Part 13 (2/2)
March 31, 1981
This has been a long day-a terrible day-a wonderful day-an I-don'tknow-what day. All I know for sure is that I'm shaken to my heels. To my very soul. You can blithely quote Hamlet-”more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”-and never think about what the words mean. And then maybe s.h.i.+t happens, like the kind of s.h.i.+t that happened to Roger and me today. And the floor you have so confidently spent your life walking on suddenly turns transparent and you realize there's a horrible gulf below it. And the worst thing is the gulf isn't empty. There are things in it. I don't know what those things are, but I have an idea they're hungry. I'd like to be out of this. And yet there is something to what Roger says. I feel some of the crazy excitement I saw in his eyes. I- Oh man, this is no good. I'm all over the map. Time to take a deep breath, settle down, and start from the beginning. I'll get this down even if it takes me all night. I have an idea that I wouldn't be able to sleep much, anyway. And do you know what haunts me? What keeps going through my head like some kind of crazy mantra? The Dark Powers must give before they can take. The possibilities in such a simple statement! If such a simple statement could ever be true!
Okay. From the beginning.
Usually it takes the alarm five minutes of uninterrupted braying to get me up, but this morning my eyes popped open all on their own at 6:58 AM, two minutes before I'd set it to go off. My head was clear, my stomach settled, not so much as a trace of a hangover, but when I got up I left my own dark silhouette behind me on the sheet; I must have sweat out a pint of mingled booze and salt water in the night. I had ugly, tangled dreams; in one of them I was chasing Ruth with some sort of poisonous plant, yelling after her that if she ate the leaves, she'd live forever.
”You know you want to, you b.i.t.c.h!” I was yelling at her. ”Smell the leaves! Like cookies in your grandma's kitchen! How can something that smells like that be bad for you?”
I grabbed a quick shower, a few mouthfuls of juice right from the carton, and then out the door I went. Roger always gets in early, but this morning I meant to beat him.
On the bus I read through the Barfield woman's letter again. Last night, fuzzy with drink and about two thousand jokes concerning lesbians, black people, and deaf nuns, all I could see was my dead brother's name. In the flat gray light of an overcast New York morning, sitting amidst the last wave of blue-collars and the first wave of white- and pink-collars-strangely serene in that uneasy mixture of Posts and Wall Street Journals-I read the letter again, this time better able to appreciate its multi-layered weirdness. Yet it was my brother's name my eyes kept returning to.
I stepped off the elevator and onto the fifth floor of 409 Park Avenue South at 7:50 AM, sure I must have beaten Roger by at least half an hour...but the lights in his office were already on, and I could hear his IBM clacking away. He was transcribing jokes, it turned out. And although his eyes were a trifle bloodshot, he didn't look any more hungover than I felt. Looking at him sitting there, I felt a kind of dull hate for Harlow Enders and all the suits above him, guys who-I'd bet on it-have never read a single one of the books they publish. Their idea of a page-turner is a profit-heavy annual report.
”They don't deserve you,” I said.
He looked up, startled, then smiled. ”You're here early. But I'm glad. I've got something to show you, John.”
”I've got something to show you, too.”
”All right.” He pushed back from the typewriter, then looked at it with distaste. ”The book about General Hecksler is going to be unpleasant, but the joke-book...man, this stuff is ugly.” He looked at his current copy and read: ”'How many starving Biafarans can you get in an elevator car?'”
”All of them,” I said. Now that we were out of the smoke and laughter and yelled drink orders and the blaring juke that combine to make Flaherty's Flaherty's, the joke really wasn't funny at all. It was sad and ugly and dangerous. The fact that people would laugh at it was the worst thing about it.
”All of them,” he agreed softly. ”f.u.c.king all of them.”
”We don't have to do the book,” I said. ”There's no paper on it yet except for a couple of memos, and those could disappear.”
”If we don't do it, someone else will,” Roger said. ”It's an idea whose time has come. It is, in its own stinky way, brilliant. You know that?”
I nodded.
”You want to know something else? I think it is going to be a bestseller. And I think the dozen or so sequels we'll do are going to be bestsellers. I think that for the next two years, jokes about n.i.g.g.e.rs, kikes, blindmen, and dying minorities are going to have a...a vogue.” His mouth gave a revolted downward twitch...and then he laughed. It was horrible, that laugh. Outraged and yet greedy. Then I heard myself laughing, too, and that was even more horrible.
”What did you want to show me, John?”
”This.” I handed him the letter. His eyes went to the signature first, then widened. He looked up at me and I nodded. ”Carlos's boss in Central Falls. Maybe we're not through with him after all.”
”How did she get your address?”
”I have no idea.”
”Do you think she could have gotten it from Detweiller?”
”She says she hates him.”
”Doesn't mean she does. Who's Kevin Anthony? Any idea?””Kevin Anthony was my brother. When he was ten, he started losing the sight in one eye. It was a tumor. They took the eye, but the cancer had already gotten into his brain. He was dead within six months. My mother and father never got over it.”
The color left Roger's face. ”G.o.d, I'm sorry. I didn't know.”
”No, you didn't. No one in New York does, so far as I know. Let alone Central Falls. I hadn't even gotten around to telling Ruth.”
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