Love Me (14 page)

“But you should’ve done it right away and not come in here and had two big glasses of Scotch,” said the woman. “That’s what Emily Dickinson did when she lost her poem ‘Because I could not stop for Lunch.’ She was at the tennis court with Lavinia. The poem was written on a scrap of paper folded and tied with string. She didn’t sit around getting pie-eyed, she sat right down with a towel around her neck and rewrote it better.”

I returned to my compartment and got out a sheet of paper and looked at it and everything I could think of about Canada was nothing but ashes, a pale shadow of the original. I got to New York in a grievous mood and I never wrote much after that that was any good.

It was soon after that, I became Mr. Blue.

 

 

 

Amber Waves of Grain
came out in September—though I’d told my editor, “It’s not done yet! The buns need to bake! ”—and the reviews were all torpedoes. (“What a dumb book!” said the
Times.)
Sales were lousy. Pitiful. Two weeks after publication, big stacks of it were on sale at Barnes & Noble for $1.89 and the security tags had been removed so as not to hinder shoplifters.

A dumb dumb dumb dumb book. Why did I write all that stuff about soybeans in the first chapter? And then in chapter 2 the agronomist, Danny Montalban, suddenly is no longer in Fargo, he’s in Fresno, and we’re at a lesbian commitment ceremony at a pimento ranch with ladies in denim caftans whanging on little drums and chanting sapphic things and Cathy and Denise affirming their love for each other and riding away on a piebald pony and then there’s that whole thing about the transcontinental railroad and the driving of the golden spike—and then George Eastman and the Kodak—where did all
that
come from?

The answer is: I tried too hard. I tightened up at the plate and swung too hard and tried to aim the ball. Just as Mr. Shawn warned me not to do.

Suddenly I was a joke. I walked down 43rd Street and heard the word
soybeans
whispered and people tittering.

What suffering can fall on us out of the blue! I was on 7th Avenue in the thirties, walking fast to make a lunch date with the fact checker named Shahtoosh, and a construction guy passed me pushing a handcart piled high with lumber and the cart tipped and a half ton of lumber brushed against my pants leg and crashed to the sidewalk. Had it fallen six inches north it would have snapped my left leg in two. And then Shahtoosh wasn’t at the restaurant. She left a message: “Sorry. Something came up.”

Soybeans.
That’s what came up. The word was out:
Wyler Laid an Egg. Wyler Pissed His Pants.

I was on the B train and a young woman said, “You wrote a book. Right?” I nodded. She said, “I remember your picture from the dust jacket.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sure.”

She said, “You probably get people coming up to you all the time saying they.recognize you from your picture.”

I said, “No, not that often.”

She said, “Really? I would think it would happen a lot.”

I said, “Not as often as you might think.”

She said, “Well. You learn something new every day.”

And we rode on together in silence all the way to 42nd Street without her ever saying, “I loved that book of yours. You’re so talented.” Nothing of the sort.

My agent, Leona, who had gotten me an advance of one half million dollars for
Amber Waves of Grain,
said that the publisher wasn’t ready to discuss an advance for a third book,
Purple Mountain Majesties,
quite yet. They were reexamining their options at this point.

Oh, go suck a rock, I thought. But it hurt.

And then out of left field came a letter from a woman named Lorna at the Minneapolis
Star Journal
asking me to write an advice column.

She wanted two columns per week. The readers would send me their letters by e-mail and I’d edit them and write my responses and e-mail the column to Lorna and it’d go into the newspaper.

“I know it’s a long shot and you’re probably much too busy,” she wrote, “and we can’t pay much. Six hundred per column.”

Actually I wasn’t busy at all. I was writing nothing. I couldn’t. The New Yorker was paying me nothing. So $1,200 a week looked good.

I called up Lorna in Minneapolis. She was thrilled.

I said, “Don’t you already have an advice columnist? A Miss Becky? The one who always advises readers to seek professional help?”

“We had her for twenty years and then she took a cruise on the Aegean and had a romance with an Albanian waiter and it didn’t work out and she came home and stuck her head in the oven.”

“I might be able to do it for six hundred,” I said.

“It’s a deal,” she said.

So I became Mr. Blue.

The name came from the hit song by the Make Rites, “Mr. Blue,” their one and only hit before they died in a plane crash south of Reno on their way to accept a crummy prize (Best Liner Notes, Male Vocal Group) at the Grammys in LA. They are not with Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Patsy Cline, Ricky Nelson, and others in the Plane Crash Hall of Fame in Mason City, Iowa, because, frankly, they weren’t big enough stars. Their song, “Mr. Blue,” was about longing for something that you know will turn out to be exquisitely painful, but you want it anyway.

The thought of seeing my own words in print appealed to me, after my long drought. I was back in business. The
Star Journal
printed a quarter-page ad for “Ask Mr. Blue.”
Lonely? Confused? Angry? Tell your story to Mr. Blue. Offering commonsense answers to life’s persistent questions, twice weekly in the
Star Journal
—and fifty e-mails arrived immediately.
Lonely
was lonely and
Angry
was disappointed in love and
Disappointed
had a wonderful husband who was crippled by jealousy and
Brokenhearted
was missing her boyfriend who was happily dating other people and when I retrieved the e-mail, a message flashed on my screen.

A picture of Harold Ross, the founder of
The New Yorker,
hung in the men’s room off the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, and when standing at the urinal, waiting for the water to fall, I looked up and saw the inscription:
“To Fingers, a great guy, yr pal Rossi.”
And I wondered who Fingers was and who Rossi was before he became Mr. Ross.

And then Mr. Tony Crossandotti appeared in my office one day. He was a big guy, solid, about the size of a Harley, with eyebrows like cockroaches, gray-black hair swept back, helmet-shaped, every strand in place. Manicured nails, and gleaming shoes, and a magnificent gold tooth lit up his smile. He wore a bright purple shirt and orange tie and a green pin-striped suit with red silk pocket hankie folded in the shape of a horse’s head. And yellow-tinted glasses. A lot of colors going on there but somehow it all worked.

“Please come in,” I said, though he was already in.

He walked over to the window. “Hey,” he said. “Still there. Look.” There were deep scratch marks on the windowsill. “That’s from Mr. Gill’s fingernails,” he said.

Brendan Gill was a sweet old guy at the magazine, very patrician, very Century Club, gray hair curling over the collar, horn-rim reading glasses, nappy sweater, vintage port, shelves of O‘Casey and Yeats, summers on the Cape, the whole deal.

“Me and a couple of the boys had to hang him out the window coupla years ago. Wrote a profile that made a reference to Lucky Lu ciano that made my blood boil and about give me a coronary infraction and we came trundling up here and stuck a gun under his chin and heaved him out the window and let him hang by his fingernails for a few minutes and then we reeled him back in. He ain’t given us no trouble ever since.”

The marks on the sill were deep grooves. The man whose fingernails made them wanted very very much to go on living in this world.

Crossandotti sat down on my desk, on top of the papers. I heard a pencil crunch. “Some guys, you know, lose track of where they come from and you got to remind them. Gill got it in his head that he was a Harvard guy and we hadda bring him back to the real world. His name is Brentano Guillermo. Sicilian. His papa was a sanitation worker. Good friend of my papa’s. That’s why I got him the job. Brentano is a good boy. Knows about theater, about architecture, writes very good quality stuff. He just got out of hand a little and we hadda thump him.

“This is sort of what a publisher does: he brings you writers back into contact with the real world in which most of us live most of the time.”

I said, “I’m Larry Wyler, Mr. Crossandotti. Forgive me, but I don’t believe we’ve met.” I was trying not to sound servile and yet I could see that the man was carrying a loaded revolver.

“I take it you work here in the building,” I said.

“That’s very funny,” he said. It didn’t sound as if funny was a good thing to be.

He put his right hand on my shoulder. It sat there, lightly, but a person got the message: if he wanted to, he could take that hand and rip your face off.

“I own the fucking building,” he said. “I’m the fucking publisher of
The New Yorker.
Okay? And I know everything about you. Okay? Where you live and your wife’s name is Iris and she’s on Sturgis Avenue in St. Paul and you got a garage full of grocery carts and—hey, anything you want to know, just ask me, okay?”

I nodded. That was okay with me.

He took the hand away.

I said, “I like your shirt.”

Mr. Crossandotti was pleased that I noticed his wearing apparel.

“I got it at Corso. Silk and poly and Egyptian linen. $300. Dean Martin wears these. You remember—in
Rick Mercato?
The scene where he’s waiting in the café for Gina Lollobrigida and instead Mr. Big Pants walks in? He was wearing this shirt. It comes from Corsica. You’ve got to order them three months in advance.”

He looked at my black suit and white shirt and decided not to express an opinion.

“So how the hell are you?” he said.

I said that I was having a good day, thank you, and hoped that he likewise was prospering.

“I was coming around looking for somebody to do a job for me,” he said. “And then I remembered about Brentano and I came to see if his fingernail marks were still there.”

“What sort of a job?”

“A good job. You busy?”

“Not right now.”

I run this thing called DWI. The Distinguished Writers Institute, okay? It’s located upstairs from the magazine. It’s a service for young people who want to learn how to write“—as he told me this, I noticed a whitish flake on his upper lip. I wasn’t sure if it was eggshell or oyster shell or what, but it was hanging there and it didn’t fall off.

“Here, you probably seen this,” he said, and he handed me an advertisement—“ Earn $$$$ Writing Fiction, Poetry, Essays, Memoirs, Literary Journalism”—which offered a “critique” of your work by a “professional editor” for $195.49 and there was a picture of a happy guy reading a note from DWI (“Very effective use of language, Brent, and with just a little more attention to form, you’re sure to be appearing in The New Yorker in a few months.”)

“Interesting,” I said. I wished he’d wipe the eggshell off his lip. It was bothering me. “You want me to write critiques of people’s writing? I could do that.”

“Naw, we get that done in Malaysia. We got little kids who punch some keys on a computer and out comes your critique. Naw, I need somebody to write the computer program. You know anything about that?”

I asked him how many clients DWI had and he said, “Between twelve hundred and two thousand a week.”

“A gold mine,” I said. He nodded. Even with him nodding, the flake didn’t fall off.

I told him he had something on his upper lip.

He peeled off the flake and examined it. “I had oysters for breakfast,” he said. “That was four hours ago. I been walking around with a flake on my lip and nobody told me?”

“I guess they were too polite,” I said.

He couldn’t get over the fact that none of his lieutenants had dared to point out the flake of oyster shell.

“I’m the fuckin publisher of The New Yorker magazine and people can’t point out a fuckin oyster flake on my upper lip for Christ’s sake?”

“I take it you’re not married,” I said.

“I mean, here I am, fuckin walkin around with this piece of crap on my face and these assholes can’t fuckin say,‘Hey, Tony, you got a flake or something on your face’? I don’t get it. What the fuck is going on here?”

“It was a small flake,” I said. “Maybe the light was poor.”

“I been talking to that asshole Newhouse and he can’t even do me the decency of pointing out a fuckin oyster flake on my lip? Jesus!” And he brought his big fist down on the desk so hard that the telephone jumped a couple inches. “Somebody oughta yank that Newhouse’s chain and get him off his high horse if you ask me. Guy thinks he’s a mogul! He’s nothing but an asshole!”