.

“I'd pretty much gotten my money's worth from Sasha by then,” he says with a low snicker.

“Sasha?”

“A Romanian nurse, if I understood her credentials properly.”

“I see.”

Owen's brazen patronage of high-end call girls is legendary in the publishing industry. He is currently working his way through the “sensual role play” ads in the back of
New York
magazine, gleefully reporting to me after every encounter.

“You heading up to the Falls now?” he asks. “The Falls” is a term used only by the locals, and it's just like Owen to insinuate himself like that.

“As we speak.”

“Well, I hope your dad's doing better.”

“Thanks,” I say, feeling suddenly guilty, as if I might be perpetrating a fraud of some kind by accepting sympathetic wishes on behalf of my father. “Did you get the pages?”

“They were waiting for me this morning,” he says after the slightest pause. Owen is not a man typically given to pauses.

“Have you read them?”

“Some.”

Given the success we enjoyed with
Bush Falls,
Owen has been eagerly awaiting my new manuscript, which I've been promising him for the last year. I actually finished it about six months ago but have withheld that information, since I'm not particularly thrilled with the finished product. The conventional wisdom about fiction, according to Owen, is that first novels are generally highly autobiographical works, and mine certainly does nothing to contradict that notion. It's the sophomore effort that confirms a writer's ability and relevance in the literary marketplace, because that's theoretically the work wherein he must truly harness his imagination and voice to create something from nothing. The publishing world is awash in blood from the slit wrists of all the one-trick ponies.

“You hate it,” I say.

“No.” I hear the unmistakable grind and click of his cigarette lighter. “There are actually some wonderful sections.”

“There's a big ‘but' hanging over that sentence.”

Owen sighs. “I never had you pegged as a magical realist.”

“I do it pretty sparingly,” I object. “It's an atmospheric conceit.”

“It's a pretentious distraction,” Owen says dismissively. “Look at me, pushing the literary envelope! It doesn't work. Magical realism is not a movement or a technique. It's a novelty act, and the novelty's long gone. Readers will tolerate it from Marquez and Calvino because the
New York Times
tells them to. You're a Jew from Manhattan and no one's going to cut you that slack. It's bullshit.”

“Why don't you tell me what you really think?”

“I think you're too good a writer to waste your time with experimental postmodernism.”

I test the waters of his remark for patronizing levels and decide that he's being sincere. “Well, other than that, how are you finding the narrative?”
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the show?

“Honestly, Joe, I think the subject matter is beneath you.”

It's shocking, really, how with one sentence he is able put into words what I've spent six months trying to pin down to no avail. The novel—working title:
It Starts Here—
is about a kid who drops out of college to follow a Grateful Dead–like band around the country for a few months with a woman he's only just met. He's running away from his privileged upbringing, and she's fleeing an abusive husband and the law. Romance and chaos ensue amid the tie-dyed backdrop of the rock-and-roll bedouin culture. Not the most original premise in the world, but I really did start the novel with the best of literary intentions, meaning to tell a contemporary love story while examining the way in which people struggle against America's invisible class system. The spare combination of two main characters and their unique spin on a universal theme should have kept me focused on the story without being overly ambitious. But they made the movie of
Bush Falls
while I was writing
It Starts Here,
and there is no denying that the film perverted my writing. I was blocking shots instead of describing scenes, an entirely transparent and unacceptable practice when writing outside the milieu of courtrooms and serial killers.

“Listen,” Owen says. “I'm barely into it, so this conversation is premature. Talk to me after the weekend.”

“But we've ruled out loving it.”

“Does it get better?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Ah.”

“Don't ‘ah' me.”

“Hmm,” Owen says.

“So,” I say after a bit. “What now?”

He coughs lightly. “Listen, Joe, you're a good writer. Blah, blah, blah. You don't have to prove anything to me. But I really don't want to talk about this until I've read it all. Then we can sit down and decide what it needs.”

What it needs, I suspect, is to be taken out back and given the Old Yeller treatment. “And if it needs to be scrapped?”

“Then we'll scrap it,” he says easily. “And you'll write me something else. Happens all the time.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“It's not my job to jerk you off. You want to feel better, go back to therapy. My job is to make you write better, and it's been my considerable experience that the worse you feel, the better you write.”

“Wonderful,” I say dejectedly. I don't bother to point out that I've been fairly miserable for the last six months and haven't managed to write a single sentence worth shit and that it positively terrifies me to think that I might be one of those poor slobs who have only one book in them.

Owen changes the subject. “So, you're going back to the Falls. Let me once again say wow. This could be interesting.”

“I'm just hoping for quick.”

“Well, keep me posted. I want to hear every last detail.”

“Owen,” I say. “Sometime in the future, you really should consider getting a life of your own.”

He chuckles. “I had one once and discovered that they're overrated. Besides, I don't need one anymore. I have yours.”

“'Bye.”

I hit the
END
button, turn the stereo back on, and step a little harder on the accelerator. The engine responds instantly with a deep, low growl. Within minutes I'm on the Merritt Parkway, luxuriating in the way the Mercedes chews up the dipping curves of the two-lane blacktop. I'm still in the formative stages of a love-hate relationship with the car. There's no denying that it handles like a dream, practically anticipating my every move. But on the other hand, everyone who can afford a Mercedes doesn't necessarily belong in one, and I'm becoming increasingly convinced that I fit into that category. The car embarrasses me, and I sometimes find myself grinning apologetically at passing motorists in Fords and Toyotas, as if those perfect strangers know I'm really one of them, out doing some unseemly social climbing. The sleek German design was never intended to house my petty insecurity.

The Parkway winds its way through the green Connecticut foliage, the outer edges of the leaves just beginning to glow red, signifying the approaching autumn. I sing along loudly to “Thunder Road” in an attempt to distract myself from the anxiety rising in me with each passing mile, but it's no use. I'm assaulted by a steady barrage of scenes from my past that flash by too quickly for proper identification but nonetheless leave me feeling vaguely disturbed. And then, as I'm passing Norwalk, Bruce begins singing “Backstreets” and, as if on cue, Sammy Haber emerges without warning from the back of my mind, striding purposefully across the stage of my brain in his checkered pants and that ridiculous pompadour. The image is so complete, so overwhelmingly perfect, that I feel my throat constrict and tears well up unbidden in my eyes. I take a deep breath, but the tears continue to come, blurring my vision, and I have to quickly pull over onto the anorexic shoulder of the highway, choking back an astonished sob as I throw the car into park.