How I Became a Famous Novelist (17 page)

But at the last minute, I got bumped for Josh Holt Cready. He’d deigned to come back from Gstaad or wherever the fuck he was wintering.

Still, plane tickets had been bought, things were in motion, the BooXpo people were apologetic and let me keep my hotel room. So I’d have a whole weekend to myself, bought and paid for, in San Diego. Sitting on the plane, I remember thinking “everything’s coming up Tarslaw!”

WHAT I SAW AT THE SAN DIEGO BOOXPO

• Downstairs in the Convention Center, people carting tote bags strolled through alleys formed by booths of publishers, an Arab bazaar for the mild-mannered and middle-aged. The place was dense with banners and cardboard cut-outs of authors and gleaming editions to flip through. It was a bonanza for free pens and key chains.

• There was a display about Tim Drew’s latest,
Ararat.
It was about biologists who discovered Noah’s Ark was real, and how that might unlock the cure for various diseases.

• There was a whole Nick Boyle section. Huge cardboard stand-ups advertised Nick Boyle’s new nonfiction work,
Nick Boyle’s Psych-Ops
. People were deep in line waiting to meet a real psych-ops guy, standing there in fatigues.

• Along one wall were booths for hardware companies, where you could try out little hand-held iPod-style devices for reading. I picked up the Toshiba Dante and the girl showed me how to scroll through. I started reading one of the Harry Potter books on the light-up screen, but I found myself missing the feeling of dominance that comes from cracking the spine in two. I suggested she add a perfume dispenser that emitted the stink of dye and cut paper. She didn’t seem interested.

• Tucked discreetly in a corner was a stand for Reizvoll Press, producers of intense erotica. One cover showed a man who had crab claws instead of arms, clutching a chesty woman in some kind of stone dungeon. I would’ve liked to have learned more, but the lady working the booth was a monstrous titan with dyed black hair, about ten rings on each hand, and a mouth like the Joker (Jack Nicholson version), and she spooked me.

• I had the most fun looking at the displays from Ramrod Publishing, a company I’d never heard of. They specialized in alternative history thrillers. Their big one
was
Blood for Quetzalcoatl,
which imagines the Aztecs invading Europe in 1491. It’s full of human sacrifices and big battles between knights and warriors, and the hero is an unknown merchant sailor named Christopher Columbus. But they had dozens. Their covers were the best: a steam train driving past a medieval castle, Abraham Lincoln in an astronaut suit, biplanes flying around the Pyramids, cave men fighting aliens, samurais fighting Eskimos, Adolf Hitler kissing Marilyn Monroe. Those guys seemed like the real geniuses. But the only other person who paid them any attention was a twelve-year-old Asian kid almost crushed beneath his giant backpack. He was arguing with the bearded fatty behind the desk about whether an AK-47 would really stop one of Hannibal’s elephants. It sounded like they’d both done a lot of research. The Asian kid kept saying, “I’d just shoot at the knees! I’d shoot at the knees!” And the bearded guy would say, “Kid, do you know
anything
about how strong the skin and skeletal structures of elephants are?”

Preston Brooks was not there in person, unfortunately. As I walked through the aisles, I fantasized about crossing paths with him—the two of us looking each other in the eye and squaring off. Maybe there’d be a final showdown.

When I saw his new book, I held myself back. I played a game of trying to imagine what new heights of sentimentality and emotional prostitution he’d reached: little children going to look for long-lost brothers with hobo satchels over their shoulders. Two
orphans falling in love and trying to raise a child the way they’d wished they’d been raised. A veterinarian who travels the country healing the hearts of old worn-out dogs.

But my wildest flights of shamelessness could not outdo the Master.

Preston Brooks’s new book was called
The Widows’ Breakfast.
Amazing, right there. He’d beaten me with the title alone. But the subject was five widows—yes, one of them was black. They meet in 1942, when their husbands are all training to be pilots in World War II. And starting in that year, they have a tradition of getting together for breakfast on the morning after the funeral, anytime one of their husbands dies.

The widows’ breakfasts go through the years, and changes and grandchildren and that sort of thing, the kind of stuff that sells Kleenex by the cartload to aging women who can barely keep it together at the mere mention of the passage of time.

What a tremendous genius he was. He made it look so easy. If I’d met him in the aisles that afternoon, it wouldn’t have been a showdown at all. I’d have shaken his hand.

That set the tone for the rest of my afternoon.

Up the escalator on the second floor, I stood at the back of a big auditorium and heard the panel I was originally on.

There was Josh Holt Cready, in the flesh. He was a tiny squirt of a thing, and his wire-rim glasses made him look like some kind of termite or poisonous beetle.

He spoke in a low, reedy whisper, so the packed-in crowd had to crane forward to hear him issue pronouncements: “Sooner or later, everybody in my generation will grow up. They’ll get tired of Shakira. They’ll turn to Saul Bellow. They’ll weary of
South Park
and they’ll remember
Mansfield Park
.”

Kudos to him for that. Great material and well delivered. A few eager school-principal types stood up to try and spark a standing ovation.

I leaned back against the far wall of the auditorium and pretended the applause was for me.

Having spent the day so far in cultural betterment and self-congratulation, I decided it was more than okay to start drinking.

TWO TERRIFIC THINGS THAT HAPPENED, AND THEN THE NEXT MORNING:

The First Terrific Thing

Down one of the touristy streets, across the train tracks and around the corner from the Convention Center, I saw one of those prefabricated Irish pubs with the Guinness signs and the etched lettering, this one called Bobby Sands’.

I walked in, and from the San Diego sunlight it took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dull darkness favored by daytime drinkers. My attention was drawn to a loud monologue being delivered around the corner of the L-shaped bar.

“If we’re gonna be an empire, then fuck it. Let’s be an empire.”

This was being delivered by a jowly man in sunglasses. His audience was the bartender. Not one of those glass-shining bartenders you see in old movies and
New Yorker
cartoons—this was a young guy with a pile of curly hair, grinning at all this as though it were a comedy show specifically for his amusement.

“But an empire needs to get its hands dirty. Decimate. You know where the word decimate comes from? Ancient Rome.
When they’d conquer a city, they’d go like this: one two three four five six”—the jowly man counted off among the three of us—“seven eight nine ten
thwack
.” He stared at me and mimed chopping. “Chop off his arm. Do that in Iraq, no more insurgents. That’s power. Imperium. Something they can understand. ’Course you can’t do it there because the goddamn TV cameras are in your face.”

The bartender slid down to me and asked me what I’d have.

But I was staring at the jowly man. He looked familiar. His flesh hung off his neck and bunched together like the curtains at my aunt’s. The skin around his eyes was cracked like poorly kept pavement. He was drunk or crazy or some epic combination.

“Here, wait, we’ll ask him,” said the jowly man, “see if he knows.” He fired a firm point at my face. “Which way is east?”

Just as he asked this, I realized who the jowly man was. I remembered him from his picture, driving the amphibious landing craft. It was Nick Boyle, author of
Talon of the Warshrike
.

“Which way is east?”

The bar was running perpendicular to the street—I was facing the bottles—I’d come from down the street—behind me was the ocean—so—

“That way!”

“All right, you pass,” said Nick Boyle. “
That
way’s the Chinese, and
that
way’s the Iranians. And
that
way, God help us, is the fucking Mexicans.”

“I hate to tell you, but there’s plenty of them that way too,” said the bartender, pointing north.

“Every fucking way, the Mexicans.”

I ordered a hard lemonade. This was a panic decision.

“Hard lemonade, Jesus Christ,” said Nick Boyle. “Give him a fucking vodka or something. Stolichnaya. Put some hair on his balls.”

“I guess I’ll put some hair on my balls,” I said.

“Don’t underestimate the Iranians,” said Nick Boyle. “They’ve got some very good submarines.”

“Excuse me,” I said, “I’m sorry—you’re Nick Boyle, right?”

“Depends who’s asking. If you’re the IRS, no. If you’re my ex-wife, no.”

“I think your ex-wife would probably recognize you,” I said. I accompanied this with the nervous laugh of male submission.

“After a bottle of red wine and a couple Xanax she wouldn’t recognize fucking Santa if he punched her in the tits.”

This sentence stunned me such that I spit up a little.

“So that’s pretty much anytime after eleven in the morning.” Nick Boyle looked me over. “You don’t look much like my ex-wife though.” Long sip from his glass of vodka. “You’re about thirty pounds thinner.”

Nick Boyle! Stumbled upon in a San Diego bar! Surely this was it. This was what literary life was meant to be like!

“I don’t mean to be a gushy fan,” I said, “or, you know, sure you hear this but I loved—love—your books. I remember one summer just sitting on this horrible scratchy couch we had, you know, ninety degrees out, rattly air conditioner going, and just plowing through them. And I didn’t want to get up, even though my legs were just horribly itchy.”

Didn’t need all that detail. But the sense memory of it was strong—I couldn’t think about
Talon of the Warshrike
without feeling the spiky burrs of that couch, upholstered with sixties rug sample seconds.

“
Arma virumque cano,
” Nick Boyle said, with a tired cadence, as though this were a cliché as worn as
That’s the way it goes
or
Can’t win ’em all.

“What?”

“
Arma virumque cano.
I sing of arms and the man.”

“Right.”

“It’s what’s worth writing about. Half these fucking critics don’t get that. But tree houses and sewing clubs aren’t worth writing about.
Arma virumque cano
. I sing of arms and the man. You know where that’s from?”

Nick Boyle pointed at me but didn’t give me enough time to answer wrong.

“That’s the first line of the
Aeneid
. That’s what it’s about and there’s no apology. Oldest story in the world.”

So now the ice was broken, and I was treated to

THE THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS OF NICK BOYLE

• ON GOVERNMENT REGULATION: “This bar should have peanuts. Every bar in America ought to have peanuts. Why can’t the government regulate that? In the shell, too.”

• ON HOW HE CAME UP WITH HIS IDEA FOR
TALON OF THE WARSHRIKE
: “I went to Venice with my ex-wife. We were taking a night cruise, and looking back at the city I thought, What if somebody blew this place up?”

• ADVICE FOR A YOUNG WRITER: “Thing of it is, I’m not a good writer. Prose, sentences, that stuff, I don’t know about it. I had a lawyer’s training, a business training. So I wrote clear and direct. But let me
tell you something. Prose, frills—people don’t care about that stuff. They want stories. This is why Hollywood’s kicking their ass. It’s why I can make the switch over to movies, video games—all I do is sketch out the story.”

• ON VIETNAM: “The Viet Cong were desperate! The Tet Offensive wiped them out! And then we pull back. What kind of nation pulls back on the verge of victory? Any boxing coach could have told you it was a shit way to win a fight.”

• ON HIS CAREER AS A BUSINESSMAN: “Writers love to knock capitalism. They’ll write five hundred pages about some hard-working farmer, but a guy working in a corporation to give his family a good life is a worse criminal to them than Stalin.”

• ON THE CURRENT STATE OF AMERICAN LETTERS: “Half the books these days are about smoking dope, masturbating, and crying about your girlfriend.”

• ON HIS OWN WRITING: “Here’s the thing—I didn’t know this when I was writing. But it came through anyway—everybody,
everybody,
wonders if they have it in them. What’s a hero? What’s a story ever been? It’s a hero proving himself. Delve into the psychology shit all you want. That’s been the backbone of stories since cavemen around a fire.”

• ON WHAT IS THE BEST “KILLING PISTOL”: Smith & Wesson 640.

• ON PRESTON BROOKS: “A sentimental faggot.”

He said it, not me.

If the reader is having trouble picturing any of this, he or she should note that we kept drinking through it all and the statements were delivered with greater vigor and reduced precision of pronunciation.

Toward round three or four, he described to me the amphibious landing craft he owned, the one I’d seen in his picture in the
New York Times Magazine.

“That’s a Higgins boat. Ike said those boats won the war. Two-inch draft! Goes right over coral, obstacles, anything!”

“A two-inch draft!” I exclaimed, with the thinnest understanding of what that meant. He told me how he’d bought his from a crusty Coast Guard coxswain who’d lost an arm ramming one into Tinian.

“At Omaha Beach, one of those boats, the whole damn thing, men, metal—vaporized! Completely gone. Ran over a mine or something. Goddamn if that isn’t courage!