After the Workshop (24 page)

I suspected that my predecessor, Max Kellogg, felt the same aching tugs at his heart the winter night that he drove through the guardrail and into the Iowa River with Joyce Carol Oates’s itinerary and a copy of his own unfinished novel. I told S. S. the story of Max and then pointed to the spot near EPB where he had driven off the road.

S. S. shivered. “An awful way to go,” he said. He looked around. “Is the liquor store near here?”

“No,” I said.

S. S., appearing neither surprised nor angry, said, “Oh.” He put his hands into his coat pocket and blew a visible puff of air toward the river.

“The anniversary of Max Kellogg’s death is coming up,” I said. “I just thought it would be nice to stop by here and pay my respects.”

“A thoughtful gesture,” S. S. said. “May I quote something in his honor?”

“That would be nice,” I said.

S. S. cleared his throat. He raised his chin, peering out over the water. He said: “‘Under thy shadow by the piers I waited / Only in darkness is thy shadow clear / The City’s fiery parcels all undone / Already snow submerges an iron year . . . / O Sleepless as the river under thee / Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod / Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend / And of the curveship lend a myth to God.’” His eyes teared up after he had finished. He wiped them with the side of his fist and said, “To your friend, Mr. Max Kellogg. From Mr. Hart Crane. May they both rest in peace.”

I took S. S. by the crook of his arm and walked him up to my parked car.

“I
am
a little drunk,” he said, simultaneously laughing and sniffling. “You know what they say about novelists, don’t you?”

“No, what?”

“Why, they’re nothing more than failed poets,” he said.

“Do you believe that?”

“Sadly,” S. S. said, nodding.

We said nothing else on the drive to the liquor store. I took us past the new Workshop building—a restored Victorian, complete with a brand-new library, and surrounded by a few acres of land. I suspected that once things got good, no one looked back on the crappier days with envy, so I seriously doubted any current students longed for the days (
my
days) when the Workshop was housed in the English Philosophy Building, let alone Army barracks.

Tate Rinehart was most likely inside right now, sitting before Gordon Grimes’s replacement, a poet named Barbara Weatherby. Weatherby, a graduate of Radcliffe and Iowa (and one of my classmates), was a Yale Younger Poets winner and a finalist for the National Book Award. To the dismay of book critics, she wrote an inordinate number of free verse poems about lighthouses and squirrels. I should pause here to note that the professional worlds of fiction and poetry are light-years apart. Poets have it infinitely worse off than prose writers. No one wants to publish a poet’s book, and if someone does, no one wants to read it; no one wants to give them a job; no one is going to option one of their poems for the movies; no one’s going to choose their book for a national book club. It was a life full of grim prospects. According to a famous study that surveyed students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop over a fifteen-year period, poets had significantly higher rates of depression, schizophrenia, suicide attempts, and actual suicides than fiction writers. A successful poet, whose parents were wheat farmers, once told me that the only thing that would have been more devastating for his mother and
father to hear was if he’d decided to become a professional mime. The fact was that poets had to do whatever was necessary to get a leg up. Normally, I wasn’t surprised to hear about poets schmoozing their way into magazines and anthologies. This was part and parcel of a life dedicated to sestinas and iambic pentameter. But sometimes the stories were born of jealousy, and this was what I suspected when I began hearing how Barbara Weatherby had slept her way to the top—seducing her undergraduate creative writing professors; shacking up with one visiting writer after another while at Iowa; sitting on the lap of a decrepit, liver-spotted magazine editor at the hotel bar during the annual Associated Writing Programs conference. Over time, the stories grew stranger and more slanderous: poetry editors getting blown underneath tables at the Foxhead, a hand job given to a Nobel Laureate in the back of a limo while he was on his way to a reading at the 92nd Street Y. We were classmates, Barbara and I, and we had gone out on a few awkward dates those early weeks after we had arrived in town, but once the semester had begun in earnest, we gravitated toward people working in our respective genres. But even after we had parted ways, I still watched her from afar. She had green eyes and wide hips—a redhead whose freckles were more pronounced at the beginning of each school year after a summer spent in the sun. Her looks were those of a movie star, but they were distinctly more mid-century than contemporary. She could have been a young Rita Hayworth or even a Marilyn Monroe back when Marilyn, only a few years removed from foster homes and orphanages, was still a redhead named Norma Jeane. Students in the Workshop viewed success (
any
success) with suspicion and cynicism, but when that success was achieved by someone who was particularly attractive, the suspicion and cynicism increased exponentially. At Iowa conspiracy theories spread faster than chlamydia, and by the time Barbara Weatherby had been named Gordon Grimes’s replacement as director, the theories had
become a full-blown epidemic. There was no way—
no way!
—she could have landed that position on her own merits . . . or so the covetous convinced themselves.

“The Workshop,” I said, pointing.

“Beautiful,” S. S. replied, barely looking. “An institution, that place.”

“Still thirsty?” I asked.

“A little parched, yes.”

Playing Raymond Carver to S. S.’s Cheever, I pulled up in front of John’s Grocery and let him out of the car so that I could search for a parking space. While backing into my old spot in front of Paul Revere’s Pizza, I saw a familiar figure across the street. He was down on his knees in front of the Dutch Boy paint store but leaning ever so slightly forward, as if praying. When he opened his mouth, a stream of vomit came rushing out.

I rolled down the passenger-side window, considered yelling out, “Vince! Buddy!” but decided to lay on the horn instead. Down on all fours now, Vince glanced over at me, his expression that of a wet, lost dog with its tail slung low. I didn’t let up on the horn. I wasn’t exactly sure what had gotten into me, but I wanted to inflict more pain on the man.

A knock at my window caused me to jump. It was a manager from Paul Revere’s Pizza.

“What the hell are you doing, man?” he asked. He was wearing a sauce-stained shirt with a name tag that said Mike.

I let up off the horn and rolled my window down.

Mike said, “Are you drunk?”

“Drunk?” I asked. “What time is it?” I laughed.

“Do you want me to call the police?” he said. “Is that it?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I’m fine.”

Mike looked over the hood of my car at Vince. “That your friend?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t know him.”

The workers inside Paul Revere’s had walked up to the plate-glass window to watch us. They were an army of pizza makers, and I was speaking to their general.

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “I’ll be leaving shortly.”

Mike nodded, but I could tell he was skeptical. He walked back to his store but turned one last time to take in the scene.

Years ago, during my first year in the Workshop, I was arrested for public intoxication. It had been a weekday, and after drinking three pitchers of beer, I decided it was time to stumble home. My mistake was turning down an alley instead of walking the side streets. There, two cops sat in a squad car, waiting like spiders. Until then, I’d had no idea that such a law existed, or that someone who was walking home instead of driving could get arrested for having had too much to drink, and yet, there I sat in the backseat of the squad car after I’d been put through a battery of tests. My baseball cap was askew and driving me mad, but I was cuffed and couldn’t move. I’d just finished reading Faulkner’s novel
Sanctuary
, in which a character named Popeye calls over the sheriff moments before he’s about to get hung for his crimes. “Psssst,” he says. “Fix my hair, Jack.” “Sure,” the sheriff says, “I’ll fix it for you.” But then he springs the trap door, hanging Popeye.

I leaned forward and said, “Psssst. Fix my hat, Jack.”

The cop in the passenger seat pivoted to regard me. I smiled at him. He reached out to fix my hat until the other cop, the one who was driving, said, “What the hell are you doing? Just leave him like that.”

At the police station, the officer in charge of inventorying my belongings asked, “So, what do you do?” When I told him that I was in the Writers’ Workshop, he nodded. “Uh-huh,” he said. “We get a lot of those in here.”

Now, sitting in my car in front of Paul Revere’s Pizza, I realized how much trouble I could get into, and given that I needed my driver’s license to earn my living, I concluded that I had caused enough trouble for one day.

I killed the engine. I walked over to John’s. When I opened the door, a cowbell jingled. I checked the liquor section first, but S. S. wasn’t there, so I walked up and down the aisles. No luck.

“Excuse me,” I said to the cashier. I described S. S. in great detail, along with what he might have purchased. “Has he been in here?”

“He left five minutes ago,” she said. She pointed to the back exit. “He went that way.”

I ambled out the back exit, which opened onto their parking lot, but S. S. wasn’t there. I circled John’s twice but couldn’t see him.

I’d hoped to find him back at the Corolla—perhaps, like actors in a vaudeville skit, we’d simply missed each other?—but he wasn’t there, either. Vince, however, hadn’t moved except to shut his eyes and curl up into a tight ball. It was possible, though I couldn’t tell for sure, that he was sucking his thumb.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said. I hated myself for what I was about to do, but I couldn’t simply leave him sleeping there in the snow. “Son of a bitch,” I said, trudging across the street, stopping when my boots reached his head. “Hey, Vince!” I said. “Yo, Vince!” I tapped his cheek with the tip of my boot, and he moaned. His thumb was indeed in his mouth. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get up. You can’t sleep out here.” I crouched down and gently slapped his face. “Wake up, Sunshine!” When that didn’t work, I started piling snow onto his head.

“What the fuck?” he mumbled. When his head was almost covered, he reached up and slapped the snow away, opening his eyes. “Jack?” he asked. “Is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said, already regretting that I had decided to help him.

“Who the hell was honking?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “A crazy person, probably.”

“I’ll bust his head,” he said and made a soft fist while drool trickled out of his mouth.

“Yeah-yeah,” I said. “But listen: You can’t sleep out here, buddy. The police will come and haul you away.”

“Police? Who called the police?”

“No one,” I said. “Not that I know of. But they’ll come by eventually and see you lying here, and they’ll lock you up. So, why don’t you come with me?”

“Where are we going?”

“You can rest up at my place, okay?”

Vince, looking as though he might barf again, nodded. Paul Revere’s soldiers watched from their various pizza-making stations as I helped Vince across the street and then loaded him into my car. On a telephone pole hung a flyer:

The writing program at Naropa University was as maligned as, if not more than, Iowa’s program but for a host of completely different reasons. Founded by Allen Ginsberg, the program was seen as flaky and silly, admitting groupies and wannabe hippies who paid little or no attention to craft. Instead of rigorous discussions on the sestina or point of view, they sat on dirty floors and banged tambourines—or so I’d heard. The reading was tonight at 8:00.

I tore the flier off the pole, folded it, and stuffed it into my back pocket.

“Roll down your window,” I said after I had settled in. “If you feel the urge to throw up, don’t do it in my car. Okay? Are we clear on that?”

Vince nodded. He rolled down the window with his eyes closed. As I pulled out of the parking space, I saw in the rearview mirror Paul Revere’s manager step outside to write down my license plate number.

“Too much partying with the students last night?” I asked.

Vince said, “One of them slipped me a roofie.”

“A
roofie
?” I said. “Are you
sure
? Do you know who?”

“I think it was this chick named Daphne. But maybe it was this dude named Grant.”

At a stop sign, I turned to face Vince and said, “Did they
do
anything to you?”

“
Do?
” he asked.

“Did they do anything sexual to you against your will?”

“No, no,” he said. “It wasn’t like that. Daphne and Grant are engaged or some shit, and I was hitting on Daphne big-time. Have you seen her? Jesus Christ, I couldn’t help myself. It was like I was possessed. So one of them—or maybe both of them, for all I know—slipped me a roofie. The next thing I knew, I was asleep in front of the paint store.”

As I drove, I looked around for S. S., hoping to see him down a side street. “So, let me get this straight,” I said. “This couple, Daphne and Grant, are engaged, but they keep a supply of roofies on hand.”

“No, no,” Vince said, opening his eyes. “The roofies were
mine
. They must have found them when they took my coat.”

“Vince,” I said. “What the fuck are you doing with roofies?”

Vince, blinking, straightened up now, clenching and unclenching his fists. “Look here,” he said. “I’ve never used them on anyone, okay?
I’m a writer. Someone gave me a bottle of them once, so . . . fuck, I don’t know what I was ever going to do with them. Nothing, probably. But I’m a writer, so I kept them. That’s what writers do. Real writers at least.
Published
writers. They chalk what they do up to experience.
Everything
they do.” He turned to face me. “I mean, who the fuck are you, anyway? You want to tell me you’re a saint, is that it? You want to cast judgment on
me
?”