Finders Keepers (13 page)

Morris slunk from the classroom with his face burning, for once not just put in his place but rammed into it and hammered flat. He had an urge to chuck the paperback down a sewer drain as soon as he got off the bus on the corner of Sycamore and Elm, but held on to it. Not because he was afraid of detention or suspension, though. How could she do
anything
to him when the book wasn't on the Approved List? He held on to it because of the boy on the cover. The boy looking through a drift of cigarette smoke with a kind of weary insolence.

He's a sarcastic, self-hating little shit. A lot like you.

His mother wasn't home, and wouldn't be back until after ten. She was teaching adult education classes at City College to make extra money. Morris knew she loathed those classes, believing they were far beneath her skill set, and that was just fine with him. Sit on it, Ma, he thought. Sit on it and spin.

The freezer was stocked with TV dinners. He picked one at random and shoved it in the oven, thinking he'd read until it was done. After supper he might go upstairs, grab one of his father's
Playboy
s from under the bed (
my inheritance from the old man
,
he sometimes thought), and choke the chicken for awhile.

He neglected to set the stove timer, and it was the stench of burning beef stew that roused him from the book a full ninety minutes later. He had read the first hundred pages, no longer in this shitty little postwar tract home deep in the Tree Streets but wandering the streets of New York City with Jimmy Gold. Like a boy in a dream, Morris went to the kitchen, donned oven gloves, removed the congealed mass from the oven, tossed it in the trash, and went back to
The Runner
.

I'll have to read it again, he thought. He felt as if he might be running a mild fever. And with a marker. There's so much to underline and remember. So much.

For readers, one of life's most electrifying discoveries is that they
are
readers—not just capable of doing it (which Morris already knew), but in love with it. Hopelessly. Head over heels. The first book that does that is never forgotten, and each page seems to bring a fresh revelation, one that burns and exalts:
Yes! That's how it is! Yes! I saw that, too!
And, of course,
That's what I think! That's what I FEEL!

Morris wrote a ten-page book report on
The Runner
. It came back from Miss Todd with an A+ and a single comment:
I knew you'd dig it
.

He wanted to tell her it wasn't digging; it was loving.
True
loving. And true love would never die.

The Runner Sees Action
was every bit as good as
The Runner
, only instead of being a stranger in New York City, Jimmy was now a stranger in Europe, fighting his way across Germany, watching his friends die, and finally staring with a blankness beyond horror through the barbed wire at one of the concentration camps.
The wandering, skeletal survivors confirmed what Jimmy had suspected for years
,
Rothstein wrote.
It was all a mistake
.

Using a stencil kit, Morris copied this line in Roman Gothic
print and thumbtacked it to the door of his room, the one that would later be occupied by a boy named Peter Saubers.

His mother saw it hanging there, smiled her sarcastic curl of a smile, and said nothing. At least not then. Their argument over the Gold trilogy came two years later, after she had raced through the books herself. That argument resulted in Morris getting drunk; getting drunk resulted in breaking and entering and common assault; these crimes resulted in nine months at Riverview Youth Detention Center.

But before all that came
The Runner Slows Down
, which Morris read with increasing horror. Jimmy got married to a nice girl. Jimmy got a job in advertising. Jimmy began putting on weight. Jimmy's wife got pregnant with the first of three little Golds, and they moved to the suburbs. Jimmy made friends there. He and his wife threw backyard barbecue parties. Jimmy presided over the grill wearing an apron that said THE CHEF IS ALWAYS RIGHT. Jimmy cheated on his wife, and his wife cheated right back. Jimmy took Alka-Seltzer for his acid indigestion and something called Miltown for his hangovers. Most of all, Jimmy pursued the Golden Buck.

Morris read these terrible developments with ever increasing dismay and growing rage. He supposed he felt the way his mother had when she discovered that her husband, whom she had believed comfortably under her thumb, had been cleaning out all the accounts even as he ran hither and yon, eagerly doing her bidding and never once raising a hand to slap that sarcastic curl of a smile off her overeducated face.

Morris kept hoping that Jimmy would wake up. That he would remember who he was—who he had been, at least—and trash the stupid and empty life he was leading. Instead of that,
The Runner Slows Down
ended with Jimmy celebrating his most successful
ad campaign ever—Duzzy-Doo, for God's sake—and crowing
Just wait until next year!

In the detention center, Morris had been required to see a shrink once a week. The shrink's name was Curtis Larsen. The boys called him Curd the Turd. Curd the Turd always ended their sessions by asking Morris the same question: “Whose fault is it that you're in here, Morris?”

Most boys, even the cataclysmically stupid ones, knew the right answer to that question. Morris did, too, but refused to give it. “My mother's,” he said each time the question was asked.

At their final session, shortly before the end of Morris's term, Curd the Turd folded his hands on his desk and looked at Morris for a long space of silent seconds. Morris knew Curd the Turd was waiting for him to drop his eyes. He refused to do it.

“In my game,” Curd the Turd finally said, “there's a term for your response. It's called blame avoidance. Will you be back in here if you continue to practice blame avoidance? Almost certainly not. You'll be eighteen in a few months, so the next time you hit the jackpot—and there
will
be a next time—you'll be tried as an adult. Unless, that is, you make a change. So, for the last time: whose fault is it that you're in here?”

“My mother's,” Morris said with no hesitation. Because it wasn't blame avoidance, it was the truth. The logic was inarguable.

Between fifteen and seventeen, Morris read the first two books of the Gold trilogy obsessively, underlining and annotating. He reread
The Runner Slows Down
only once, and had to force himself to finish. Every time he picked it up, a ball of lead formed in his gut, because he knew what was going to happen. His resentment of Jimmy Gold's creator grew. For Rothstein to destroy Jimmy like that! To not even allow him to go out in a blaze of glory, but to
liv
e
! To compromise, and cut corners, and believe that sleeping with the Amway-selling slut down the street meant he was still a rebel!

Morris thought of writing Rothstein a letter, asking—no,
demanding
—that he explain himself, but he knew from the
Time
cover story that the sonofabitch didn't even read his fan mail, let alone answer it.

As Ricky the Hippie would suggest to Pete Saubers years later, most young men and women who fall in love with the works of a particular writer—the Vonneguts, the Hesses, the Brautigans and Tolkiens—eventually find new idols. Disenchanted as he was with
The Runner Slows Down
, this might have happened to Morris. Before it could, there came the argument with the bitch who was determined to spoil his life since she could no longer get her hooks into the man who had spoiled hers. Anita Bellamy, with her framed near-miss Pulitzer and her sprayed dome of dyed blond hair and her sarcastic curl of a smile.

During her February vacation in 1973, she raced through all three Jimmy Gold novels in a single day. And they were
his
copies, his
private
copies, filched from his bedroom shelf. They littered the coffee table when he came in,
The Runner Sees Action
soaking up a condensation ring from her wineglass. For one of the few times in his adolescent life, Morris was speechless.

Anita wasn't. “You've been talking about these for well over a year now, so I finally decided I had to see what all the excitement was about.” She sipped her wine. “And since I had the week off, I read them. I thought it would take longer than a day, but there's really not much
content
here, is there?”

“You . . .” He choked for a moment. Then: “You went in my room!”

“You've never raised an objection when I go in to change your sheets, or when I return your clothes, all clean and folded. Perhaps you thought the Laundry Fairy did those little chores?”

“Those books are mine! They were on my special shelf! You had no right to take them!”

“I'll be happy to put them back. And don't worry, I didn't disturb the magazines under your bed. I know boys need . . . amusement.”

He stepped forward on legs that felt like stilts and gathered up the paperbacks with hands that felt like hooks. The back cover of
The Runner Sees Action
was soaking from her goddam glass, and he thought, If one volume of the trilogy had to get wet, why couldn't it have been
The Runner Slows Down
?

“I'll admit they're interesting artifacts.” She had begun speaking in her judicious lecture-hall voice. “If nothing else, they show the growth of a marginally talented writer. The first two are painfully jejune, of course, the way
Tom Sawyer
is jejune when compared to
Huckleberry Finn
, but the last one—although no
Huck Finn
—
does
show growth.”

“The last one
sucks
!” Morris shouted.

“You needn't raise your voice, Morris. You needn't
roar
. You can defend your position without doing that.” And here was that smile he hated, so thin and so sharp. “We're having a discussion.”

“I don't
want
to have a fucking discussion!”

“But we
should
have one!” Anita cried, smiling. “Since I've spent my day—I won't say
wasted
my day—trying to understand my self-centered and rather pretentiously intellectual son, who is currently carrying a C average in his classes.”

She waited for him to respond. He didn't. There were traps everywhere. She could run rings around him when she wanted to, and right now she wanted to.

“I notice that the first two volumes are tattered, almost falling out of their bindings, nearly read to death. There are copious underlinings and notes, some of which show the budding—I won't say
flowering
, it can't really be called that, can it, at least not yet—of an acute critical mind. But the third one looks almost new,
and there are no underlinings at all. You don't like what happened to him, do you? You don't care for your Jimmy once he—and, by logical transference, the author—grew up.”

“He sold out!” Morris's fists were clenched. His face was hot and throbbing, as it had been after Womack tuned up on him that day in the caff with everyone watching. But Morris had gotten in that one good punch, and he wanted to get one in now. He needed to. “Rothstein
let
him sell out! If you can't see that, you're
stupid
!”

“No,” she said. The smile was gone now. She leaned forward, set her glass on the coffee table, looking at him steadily all the while. “That's the core of your misunderstanding. A good novelist does not lead his characters, he follows them. A good novelist does not create events, he watches them happen and then writes down what he sees. A good novelist realizes he is a secretary, not God.”

“That wasn't Jimmy's character! Fucking Rothstein changed him! He made Jimmy into a joke! He made him into . . . into everyone!”

Morris hated how weak that sounded, and he hated that his mother had baited him into defending a position that didn't need defending, that was self-evident to anyone with half a brain and any feelings at all.

“Morris.” Very softly. “Once I wanted to be the female version of Jimmy, just as you want to be Jimmy now. Jimmy Gold, or someone like him, is the island of exile where most teenagers go to wait until childhood becomes adulthood. What you need to see—what Rothstein finally saw, although it took him three books to do it—is that most of us become everyone. I certainly did.” She looked around. “Why else would we be living here on Sycamore Street?”

“Because you were stupid and let my father rob us blind!”

She winced at that (
a hit, a palpable hit,
Morris exulted), but then the sarcastic curl resurfaced. Like a piece of paper charring in
an ashtray. “I admit there's an element of truth in what you say, although you're unkind to task me with it. But have you asked yourself
why
he robbed us blind?”

Morris was silent.

“Because he refused to grow up. Your father is a potbellied Peter Pan who's found some girl half his age to play Tinker Bell in bed.”

“Put my books back or throw them in the trash,” Morris said in a voice he barely recognized. To his horror, it sounded like his father's voice. “I don't care which. I'm getting out of here, and I'm not coming back.”

“Oh, I think you will,” she said, and she was right about that, but it was almost a year before he did, and by then she no longer knew him. If she ever had. “And you should read this third one a few more times, I think.”

She had to raise her voice to say the rest, because he was plunging down the hall, in the grip of emotions so strong he was almost blind. “Find some pity! Mr. Rothstein did,
and it's the last book's saving grace!
”