How I Became a Famous Novelist (29 page)

Preston Brooks, through the door, yards away. And though I fell back asleep, my sleep was bothered by alarming half dreams that appeared and vanished: Preston in a tank driving over a doghouse. A tiny me lost in his beard like a hiker in a forest. Preston eating Hungr-Buster after Hungr-Buster through a mouth in his forehead. Unsettling stuff, such that in the morning I was kind of a wreck.

But I’m not trying to make excuses.

The Arena

At the Marfa Book Company, the shelves were parted to the sides and the gap was filled by rows of folding chairs. A simple
wooden table with two microphones, two glasses, and a single pitcher of water was set at the front.

The Audience

They were settling in by the time I got there. And they were from both categories. There were the pale and small-armed. But there were also broad-shouldered women with arms that looked like they’d been used for lifting grain sacks. Real Texans and exiled smarts. And combinations: in the front row a muscular older man, the kind of guy who maybe writes poetry but is still proud of his ability to drywall a house, leaned over to his thick-calved lady companion and said, “This should be interesting.” There were several people typing on laptops.

To calm myself I scanned the audience and picked my target. She had sort of off-blonde hair, and in a tan skirt she was overdressed for the morning, which I liked. She was young but she wore on her face a semitired expression, as though she’d been exhausted by complicated and passionate love affairs, and she tossed back water from a plastic bottle she held with a sexy limpness.

Pregame

Preston wasn’t there when I arrived. I cursed myself for showing up too early. Good power move on his part to make me arrive first.

The moderator, Ted, some kind of local radio guy, knew me by sight. He was a younger guy who looked like he ate a lot of crap that he knew he shouldn’t. He came over, shook my hand. He thanked me for coming down.

“I really think this is going to be a fruitful discussion,” he said. Then, excited, he said, “and feel free to cut loose as much as you want. I told Preston the same thing—I’m not gonna step in. We’ll see where the conversation takes us.”

He led me to the table and sat me down. I saw that in the back of the room they were setting up a camera.

“I’m sure you don’t mind—we’re taping this, show it on the community station.”

The Arrival of My Opponent

Preston Brooks knew how to walk into a room.

He stood there, in the doorway for a solid minute. Completely still.

Then he began looking around. Slowly, like an alligator.

This was all an act, of course. He was waiting for people to see him. And after a few seconds, they did.

A guy in the audience jumped up—literally leaped out of his chair—and pointed to the stage. Preston Brooks nodded thanks, as though this guy was doing him a great favor by pointing out the stage.

Preston strode up. I tried to look relaxed. The radio guy said a few things to him that I couldn’t hear over the sound of the filling-in audience.

Preston’s presence, as he took his seat, was both scary and silly all at once. He gripped the chair with his hands as though it were a snake he was trying to strangle, then he lowered himself down.

Part of me wanted to lean over and explain everything to him. All this, how I’d gotten here. He looked weaker than he
had on TV, smaller. I could see his shoulders heave as he breathed. I felt I could almost smell his breath, hints of leather and apples.

Not knowing what else to do, I poured myself a glass of water. From his shirt pocket Preston took out a leather notebook and jotted a note. He underlined it emphatically, three times. Then he folded his arms and stared forward. I did, too. I looked right into the camera and wished it wasn’t there.

Nerves made the whole rest of the preliminaries zip by. I glanced at Tan Skirt and saw her look back at me. Suddenly Ted was introducing us. He didn’t set it up as a debate or anything, just sort of talked about how we were “two very different authors with two very different views,” and thanked us both for coming.

Kickoff

Ted turned to me.

“Pete, we’ll kick things off with you. You had some interesting, and indeed controversial, things to say about Preston Brooks in a recent TV interview—some of you may have seen it. So let me ask you this—how do you think his novels are different from yours?”

Watch the video, if you haven’t. I’m sure it’s still on there somewhere.

On the video, my response sounds confident. I ramble a little bit, and wave my left hand too much. My voice is, weirdly, an octave too high. But basically I say what I meant to:

I say that I have a lot of respect for Mr. Brooks—I called him this on purpose to make him sound like a boring teacher.
Obviously, I say, you have to give him credit for writing all those best sellers.

Then I say he’s brilliant at what he does. He’s absolutely brilliant at writing popular, you know, over-the-top books that, you know, women, old people, whoever, really love.

That he’s great, truly great, at writing sentences that sound sort of grand and epic. That he’s a genius, really, at coming up with plots that make readers cry and feel moved. I compare him to the guys who write greeting cards and commercials for detergent, and say they’re all really brilliant at manipulating people.

And that, you know, who can blame him? I don’t. That’s what people want, and he’s the best at it.

I say that he really inspired me, his whole, you know, schtick. I say I studied him, really, to try and write
The Tornado Ashes Club
.

But I say that obviously, I mean, his books are a little ridiculous. I mean, leprechauns? And cancer dads? And Katrina? And all those funerals? I mean, c’mon. It’s all a bit much.

I was watching my target now, the woman in the tan skirt. She seemed to smile here. So I maybe got ahead of myself.

You can spot the exact moment, right on the video, where I half-smile back at her.

I decide to close out positive. So I say that, all in all, Preston deserves “a certain kind of respect” for what he does. After all, he’s “a brilliant, top-of-his-game con artist.”

The audio on the tape isn’t good enough to hear this. But when I said that you could hear air going out of the room. You could feel the crowd almost recoil.

Then one by one they spring back forward. Because they realize Preston is about to unload on me. Ted fumbled with his mic, but couldn’t interject himself in time to stop Preston with a question.

Here’s a weird fact: looking back on it now, putting myself back in that chair as I drank water and let the words
con artist
sit in the air, I can’t sort out whether or not I really believed what I’d just said.

Certainly I thought I did. But did I
really
? Or was I coasting by on some shell of self-deceit that I was just too cowardly to look through?

If you’d drugged me right then, given me some truth serum or something, would I have said the same thing?

I honestly have no idea. I can’t remember.

Preston Unloads

He coughed. He took his time. He kept his arms folded.

“Until a week ago,” he said—and he said this, and everything that followed, very precisely. Very clearly. Like a distinguished Latin teacher. But he wasn’t directing it at the crowd. He was looking right at me, talking just to me, his crinkle-paper voice cutting the air.

“Until a week ago, I’d never heard of you. Pete Tarslaw. I hadn’t heard of you or read your book.

“But then some friends told me about you. They said you’d written a book. Then you’d gone on television and pulled some kind of
stunt
.

“So I watched your television program. My daughter showed it to me. She seemed to think the whole thing was very funny. A young man poking fun at the old fart.

“Well, I like to be a good sport. Like to be in on the fun. But I didn’t like this joke very much at all. It seemed to me, Pete Tarslaw, that you were a young man going around saying stupid things about writing. Something you didn’t know a damn thing about.”

His words, or at least the sound of them, had a grip on me. To try and wrestle out I offered a snarky smile to the audience.

No one returned it.

“You think I’m a con artist. You think I’m some Typewriter Johnson who puts pen to paper to sell armadillo soap. Well, I think that’s a shame, a real shame. But I’m not surprised.”

Here Preston looked away from me for the first time. He studied his shoes for a moment, then looked at the crowd. He knew how to stretch the time. Ted certainly wasn’t moving.

“You know, my daughters tell me there’s a drug now called Ecstasy. Imagine that. Ecstasy. The feeling I learned from a Shenandoah sunrise, or from gazing at Giorgione’s
La Tempesta,
the feeling I had when I looked at my young bride, people get that feeling now from a drug.”

He let that linger. I thought I saw an opportunity here. So I leaned into my microphone and made my
First Joke
:

“I don’t really see how that’s relevant,” I said.

Nobody laughed.

Preston Brooks let the room not-laugh for a while.

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’ll tell you why that’s relevant.

“You seem to me like a lot of young men. And that’s no crime. I was young and dumb once, too.

“So maybe you’re young, and dumb. Maybe you’ve never done anything hard. Maybe you’ve never sweated. Or seen a
wasted life at the other end of a bar. Or seen worry in a father’s eye in a hospital hallway.

“Maybe you’ve never put your hand on the feet, the cold toes, put your fingers through the cold toes of your wife, who’s died, alone, before you could get there. And now you touch the metal on the gurney, and now you touch her toes, and they’re both cold now.

“Maybe you’ve never heard the shots—clickclick . . . BOOM, clickclick . . . BOOM—when they fire over a coffin with a flag draped on it.

“Maybe you’ve never seen an old man in Louisiana, sitting on a patch-tar roof. And he’s weeping, a grown man weeping, a man who’s seen a bushelful of bad things in his day, they’re written on his face, but he’s weeping like a little boy over a dog that’s gone drowned.

“Maybe you’ve never felt the squeeze of a child’s palm on your pinkie and your ring finger, as she tries to squeeze an extra bit of something, love maybe, right out of you.

“Maybe you’ve never lived in a place where you can hear the whine of oil derricks, and the people in town depend on each other, in relationships as deep and necessary as the animals on a reef.

“Maybe you’ve never felt that worry, that absolute sick, churning worry, when the bills come in and sit on the kitchen table until you’re afraid to open envelopes, and your damn car won’t work, and you’ll have to take the bus three and a half hours, the prison bus, the shame of the prison bus, to visit your son who’s locked up, just so you can sit and watch him lie to you, watch him tell you lies about how it’s ‘not so bad’ inside, lie to you while you can see in his eyes that every day is killing
your boy a cruel slow death. A death like Jesus himself died. And you just don’t know what to do but beat your hands bloody against the cracked wall.”

He took a breath.

“Maybe you’ve never sat at a bar, four whiskeys in, your whole life undone, but you sit there, tears streaming down your face, trying to write one true sentence ON A NAPKIN!”

That part rose into a crescendo. When he was done he slumped back into his chair for a minute, his eyes wet. He waited for a moment, as though refilling with indignation.

“Well I’ve felt that. Or something like it. I’ve felt that. I’ve listened to that. And my readers have, too.

“But you think I’m a con artist.”

He unfolded his arms and let them lie upturned on the table.

“Truth is, I’m not surprised. Sad. Not surprised. Your generation is like that.” Then he turned to the audience and smiled.

“You’ll forgive me for saying that—
your generation
. I know I sound like an old man on a bus bench eating half a tuna sandwich. Well hell, I am an old man. Maybe not on a bus bench. Maybe no tuna sandwich.”

He let the audience laugh for a minute. Then he snapped back at me.

“I’ve known clever young men like you, in love with no God save for your own cleverness. You’re always looking for the falseness in everything. You’re used to falseness. You grew up with that lie machine, the television. It’s no wonder then that you look for liars everywhere. You make a sport of it. You chase priests and poets and policemen, writers, too. And when you find one, and catch him, you rub his face in the mud and dance about.

“The truth is, you have been cheated. You’ve had it too easy. You’ve never done anything hard. You’ve coasted by on sacrifices bought and borrowed.”

Here I don’t know what I was thinking. But I leaned forward again and interjected my
Second Joke
. And I’m embarrassed to report it, but it’s on the video so I may as well.

“Our generation has, too, had it hard,” I said. “What about the tech bubble?”

No one laughed.

After a solid eight seconds, Preston smiled a little.

“Jokes. Well all right. Young people should make jokes.”

I thought maybe he was going to let me off with that. He did not. He pointed at me.

“Maybe you think anything earnest must be a joke. But you are wrong, damn wrong. Maybe you think I take things too seriously. But you’re wrong there, too.

“You wrote your little book,
Tornado Ashes Club,
as some kind of joke. And my God, books are no jokes. Books save lives. We lose lives for books. So you better damn well think twice before you make a joke of them.

“You put something down on paper that you knew was a lie. That you knew was bad.

“That’s the worst crime there is. That’s a crime against readers. That’s a crime against literature. That’s a crime against anyone with a heart and a mind and a sense of compassion.