Exile on Kalamazoo Street (12 page)

“None whatsoever. How the hell are you, Mavis?”

“Busy, but good. Hanging by my fingernails, as always.”

“And how's New Damn York, Mavis? Still there, is it?”

“Right outside the window,” she said. “Shall I open it so you can hear the city?”

“How cold is it?”

“It's not warm.”

“Fuck the window, Mavis. Fuck New York, too.”

“I see you still have affection for us, Bryce. And that impressive writer's vocabulary.”

“Once a writer, always a fool, Mavis.”

“Sounds clever … and familiar,” she said. “Wasn't that a jacket blurb for your last novel?”

“Of course. I believe Hemingway wrote it. Or maybe it was Faulkner. Or Fitzgerald. Or Virginia Woolf. Or J.K. Rowling, since she's actually alive.”

“And selling books.”

“Book are supposed to sell, Mavis?”

“That's the theory, anyway,” she said. “Rowling's do.”

“But enough of the pleasantries,” I said.

“Are you doing stand-up comedy these days, Bryce?”

“Sit down comedy. I do it right here from my sofa.”

“Convenient.”

Mavis and I had always had a blunt relationship, yet we understood that the barking was always far worse than the biting. Sort of a necessary ice-breaking. She was a tough New York City bird.

“What are you reading these days, Bryce?”

“Right now,
Tender is the Night
.”

“Fitzgerald? That's ambitious.”

“Could you sell
Tender
now, Mavis?”

“Iffy, my friend. I suspect we'd need to get some Opus Dei conspirators mucking about in it.”

“I could get on that right away for you, Mavis, if you like. Fitzgerald isn't likely to complain.”

“That's why I'm calling.”

“To have me fuck up a great novel?”

“You can do that if you want, but I'm calling to see if you're interested in writing a screenplay.”

“Really?”

“Go figure,” she said. “There are still people who remember you.”

“Two or three, I suppose. “

“Be optimistic, Bryce. It might actually be up to four or five now.

“I don't think I can count that high.”

Then it's good you're not a mathematician,” she said. “So, does a screenplay interest you?”

“Well, I'm not doing anything.”

“What
are
you doing Bryce? Still teaching?”

“I took a hiatus.”

“I see,” she said. “To have more time for drinking?”

“I took a break from that, too.”

“Just a break?”

“More than that,” I said. “A divorce. A pox on its house and all that.”

“Good for you. Sounds promising. But what are you doing to stay busy?”

“I've exiled myself in my house for the winter.”

“That would make a good first line for a novel,” she said. “You still have the Bryce Carter touch.”

“Except it's true,” I said. “I haven't stepped foot outside since after Christmas.”

“Jesus, Bryce. You don't look like Howard Hughes, do you?”

“Not at all. I shower daily and even wash behind my ears.”

“Just you in the house alone?”

“I have a cat. Black Kitty.”

“That's his name?” she said. “And here I was thinking you're still a writer.”

“Tell me about this screenplay, Mavis.”

“Well, hard as it is to believe, there are people who still remember you and even like you—no doubt the dwindling few who caught you on the days when you waited until afternoon to start drinking. There was even an article in
The Times
about your first two books. I can't explain it, but you still have fans—at least three of them. “

“You said I was up to four or five now.”

That's the people who might remember you, Bryce. The fan club is surely even smaller. Anyway, a producer friend of mine wants to know if you can write a screenplay based on a novel.”

“I was in
The Times
?”

“Buried inside, a short piece, nostalgic, a little pathetic, but yeah.”

“Send me a copy. And what novel are we talking about,
War and Peace
?”

“Cute, Bryce.”

“Is it something I've heard of?”

“You have intimate knowledge of it.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Your last one.”

“Fuck
me
,” I said softly.

* * *

A couple hours later, I called Mavis back to make sure I hadn't been dreaming, mildly delusional, or too gullible because she'd been merely playing a prank.

“Are you really sober, Bryce?”

“Yes. Nary a drop all winter.”

“Nary? Who uses ‘nary' anymore?”

“Maybe it's in Fitzgerald somewhere. If not, I'll pencil it into my copy of
Tender
.”

“That's how you keep busy these days?”

I thought briefly of Elsa—certainly that was how I kept busy some days, and I hoped to be busy with that some more.

“These days I don't worry about keeping busy. I worry about the day I step outside my house again.”

“Do you?”

“I certainly wonder about it,” I said. “Mostly I worry about where the world has gone since I've been away from it.”

“Really?”

“No. Only when I watch TV. Or hear Republicans talk.”

“Do a good job with the screenplay, Bryce, and maybe you can start writing reality TV show scripts.”

“They have scripts?”

“I have no idea.”

“What
do
you know, Mavis?”

She didn't say anything for a few seconds.

“I know that Fitzgerald was wrong about no second acts in America,” she said. “It happens all the time.”

* * *

The first and last thing to know about my third novel,
Reflections,
is that it was so bad it circled the sun three times, reached the speed of light, fell singed to earth, and magically became good in the way that the film
Road House
is so bad it somehow became good and a cult classic.

I wouldn't call
Reflections
a cult classic—nobody would—though it wouldn't surprise me if some tiny absurd cult somewhere, say in the wilds of rural Oregon, used it as their Bible. Or at least tore pages out for toilet paper … unless of course it was an anti-toilet paper cult. Or an anti-shitty novel cult.

The second thing to know is that
Reflections
is a self-indulgent mess by a self-indulgent drunk.

A drunk who was still capable of obtaining ink by the barrel.

Reflections
avoids plot, mixes stream of consciousness with sudden passages of experimental prose that Joyce could have whacked off to, and it's a 500-page leviathan that lurches finally into incoherence about a man searching for his soul.

And he never did find it.

Perhaps he didn't even have one.

Or know where to look.

At the time, the writer certainly didn't.

And mercifully he ran out of gas on page 500.

Ran out of booze, maybe.

Hard to remember.

It got published only because I still had a name that could be traded on.

I guess it's the literary version of “Revolution 9” by The Beatles.

While
Ulysses
is genius to millions,
Reflections
is genius to four or five people, apparently, including some dipshit producer from LA who figured the only thing wrong with it is that it's a story better put on screen than the page, and that it's really a concept that can only work if it's built around just the right actor. That way it might become a cinematic tour de force, the way
Road House
somehow exploited the talents of Patrick Swayze as Dalton the unlikely and diminutive Zen bouncer.

In short, a stinker on the screen, too.

But perhaps bad enough to become the next
Road House
.

And who better to write the screenplay than the idiot who created the novel?

The theory, as Mavis explained it, was that I might be counted on to make the screenplay as incoherent as the novel, which is what the producer was shooting for. An actual experienced screenwriter in Hollywood might instead turn
Reflections
into something coherent and plot-driven, which would ruin the whole idea of taking a cinematic dump and hoping the audience would call it art featuring a big name star.

They were counting on me to fail.

And I would be well paid for it, too.

“So, Mavis,” I said by phone the next day, “My appeal to Hollywood is that I wrote a shitty book?”

“Shitty's not the word they used, Bryce.”

“What word
did
they use?”

“Crap,” she said. “Pure crap. I think mindless drivel was mentioned, too.”

“But that's what they like about it, right?”

“Absolutely, Bryce. They said they couldn't be more pleased with how bad it is.”

“And they're counting on me to make the screenplay pure crap, too, right?”

“They've got their fingers and toes crossed that you'll fuck it up royally.”

“Wow, zero expectations. And for good money.”

“No, Bryce, they're paying good money because they actually have sky high expectations. The bar's actually set pretty high here, my friend.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have to avoid coherence,” she said. “They even suggested you write it while drunk, but I told them you were on the wagon.”

“What did they say to that?”

“They offered to pay more and then pay for rehab later.”

“Generous.”

“I thought so, too,” she said. “I told them I'd run it by you.”

“Nice of you to look out for me.”

“That's what an agent's for.”

“Do they have a title yet?”

“I believe
Incoherent Shitty Movie
is a contender so far.”

“Nice,” I said. “Seems to capture it.”

“I suggested ‘Slutty' instead of ‘Shitty' to add sex appeal,” she said.

“Sounds more like porn appeal.”

“That's a large audience, too, Bryce.”

“Maybe it could become a weenie whacker classic.”

“It could be called
Masturbation Nation
. How does that sound, Bryce?”

“As a title, it has good cadence. Who do they like in the lead?”

“The usual,” she said. “You know … Johnny, Tom. The other Tom. And Denzel. Can a black actor work in your story, Bryce?”

“I imagine even a dead one could. And race is no barrier to incoherence.”

“That would certainly save them money. A dead actor,” she explained.

“Which they could lavish on me for rehab.”

“Something to think about, Bryce.”

* * *

The movie people were very understanding, very solicitous. The whole notion of self-exile was “charming” and “inventive,” the producer said on the phone. I wondered whether he could find Kalamazoo on a map. I suspected he missed the whole point of what I was doing, rather preferred to miss the point, or just wasn't interested, and instead made superficial LA conversation before lunch at Spago. He seemed to instead regard exile as wily self-promotion. After they faxed a contract, which Janis delivered and sent back for me after a lawyer had a look, the movie people dispatched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to my house to get me going on the project.

I watched the movie people's courtiers get out of their rental car in front of my house and look around. It was snowing lightly, morning and not particularly cold by my standards, but by theirs I imagined it was arctic, as though they had been parachuted abruptly into
Ice
Station
Zebra
. The man was thirtyish, tall and lean and tan with spiky dark hair. The woman, who looked to be the same age, was rather short but attractive, blond—tan, of course—raised her sunglasses momentarily to regard the falling flakes. She wore white gloves. And shiny black boots. Apparently someone had reminded them that they had been banished to the barren provinces between New York and LA in a lingering winter, and so they both wore long dark wool coats but didn't look comfortable in them. The man had turned up his collar and his hands were thrust deep into pockets. They looked up and down my street at the houses and pointed and gestured. All in all I suspected they were golden people hoping to survive passage through a rather black and white Oz.

The two courtiers knew to knock on my side door. I lingered in the kitchen with Black Kitty a long moment, enjoying the picture of them trying to make sense of the cold and snow.

“We'll just let them absorb the atmosphere and ambience a little more,” I said to Black Kitty, who swished his tail a few times before trotting out of the room.

I wore jeans, but also a nice navy sweater, and the house, too, was presentable. When I opened the door, smiles popped wide on the courtiers' faces, like window shutters flying open.

“Please come in,” I said as I headed up the stairs to the kitchen landing. Behind me I heard the man remind the woman—Marci—to stamp her feet on the rug to shake off the snow.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “That makes perfect sense, Dylan.”

I listened to her stamp her feet far longer than a local would have done. I would learn later that the man was originally from Wisconsin and knew what snow really was. The woman was born and raised in LA and knew what sand was. The closest I had to sand was the kitty litter in the box in the basement.

I took their coats, and while I hung them on the kitchen coatrack, they looked around the kitchen, at the pots and pans hanging on hooks by the stove, out the window at the snow-covered backyard, down at the white tile floor, which I had steamed clean.

“How about some tea?” I said. “I have green tea and plenty of honey. Or would you prefer coffee?”

“Whichever is easiest, Mr. Carter,” Dylan said.