A Tragic Honesty (86 page)

Every so often the awfulness would overwhelm Yates, and he'd go from soda to beer to bourbon and back to the hospital. His health was such that any kind of sustained drinking was all but guaranteed to cause a breakdown. That winter Wendy Sears called to check on Yates, who gagged and gurgled on the phone for some fifteen minutes before finally hacking out,
“Help me
.
”
Sears was afraid of what she'd find in Yates's apartment, and called around until DeWitt Henry agreed to investigate. He and Brodigan found Yates unconscious in a room spattered with blood and garbage. When Sears visited Yates a few days later at the VA, he seemed in a daze of pain and didn't speak; she thought he was dying. The next week Yates called with the cheery news that he was back home and feeling much better. He'd been taken off lithium and given Tegretol, which (it was hoped) would do double duty in controlling his seizures and manic episodes. But none of it was any good, of course, if Yates wouldn't stop drinking.

It had been a bad year all around. That summer Yates's beloved friend Andre Dubus was hit by a car and permanently crippled; in September his left leg was amputated at the knee. There would be no more hilarious, comforting get-togethers at the Crossroads or Yates's apartment. Meanwhile Yates did what he could. Amid the mixed literary company of John Irving, Jayne Anne Phillips, Updike, Vonnegut, and others, Yates participated in a benefit reading that February at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge to raise money for Dubus's medical expenses. While Dubus smiled at him from a portable hospital bed in the back of the ballroom, Yates kicked off the event with his story “Trying Out for the Race,” which he described as “a little tarnished, but it'll have to do.” When he finished—“charm[ing] the audience with a quiet, dreamy tale,” according to the
Boston Globe
—he introduced the next reader, Vonnegut, who (Yates said) had promised to be “just as long and just as lugubrious.”

Nothing much happened to Yates for another five months, when his second grandchild Emily was born July 17, 1987. Yates took a shuttle flight to New York and left the same day, lingering long enough to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Sharon and, once again, take his son-in-law out for a celebratory drink. As Yates was leaving the hospital he heard a familiar voice— “Hi, Dick!”—and there was his first wife Sheila, whom he hadn't laid eyes on in twenty years. Startled, he dropped something to the floor but was too feeble to bend over and pick it up; Sheila handed it to him. “He was so weak and done in,” she remembered. “His life was over. And we had nothing to say to each other.” Later Yates called Sharon and expressed his amazement: “My God, she's an old lady! She let her hair go white!”

*   *   *

By the end of the summer it was clear that
Uncertain Times
wouldn't be finished by November or anywhere close. Nor was there any question of renegotiating his contract: Yates had no agent, no capacity for handling such matters on his own, and no semi-tractable publisher such as Sam Lawrence. By a somewhat happy coincidence, his friend DeWitt Henry was then acting chair of the creative writing program at Emerson, and was able to provide Yates a one-semester appointment teaching undergraduates; after that he was on his own. By then Yates was viewed in Boston (and beyond) as an unemployable drunk, but if he managed to acquit himself at Emerson he might regain a measure of credibility. That was the idea anyway, and in fact Yates rose to the occasion rather nicely: He met all his classes and even recommended a student's work for the “Discovery” issue of
Ploughshares,
writing an introduction to the accepted story.

But it was shaping up to be a cold winter. With his advance gone and the semester almost over, Yates was facing total destitution, and even the better-case scenarios were grim: The Emerson job had served to remind him that he had neither the energy nor the desire to teach anymore, yet the alternatives were nil, and he'd have to count himself fortunate if anyone was willing to hire him at all; meanwhile he was forced to borrow money from Vonnegut, whose affable eagerness to help didn't make the request any less excruciating. Only three years before he'd been an NEA Senior Fellow, America's “least famous great writer” according to
Esquire,
and all his books (but one) were back in print for the first time in years; now, at age sixty-one, he'd be lucky to keep a roof over his head. On the other hand, it was more than a little miraculous that he was even alive.

And then a number of things happened to remind Yates that, as he put it, “the world [wasn't] really at [his] throat after all.” Dubus, Vonnegut, and others got the word out that Yates was in trouble, and benefactors soon began to appear. For years Dubus and George Starbuck had been urging Don Hendrie at the University of Alabama to hire Yates, his old teacher, for the prestigious (and lucrative) Coal Royalty Endowed Chair in Writing. Clearly the time was now, but the earliest Hendrie could schedule Yates was the fall 1988 semester; it was possible, though, that an interim stipend could be worked out if Yates was willing to read student manuscripts and visit the odd class. The thought of living in the Deep South (“fucking
Dixie
”) was anathema to Yates for any number of reasons, but this time he couldn't see a way around it. By December he'd arranged to forward his mail to the Alabama English Department, but then a most improbable savior intervened.

Yates's old nemesis David Milch was now in Los Angeles as producer of the hit TV series
Hill Street Blues
. Looking back, Milch can't recall who told him of Yates's predicament; in any case Milch was in a position to help and didn't hesitate to do so, though he realized he'd have to make it seem like a legitimate job offer lest his proud old teacher refuse. He invited Yates to write treatments for TV pilots, and assured him he'd have plenty of time left over to finish his novel—anyway they'd work out the details later, and meanwhile Yates was welcome to stay in Milch's guest house for as long as he liked. Yates was in no position to question such generosity. As for Milch, he wonders if he was fully conscious of his own motives at the time. “As Katherine Anne Porter once said,” he remarked, “‘I never heard of a perfect synonym, or an unmixed motive.'”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A Cheer for Realized Men: 1988-1992

By February, Yates had moved into Milch's guest house and was hard at work on some treatments proposed by his benefactor: One idea concerned two families with lots of foster children, a kind of postmodern
Brady Bunch
meets
Eight Is Enough
; another was about a group of young newspaper reporters living in a communal house in Washington, D.C. Yates despised the work (“There were a lot of jokes on the word ‘treatment,'” his daughter Monica recalls), but Milch was covering his room, board, and child-support payments—as well as dispensing plenty of “walking-around money” as he called it—so Yates bent himself to the task of contriving joys and sorrows related to the business of communal living. “I remember Milch well,” Vonnegut wrote Yates, “since he took a strong dislike to me, which, you will agree, I'm sure, makes about as much sense as hating hot fudge sundaes or Helen Hayes.” Vonnegut wryly observed that
Hill Street Blues
was “a very important work of art,” but applauded the fact that Milch had “thrown lucrative work in the direction of good writers who would like to make some real money for a change.”

Yates was miserable. He desperately wanted to believe that he was doing something worthwhile for Milch—at any rate he was determined to persuade Milch of that fact—but something in the latter's manner belied any such hope. “How we doin' today, Sport?” Milch would greet him of a morning, clapping him on the shoulder. (“That little shit! He called me ‘Sport'!” Yates raged wonderingly to a friend.) At other times, though, the two would sit and talk about writing, at seeming ease with each other; Gina Yates, who knew how damaging the arrangement was to her father's ego, nevertheless got the distinct impression that Yates and Milch were friends. And really Milch
was
fond of Yates—perhaps more so than he'd anticipated—but at the same time he harbored “a real undisclosed anger” for having been bullied and rejected all those years before at Iowa: “It was kind of an ongoing humiliation for Dick to be the recipient of generosity,” said Milch. “Thank God I wasn't aware of it consciously, but in retrospect all those elements fed into it. This was payback for ‘Wouldn't you like to be David Milch?'”

After tactfully rejecting a number of treatments, Milch suggested that TV work wasn't Yates's line and encouraged him to go back to his novel. Yates was crestfallen. He proposed that part of his debt to Milch—which would eventually climb to $36,000—could serve as an option on
Uncertain Times,
and he constantly assured Milch that he'd pay back the rest of it one way or the other. Whatever he proposed was fine with Milch (“Fine, fine”), but the whole situation was far from fine with Yates: “He chafed and chafed and chafed that this young snotnose was supporting him,” said Monica. “He was
always
growling about the $36,000 he owed Milch:
‘I'll get him that goddamn $36,000!'
It wasn't an issue to Milch, but Dad wouldn't drop it.” Meanwhile Yates's cigarette fumes were forever wafting about chez Milch, an otherwise smoke-free environment where children lived besides. “Well, if there's no real work for me out here,” Yates stiffly told his host one day, “I guess I'll go home and tie up some loose ends.” Milch said that was fine.

After a long despondent bender in Boston, Yates reappeared in Los Angeles looking as if he were on the verge of death. His hands trembled, he couldn't catch his breath, he seemed in pain all the time. He was frantic to finish his novel, but equally to do whatever he could to earn his keep with Milch. Milch was appalled: He urged Yates to concentrate on his health and novel, in that order, and let the rest go; they formalized a financial arrangement and found an apartment for Yates in west Los Angeles. Naturally Yates insisted on something spartan, and he got it: a furnished one-bedroom in a motel-like complex built around a shabby courtyard. On the orange shag carpet Yates set up a card table for his manual Royal, then nailed three portraits of his daughters to the wall and that was that. The apartment—as noted by a reporter who later interviewed Yates there—“was the kind of place people hole up when they're on the lam from the law.”

Other than Milch, Yates's only companion during these months was a three-hundred-pound recovering heroin addict named Larry, who was dying of AIDS. Milch had put the man up in an apartment near Yates's, and in return Larry cooked breakfast for Milch's children and served as Yates's chauffeur. “Larry and Dick formed the most unlikely duo,” Milch remarked with twinkling understatement. “They were the best thing in each of their lives. Driving Dick around gave Larry something to do during the day, and gave Dick something to bitch about.” The poignant Larry seemed to provoke Yates in a number of ways: The car always stank of his cigars (though he was careful to put them out as soon as Yates got in), and he insisted on taking Yates to intolerable movies; also, he was morbidly devoted to David Milch and Narcotics Anonymous, and Yates thought it was all a bunch of hokum—both Larry's ease with accepting charity and his faith in twelve-step programs. Mainly Yates was exasperated by the hopelessness of the man: When he wasn't placidly resigned to whatever remained of his life, he tended to dwell on the guilt he felt for being a bad father during his addict days. “You're a
hive
of regret!” Yates would explode. “Dick resented everything about Larry, but in fact adored him,” said Milch. “He'd gather all his strength to berate Larry's taste in movies or whatever, then he'd be tired and go to sleep, and Larry could go home. That's why Larry was such a gift to Dick: Dick's ranting was just background music to Larry, who understood it for what it was.”

Yates's rancor spared no one; indeed, at times, it seemed the only thing keeping him alive. Once he'd gotten over his initial gratitude, he became particularly abusive toward Milch, as if he were baiting the man to cast him into the outer darkness. As Milch recalled, “A necessary precondition for any conversation with Dick was to spend five or ten minutes on the extent to which I'd abused my gifts and abdicated my responsibilities as a writer. By then he was out of breath so we couldn't talk about anything else.” In the end Milch was no more offended by such bluster than Larry—if anything it was simply painful to witness, as when Yates would insist on showing Milch bits of manuscript to prove his novel really existed. But no matter how pitiful Yates occasionally seemed, he commanded respect and hence forgiveness; he was struggling to keep his dignity, and he refused to give up.

One day he asked Milch to meet him for dinner at the Bicycle Café on Wilshire. (The place was around the corner from Yates's apartment, and soon became his Crossroads and Blue Mill in Los Angeles.) “After the usual diatribe about my having embraced everything philistine and inauthentic in American culture,” Milch remembered, “we settled down to business. It was hard for Dick to ask for anything: You had to figure out what he wanted, offer it to him, then be lambasted for a while for having offered it.” Yates embarked on an elaborate preamble about how “full of shit” Hollywood parties were, how Milch's parties were liable to be worse than most (“I'd never been to a Hollywood party,” said Milch, “but I was trying to agree with him in principle”), full of “fucking Hollywood phonies” and so forth. Then Yates segued to the topic of his sixteen-year-old daughter Gina, who was coming out for a visit; he hadn't seen her in a long time, etc. “Dick, I have an idea,” said Milch, getting the picture. “Why don't we have a party?” Yates consented, and seemed pleased with the result: The other guests made much of him, and Gina seemed to enjoy herself and plainly adored her father. At some point the tipsy Yates, expansive with happiness, made to embrace Gina and caught his thumb in her hoop earring, tearing the lobe. As the blood gushed from her ear, Yates became abject, and Gina forgot her own distress and fell to consoling him. “It was so sad,” said Milch, “and yet a perfect moment from one of Dick's stories: the best of intentions, but some fundamental inauthenticity or incapacity with devastating results … and yet something transcendently beautiful in the failure of the moment.”