How I Became a Famous Novelist (2 page)

Warren Buffet has this word: “partnership.” This is realistic. The many cases of blemishing companies were cases when this did not partnership. For one year
I have worked at sales managing. Here, I dampened with the Japanese method of business: loyalty, namely self-sacrifice, namely adherence to the group, namely entrusted effort. This maintains the strong corporation, the flood of all sections is very skillful. Yet also I learned “partnership.” This is seen in the part of a car. They experience partnership or the car failures.

But “globalization” means changings in turbulence. The company and the leader where the entire market is part of success always maintain the necessity of adjust to the environment. As for the business school, “actual state,” and the serious problems which face the entrepreneur are engaged in the setting of science.

This is as in a car’s machinery. A new leader is prepared. This is my sincere hope.

Now began the part of the day where I would stare out the window and think about how I got here.

It began with my mom: she was vicious about limits on the TV. This was back when moms could still pull that off. There probably would’ve been nothing she could do if I was born ten years later. But we didn’t even have cable.

Books, on the other hand, were allowed. Books are not as good as TV, but they were the best I could do, so I read a lot. By the time I was twelve I’d read the entire Nick Boyle oeuvre, from
Talon of the Warshrike
to
Fateful Lightning Loosed.
I’d go to the library and pick up any book that had a sword, a gun, or a powerboat on the cover. This led to an interesting informal education, like the time I read
The Centurion’s Concubine.
I
knew what a centurion was, and I assumed a concubine was a type of sword.

With no TV to fill it, my spongy brain absorbed everything. Once Mom took a bite of pecan pie and said it was really good. So I asked her if it made “her tiny muscle of passion quiver with inflamed anticipation.” This was a line from
The Centurion’s Concubine
that didn’t apply.

But all this reading taught me how to churn out sentences. Before long, Mom was paying me to write thank-you notes for her, a dollar a pop. And they were good, too—“I was touched to my very core with gratitude,” etc.

Thusly I cruised through high school.

In senior year, an English teacher who was called Weird Beard recommended his alma mater, Granby College, “sort of a small college Ivy.” The brochure he gave me showed a flaxen-haired woman in a skirt, half sitting and half lying next to a field hockey stick while listening to a guy with glasses reading from a book. The moral was clear: guys with glasses who read books could do well here. So that’s where I ended up.

Suddenly I found myself transported to a secular paradise. A lush green valley where no one expected anything of anyone. I could do whatever I wanted, which it turned out was not very much plus drinking. I played Flipcup and Beirut and Knock ’em Toads. Off trays I ate cheese fries and ageless pizza in the Commons while girls scurried through in their last night’s clothes and fliers demanded I free Tibet and take guitar lessons. I slept on futons and went for pancakes and pounded the Plexiglas at hockey games and parsed
The Simpsons
and lost bets and threw Frisbees. I went to seafood dinners with people’s uncomfortable dads.

The stoner who couldn’t shut up about Radiohead, the guy who tried to pull off smoking a corncob pipe and loaned me his dog-eared copy of
Atlas Shrugged,
the premed who would fall asleep with a highlighter in his mouth, the dude already with a huge gut who quoted
Rudy
and ordered wings—I loved them all. I knew the taste of Busch Light as the sun came up after a drive to the beach.

But best of all was my girlfriend. The fetching Polly Pawson first slept with me because it was easier than walking back to her room. We’d have low-energy make out sessions that devolved into naps. She wore faded sweatshirts and track pants over her dainty figure, and her flops of hair smelled like raspberry shampoo.

The actual classes of course were pointless. I signed on as an English major, but the professors were dreary pale gnomes who intoned about “text and countertext” and “fiction as the continuance of a shared illusion.” Instead of loving perfectly good books like
Moby-Dick,
where a fucking
whale
eats everybody, these fuckers insisted on pretending to like excruciating books like
Boring Middlemarch
and
Jack-Off Ulysses.
They were a bloodless and humorless race who spent their hours rooting around in eighteenth-century sonnets and old
New Yorker
stories looking for coded gay sex. But I got their lingo down. I could rattle off papers on “
Moby-Dick:
A Vivisection of Capitalism” or whatever in a couple hours and get an A–.

Polly had her own ingenious strategy to get herself out of papers.

THE PAWSON METHOD
. Rub bits of crushed-up flowers or peppers under your eyes. Your eyes will get red and
puffed-up. Go to your professor at his office hours. He’ll (or she’ll, but Polly was especially good on males) be stunned to see you because nobody ever goes to office hours. He’ll be so excited he’ll start prattling about the Northern European Renaissance or whatnot. Look distracted. Stare out the window, look around the office, pick up a book or something. Then sob—once, not loud. Hold your face in your hands until he stops talking. He’ll ask you what’s wrong. Say “I . . . I need to go home for a while.” GIVE NO DETAILS. The professor, remember, is just an awkward grad student, grown up. If he had people skills he’d be doing something cooler than lecturing hung-over twenty-year-olds about the Northern European Renaissance. He’ll be ashamed that he prattled on. Say, “I don’t think I can take the exam right now.” Remember that these academics are trained to be on the lookout for depression, schizophrenia, etc. He’ll envision nightmare scenarios where you kill yourself and after an investigation and a lawsuit he doesn’t get tenure. He’ll agree to anything. Stand up and give him a hug. Hug him for a few seconds too long, to reinforce the awkwardness.

Polly was brilliant.

If I could’ve stayed in college forever, everything would’ve been fine. Sometimes, on dull afternoons, I’d duck down to the Talbot Reading Room, a wood-paneled chamber in the library, full of voluptuous leather chairs. I’d take out
Stackpool of Granby College,
a nineteenth-century boy’s book set at my very institution. It tells the story of Stackpool, who after a few missteps wins the big game for the Granby eleven in between innocent
hijinks and courting visits to the daughter of a local farmer. Here’s Stackpool’s assessment of College Days:

Bless the blissful idyll! Bless the companionable pipe, and the low arm-chair, by now well-broken for comfort. Bless evenings among that hearty fellowship, reading the old volumes and filling the head with wonders. Bless days free to wander in the scholar’s revelry, before the cares and labors of the world press down upon the brow. Bless those days before the summons of manhood must be answered, and one may linger for a fading hour as a carefree youth.

Exactly. I’d fall asleep and dream of Polly.

Stackpool ended his college career carried off the field in triumph. I was not so lucky.

I should have known. The signs were everywhere. I even saw a test prep book in her room once. She claimed it was her roommate’s. And I guess I just wanted to believe her.

Polly Pawson was cheating on me. With the LSAT. The whole time she was secretly working on her law school applications. Those times when she told me she was taking a second nap—a second nap! Think of how I loved her!—she was working.

She hid her law school acceptances from me until graduation day. And then she broke up with me. I pleaded. I told her about my plans for us (conning a wealthy dowager) and she retorted that they weren’t “realistic.” It was awful. There were hysterics and there would’ve been worse hysterics if I hadn’t been so hung over. I swore at her before vomiting on the granite steps of Prendil Hall.

So I was shoved, bloodied, into adulthood.

My friend Lucy told me to get a job like hers. She became an assistant at Ortolan Press in Manhattan. But I knew they’d find some twisted assignment like making me edit textbooks. The last thing I needed was for the universe to impose a
Twilight Zone
ironic twist.

Anyway, that summer I decided to stop reading, because of the worst book I ever read.

The Worst Book I Ever Read

During the Dark Period, right after graduation, I loafed around the Granby campus, sleeping on a friend’s futon, working at a sandwich place called Stackers. If you ate at Stackers that summer you should know that I rarely washed my hands.

Worried about my condition, my mom paid me a visit. She gave me a copy of
The Chronicles of Esteban,
which her lesbian sister had told her was inspiring. It said “a touching, uplifting narrative of love, pain and healing” right on the cover. Sounded like just what I needed.

Wrong. Here’s the plot of
The Chronicles of Esteban
. As his ten-year-old daughter lies in a hospital bed, dying of leukemia, Douglas entertains her by telling a story of his own invention. It’s about a shipwrecked sailor from the Spanish Armada, Esteban, who’s stranded in Ireland.

The daughter gets sicker and sicker. Meanwhile Douglas continues the story, in which Esteban gets sick. Esteban is helped along by kindly spirits and fishermen full of folk sayings. He searches Ireland for a mystical spring that’s been blessed by either Saint Patrick or some leprechauns, depending on who he asks. All of Douglas’s characters talk in a ludicrous brogue,
but they all agree that there’s a spring somewhere with healing powers.

Here’s the last paragraph of
The Chronicles of Esteban.
Douglas is talking to his daughter:

“There, beside the cool and clear and dark, the placid waters, Esteban raised his hand. Trembling. He grasped at the thin mist as though he might capture it in his palm like a butterfly.” Douglas paused. And he knew, in the silence, that the strained, timid breathing that had been to him like a second heartbeat, that faint and fickle dream of love and life, was gone. The moonlight illuminated the unforgiving steel of the respirator and cast its pale light across the bed. But Douglas wouldn’t look, knew he couldn’t look, not until he finished his tale. And so he continued, summoning everything within him. Memories and hands and remembered laughter he called upon now, to keep his voice steady. So he could finish his story, into the still air. “Esteban bowed before the waters, the sacred waters he had seen in visions. The waters that promised to heal. To restore. To give. He dipped his face, closing his eyes as his lips touched. And he drank.”

I read that last section while I was adding bacon to a Stackers Meat Combo. In furious disbelief, I almost dropped the book into the vat of spicy southwest sauce.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I shouted, alarming several customers.

It wasn’t that big of a deal at the time. I stopped reading. Whatever. The tide had already been turning me toward TV for a while.

* * *

At the end of the summer I found the EssayAides job on Monster.com. Jon Sturges was impressed by my Granby degree and my shallow but convincing erudition. In a practice test, I turned a Korean high schooler’s dense babble into a tidy five paragraphs about how her pet snail taught her to love biology.

Now here was Hoshi Tanaka. A core of earnestness runs through all four paragraphs of Tanaka’s work. You can tell he means what he says, whatever that may be.

Hoshi did manage to get across that he worked in the auto industry and this had taught him something or another. So I made up a story where Hoshi learned about how important cars were from an aging mechanic. The mechanic took him into the shop and showed him how all the pieces had to fit together just so. It was a nice moment, ending with a grease-stained handshake. This, I’d have Hoshi conclude, was a good metaphor for running a company.

This had all the elements of a tight business school essay. There was a vague metaphor, a sense of respect, a mentor figure, evidence that the applicant didn’t think it was all about money, and creative thinking (but not too creative). It sounded plausibly Japanese. Pleased with myself, I decided to knock off for lunch.

For lunch I favored Sree’s USA Nepal Food Fun, located in a strip mall across a four-lane highway from the Hamilton. Trying to cross without being killed was the most invigorating part of my day. This was in January, too, so there was the obstacle of melting snowpiles to add to the challenge. The thrill made Sree’s feel extra-relaxing, like sitting on the beach of a remote island surrounded by sharks.

Sree’s was decorated with Nepalese posters for the movie
Ghostbusters
. Sree loved
Ghostbusters,
and he liked me. So, solid guy.

“Hello! Pete.”

“Hi, Sree.”

“Did you see Conan O’Brien show last night?”

“No.”

Sree heaved with silent laughs. “Oh! He had a comedy who talked about women’s thighs. Oh!”

This may not have been the conversation we had that day, but it’s the kind of conversation we had. Actually, I think that day he was in the back, setting traps for an animal of some kind, so I ordered from his wife who was shaped like a squash. I got the Nepalese Fish Fry, which was fish sticks with some sort of pineapple sauce smeared on top, $3.99.

The only other regular was there. He was a lopsided old man with chapped lips who always wore a New England Patriots parka, ate a Curry Hamburger, and drank a Bud Light. When he finished his food, he would saunter over to me. He would tell me about his daughter, who lived in Arizona, and how when she was a little girl she could sing like Judy Garland. Then he would start alluding to terrible things he’d done as a Marine in Korea.