Authors: Tom Grimes
Mentor: A Memoir (10 page)
I said, “It disappeared.”
He nodded. “That’s what a fastball does.”
“Then how do you hit it?”
“If it’s a good one, you don’t.”
That evening, I called my sister, who could talk, although her sentences were strung out, like a junkie trying to speak when she’s high. “I’ll see you in June,” I said, “when I’m in New York. We’ll talk then.”
For several days, I made myself inconspicuous, but I paid attention. In the locker room, players undressed and dropped their uniforms on the floor. They untied their cleats and kicked them out of their way. A frail old man with walnut-colored skin pushed a huge canvas laundry basket on shopping-cart wheels and stopped to collect their grass-smudged clothing as he moved past them. Later, he scrubbed caked mud from each player’s numbered cleats with a wire brush. Then he buffed the leather tops until they shone like new coins. The players showered, slipped on their thousand-dollar jackets, their silk shirts and custom-tailored trousers. And when they disappeared, the room became so hushed that I could hear the barely audible
clink
as the old man hung spotless uniforms in every locker.
clink
as the old man hung spotless uniforms in every locker.
Once I’d returned home, I found the uncorrected galleys of my first novel lying on the dining room table. The next morning, I sat down with them in my study. As I sharpened a pencil, I noticed that the angle of the sun had changed. A bright light now fell across my desk. I pressed the lead point to the pages. In my six months in Iowa, I’d learned more than I thought there was to learn. Bearing that in mind, I began to revise what I’d once considered perfect.
CHAPTER EIGHT
S
hortly before I applied to Iowa, I’d submitted a manuscript to a small New York publishing house. I’d read about the new venture in a literary magazine I found on the dusty, wooden shelves of a Key West shop that seemed to stay in business by selling absolutely nothing. Each week, I passed a few hours in the deserted place, listening to flies buzz and the ceiling fans overhead tick as I flipped through periodicals, used paperbacks, and comic books. I’d enter through the shop’s warped screen door, which drifted shut behind me and barely clapped when it touched its frame. The owner sat on a stool behind a long counter with a glass top. He had a gray beard, which he trimmed perhaps twice a year, and coconut-brown skin. His age lines looked as if he’d slashed his face with a razor. He always wore an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, and his sweaty, slightly hairy stomach bulged above the waist of his crinkled shorts. At his elbow, a beer can stuffed into a rubber holder to keep it chilled stood like a sentry. He’d nod at me with a lizardlike slowness whenever I entered the store. Then he’d return to his crossword puzzle. Often, I’d skim
Esquire
, which in the 1980s annually printed a map of the “literary universe.” In order of importance, publishers circled the sun like planets. Against the blackness of deep space, editors were depicted as either comets or black holes. “Hot” agents burned like supernovas. And writers with fading careers sailed toward an abyss beyond the margins of the page. With my few published stories, I didn’t even register as a mote of stardust.
hortly before I applied to Iowa, I’d submitted a manuscript to a small New York publishing house. I’d read about the new venture in a literary magazine I found on the dusty, wooden shelves of a Key West shop that seemed to stay in business by selling absolutely nothing. Each week, I passed a few hours in the deserted place, listening to flies buzz and the ceiling fans overhead tick as I flipped through periodicals, used paperbacks, and comic books. I’d enter through the shop’s warped screen door, which drifted shut behind me and barely clapped when it touched its frame. The owner sat on a stool behind a long counter with a glass top. He had a gray beard, which he trimmed perhaps twice a year, and coconut-brown skin. His age lines looked as if he’d slashed his face with a razor. He always wore an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, and his sweaty, slightly hairy stomach bulged above the waist of his crinkled shorts. At his elbow, a beer can stuffed into a rubber holder to keep it chilled stood like a sentry. He’d nod at me with a lizardlike slowness whenever I entered the store. Then he’d return to his crossword puzzle. Often, I’d skim
Esquire
, which in the 1980s annually printed a map of the “literary universe.” In order of importance, publishers circled the sun like planets. Against the blackness of deep space, editors were depicted as either comets or black holes. “Hot” agents burned like supernovas. And writers with fading careers sailed toward an abyss beyond the margins of the page. With my few published stories, I didn’t even register as a mote of stardust.
The magazine article featured two frustrated young editors. They’d quit their jobs to start Four Walls Eight Windows, a press dedicated to publishing books rejected by their corporate employers. Their idealism and naïveté matched mine. Since they accepted submissions “over the transom,” I decided to submit a novel that had once been three hundred pages but had been whittled down to one hundred and fifty. I’d written it in my midtwenties, and, like most first novels, it evolved through a series of failures. I had no sense of form or structure. I imagined skyscrapers when all I could build were tree houses. I wasn’t an architect; I was a kid with wooden planks, a hammer, and a box of nails. My sentences were imprecise. As a result, the characters and landscapes I described were difficult for a reader to see, like blurry images observed through an out-of-focus lens. And I didn’t understand the difference between action and dramatic action. Action alone has no consequences: a character washes a dish and the dish is clean. Dramatic action has
consequences
: a character flings a dirty dish at another character, splits his upper lip, and cracks his front teeth; the assaulted character then grabs a conveniently placed meat cleaver, flings it at the other character, and splits open his head like a halved cantaloupe. I had another problem, too. I imitated authors. On Monday, I sounded like Vonnegut, who, on Tuesday, became Nabokov, who, on Wednesday, became Toni Morrison, who, on Thursday, became Philip Roth. My voice hadn’t developed to the point where it was distinctive. And, repeatedly, I made the same mistake. I thought literature existed outside of me, that it was static rather than dynamic, that I had nothing new to add. If I couldn’t write about debtors’ prisons with Dickens’s authority, I failed. If I couldn’t outwit Jane Austen, I failed. If I couldn’t philosophize like Bellow, I failed. For a year, my novel remained ten pathetic pages, each successive draft worse than its predecessor.
consequences
: a character flings a dirty dish at another character, splits his upper lip, and cracks his front teeth; the assaulted character then grabs a conveniently placed meat cleaver, flings it at the other character, and splits open his head like a halved cantaloupe. I had another problem, too. I imitated authors. On Monday, I sounded like Vonnegut, who, on Tuesday, became Nabokov, who, on Wednesday, became Toni Morrison, who, on Thursday, became Philip Roth. My voice hadn’t developed to the point where it was distinctive. And, repeatedly, I made the same mistake. I thought literature existed outside of me, that it was static rather than dynamic, that I had nothing new to add. If I couldn’t write about debtors’ prisons with Dickens’s authority, I failed. If I couldn’t outwit Jane Austen, I failed. If I couldn’t philosophize like Bellow, I failed. For a year, my novel remained ten pathetic pages, each successive draft worse than its predecessor.
Then, not for the first time, I got drunk. My first wife had taken our car, I didn’t know where. We were broke. Our marriage clearly had been a pitiful mistake made by twenty-one-year-olds who felt guilty about having an abortion. We’d left New York and moved to North Truro, a hamlet near the tip of Cape Cod. We lived in a small cottage. To stave off total poverty I worked at the fishery in Provincetown’s harbor. It was winter; no other jobs were available. So at 7: 00 AM, I made my way, often through fog, along the wooden pier. Inside, the warehouse smelled of dead fish because most of us wore the same clothes for days and the stench was absorbed by our stiffened jeans and thermal jerseys. An oily residue of fish scales made the slick floor dangerous to walk on in boots with hard rubber soles. My job consisted of two tasks: dropping a metal winch into the bellies of fishing boats to retrieve metal baskets filled with the day’s catch, and then filling splintery pine crates with twenty pounds of fish packed in crushed ice. My gloved fingers were always numb, my beard glazed by sleet, my wool watch cap soaked with perspiration. The evening my wife was out, our cottage’s windows were ice-covered, and the small bundle of firewood I’d bought had burned down to orange cinders no larger than glowing cigarette tips. I’d put on gloves to keep my fingers warm while I held cold beer cans. I couldn’t concentrate enough to read, and we didn’t own a television set. I glanced at our scratched Formica kitchen table. On it, my blue electric typewriter nested beside a cracked sugar bowl, as if the machine might hatch a novel if it sat there long enough. Alongside it was the skimpy stack of pages I’d composed. Revising them had become brain-racking torture. Yet I wouldn’t quit. So I walked to the table, pulled out one of its padded chairs, dragged the typewriter toward me, and reread the novel’s opening paragraph for the thousandth time. Whatever life it once may have had, I’d wrung out of it. If a moment’s authenticity had ever sung out from the page, I’d silenced it. I didn’t believe the narrator’s voice. I’d forced it. I’d sentimentalized my family. I didn’t know the happy household on the page. My father’s bitterness, my mother’s theatrical self-pity, my sister marrying at nineteen, my brother deemed an idiot by all of us: that world I knew. I fetched a blank sheet of paper, fed it into the typewriter, drained my beer can, grabbed another, and waited. Five minutes passed. Then I pecked at the keys. After I read the words I’d tapped out, I obliterated them behind a scrim of xxxxxxxxxxx’s. I tried again. And then, rather than gravitating toward sentimentality, I instead described the night my father crashed our car, drunk and doing ninety:
The car’s front end had been pushed in and up, like snow that had been plowed into a pile. It was a heap of metal, twisted and creased. The headlights had been smashed and two pools of glass were scattered on the ground. The windshield was shattered but in place, with a hole the size of an orange directly over the steering wheel. I peered inside the car and saw that the apex of the wheel was cracked and dappled with dried blood. Beer cans, an empty Jack Daniels bottle, cigarette butts, and maps that had fallen out of the glove compartment littered the floor of the car. One of my father’s neckties was on the backseat, and beside it, as if he’d been undressed at some point during the night, his undershirt.
I paused, astonished. I’d written something true. And, as I continued to type, and the story grew blacker, I laughed, partially at my family’s life, and partially at the unexpected authority of my voice. I wrote until I passed out. In the morning, I woke to find my soon-to-be ex-wife still absent and pages scattered on the kitchen table. I brewed coffee. Then I poured some into a mug, ladled in two tea-spoons of sugar, and lifted a page from the table. Habit prepared me to stop listening the moment my words sounded false, clumsy, and sickeningly meaningless. But oddly, I was able to continue reading. I trusted the voice. I could imagine characters and places from the way the words had been strung together, as if by a stranger. I had a story to tell. Four years later, I had a novel.
Not that I knew exactly what to do with it. At twenty-eight,
Esquire
’s “literary universe” still intimidated me, even though I’d published several stories and lived with Jody in a West Village apartment two miles from the center of that universe. The anonymous sting of rejection letters no longer bothered me, but I lacked the confidence to contact agents. However, Houghton Mifflin, a Boston publisher, ran a First Novel contest. The winner’s novel would be published, and its author would receive a seventy-five-hundred-dollar advance. So I mailed in my novel.
Esquire
’s “literary universe” still intimidated me, even though I’d published several stories and lived with Jody in a West Village apartment two miles from the center of that universe. The anonymous sting of rejection letters no longer bothered me, but I lacked the confidence to contact agents. However, Houghton Mifflin, a Boston publisher, ran a First Novel contest. The winner’s novel would be published, and its author would receive a seventy-five-hundred-dollar advance. So I mailed in my novel.
I also submitted it to the PEN American Center for its Nelson Algren Award for Best Novel-in-Progress. One evening, a letter from PEN arrived. Out of two thousand applicants, I’d been named one of three finalists. (I didn’t win.)
Meanwhile, Houghton Mifflin seemed to have forgotten me, but I was reluctant to send an inquiry, fearing it might be interpreted as impatience. Six months passed before a letter from the company’s editor in chief appeared. He admired my novel, he said, but, in his experience, an author’s second novel often was stronger than his first. So, whenever I was ready, would I please send him a section of my new novel, which he would read eagerly, and with great pleasure. Once I showed Jody the letter, I put the rejected novel in a blue, wooden storage box and didn’t look at it again for six years.
Within a few months, I had one hundred pages of a new novel and I mailed them to him and to PEN. For the second year in a row, I was named a Nelson Algren finalist. (Again, I didn’t win.)
Three days later the Houghton Mifflin editor who had recommended my first novel for publication wrote to say I’d “gone off track.” Nothing he liked about my first novel existed in my new novel, the rest of which he didn’t ask to see. Instead, he advised me to “follow the often-lonely road to literary achievement.” Earlier that day, I’d stopped work on page two hundred and seven, midsentence. I read the letter to Jody. Then I opened the blue box, placed the new novel inside it, and didn’t touch it again for a decade.
Not long after the morning Frank ignored me in Key West, I received a note from the Four Walls Eight Windows editors. They wanted to publish the
first
novel Houghton Mifflin had rejected. As an advance, they could offer me five hundred dollars. They promised the book would never go out of print. For several days, I carried the letter with me. I would unfold it, read it, refold it, and then place it in my back pocket. I even brought it to work, as I wanted to feel it against my hip while I took orders from customers. I didn’t tell Jody about it. Instead, I bought a seven-dollar bottle of champagne and hid it in the cooler we took to the beach with us. In February, the water was too cold for swimming, but we went there on our afternoons off anyway. I’d sit at a picnic table and write, and Jody would either read or walk along the deserted shoreline, scavenging for shells. Before sunset, I’d open a can of beer, Jody would uncork a bottle of wine, and we’d listen to music through our tape player’s tinny speakers. The evening I gave her the letter, we shivered in our sweaters, and the wind swept her hair across her face. “Open it,” I said, handing her the envelope.
first
novel Houghton Mifflin had rejected. As an advance, they could offer me five hundred dollars. They promised the book would never go out of print. For several days, I carried the letter with me. I would unfold it, read it, refold it, and then place it in my back pocket. I even brought it to work, as I wanted to feel it against my hip while I took orders from customers. I didn’t tell Jody about it. Instead, I bought a seven-dollar bottle of champagne and hid it in the cooler we took to the beach with us. In February, the water was too cold for swimming, but we went there on our afternoons off anyway. I’d sit at a picnic table and write, and Jody would either read or walk along the deserted shoreline, scavenging for shells. Before sunset, I’d open a can of beer, Jody would uncork a bottle of wine, and we’d listen to music through our tape player’s tinny speakers. The evening I gave her the letter, we shivered in our sweaters, and the wind swept her hair across her face. “Open it,” I said, handing her the envelope.
I watched her furrowed brow as she concentrated. Then a smile bloomed on her face and she smacked my forearm with the sheet of paper. “You see?” she said. Meaning, you’re not the failure you think you are.
“It’s only five hundred dollars,” I said.
“Who cares? It’s a book!”
I poured champagne into two clear plastic cups.
“Do you have a new title?”
The editors had requested that I change the original,
Domestic Depravities
. “No,” I said.
Domestic Depravities
. “No,” I said.
The next day, I accepted their offer. A day later, I donned my waiter’s outfit. But I felt as if I’d become two people. One had achieved a measure of success; one hadn’t. Otherwise, my life remained unchanged, until Frank called.
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