Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (22 page)

(1998)
The corner of my father’s bed is the only surface in his room not stacked high with newspapers or books, pilfered reams of paper or tchotchkes. I take off my coat, sit where his body must have lain a few hours before, ask how he’s been. It’s still early in the month, so he hasn’t gone through his disability check yet. This means he’s drinking,
good, Russian vodka, not that rotgut crap
…. His background is, as he will often point out, Russian and Irish, so he’d be a little weird not to drink, if you get his point. So for the first ten, fifteen days of each month he drinks. Occasionally he takes himself out for a meal, somewhere other than a church basement, maybe he buys himself some shampoo. The remaining four hundred dollars goes to vodka, stamps and cut flowers. Cheap bouquets from the 7-Eleven. Stamps to send out letters to those few people with whom he keeps contact. The rest of the money goes to half gallons of Smirnoff’s, which he drinks with orange juice all day, days on end, until the money begins to run out, then for the last few days he drinks it straight. During this time he may have a friend crash on his floor, someone he knows from the streets—Mississippi Mike, Joe Kahn (I remember Joe from the shelter). My father points out the narrow passage on the floor, between his bed and a mound of clothes, where his visitors sleep, and it seems unlikely, though perhaps a relief from shelters or doorways.

After insisting I shake his hand properly, deep and firm, he launches into a familiar flurry of hate speech, paranoid fist-to-palm gesticulating, racial invectives, this time something about ten-year-old white girls getting raped night after night outside his window by
the blacks
. This tirade causes me to have trouble focusing, and I consider leaving quickly, but will myself to stay. I look at the one cleared chair, turned vaguely toward the snowy television, take in the disorder—every wall, every chair, every countertop, deep with worthless junk. My inheritance. The television, donated by Tommy the Terror, his pal from the Portsmouth days, is always on, even if the volume is down. A one-panel comic strip pinned over my desk passes through my mind—a king holds an ice pick up to a boy and declares,
Someday son this awl will be yours
.

My father negotiates the passageway between where he sleeps and the kitchen, keeping up a constant patter, pouring more orange juice into his vodka cup. I imagine Joe sitting in the one cleared chair, drinking the beer he’s brought, nodding, maybe wedging a story of his own in between my father’s endless stream. I tell my father I spoke with Tommy a few weeks ago. He answers that Tommy was sitting where I am, on the edge of his bed, not three days ago. But I know it was seven years ago, Tommy told me this, told me he’s given up on my father. Even Ray no longer writes, no longer visits, and Jonathan is not welcome to visit him. I excuse myself, pick my way to my father’s bathroom. The bathtub’s jammed with more magazines and clothes, so much so that to bathe must require a considerable investment of time and energy. I ask him if he uses it.

His stovetop too is thick with unopened cans of food, arranged in aesthetic patterns and pyramids, but never touched, as evidenced by the ever-thickening layer of dust over it all. The canned food is a relief, for it seems he’ll never starve. His refrigerator, unopened for years now, is barricaded by the ever-growing towers of saved magazines and newspapers. Even his bed’s mostly covered during the day, stacks of magazines which must be moved onto the one empty chair before he can lie down.

It’s a form of generosity that my father invites a street person, a friend, up for the night. He’s even offered it to me, or my brother, anytime we need a place, something I never offered him when he was living on the streets. But in his room there is no place, unless I sat upright in a straight-backed chair all night, or stretched out on the bit of floor beside his single bed, in the path to the bathroom. Or, the horror, crawled in bed with him. I would first sleep on a bench, or under a bush. I would risk rats and mayhem before I would spend a night in his room.

When I ask my father the story of how he met my mother he tells me the story of how to rob a bank. I ask him about his years sleeping outside and he tells me about scamming a room at the Ritz. Can I see your book? I ask, every time I see him. He feigns shock, indignant at my doubts, points to a corner of his room, to a box buried beneath his piles of unread newspapers.
It must be there, it’s the only place untouched
. I offer to dig into it with him. He’ll ask how much time I have and if I say a couple hours he’ll say it’ll take ten, if I say a couple days he’ll say a week. Of course there’s a book, the book he’s been working on his entire life,
The Button Man
, though sometimes it’s called
The Adventures of Christopher Cobb
. Letters from Little, Brown and Viking are framed on his walls. He walks to these framed letters and points to them as proof. One describes the book as “a virtuoso display of personality,” but, unfortunately, “its dosage would kill hardier readers that we have here.” At the bottom of one my father has written, “Ann Hancock and I are still close friends. She loves my work.
The Adventures of Christopher Cobb
!—It shall be an American classic! I never quit! I never give up!” Yes, I say, I can see the letters, you’ve sent them to me a hundred times, but can I see the book?

When she was still with us I asked my mother about
The Button Man
. He’d mentioned the title in one of his letters from prison.
He’s still talking about that?
was all she’d say. At his sentencing for nonpayment of child support, the time he escaped through a bathroom window (
It’s my duty to remain free, as a poet, as a human being
), he stood before the judge and cried,
Soon
, his book would be finished and he would be known.
Tears
, my mother hissed. The judge gave him two months.

Some days there are twelve chapters, other days there are twelve books. This is why he needs twelve desks, one for each chapter, one for each book. He learned this from Solzhenitsyn, who shared a cell with my father, in a metaphysical sense, both put away unjustly, both redeemed through words. When Solzhenitsyn got out of Siberia he moved to Vermont to write about life in the gulag. He set himself up in a barn, surrounded himself with eight doors supported on sawhorses, a door for each of his chapters, spread them out before him, to keep track of what belonged where. This is what my father plans to do with his advance—he’ll buy twelve doors, and his own barn, a place where he can lay his life out and the next day it will still be there. On each door will be a typewriter—twelve doors, twelve typewriters. Once inside and settled, he will move between these doors, fashioning his stories into his masterpiece. Each year of his life is a chapter, the life itself is the book. This is his plan, but it takes time, he insists, it’s all about time and space, as Einstein (apparently never a close friend) said. Have you written each chapter? I ask.
Of course, it’s all written, every word
. I ask, Is there a notebook, a sheaf of paper, ink, words, does this novel have a body, can I see it?
Of course
, he snorts, indignant, waving a hand magisterially around his clutter, his organized chaos. Yet ask him the next day and he again needs more space, to spread out, to finish. He’s holding out for an advance of two million from Little, Brown, because Kissinger got two million for his book, and Kissinger isn’t even a writer. My father, who has slept in a cardboard box, is holding out for two million, holding out for a barn so he can begin, or finish, the project that defines his entire life, the book he’s been writing since before I was born. His apartment is not big enough to contain his book, a book in part about living in a cardboard box.
Things cost money, kid
, he tells me. Seven figures. The devil’s arithmetic. I am beginning to see I am asking the wrong question.

Across town from my father’s subsidized apartment, in the same city, in a parallel universe, my brother, who has no use for our father and has refused to see him, to even speak to him, for a quarter century, not since our mother drove them both to Peggotty Beach that time, waits for the future. “Nanotechnology” is its name, the creation of smaller and smaller things. In twenty years, my brother tells me, we will be immersed in a computer fog, millions of microscopic computers filling the air around us, answering our beck and call. There will be no chairs in this future, no elevators. In your room you will begin to sit and the fog will automatically form a chair below you. Raise your leg and the fog will be your ottoman. The door will open when you want it to open, you’ll step into a seemingly empty shaft and the fog will be your elevator, carry you wherever you want to go. Maybe this fog can be shaped into apartments for the homeless, I venture, but my brother ignores this.

When I go to Boston I usually sleep on my brother’s couch, and before we drift off we speak to each other through the half wall he’s built to divide his studio. Often I have just come from an afternoon with our father. Though he seldom asks, my brother seems mildly curious, as much about my inclination to maintain contact as with the specifics of our father’s life.
Photogenic
, our father promises,
smells, everything
. I tell my brother this through his bookcase, and we laugh. Since he’s two years older he can remember a little about how it was when our father was with us, and those few years were apparently enough for a lifetime. I now find myself writing a book about an absent father who writes letters to a son about the novel he is writing. A novel the son doesn’t believe exists. The Great Unseen American Novel. My brother never asks why I still visit our father—I couldn’t tell him if he did. What
do
I hope to find? My father’s photogenic memory, to recreate a world I can’t quite remember? An envelope with a photograph of my mother inside, before…before what? Before she met my father? Before she was born? You might as well hold fog in your hands.

“Cobb” is the character my father has created to represent himself. His book is the story of his life. He is Christopher Cobb.
That’s the way it always works
.
Look at Salinger, look at Twain, anyone who says otherwise is a liar
. When asked for a synopsis he’ll tell you that it is a novel of an innocent dream of glory, of a man who believes that the world can be made whole again by a story, that he can change the world by what he makes. Like Noah. That if you stick with your word long enough it will become flesh. Amen. His father created a life raft where bodies were sinking into the sea. Noah built an ark miles from the nearest water. The offspring of Noah went on to build their way up to heaven, constructing their Tower of Babel. Noah needed to gather nails. My father writes his letters. These letters are all I know of his writing, my own little box of babble. Maybe this box of letters
is
the novel, a book that transmutes as you try to find it, the one you can never hold in your hands. Maybe I’ve had it the whole time.

My father’s room is filled with boxes, inside the boxes are his masterpieces, his novels-in-progress, alongside notes for future masterpieces, the blueprints for his stories. But open the boxes and you will find only more emptiness. The elements are all there—torn photographs, notes scrawled on cocktail napkins, check stubs, ink on paper—all meaning shattered. No one could reconstruct a life from these scraps, no one would find the thread that would lead to the particular stories he tells. Only his voice does that, the air moving through him, vibrating out as words.
What is word made of but breath, breath the stuff of life?

Maybe the whole time the book has been standing in front of me and I’ve failed to grasp it. If I could hold my father in my hands, bring him under the light—his stories are all there, each story is inside him. The transparency of the word, the transparency of the story, he is constructed entirely of the stories he tells, like the scaffolding around a building still unbuilt. The story of how to rob a bank. The story of sleeping on a bench. The story of his father inventing the life raft. The story of my mother, the love of his life. How many stories could you take from him and leave the building standing? Is there one essential story, is it the story of his masterpiece, as yet, forever, undone? Is there a deadline ticking inside him for when he must finish, a day marked, like Noah, when the rains begin? As I reread his letters, as I try to write out his life, I worry that his obsession has passed into me, via the blood, via the letters, via the vision of him rising naked from a tin tub. For the only book being written about my father (
the greatest writer America has yet produced
), the only book ever written about or by him, as far as I can tell, is the book in your hands. The book that somehow fell to me, the son, to write. My father’s uncredited, noncompliant ghostwriter. Not enough to be stuck with his body, to be stuck with his name, but to become his secretary, his handmaid, caught up in a folly, a doomed project, to write about a book that doesn’t, that didn’t ever, that may not even, exist.