How I Became a Famous Novelist (23 page)

“So it snows for a week, and this is in
June,
so nobody was ready for it. Then the snows melt, and there’s floods, and that washes everything out, and it’s July before they can even get a rescue party together to go out and relieve this poor kid that’s been stuck in a watchtower in a blizzard.

“Mike was one of the guys that went out there. He’s worried sick about him, and they hike as fast as they can, but it still takes a day and a half to get to the tower. The whole way
they’re wondering how this kid made it. So they get to the tower, they climb up the ladder, and they find the kid. He froze to death. Mike used to have nightmares about it, because by then the flies had got to the body. And the weird thing was, they had a little hut in the tower, so that would have been some shelter at least. But the kid was outside. He was outside, on the deck. And Mike told me the kid died just sitting Indian style, outside. And he was slumped over his copy of
Leaves of Grass
.”

For a while nobody said anything. I certainly didn’t, because, fuck. That was a story, all right.

Then Tom Buckley said, “The disdain and calm of martyrs.” Ethan nodded.

I skipped
Leaves of Grass
in high school but I’ll make a confident guess that’s what he was quoting.

After that the drinking continued. Even a few jokes. Tom Buckley told a story about helping John Cheever find an alley to pee in in Iowa City. But I certainly didn’t say anything. I was feeling a vague but palpable kind of pretty bad. We closed out the place.

In the stories in
Prairiegrass Review,
the characters’ epiphanies are muted and subtle. I don’t know if that’s an official rule for publication or just an informal agreement, but that’s how it is. You don’t spell it out. The
Prairiegrass Review
version of my trip to Montana would end with me lying on my bed at the Super 8, watching a rebroadcast of an especially uneventful Colorado Avalanche game, eating Funions because I’d resolved to give Funions another try.

But Pamela McLaughlin spells everything out: why people do stuff, what they’re thinking about, and so on. It may be worse, artistically, but it’s what people prefer, so that’s what I’ll go with here:

As I lay on my bed at the Super 8 watching a rebroadcast of an especially uneventful Colorado Avalanche game, reconfirming that Funions are terrible, I thought about Marianne’s story. Ethan, Marianne, Tom Buckley, all of them—they were living up here in this shit hole, damn near pulling their hair out, driving around in trucks with duct tape on the windows, telling each other these awful stories they’d accumulated, because of one idea. Because they believed that getting a story right, telling it right, holding it, was a holy duty. They seemed to believe that getting a story right could save the world somehow. Or at least make you a better person. And to fail to tell a story honestly was sacrilege.

The story I’d put down, whatever it was, wasn’t honest. It was a fraud. For the first time, I wondered if that was a kind of crime.

16

Dad didn’t know much about Vietnamese food. Brats, sauerkraut, and Chicago dogs, heavy on the chili, were more his style. If you couldn’t order it at Bo Merrick’s Sports Bar and Grill on West Addison, it wasn’t worth eating. We were the only family I knew that glazed their Thanksgiving turkey with Miller Genuine Draft.

But as I grew older, Dad decided that maybe I ought to know something about the culture that I came from. He took out the Yellow Pages and found a restaurant called Pho 54 up in Evanston. “Authentic Vietnamese Cuisine.” So one Sunday, the three of us set off for what would prove to be a very memorable brunch.

The waiter sat us down in friendly but garbled English, no doubt wondering what this awkward little black-haired girl was doing with the big guy in the Bears jacket and the lady with the permed blonde hair. Some kind of kid exchange program maybe.

Opening the menu, Dad immediately looked daunted. I hadn’t seen him so confused since our doctor gave him a pamphlet on menstruation.

“Spring rolls, those sound good, as an appetizer,” Mom suggested, as usual trying to be helpful. Dad ordered those confidently—at least they had an English name.

The waiter dutifully brought over four little logs wrapped in rice paper, set them down, and wandered off. He trusted us to know what to do. Big mistake.

Mom figured the best course was to plow ahead smiling. So she cut the roll into slices, like a butcher carving up a salami, and arranged them neatly about her plate.

“Look Dennis, cucumber!” she said, offering some much-needed encouragement.

Dad, however, didn’t want to be fooled. He knew perfectly well that, Vietnamese or not, nobody eats paper.

So his picked up a spring roll and unwrapped it, like peeling a banana. He dumped out the contents on his plate. A messy pile of shrimp, cucumber, and lemongrass sat in front of him.

“Boy they sure don’t give you much, do they?” he said, obviously disappointed.

Mom practically gasped in horror, and looked around to make sure no one had heard.

“Dennis!” She leaned in close and whispered. “They do the best they can.”

—excerpt from
The Luckiest Polack in Chicago
by Ellen Krapowski (Copyright © 2006 Doubleday, reprinted with permission)

My emotional rope was already frayed on the day an episode of
Oprah
made me cry. Now, I know a writer talking about
Oprah
is like a sinner talking about God, but bear with me here.

The flying schedule that took me from Billings back to Boston was one of these awful stop-in-Phoenix combinations, such that I landed at Logan in purple predawn, before Dunkin’ Donuts had even opened. When I turned my phone back on I had a message from Jon Sturges.

“Pete, Jonny Sturg here. Listen. You might get a call from the US Attorney’s Office. They got these bureaucrats over there who are hounding us, completely trumped up; this is why I’m thinking of moving the whole thing to one of those islands. Anyway, just play it cool. I’m sure it’ll blow over. But—um, they took a look at some of the computers and they do have your name, so—whatevs, I’m sure it’ll blow over.”

So I had to file that away in the “Things That Might Become a Huge Nuisance Later” section of my brain.

Back at the apartment, Hobart wasn’t in his room. In the kitchen I found a pot of untended instant mashed potatoes. It appeared they’d been left for several days, because hovering above them were several unidentifiable exotic varieties of fly. I crawled into bed in my pants.

When I woke up, around two-thirty in the afternoon, I found solace in my Panasonic 54-inch flat-screen TV.

I’d spent a decent chunk of my advance on it.
The Tornado Ashes Club
hadn’t afforded me a house, but a 54-inch flat-screen was a fine substitute.

I went to one of the HD channels, showing aerial footage of British Columbia, and flipped through the mail that had accumulated.

There was a note from Polly. “Pete,” it said, and I could hear it delivered in the newly nasal tones she’d acquired since leaving me. “I saw your book at our [
our! That bitch
] local bookstore the other day. I was so proud! Always knew you had it in you. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet—this wedding stuff is nuts—but I’m looking forward to it. And I’m so glad you’re coming to the wedding. It’ll be so nice to see you again. Best, [
!
] Polly.”

What a despicable she-monster she was. It was all the worse because I admired the craftiness of it—the mock-kind note, the gentle tone, the reminder of the wedding. It was a counterintuitive strike worthy of Sun Tzu. It was an attempt to reverse my victory, to pretend to be proud (PROUD!) of me so that at her wedding my precocious success as a famous novelist would seem to bolster her grandeur rather than outshine it.

It shook me, in any case, and I’m embarrassed to admit here that I took my vengeance out on the pizza guy, tipping him less than a dollar, although I tried to make it up a few weeks later when not only did I overtip but I ordered some breadsticks I didn’t even want.

All of my problems could’ve been solved, or at least temporarily removed, by a round of daytime drinking with Derek. But he’d gotten back together with his Mount Holyoke girl, the
one who’d taken pity on him when he came down from his tree those years ago. So he couldn’t be rallied.

So alone I ate, and clicked around on the HD TV.

On a TV like that, almost everything is engrossing. On
MSNBC
, Olbermann looms Godlike, leaning forward into your living room with a definitive pose. On the Spanish-language talk shows you can see the details of the flimsy sets, the lines where they stopped painting or bent back the boards. On
Hotrageous Celebrity Couples
on E!, Angelina’s image covers the screen and dominates the room like an Easter Island head. I’d gotten good speakers, too, so on the bass-fishing show you could hear the echoing thwack of desperate fins against the steel deck of the boat.

I stopped clicking to make a study of the face of an Asian woman, midthirties maybe, whose makeup artists had counted on a blurrier resolution than my Panasonic provided. As a result there were pockets of her forehead much shinier than others. Stopping to analyze, I realized I was watching
Oprah
.

Turning the sound down, I made a game of trying to decide why this Asian woman was there. She wasn’t quite thin enough to be an expert on dieting. She was too young and unharried to give marriage advice. She appeared too cheery to be offering warnings about child molesters or why boys are lagging behind in school. But Oprah—on whom a much more balanced makeup effort had been exerted—listened with one of her serious faces. A psychologist of friendship maybe? I surrendered and turned the sound back up.

“. . . how about at school, did the kids treat you any differently?” Oprah was asking.

“Well, when I was really young, kids were just curious. Because my eyes were different, they’d ask me if I could see everything, or if it was like I was always squinting. ‘Can you see up here?’ Yup. I can,” said the Asian woman.

The audience laughed at this. I laughed, too, because I remembered John Whitbeck giving a similar eye exam to Chris Pai in second grade, the results of which were considered to be a baffling but decisive scientific rejection of our understanding of how eyes worked.

“But most kids just treated me like everyone else. And I
was
just like everyone else—birthday parties, school, I was a huge Cubs fan, I had a crush on Kirk Cameron . . .”

The audience laughed again.

“Now just like everyone else, you had a bully, all kids have bullies,” Oprah said. She looked to the audience. “Raise your hand anybody here that didn’t have a bully.” The camera didn’t catch this, but Oprah said “You few were probably the ones doing the bullying!” Everyone laughed again, and Oprah turned to her guest. “You tell a great story about a bully in the book.”

“That’s right, Mitchell was his name.”

“Mitchell, that can be a bully name,” Oprah said. Very astutely observed! I agreed with laughter as did the audience. There
were
certain bully names, and Mitchell was definitely one. Why did people condemn their child like that?

“Mitchell used to call me names and chase me home from school, and I complained about it to my dad. Now, my dad, of course, classic Chicagoan, he tells the story to his buddies at the bar. Big guys, factory workers. And they form a plan. So one day after school, Mitchell follows me home, calling me names and throwing twigs at me. Just as I’m running up to the door,
my dad comes out. And I’m crying, and Mitchell’s standing there trying to look innocent.” The Asian woman did a funny impression of Mitchell trying to look innocent.

“My dad says, ‘So, you like to bother girls, huh?’ And Mitchell shakes his head. Then my dad says, ‘Well, my friends and I, we like to bother bullies. Why don’t you meet my friends?’ And out the door of our house come about a dozen of the biggest, toughest, meanest-looking Chicago guys you’ve ever seen. And Mitchell takes one look at them and
starts crying
.”

The audience enjoyed this very much. They laughed loudly, and so did I. Some of the audience started applauding. I did not, because I was alone and it seemed inappropriate.

“That was the last day he ever bothered
me
!”

Oprah held on to the Asian woman’s knee, by way of “let’s-hold-it-right-there.”

“When we get back, we’re going to
meet
Ellen’s
dad!
” Oprah said these last three words in a chant that got the audience riled up as the commercials came on.

I didn’t even change the channel. Maybe if I had—if I’d just thought to check back on British Columbia—everything might’ve played out differently.

“We’re back with Ellen Krapowski, a Hmong—am I pronouncing that right?”

Ellen nodded.

“A Hmong-American who at age three”—Oprah pronouncing all this in her solid from-the-lungs voice—“was adopted by Bill and Denise Krapowski right here in Illinois. She’s written a memoir about that experience called
The Luckiest Polack in Chicago
. Now Ellen, you’ve written that your dad was your greatest inspiration growing up.”

“He was, absolutely. He taught me moral values and the importance of doing something greater than yourself. He wasn’t always
talkative
”—here the audience laughed on account of Ellen’s funny delivery—“but he taught me, really, through his actions, and how he was always there for us, always keeping our family together, and letting us know we were safe and loved.”

This was a high-impact statement. Even I needed a second. Oprah herself took a pause, a nodding pause, before continuing.

“Reading this book I thought, I for one have got to hear from this man, this father, who, in his own funny way—and it is a
very
funny book—but he, your dad, really teaches us what it means to be a father. So we’ve brought him here. Please welcome—Dennis Krapowski!”