Love Me (15 page)

I was not there to disagree with him. On the other hand, I had no grudge against Mr. Newhouse, whoever he might be.

Mr. Crossandotti got up to leave. “Think about the offer, kid,” he said. “And don’t worry about me throwing you out the window. I give it up for Lent.” He chuckled and slapped me on the back and I could feel a rib crack. “Oh, by the way—what’s this I hear about your writing being girlish? That’s what somebody told me. What’s going on?”

“My writing isn’t girlish in the least. Anyone who reads it knows that a man wrote it, I warrant you.”

He poked a toothpick into his mouth. “You ever write a story in which somebody gets shot in the head?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

I explained that most of my stories are set in the Midwest, where gunfire is a rare occurrence, except during hunting season.

“The fact that it’s rare oughta make it even more interesting. Sez me.” He hiccupped and let out a long rich belch and reached into his mouth and dislodged a shred of meat from between two upper molars on the left side. “If you want to hear about how I snuffed that family in Kansas so Capote could write In Cold Blood, come over to the Algonquin, I’ll buy you a drink.”

“You murdered that whole Kansas farm family so that Truman Capote could write about it?”

“How else was he gonna do it? He couldn’t shoot ‘em himself.”

“What about the guys who went to the gallows for it?”

“Couple of losers. No big loss to mankind, believe me.” He examined the shred of meat and then chewed it. “Capote wrote girlish stuff, you know. But then I give him some murders to write about and he did a bang-up job. And then he came back to New York and he wrote girlishly again. Wrote gossipy stuff and moony stuff about fame and loneliness and futility. Magnolia blossoms. I don’t know what. Then he kicked the bucket. If you’re a man, don’t write that stuff. That’s all I got to say. Fuck futility. Just do your job. Right?”

A flood of mail came in for Mr. Blue. Torrents. I had no idea that the readers of the Minneapolis
Star Journal
were so troubled. I thought of Minneapolitans as fundamentally sound, Scandinavian people given to low-fat diets, aerobic exercise, listening to public radio, but here was the grandfather of
Distressed
holed up in the attic, ogling naked nymphets on the Internet, hour after hour, tying up the phone line, an embarrassment to the family. The mother-in-law of
Astonished
goes into a grocery and eats the vegetables right off the produce counters, carrots, tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, even bananas—she stuffs the peels in behind canned goods—and when he protests, she says, “They figure it in when they set prices. I’m paying for it anyway.” She is 62, a college professor, and she shoplifts food.
Horrified
wanted to know if she should attend a baby shower for a 17-year-old neighbor girl living in the basement of her unemployed boyfriend’s parents’ house and the two of them watching cartoons while awaiting the birth of their child.
Floundering
fell in love with a guy, and he with her, and then he went ahead with a three-week fishing trip to northern Ontario with his buddies—dur—ing which she looked through his desk and found the poems he wrote that suggest that he is Bob but is also “Blanche” who is not happy about sharing a body with Bob and wants it to be more her own—what should
Floundering
read into this? She’s 34 and has no time to waste.
Headache
wonders if she is “too nice” to her boyfriend, who lives in a filthy apartment with mountains of dirty clothes and dust bunnies the size of ponies and says he can’t marry her because he is depressed because he thinks he might be gay. He isn’t sure. She pointed out to him that gay men have perfect hair and shiny skin and live in fussy apartments with little antique lamps and lacquered trays. She wonders whether to drop him. She has no time to waste either.

 

 

Too bad I was Mr. Blue, otherwise I’d have written to him about my own situation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A person looks at
The New Yorker’s
cover, a painting of an old frame beach house aglow on a summer night, and you never imagine there’s somebody like Tony Crossandotti running it and dangling somebody like dear old Mr. Gill out of the window to hang by his fingernails. I wanted to discuss this with Mr. Calvin Trillin but he was hard to reach. I left a dozen plaintive messages on his answering machine and once even passed by the fashionable Aeolian Hotel on West 22nd and looked up to see if his penthouse lights were on. They were not. He was in Los Angeles on
The Tonight Show.
His new novel,
No Parking,
was an enormous hit. Michiko Kakutani called him a genius in the
Times,
and Harold Bloom, writing in
The New York Review of Books,
called the book “essential” and said that all literate people should take notice, and Helen Vendler, in
The Times Literary Supplement,
referred to him as a “national reference point,” and at the same time his handsome visage adorned the cover of People. Mr. Popularity!

It was hard not to draw comparisons between the blockbuster success of
No Parking
and the quiet demise of
Amber Waves of Grain,
though of course I admired Mr. Trillin and wished him well.

Nonetheless I felt he owed me some straight answers. I sent Mr. Shawn a note asking about Mr. Crossandotti and he wrote back—

Alaska piece? What Alaska piece? I never went to Alaska in my life. Had no desire to.

 

 

 

 

Mr. Trillin came by the office one day, and when I mentioned Tony Crossandotti he closed the door and told me to sit down.

“Forget what you learned in English composition,” he said. “You’re not in Minnesota anymore. The magazine is a snake pit. Sorry I didn’t warn you. Crossandotti is a shark. Cross him and you’re dead. He’s got a lot of pals with hair on their backs and if they decide to not like you, you could find yourself in Umberto’s Clam-house face down in the linguini with your brains for white sauce. So keep your nose clean.”

He walked to the window. “Those cigarette burns on the desk are the result of nervous guys sitting here waiting for the knock on the door. You got the gun?”

I nodded. “Top left-hand drawer.”

“Loaded?” I nodded. “Good,” he said. “Mr. Ross wished he had one, I’ll bet.”

I asked him why our founder, Harold Ross, was referred to as Rossi by certain people.

Mr. Trillin looked out the window for a long time. “I’ll make this brief,” he said. “My name is Calvino. Buddy Calvino. And I’m not from Kansas City, I’m from Palermo. My papa brought us here when I was thirteen years old and he paid for speech therapy to straighten out my accent. By the time I was sixteen, I spoke well enough to get into Yale, even though I had too many vowels in the old patronymic. The old Wasps looked down on my people as garbage men even though we produced Michelangelo and Dante and Vivaldi. Those blue-eyed thin-lipped patricians saw an Italian name and visualized a paper sack dripping with coffee grounds and orange rinds. They accepted the Irish after a hundred years, grudgingly, but we Italians couldn’t get our foot in the door. So I kept my head down and made inroads where I could and met a guy named Lobrano and his aunt Pauline Coeli was a writer at The New Yorker. She was Brentano Guillermo’s cousin. He was related to Gianni Chivera, who was Roger Angeli’s cousin, and Roger is the stepson of the great E. B. Blanco.”

“E. B. White is Italian?”

“The one and the same. The guy who wrote about Carlotta the pig and Stuart Piccolo.”

And then I saw the bulge under Trillin’s jacket. It looked like he was packing a toaster.

“Are you telling me that
The New Yorker
is owned by the Mafia?” I said.

He said, “I’m not telling you anything. I’m walking out that door and you and I never had this conversation. Ciao, baby.”

 

I was forlorn. I was a man with a mysterious disease. Except for Mr. Blue, I couldn’t write. Other writers avoided me in the halls, afraid of contagion. I tried antihistamine, aspirin, zinc, and vitamin E, varying the dosages. I tried ice cold showers. I went to a shrink on Madison Avenue who said that maybe I was blocked because I was terrified of rejection. She thought it could be related to toilet training and Mommy making her little boy stay on the potty until he produced. She prescribed a pill to lighten my mood but said I shouldn’t use it if I needed to operate a motor vehicle or work with numerals.

One horrible night, thinking this might help, I took a tab of acid in an Oreo, and a few hours later, on my terrace, I saw green and orange neon lights, parrots, Roman candles, violet wallpaper, sopranos, rivers of taxicabs, I was talking to Baudelaire. My ears were ringing. And the next day, a doorman came up with the four notebooks I had thrown over the railing, which almost hit an old lady on the street. The notebooks were pure gibberish. A gibbon would have done as well.

Mine wasn’t the longest-running writer’s block at
The New Yorker
—far from it. The place was famous for sheltering the non-productive. Shawn, for all his bluster, had a soft heart, and there was a whole stable of writers who drew nice salaries to sit in their offices and brood, such as J. D. Salinger, whose most recent story was “Ira and Ellie” in 1972, about Seymour Glass’s son Ira and his girlfriend and their weekend in Miami with Franny and Buddy and Zooey and Bessie and Woody and Jerry and Rodney. Joe Mitchell was another famous nonwriter and then there was J. F. Powers who had dreams in which he read his own new work and found it so substandard that he never wrote any.

I told Salinger that I was blocked and he gave me a white silk prayer scarf from the Rabindranath Janarandamahakrishnamurti Meditation Center. “It helped me,” he said. Helped him do what? I wondered.

I felt claustrophobic in my little jail cell of an office. Once I had a panic attack and dashed to the end of the hall and threw open the EMERGENCY ONLY door and stood on the fire escape gasping. I was paralyzed. Locked into failure. I kept trying and trying, but you come up to bat with 156 consecutive strikeouts and the bleacher crowd is chanting, “Hey hey, Mister K!” and no matter how you try to steady yourself (
Visualize success. Accept good fortune. Open your arms to it. Swing from the hips.
) you feel that chill in your shorts and you no sooner get settled at the plate than ZOOM comes the ball and it’s
steeeeee-rike ONE
and you think, Okay, here we go again. Hello, failure.
Steeeee-rike TWO, steeeeee-rike THREE.
And you turn and walk back to the dugout, feeling some sense of completion.

I found myself sitting and looking at three words on a screen,
It would appear,
and changing it to
It would seem
and then after lunch to
One might conclude.
I heard about a little club near Times Square, where mature women in sturdy foundation garments force naked men to speak in a foreign language and correct them without mercy. Strangely appealing, I had to admit.

I went to Siegfried’s for a haircut ($85), the same place Trillin went and Updike and Tony Crossandotti, and there amid the stylish young hair designers in black jeans and T-shirts was an old guy named Earl and naturally I got him and his hands were shaky and before I knew it he’d mowed a big bald strip down the center of my scalp and I wound up having to go to a place called Domenico’s House of Hair and buying a small unconvincing toupee.

I called Iris to beweep my outcast state and she was in a sour mood over a losing candidate for Congress. Some thoughtful fellow seeking to improve mass transit and reduce class size and clean up lakes and rivers and build affordable housing and he got his gonads cut off by a Republican rottweiler who wrapped the flag around himself and accused Mr. Bright Eyes of undermining national security and wanting to tax the jammies off people and confiscate guns, slingshots, and paring knives. The dog bit the man and the man ran away. No news there. But she was all torn up over it. She was thinking of selling the house and moving to Vermont. Our old stucco house with our old bedroom and the rickety garage full of grocery carts and covered with honeysuckle vines.