Usually in my fiction writing classes there’s a student with a critical streak who pipes up early on in the semester and says, “What’s the point of fiction?” And he or she will go into the whole litany we’ve heard ten or fifty thousand times before: most people read non-fiction only, movies and TV have stolen the market once ruled by books, and on and on. I’m not supposed to whack students over the head with a staff, as a Buddhist monk would, and I can’t answer this question in a philosophical sense. I can only tell you what it is to me, I mean personally. But still I have an answer, and it’s in story form, and whenever the question arises, I tell it to my students. It starts with me getting mugged.
So what happened was this. One of my grad students tied the knot to another of my grad students and they invited me to the party. The wounds from my divorce were still pretty fresh at that point, and I didn’t have a date, so I went alone, in my best black suit and a shiny blue tie on a shiny blue shirt. The whole thing was on this party boat that leaves from a pier on the west side, next to that aircraft carrier museum, the Intrepid, in a neighborhood of car dealerships and strip clubs. You get on board, the boat leaves, you dance around on the Hudson to earsplitting hip-hop music, and you can’t leave no matter how irritable you become. So I chatted with the other professors at the party’s dullest table and got hammered on martinis, which nobody seemed to find surprising. I mingled a little, too. The single women I talked to, some younger than me, some older, all gave me eyebrow-pitched looks of pity and flat smiles and patted my elbows to say everything will get better. The rest of the guests were couples and kids, so I was a pretty odd man out, and eventually I just stood on the deck and smoked and watched the spinning radar thing. I bottled up my misery pretty well but I wasn’t about to dance the Electric Slide.
When I write, I try to put everything on the line– you should have a pen in one hand while the other thrusts a blade into your heart. I have no qualms about telling my students all this. I’ve been through tough times– things are better now, and that’s not the point here. The point is I was irritable, and when the boat finally docked, everyone surged out in a big crowd and it looked like a long wait for a cab, so I started walking home, right up the west side. It’s a windy two-mile walk, give or take.
Hell’s Kitchen ain’t what it used to be– the Irish gangsters have assimilated into local pols and there’s a bike trail between the avenue and the river, but at three a.m. you never know, and you don’t want to look like a piss-drunk banker. A few late-night bicyclists and dog-walkers went by but mostly it was quiet. And then as soon as I was out of sight of other guests, and there’s nobody else in sight, somewhere in the west fifties, I get to this place sheltered by trees from sight by the highway, and someone grabs me by the arm and I see the glint of something metallic and he spins me around and says gimme your wallet and your cell phone. Reflexively I stumble forward and break free and I turn, so I’m a couple feet away. In my dress shoes I’m not running anywhere though, so I’m really up shit creek.
“I don’t want to give you my wallet. Or my phone.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you want, come on!” and he advances a bit. Let’s not get stereotypical. I imagine you picture a young black man with a gun, but my assailant was actually a white man in his thirties, aged by street life. He hadn’t shaved in months and his skin and clothes were antiqued by the gray-black grime that coats every hidden surface in the city.
“Look, I don’t have a wallet.” I pull out what’s in my right pocket. I hadn’t brought a wallet, I just took a little cash and cards so it wouldn’t bulge out from my suit pants. “I have a twenty and a driver’s license and a credit card, and I’m going to cancel the card. Why don’t you just wait for the next guy?” With my other hand in my suit jacket pocket, I’m trying to dial the police without being able to see the phone. So I later realized I missed it and dialed 311 instead, the number for city services, which you’re supposed to call when a fire hydrant bursts open or there’s a dead raccoon in the street.
“I don’t have time for a debate, just gimme the money.”
“What, you got someplace better to be?” I didn’t want to hand over the twenty. Stupid as it seems in retrospect, I was emboldened by the booze and my principles, and I say, “Fuck off, I’m keeping my money.” And so he charges at me and I lurch aside and he catches me with a fist to the gut, and I reel backwards but I’m okay, and I see that the knife he’s holding is a butter knife. “What are you gonna do, spread me on toast?” I can tell he isn’t a real fighter– way too scrawny, and honestly, I could probably have taken him. It looked like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. I know most people would have ignored him or screamed or run off, but I have the gift of empathy, a little bit. And somehow– maybe it was that word ‘debate’– I could see that he wasn’t really street trash, that he’d had some hard luck. Curiosity often gets the better of me, and instead of shoving back I say, “How about this. Let me take you to a diner and we’ll get some food. You can order whatever you want. Then I’ll give you the twenty and I won’t go to the police and you’ll come out way ahead. All I ask of you is, I wanna know how you wound up on the street. Tell me your story.” At this point in the telling, my students usually perk up a little bit, since I seem to be getting to something relevant, although the main dramatic moment has already slipped by.
The mugger gives me a look like I’m asking for a blowjob, but then he agrees to join me. I grew up Christian, and even though I don’t believe in god I still occasionally have one of those very Jesus-like moments. So, edging through the shadows– he’s got no reason to trust me, after all, and vice-versa– we get to this place on 10th simply called All-Night Diner. Midget jukeboxes on Formica tables, ugly buzzing fluorescent lights, tired old waitresses in stained green aprons, chrome stained by years without polish, a persistent scent of nicotine despite the smoking ban. A good old fashioned family diner. Inside, away from the wind, it’s clear how much the mugger reeks of old sweat and piss and shit. The diner is empty anyway. Our waitress turns her head when he talks, to avoid getting a whiff of the guy’s breath, but I guess she knows it’s a complicated situation, me being in a suit and all, so she keeps her attitude to herself and lets us order.
The mugger– his name turns out to be Bruce– orders about sixty dollars worth of everything under the sun. Lucky for me the place takes credit cards. He’s good enough to go wash his hands and face and he even washes his hair with the cheap hand soap from the bathroom. Later I went to the can and there was a ring of blackness in the sink from all the grime he got off. Anyway when he gets back the food is there and he eats it all. Me, I get a six dollar grilled cheese sandwich and a couple of beers. One of his plates comes with a steak knife and I tell him he should keep it, and he grins and tells me to fuck myself. He might have actually pocketed it though, after the meal– I don’t remember.
So we’re sitting there and I say so what’s your story, but he’s so focused on the food all he can say is “why don’t you tell me your story first.”
I didn’t really want to tell him my story because the divorce was so fresh and it would have been a serious bring-down. But it so happens that I can recite a few Edgar Allen Poe stories from memory, verbatim. Clearly this is something I put some time into. I was in college when I committed them to my brain, and I used to tell them at bonfires and other parties because I was deluded enough into thinking it would help me get laid, it being UVA and all, where Poe went briefly before he gambled away his tuition money. I simply never forgot the words. My favorite is “The Cask of Amontillado”– it’s just so simple and delicious. So I recited that: the friends/enemies and their trip to the family dungeon to find the old bottle of sherry, and the only example I can think of, in all of fiction, of murder by masonry. I didn’t tell him who wrote it, I just delivered it there at the table, and at the end the Mugger says: “I knew that one. It’s Poe. It’s ridiculous, nobody would go to all that trouble.”
“Yeah, and the characters are thin, too. You know, somehow I knew you weren’t just…” I trailed off.
“Walking garbage? Is that what you were going to say? Fuck it. What are you, a college professor or something?”
“I teach fiction writing. You know, workshops mostly. Students hand in stories for other students to critique.”
“That’s what I really wanted to do, when I was in school. But I never had the talent. I took a couple classes but I never had the…” He shakes his head. “Nothing I ever wrote had any feeling. It was like, I always had these strong emotions, but I couldn’t get them into the characters, I just didn’t have… it.”
“I guess the word you’re really looking for is ’soul’? That isn’t everything, though. I mean the guy in that Poe story hardly seems real, and people have kept reading it for what, a hundred and seventy years? Anyway, it comes with time and age and experience, otherwise it’s phony anyway.” At this point, as I swigged my beer, I thought I’d stumbled on the next Raymond Carver, who, like him or hate him, definitely knew a thing about soul, not to mention booze. And I admit the situation seems a little unbelievable, this guy talking this way, but as I tell my students, it’s just one of those random crazy things. “So. Lawyer? Banker? Please don’t say you work in publishing.”
Bruce has finished most of his food now, he’s patting his belly, so I order more beer. He goes into his story. His gruff street voice fades away, or maybe I just start seeing him differently, but he suddenly sounds pretty well domesticated. He tells me he was an architect. An architect! And he had a wife and they used to live in Carroll Gardens, which is basically Park Slope minus the strident politics and lesbians, and they did the whole Brooklyn yuppie thing, and he started spending way too much time at work because of this one demanding project– something connected to the reconstruction at Ground Zero, with all the difficult requirements of sanctifying the dead without chastening the next generation of American capitalists. It is a very demanding public project– a rare architectural opportunity where you’re guaranteed to offend literally millions of people. Constant corrections and changes forced by city hall, focus groups, interest groups, lobbyists, not to mention his own architectural aesthetics. He starts having the same problem with his Ground Zero designs that he had with his writing– no feeling (maybe, I interject, ’cause of all the kibitzing from assorted civic mush-heads). But he has to work, and he starts using methamphetamines, speed, I mean, to keep up, and next thing you know he’s selling things, he sells his wife’s wedding ring, the wife kicks him out, he burns all his friends in a couple months, the wife takes up with some asshole, Bruce’s teeth get all fucked up from the meth, nobody wants to look at him, he’s too proud and drugged to go home to his parents in Ohio or wherever, and he hits the skids. He turns and looks out the window and I see his eyes getting misty but he’s able to blink it all away. “It’s like Poe without the happy ending.”
“Hey,” I tell him, now putting a hand on his elbow, impressed that he can be both facetious and maudlin. “Don’t say that. The ending hasn’t come yet. We all have good times and bad times, and you’re in a bad time, but your life is far from over. Tomorrow…” I shrug.
“I just tried to mug you,” he reminds me. “Some self-help book told me to seize every opportunity, and I saw you, and I had that stupid butter knife and that’s what got into my head, seizing the opportunity. I bet that’s not what the author had in mind, huh?”
“Beats workin’, right?”
He chews on the end of a straw for a while and studies the grime lingering underneath his fingernails. Finally he speaks up again. “I used to have this dream,” he tells me. “I would climb up the Empire State Building.”
“Like King Kong.”
“Yeah,” he says impatiently, “but I’m normal sized. And when I get past the top floor, I keep going, I climb up that spike, where they’re supposed to moor blimps, and then I get up there to the very tip and I screaaaaaaaaammmm and the whole city can hear it and everyone turns to look at me. And there I am.”
“There I am what?”
“Just, there I am. That’s it. Everybody sees me. The whole damn city.”
It would have to be one hell of a scream, I think, but I take a sip of my beer and study his face and then I say, “you can be a writer, Bruce.” The waitress has dropped the credit card receipt for me to sign, and I swipe the pen and hand it to him. “This is all you need.” And he looks at me and I add, “You’ve got soul.”
“Soul.” He snorts. “Shitty dream anyway, everyone knows the Chrysler Building’s better.”
“Listen, I’m gonna be serious, I want you to audit my classes. It’s not going to do you any harm. But you are going to have to, uh, fit in a little.”
Long story short, I wind up taking him in and cleaning him up and getting him some new clothes, and I even pay for him getting his teeth fixed up, on the condition that he attends my fiction classes and tries to get a job, and if he lays a finger on my stuff I’ll never let him come back. But the year on the streets has already cured him of the drug problem, and he’s so grateful that after a couple days I never worry again about getting burned. Once he’s clean he fits in just fine, and none of the students ever suspect. He sleeps on my couch next to a pile of magazines that become a nightstand. He clerks at the bookstore and doesn’t make a fuss, and with his new t-shirts he can hang out in the student coffee shop and write all day without being asked to leave. He’s quite good-looking in fact, a handsomely worn face, though he’s always a little jittery, like someone might sneak up on him, and there’s this persistent redness around his eyes that makes him seem haunted and broken.
When I didn’t have something to do, no class stories to read or blurbs to write, we’d hang around the apartment and watch Rangers games on TV even though I hate the Rangers and Bruce knew nothing about hockey. He would just watch, blankly. Or we’d go down to the bar and buy round after round of beer. Bruce was never an ingrate, he was always willing to pay, but I would usually cover the cost at the end of the night with the rationale that Bruce could never be as expensive as my ex-wife was. As for him, he didn’t want to talk about his wife at all (technically they were still married). If the subject came up, he’d crawl into his beer, so I didn’t pry much, but it was clear he’d lost someone who really mattered to him, and his guilt was corrosive.
Other times we’d wander around town and he’d name the designers of buildings I’d never even noticed before. He liked anything art deco: the Chrysler Building, sure, and ocean liners, and he’d even point out Bakelite radios in antique store windows. Something about the lines, the luxuriousness, the triumphalism– “in an art deco world, all the men wear monocles, and the women all wear fur coats.” At some point he admitted to me that he never liked the World Trade Center towers, that they were an ugly, uninspired blight. He was the wrong guy for rebuilding them and that made me even more convinced he should be a writer. In any case, the Empire State Building is king again, and… Okay, I’m getting way off track, I sometimes lose a little focus in the middle.
Eventually he submits a story to the emotional witch trial, by which I mean the fiction workshop. It goes over okay, nobody’s mind is blown but he comes out more confident, and he keeps it up. The sad thing is, his stories are actually too real– now that he looks like just another thirty-something liberal-arts yuppie again, nobody believes his tales from the streets. Like he’s got one where the narrator gets ass-raped at a homeless shelter, and he ends up beating the rapist halfway to death while the guy’s sleeping. He tells me it really happened, although I don’t know if it really happened to him and really I don’t want to know, but the other students say it’s a cliché and I won’t let on what I know, that Bruce knows better than they do. But in the workshop, it’s like whatever he writes, if it seems realistic, the other students say it’s a cliché. And when it isn’t a cliché, the other students, with their bourgie backgrounds, say it isn’t believable. Really they only base their judgment on other fiction, from television probably or maybe other books. But it’s always about authenticity, even though it’s supposed to be fiction. True stories are usually a no-no, we can leave that for the non-fiction classes, but writers usually apply some element of their own experience to make a piece convincing. I say, if your character pukes up rabbits like in Cortázar, or gets ass-raped in a homeless shelter, all that matters is that you make it real. Biographical authenticity is a red herring.
In any case he gets better at the basics and some of his stories wind up being pretty good. But, admittedly, they’re not great. I can tell he isn’t going to be the next Raymond Carver, not unless the world seriously lowers its standards or he gets a very patient editor. Truth be told, his stories never seemed like they’d break through a slush pile, and he wouldn’t have been admitted to our program. There was potential, but I’d have been hard pressed to call him a promising talent. He wrote these stories full of miseries, but they had no subtlety, so they’d make you feel bad emotionally without providing any intellectual reward. And there wasn’t any real drama either, though that can probably be taught. The best he could hope for is to be some kind of muckraker, an Upton Sinclair type, focused on homeless life instead of slaughterhouses. Not that it wouldn’t be something to take pride in. There’s no better or worse form of writing. Some of us write trashy page turners, some of us write haikus and koans. The marketplace is the only real master and it has no hierarchy of aesthetic value, no opinions of its own, just monetization.
One day his name comes up when I’m chatting with some of my colleagues in my office, and I tell them all that I just told you about Bruce’s limitations– and only after the words leave my mouth do I realize Bruce is outside waiting and the door is open so it’s clear he heard everything. He comes in and I expect him to be upset, but he tells me I’m right, he’s not a writer, he’ll never make it and he knows it. Let’s face it, not everyone is going to be successful at this, not even the talented ones (I’m not afraid to tell this to my students). Persistence pays off, but it can’t mask mediocrity. And then he just stops coming to the classes and he starts spending all his days watching soap operas and laying on the couch with that same old red-eyed, haunted look.
So after a couple of weeks I get bold, and I remind him of our arrangement, even though it’s now a bit pointless. At least he has a job now. And I say, “what I said about your limitations isn’t true, you just have more to overcome than other students who have been doing this since they were kids.”
And I’ll spare you the teeth-pulling here, but he eventually admits that the problem isn’t the writing, it’s the ex-wife. And then he launches into this story about how he went down to Carroll Gardens and lurked around his old apartment, some ground-level brownstone, and through the window he saw his ex-wife getting knocked around by this new asshole she’s been with, who’s apparently a trader or analyst or something. Later he saw her again, and bruises on her face shone right through her layers of make-up, and she was wearing big sunglasses and he figured she had a black eye. And I say that’s a cliché, Bruce, and besides, nobody believes it if you say some yuppie beats his girlfriend. That’s a low-class thing. And he says it’s true, tells me to put aside the fiction for a moment and take this seriously. So I ask him what he’s going to do and he says he’s not sure but he wants to get back together with her. I tell him I’m not sure it’s a good idea– my divorce was acrimonious and embittering, and I assumed his split was no better– but they could maybe meet and see if there’s any spark. And he nods.
And a week later he’s gone, leaving behind all his clothes and a one-word note, ‘Thanks’, and a pile of unfinished stories, handwritten, none of which he’d ever submitted, all of them on the topic of revenge. I never saw Bruce again, but on New York 1 there was this news report about a break-in and a homicide in Carroll Gardens. A guy in an apartment was slashed to pieces and found dead on the floor, and whoever killed him left a butter knife sticking out of his gut. Obviously it wasn’t the murder weapon, but it was clearly a message for me. And I understood. There was no need to call the police, Bruce was obviously a suspect. The police would call me on their own before long, I figured, and they did, and I told them everything, what else could I do. But it wasn’t terribly helpful since I had no idea where he’d be, so I guess it all just wound up in the homicide division equivalent of the slush pile. Bruce’s face appeared on a few “wanted” posters, like at the post office, but that was the last I ever saw of him.
But there was one thing that happened with the police that never left me. When they questioned me about Bruce they asked me what I knew about him, of course, and I gave them copies of his stories and recited everything from his history I could think of. When I told the detective Bruce had been an architect, he put down his pen and said, “An architect? He told you that?” And he wouldn’t answer my follow-up questions but it put me in doubt about everything I thought I knew about Bruce from the get-go. It made me seriously wonder– I mean, it was not a big deal, in theory, that he made up a career– but I felt burned, betrayed, that this guy I helped and trusted etcetera etcetera…
That’s when my students usually give me this look of horror, suddenly thinking they’ve grasped the power of fiction. But really, that isn’t the point at all, and the story isn’t quite as dramatic as I led them to believe. Because that’s not quite the end. A couple of years later, with my own life straightened out– me drinking less, and spending more time at the theater with my shiny new wife, who’s a costume designer– we got home one night and there’s this galley outside my door, you know, those blue-covered proofreader copies of a novel. It’s got some bland title and an author’s name I don’t recognize, but when I flip it open it’s dedicated to “My fiction professor” and I know at once that it’s from Bruce. The book’s a description of that one year with the drugs and how he lost it all and wound up on the street, and the shit that went down in the homeless shelters and meeting me, and culminating with the narrator killing his wife’s new lover. I read it in one sleepless night. It was bare and chilling and it was listed as fiction on the cover. Blurbs calling him “A Major New Talent.” A publishing house in London, whatever that means. No author photo. There’s this one far-fetched section about the narrator climbing the spire of the Empire State Building and screaming, but the rest is entirely true as far as I know. Hell, maybe that part is true too. Story had a hell of a lot of soul though, I’ll say that– more than I could ever muster in my own work. With his life presented in this form, I was genuinely moved to tears– fancy that, reading a story I already knew! Tucked into the book there’s a foreign phone number scrawled on an index card, with no name. I have that index card in my desk now, and I think about calling sometimes, but I never have.
So at that point in my retelling this story the students usually seem to come away a little baffled, because my tale has been interesting and it has some drama and all, but it’s hardly Shakespeare or even Poe, and now I’ve wasted most of a class session on explaining how one of my pet students got a novel published. Or they ask me where they can get a copy, and I tell them how it portrays me as a washed-up drunk in a university sinecure, so I won’t reveal the name of the book. But I was still pretty proud. And the dedication was to me, after all, though he gave me a different name in the book. Mostly it focused on the tawdry details of killing his ex-wife’s new lover, not my workshop.
And then I say “the end” and they file out of the classroom. But two or three times when I’ve told the story, a student has come over after class saying she wants to turn it into a screenplay– one of those “Based on a True Story” things– or an article for the Village Voice or something, and she wants to get that phone number off me and call Bruce and get his side of the story. And I’ll say, “Sorry. You can’t.”
And she says, “Why, is he dead or something?”
“No,” I respond, and pause for a moment. “Bruce doesn’t exist. I made the whole thing up.”
And when her mouth falls open, I smile. Now she has heard sound without sound, and enlightenment shines from her eyes.
