Flagged Victor (37 page)

I had foreseen withstanding obscurity, with all its honour and glory, for a few years, but a decade and longer was a little too much even for a guilt-ridden motherfucker like me.

Maybe Rivers had known what I was in for all along.

I
got married and moved to Brooklyn, the Dartmouth of the five boroughs. I got divorced and stayed there.

Chris was let out of prison a few years early. I had never managed to visit him. He moved into a halfway house for six months, then into a shitty basement apartment near my old place.

How far I’ve come, he wrote, how far.

Yet, the difference between inside and out was all the world.

We started talking on the phone once he could afford a line. We talked about what he was doing, but mostly, at his urging, we talked about my writing. He kept telling me how great the stories I showed him were, and expressed as much frustration as I had ever felt about my ongoing failure.

You got to figure it’s only a matter of time, man, he said.

It was just like the old days.

We talked about what a great novel his story would be. And he was willing and eager for me to tell that story, warts and all. That had always been part of the deal.

I told him all kinds of bullshit to explain why I couldn’t make any significant progress. I told him that I still felt too close to the story. That too many people would be hurt by the truth that would be revealed.

You can’t hold back, he said. It’s got to be all or nothing. People can tell when you’re lying.

I wondered if that was part of my problem.

Through
one of my rejections, I got a series of gigs ghostwriting thrillers for authors who were either dead or had better things to do. This, initially, felt like a huge accomplishment
and perhaps a break, and the money gave me time to do more of my own writing. I even worked on Chris’s book, tackling it from various angles, trying to parse out the truth, to lay the evidence bare. I wrote a thousand pages of backstory to explain what we did and why. I talked about who and what and where. But my straightforward, nonfiction account failed to move even me. There was nothing you could hang a story on, or an author.

The glory of ghostwriting tasted more bitter than sweet after one of my authors made an appearance on Oprah without me. But the assignments did give me good excuses to talk to Chris. I called him whenever I couldn’t work out a plot point in the notes. Chris always had the perfect plot-driven solution.

I didn’t tell him anything about his book. Unlike every other thing I’d ever written, I couldn’t talk to him about his own story.

In particular, there were certain plot points I couldn’t discuss with him.

I
asked him once, my heart beating like a drum, Do you ever regret what happened?

He paused for what seemed like a minute.

Nah, he finally answered. If I hadn’t done all that stupid shit and brought the whole fucking world down on my head, where would I be now?

Ha ha.

Then he added, But there’s one thing that still bothers me. I can’t figure out how I got caught.

He was surprised that he, of all people, had not committed the perfect crime. To me, this represented a level of delusion so staggering, I did not know what to say.

Then I thought, How delusional am I?

Then I asked myself: How delusional do I need to be?

Through
the ghostwriting gigs, I met an agent at a party who was actually interested in my fiction. At one point, I told him about the
Moby-Dick
of travel novels, and when I sensed his attention flagging, I interrupted myself to tell him about the book I was really working on, the story of my oldest friend who’d robbed banks over a two-year period.

He arched an eyebrow and looked impressed.

He was the son of a police officer, I said.

A thin smile. He nodded. That’s good. Tell me more.

It was all neighbourhood stuff but done under the noses of everyone we knew. There were some very comic moments.

I described the movie theatre job, the money plastered wetly to the inside of the windshield.

I love it, he said. It’s a comedy of errors. The Keystone Robbers. In fact, that’s what we should call it.

Yes, I agreed, willing to agree with whatever he said.

And it’s a true story, he noted.

It wasn’t a question, but I answered it that way. Yes, I said. It’s all true. Unbelievable but true.

I immediately regretted the use of the word
unbelievable.

A memoir, he said.

I made a sound that was partway between agreement and How interesting. I did not yet know where his ducks were lining up.

Memoirs are selling very well these days, he said.

And it was my turn to smile and arch an eyebrow, as though he were finally coming around to my way of thinking.

I haven’t seen a caper memoir in some time, he said, something with action in it, instead of simple malaise or emotional abuse, at least not one from the point of view of a nice middle-class boy like yourself. You usually see these written by ex-criminals, people from Boston.

Right, I said.

Where is it set? he asked.

In Halifax, I said.

He arched the eyebrow of confusion. The one that meant, Elaborate, or possibly, Did I hear you correctly?

Halifax, Nova Scotia, I clarified. In Canada. That’s where I grew up. And then, as though apologizing for having had anything to do with the country whatsoever, I told him I hadn’t been back in almost fifteen years.

I like the story, he said. I like that it’s true. Do you think we could change the setting?

I simply was not able to compute what he was asking.

To a different city, he said. Maybe Seattle. Seattle’s probably a lot like Halifax. I wouldn’t want Maine. Too many editors vacation there now. They don’t want to shit where they eat.

Absolutely, I said, willing to say anything.

Get me fifty pages, he said, and I’ll sell it on spec.

When I got home from the party, I got straight to work.
Laptop keys don’t explode with quite the ferocity of a typewriter, but there was a familiar vigour in my typing nevertheless.

When
Kundera wrote about Tomas, it seemed to me that he was writing about himself. Be thankful you never experience the artful interrogation. No one is strong enough. Everyone’s complicit. This was his own personal confession, written in the guise of fiction.

I began to write mine.

I got my fifty pages done in a month. It wasn’t perfect, but it hummed with story. I’d taken every lesson I’d ever learned from thriller writing and applied it to Chris’s life. The agent loved it. He said that he wanted to talk to Leonardo DiCaprio as soon as I had a full draft. In the meantime, he was going to start priming publishers and I was to get back to work.

A few months later, James Frey became the most hated man in American letters for admitting that his memoir had been made up. Larry King denounced him. Oprah publicly flogged him. His agents abandoned him. His publisher agreed to place millions of dollars in sales aside for refunds. A bunch of suckers had assumed that just because it was in print, it should have been true.

I was among those who would have picked up a stone to throw, but for different reasons. The son of a bitch had gotten caught before I’d even had a chance to commit the same crime.

I knew the phone call was coming. My agent, who’d laughed at my stories of Chris’s escapades, who’d told me that I was going to kick the doors of publishing down, had a different tone
in his voice now. He sounded like a school principal dealing with a disappointing child.

Is everything in your story fiction? he asked.

Of course not, I said.

Is everything in your story factual? he asked.

Of course not, I said.

Are there things you’re not telling us? he asked.

What do you think? I said.

Before we hung up, he promised to consider the matter carefully, but I knew it was over. He would have made a good interrogator in Czechoslovakia.

Unlike
Kundera, Frey signed his letter of retraction.

I didn’t initially think of what I was writing as nonfiction or fiction, memoir or autobiography, he wrote.

I altered events and details all the way through the book, he said.

I made other alterations in my portrayal of myself, most of which portrayed me in ways that made me tougher and more daring and more aggressive than in reality I was, or I am, he admitted.

Hadn’t he read
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
? It’s the guy who doesn’t sign the confession who ends up getting laid. The guy who signs just ends up getting fucked.

I
put aside Chris’s book. I didn’t bother to approach dozens of new agents. I was an experienced unpublished writer by this
point, and I knew the answer would be the same. The gypsy curse lived on. The weight of the universe could not be avoided. It pressed and pressed and pressed.

I got married again, and divorced a few years later. I still couldn’t handle commitment. I kept writing, though, as seriously as ever.

You pin your hopes on one story after another, one agent after the next. You struggle through the tumult of disappointment and the busyness of everyday life to write something worthwhile. You need the words to be beautiful and the characters to make sense and the story to miraculously cohere, even as the entire exercise must satisfy the mood of each gatekeeper in turn, and the latest reading trend. You need endless determination and a great deal of luck to make progress, and more love than any fault-ridden and ill-formed person deserves. And when the magic doesn’t happen, you call it failure. And if you have the strength and self-delusion, you try it all again.

This is how a few more years went by.

At
one point, Chris asked me what I would need to do to pick up the pieces on his book again. This was the most impatience he ever showed me.

I told him I thought I needed time and space. In other words, money.

There are some books, I said, you need to rob a bank to write. Ha ha.

We came up with an idea for a money-making thriller we could both write, a murder mystery set in prison. I pitched it to
my circle of publishing contacts as
The Name of the Rose
meets
Oz.
We made a reckless and heartwarming deal, Chris and I, to split the profits fifty-fifty, since his experiences and my skills would go into the writing of it in more or less equal proportions, and we also decided to go with a pseudonym as the name of the author. But when the pitch worked, and the deal was struck, for far more money than I’d anticipated, I lied to Chris and told him it was a tenth of the amount. Twenty-five thousand dollars was still a respectable deal for a first novel, and replaced the money he’d stashed under the floating dock. But I needed the big dollars to pay my bills, to support my ex-wives, to survive in New York, to write the damn thing.

I’m pretty sure Chris would have understood, if only I’d trusted him enough.

As Jesus said to Judas at the Last Supper: Do what you need to do quickly.

I
had a modicum of success with the prison thriller. Not so much that you would notice, but enough for me to feel the freeing effect. It changes everything. And when they asked me what my next book would be, I told them about my friend who had robbed banks. They gave me an advance and said they wanted to see more.

With that validation and money, and the time it secured, and having doubled or tripled down on my guilt, I finally found the space to tell Chris’s story truthfully, even loaded with falsehoods.

I Skyped Chris and began a rhythm of talking about his story, every few days. Patiently, with infinite generosity, he
fed me details. Things that had happened, things that he’d felt. I could have written an amazing novel from his point of view. He was an indisputably great character, a combination of Nietzschean overman and Don Quixote, if only I’d had the ability or the grace or the luck to get it right.

But that wasn’t the story I was able to tell.

I dug out my old copies of
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
and
Lord Jim
and
St. Augustine’s Confessions
and lined them up on my desk. I found my old notes. The midden of what we did and the evidence of why. I put up pages of quotes, recorded like aphorisms, and tattooed my walls with the seriousness of my intentions. Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality, Kundera wrote, in one of his books on writing, and he ought to know. I’ve never heard of a crime which I could not imagine committing myself, wrote Goethe, allegedly. It is not the business of writers to accuse or prosecute, but to take the part even of guilty men once they have been condemned, said Chekhov, as any doctor would. I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, said Burroughs, referring to the spouse he shot through the head while playing William Tell. I was trying to write a book that simply would not come, admitted Graham Greene, who then added, How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a God made us … And from Nietzsche, What if the “good” man represents not merely a retrogression but even a danger, a temptation, a narcotic drug enabling the present to live at the expense of the future? More comfortable, less hazardous, perhaps, but also baser, more petty—so that morality itself would be responsible for man, as a species, failing to reach
the peak of magnificence of which he is capable? What if morality should turn out to be the danger of dangers?

It had been a long time since I’d travelled and Chris had been in prison. It had been a longer time since we’d committed Chris’s crimes. What if morality was the danger we’d successfully avoided all along? What if the lives we’d led would have been less … less what? Less propelling, less challenging, less formidable, less noteworthy, less ours had we lived them any differently? Shouldn’t you be willing to commit the same crimes, no matter how horrible or trivial, and to tell the same lies, over and over again, for all eternity? Isn’t that the lightness with which you should live?