After the Workshop (10 page)

“What about
Finnegans Wake
?” I asked him.

“Crap,” he said, depositing the tooth-gray nugget of spent gum in the ashtray. He unwrapped a new stick and popped it into his mouth. I expected him to say more about
Finnegans Wake
, but he didn’t.

Gordon Grimes was notoriously rough in workshop. One time he held up a particularly bad story with the tips of his forefinger and thumb, and asked, “What smells like shit in here?” Another time, he spent an hour berating a student who had misspelled the word
fluorescent
, which also happened to be the story’s title. “Don’t you own a dictionary?” he asked. “Imagine Faulkner misspelling ‘sanctuary,’ for Christ’s sake. Imagine Hemingway not taking the time to look up the proper spelling of Kilimanjaro.” On yet another occasion, he spent the entire four hours of workshop reading aloud, sentence by sentence, a story that he most likely hadn’t read
before
coming to class. He now painstakingly questioned every choice made by the author, a young woman named Betsy McKay. “Why is there a semicolon here? Why is the relationship between
this
sentence and
that
one so important that it
requires
a semicolon? Can anyone explain this to me? Oh, and why the paragraph break here? Can anyone show me where the transition is? If the reader starts thinking that your choices are random, well, then, you’re through. You’re
done
! The reader is going to toss your precious work into the fireplace. Who wants to read a story in which the author hasn’t questioned every word, every comma, every break in paragraph?” Not even the sound of Betsy weeping moved Gordon to stop the assault. Only after Betsy, unable to take any more, left the room did Gordon, broken from his own trance, finally look up. His bloodshot eyes searched the
room for his victim. We were well into the fourth hour of the interrogation. Without acknowledging Betsy’s abrupt departure, Gordon said, “Okay, then. I guess that’s all for today.”

Gordon’s were workshops of either tough love or masochistic persecution, depending upon the quality of light in which you viewed it. But Gordon liked me, and, more importantly, he liked my fiction. Most nights, we ended up at the Foxhead at about the same time and wrote our names on the chalkboard for the pool table.

“Sheahan!” he often yelled. “Are you sure you want to make that shot? The side pockets are the hard pockets!” Or else, in an attempt to throw me off my game, he would yell, “Are you sure that’s the English you want to put on the ball?
Think
about it before you shoot!”

Once, when he accidentally separated an otherwise tight-knit group of solids while leaning over to shoot another solid, Gordon raised up, smiled at the new, more promising configuration of pool balls, and said, “Hey, whaddya know?” as if the balls had separated of their own volition. By then, he was back to drinking whiskey and smoking. Groups of workshop students surrounded him—he had a guru’s following—and he would make offhand comments about how
this
writer or
that
one was whoring himself by working in Hollywood or writing thrillers under pseudonyms. “I’m not saying it’s wrong,” he added. “Everyone whores himself every now and then.” But you could tell that he
did
think it was wrong, even though he himself had spent considerable time doing hackwork.

I occasionally sat with the group, but mostly I remained in a booth across from everyone, alone, separating myself from all the bootlickers, even though I knew deep down that I too was one. I focused on the pool table instead, on whatever game was being played, ignoring the whoops of my classmates each time Gordon Grimes insulted one of his contemporaries or even, after a long night of drinking, one of our own classmates.

Gordon Grimes was responsible for awarding me the much-coveted teaching-writing fellowship—the TWIF—given to only four fiction writers each year, and he was the one who had sent my short story, “The Self-Adhesive Postage Stamp,” to an editor at
The New Yorker
. The story appeared in the magazine three months later, which, as I later gathered, was practically unheard of. He also guest-edited the volume of
Best American Short Stories
in which my story was reprinted. In other words, Gordon Grimes was single-handedly responsible for my meteoric rise. When he finally succumbed to cirrhosis, his wife Jenna, whom I had met but didn’t really know, called to ask if I could say a few words at his wake, and though I agreed, I went to the Foxhead instead and drank until I could barely walk and then got arrested for public intoxication after calling a cop “a little pinheaded Nazi,” all of which, I believed at the time, was what Gordon would have preferred. I later apologized to the cop, but I couldn’t ever bring myself to call Jenna Grimes. What kind of man stands up his mentor’s widow, abandoning her at the funeral home? A shit-heel. That’s what kind.

Why all of this was swirling through my head the morning I awoke after the disappearance of Vanessa Roberts, I didn’t know. Gordon Grimes had been dead for over two years. My days in the Workshop were a lifetime ago: a rapidly receding memory.

S. S. Pitzer was sitting on my couch, holding my manuscript box in his lap. Half the manuscript’s pages were face-down on the coffee table.

“No, no,” I said. “You don’t want to do that.”

S. S. looked up. “
This
,” he said, looking down at what he was holding and then back up at me, “is a masterpiece.”

“Please, no,” I begged. “I really wish you wouldn’t.”

“I can’t stop now, for God’s sake!” he yelled. “But I have to ask you. Where’s the rest of it?” He held up the box, as if to prove how light it was.

“I never finished it.”

“You
what
?”

“I got stuck. And then I finally gave up.” I considered telling him that he was responsible for me giving up, but as soon as the words formed in my head, they seemed too preposterous to say aloud. A lie.

“That can’t be,” he said, physically wilting, as though I had just told him about the death of a mutual friend.

I shrugged. I made a face to show that these things happen.

“Did you start writing another one?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Not really.”

“Short stories?” he asked. “Poems?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh-oh, I know,” he said. “Creative nonfiction. A memoir! Those are hot now, aren’t they? Or perhaps their time has already come and gone.”

“Nothing,” I said. And then to end the conversation, I added, “I gave up. Now if you’ll excuse me.” I could see that S. S. had wanted to pursue the subject, but before he could say another word, I pressed the playback button on my answering machine.

The first dozen messages were, as I had guessed, from Lauren Castle. In each message, Lauren berated me, calling me “irresponsible” and “childish.” In a few of the messages, she claimed that my behavior bordered on criminal intent. What followed were a few desperate messages from M. Cat begging me to make Lauren stop calling him, that he was going out of his mind. “Dude,” he said in one message, “this is, like,
your
problem? Not
mine
?”

All of these were left before I had dispatched M. Cat to find Vanessa, so I busied myself making coffee and brushing my teeth while more rebukes came in from Lauren. In one, she said, “Do you have any idea of the damage I could do to you, you shithead? I’m the head of
publicity for a major New York publisher! That may not mean much to you out there in Ohio or Iowa or whatever the hell cowpoke state you live in, but it means something where I live, goddamn it. It means something in New York
fucking
City!” In her next message, she started pleading with me. “
Please
,” she began. “
Please
call me back. Vanessa Roberts’s book is poised to be number one on
The New York Times
best-seller list. We just went into a second six-digit print-run. If she stops touring, she’ll lose all this momentum. Bookstores will start sending back all those copies. I don’t
even
want to think about that. Have you ever seen a warehouse full of a book that tanked? I have, and it’s not pretty. I started out working in a warehouse—yeah, that’s right:
me, in a warehouse
!—when sales for Jay McInerney’s
Story of My Life
went south. We must have gotten a hundred thousand of those books back. Maybe two hundred thousand. Do you know what a hundred thousand books look like? Picture it, would you? You can’t, can you? Well, then, can you imagine the psychological effect that that many returns has on—” The answering machine cut her off. The next message began, “Fuck it. What do you care? You’re just a writer wannabe, right? You’re just a slacker hanging out in a college town at his local coffee shop, wearing a beret—Am I right? Are you wearing a beret right now?—writing the Great American Novel on legal pads. Is this a bull’s-eye or what? You probably smoke clove cigarettes and drink Jameson’s but don’t eat meat. You know what? You’re pathetic. You’re a living, walking cliché, and I bet deep down you know it too. Don’t you?”

S. S. had wandered over to where I stood by the coffeemaker.

“Want a cup?” I asked.

“Who
is
this awful woman?” he asked.

“Oh, her? She’s just a publicist,” I said. “But I don’t take it personally. They’re all like that.”

“Really? They don’t treat
me
that way,” he said.

“Of course they wouldn’t. But media escorts? We’re at the bottom of the food chain. Oh, wait: Here comes another one,” I said, tipping my head toward the answering machine.

“I’m booking a flight there even as I speak,” she said. “Travelocity, baby. Travel-fucking-ocity.”

The answering machine gave one final, long beep—the equivalent of an electronic sigh. There were no more messages.

“Did she just say she was coming here?” I asked.

“She did indeed,” S. S. said. “But have you peeked outside yet?”

I walked to the living room’s bay window, pulled back the curtain, and peered out into the blinding whiteness. A man wearing a snowsuit was using a shovel to dig his car out. Two kids on plastic sleds slid down East Burlington, where, on a normal day, they would have been run over by a Heartland Express semi. Even the tops of stoplights were piled high with snow, like frosting on a cupcake. Each time I breathed, steam covered the window, and I finally had to reach up and wipe it away with my forearm, just to see out.

“She won’t make it,” S. S. said. “Not today.” He sighed and said, “Oh well.”

“Shit,” I said and, coffee cup in hand, left my apartment and walked across the hall, pounding on M. Cat’s door. I pounded several times, but there was still no answer. Back inside my own apartment, I explained the situation to S. S.—the disappearance of Vanessa, followed by my foolhardy decision to ask M. Cat to go looking for her—but in the midst of my story, I remembered that I was talking to a man who had himself effectively disappeared not for a day or a week or a month but for several years.

When I finished talking, S. S. shrugged and said, “She’ll turn up. I wouldn’t worry.”

S
. S. HAD TAUGHT in the University of California system for twenty years before his novel
Winter’s Ghosts
hit the
Times
best-seller list, and then, like that, he simply disappeared. Sometimes I wondered if it was the teaching, rather than success, that had driven him into hiding. During my two years in the Workshop, I taught introductory fiction writing courses and entertained the idea, after reading a stack of my students’ stories, of shooting myself in front of my class. If ever there was a course designed to drive a person away from teaching, it was short story workshop. My students, by and large, took the course to scratch a creative itch, but few of them had read anything other than what they’d been assigned in school, and most of them had resented the little they’d been made to read. If they had read anything on their own, it was usually a novel featuring vampires, or it was John Grisham’s latest, or maybe it was a novelization of
Star Trek
. The worst were the J. R. R. Tolkien fans who saw themselves as the “serious readers” of the class.

In the stories that were turned in for the workshop I taught, main characters often died at the end, or else they revealed to the reader long-held secrets on which the entire plot of the story pivoted. Punctuation was random; students were unable to remain inside only one character’s head; correct spelling eluded them. Despite their inability to master the
basics, my students felt compelled to argue the most elementary points with me.

“I don’t like concrete details. If something has too many concrete details, it doesn’t leave enough for the reader’s imagination,” one girl pronounced. Or, “I
like
it when we don’t know the narrator’s name. It makes him seem more, I don’t know,
universal
.” Or, “I don’t know why all stories have to have a conflict. It makes the story seem formulaic.” Or, “What’s wrong with clichés? I mean, we all know what the clichés mean, so why not use them?” Or, “I don’t see why we can’t use stereotypes. Like, stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. People like that really do
exist
!”

The semester was flush with dead grandmother stories (“When I saw her powdered face in the casket, a single tear rolled down my cheek. ‘Grandma!’ I yelled. ‘
Don’t leave us!
’”), stories about the big football game (“It was the fourth quarter, fourth down with twenty yards to go and only thirty seconds on the clock—it was now or never, baby!”), or stories that ended with the narrator’s death (“The last thing I saw, as I stood on the tracks, was the front of the speeding locomotive with the maniacally laughing conductor inside . . . and then everything went BLACK . . . ”).

Unstapled when I had asked otherwise, often missing pages, sometimes unfinished, the stories arrived week after week for those two years, and I dutifully read them, made comments in the margins, typed up critiques, and assigned grades. I had decided, midway through my first semester, that I would have preferred shoveling shit at a zoo or being a rodeo clown to reading short stories written by college undergraduates, and although I never had to make that choice, I saw several lean months after graduation and before landing the media escort job, and on more than one occasion, while doing data entry for a temp agency or taking typing-speed tests at the university, I’d had to sell my own
plasma to make ends meet. The whole process of selling plasma took about an hour. There was always a movie playing (John Candy movies were particularly popular at the Plasma Center), so I would kick back in the heavy-duty recliner and watch
Uncle Buck
or
Spaceballs
as blood pumped out of my body. The blood would go into a spinning device that separated the plasma from the rest of the blood, and although the rest of the blood eventually got pumped back into me, the plasma container would continue to fill up. My container of plasma, after it had filled all the way up, looked curiously like a pitcher of Michelob. That first time, when the nurse came to unhook me, I motioned toward the container and said, “Cheers!” but all she did was pull the needle from my arm, make me hold a piece of cotton over the point of entry, and then place a Bugs Bunny Band-Aid over the cotton. Not once during my first plasma donating procedure, for which I was paid thirty dollars cash, did I regret that I hadn’t pursued a career teaching creative writing, nor did I regret it during my subsequent visits to the center, visits so frequent that, many years later, I still had a white scar on the crook of my left arm.