“Jesus. Who knew?”
For twenty-five years, Russell had been trying to understand and channel that mysterious force alternately known as buzz or word of mouth, and now it seemed to have mutated into this new digital form.
It was always a little mysterious, what made some books pop and others evaporate. This week he’d sold rights in Spain, Germany and Italy, which basically meant that Jack’s advance was covered and everything from here on was profit. Exactly how Russell liked to do it.
Jonathan rushed back into the office, waving several sheets of paper. “I’ve got it!”
“And?”
“It’s a rave….I’ve only skimmed it, but it’s basically a blow job. Here, listen to this: ‘Jack Carson’s characters are the demon spawn of Faulkner’s Snopes family and Carver’s lumpen proles, the descendants of Walker Evans’s Depression-era subjects, trapped deep in the sunless hollers of Tennessee and Kentucky. Their American dream is a nightmare of cruelty and inbreeding compounded by privation; moonshine and meth their only escape, and yet Carson manages to invest their struggle to survive with a kind of stoic grandeur, and even, at times, to celebrate their inchoate yearning toward the light….’ ”
“Jesus, let me see that,” said Russell, practically tearing the review from Jonathan’s hands.
—
The afternoon before the party, Russell was looking over the reorders for the book, which were strong, when Corrine called, all worked up about a hard day with the bureaucrats at the New York City Housing Authority. She was trying to get permission to set up a food giveaway in the parking lot of a housing project in Brooklyn. “I don’t know whether to be somewhat encouraged or thoroughly discouraged.”
“Well, if you don’t know, honey, I’m not sure how I would.”
“Do you realize you call me honey when you’re exasperated with me? I think you do it because you feel guilty that you’re exasperated and it assuages your conscience.”
“I can’t say I’m aware of this alleged tic, nor do I believe it.”
“All right, I’ll stop bugging you. I’ll see you at home.”
“Not till late. Tonight’s Jack’s book party, remember?”
“Oh, right. Do you want me to come?”
“If I were you, I’d skip it. Looks like it’s going to be a real hipster ratfuck. I won’t be too late, I hope. If he wants to go out afterward, I’ll send Jonathan.”
—
In hopes of getting the guest of honor to the church on time, Russell decided to pick him up at the hotel himself. He arrived at the Chelsea just before six; when Jack didn’t answer the call from the lobby phone, he asked at the desk, where they had no information on Mr. Carson’s whereabouts. Why, Russell wondered, had he put him up in the same hotel where Sid Vicious had murdered Nancy Spungen? He turned and walked out the door and down the street to the Trailer Park Lounge, where he found the missing person huddled over a drink, looking exceedingly mournful sitting on his stool.
“I don’t guess this was a real good hidin’ spot,” he said when Russell sat down beside him. His hair pointed in several directions and he had a greenish pallor. The kitschy bar and grill with its Elvis memorabilia had become Jack’s home away from home in the city. It was his kind of joke: a real redneck in a fake redneck bar.
“You’ve done better, certainly.”
“I don’t think I can do this.”
“Sure you can.”
“I can’t get up and read my stories to a bunch of smart-ass New Yorkers.”
“Just look at it this way—most of the characters in your stories could kick their asses all the way to New Jersey.”
“Most of my characters are dumb crackers.”
“I wouldn’t call them dumb. They actually seem very savvy to me. If they were competing on Survivor, these New Yorkers wouldn’t stand a chance. They’d get kicked off the island in a heartbeat by your boys and girls. I’ll tell you a secret about smart-ass New Yorkers; ninety percent of them are former hicks who landed here utterly clueless after being the least popular kids in their high schools. The popular ones stayed back home, where they were wanted.”
“Just fuckin’ shoot me now.”
“Have another drink.”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
After another vodka, he seemed slightly less terrified.
“What are you going to read?”
“I have no fuckin’ idea.”
“Well, let’s think of something. Read the story you think is least likely to go over with this audience, and I bet you it’ll bring the house down.”
“I need some blow,” he said.
“Well, sorry, but I used up my last gram about twenty years ago.”
“Somebody’s comin’,” he said. “I have to wait.”
“A dealer?”
“A friend,” Jack said.
Russell pointed out that the reading started in ten minutes, but Jack wouldn’t budge until his friend arrived—a petite, voluptuous brunette with a gold nose ring who introduced herself as Cara.
“You got the stuff?” Jack asked.
“Come on,” she said, walking off toward the bathrooms.
Russell finally got them both into a taxi ten minutes after the reading was supposed to have started, somewhat fretful about Jack’s condition. He seemed just as drunk as before, only now he was twitching and chewing his lower lip. As they approached the bookstore on Tenth Avenue, they could see a milling throng on the sidewalk. The chatter of the crowd subsided as Jack emerged from the cab and shuffled through the gauntlet, Russell guiding him with a hand on his shoulder, apologizing as they pushed forward into the mob. “Got the reader here. Sorry, coming through. Excuse us….”
There probably weren’t more than a hundred people, but the place was packed to capacity, half seated in the chairs that had been set out and the rest standing, crowding the floor as the stragglers from outside struggled to get in. Astrid Kladstrup, overdressed for the occasion in a tiny black cocktail dress, waved to him from the back. He couldn’t believe it had been a year since he’d taken the keeper of Jeff’s Web site to lunch, or that he’d managed to resist her.
It was as good a crowd as Russell had ever seen here, and the atmosphere was charged with anticipation. The audience seemed convinced that they were in on something special, pleased with themselves for being here and anxious to have their expectations fulfilled. Russell wished he could tell Jack that the crowd was with him—that they wanted him to be someone they could say later they’d seen at the very beginning, that they’d follow him almost anywhere tonight as long as it was novel—but Jack was enduring the pleasantries of the owner and the staff. He looked as if he’d just crawled out of bed after sleeping off a terrible bender—his hair an unruly mess, his face drawn and gaunt.
He was fucking perfect.
When he started to read, the crowd collectively leaned forward; Jack was mumbling, and speaking so fast that it was difficult at first to make out the words, even for Russell, but a helpful staffer adjusted the mike and a hush fell as he started again. He was still mumbling, and occasionally slurring, but it was just possible to make out most of what he was saying.
He read “Family First,” a story about a young woman from a small Tennessee town who is sexually abused by her father and runs away to Memphis, where she eventually ends up working for an escort service. Years later she gets an outcall for a trick at a motel and arrives, only to find her father waiting there, and she shoots him with the pearl-handled revolver she stole from his truck the night she ran away. We have already learned that this is a girl who knows how to hit what she shoots at, and though she wants to kill him, and we want her to, she shoots him through the thigh and walks away, leaving the pistol behind on the bedside table.
The climactic action all happened in less than a page—what had once been three pages describing her thoughts and feelings, until Russell had cut and pared much of it away, saving the essentials and exposing, as he saw it, the hard, adamantine c
ore. It was all there, but Jack had told too much in his original draft, hadn’t trusted his material, when, in fact, he’d already set it all up and provided everything the reader needed to know. And Russell, as he saw it, had shown him what was already there, and how to overcome his fear of not making his case explicit, and had cited the eternal cliché that less is more. He didn’t want credit, but he knew he was right, and he was grateful that this incredible material had come to him so that he could help to make it what it wanted to be. Even the draft he’d first read, cluttered with exposition, had had that vertiginous liftoff that he always wished for at the end of a story, the simultaneous feeling of rising out of the mundane comprehension of our mortal experience and the sensation as we rise of looking down into the abyss, an intimation of redemption—or damnation—that was all the more powerful for being left almost unspoken, and now the audience felt it, too; the combination of the story itself and how clearly the crowd was validating his assessment of its worth made Russell’s eyes well with tears, as did, perhaps, the knowledge of how hard-earned Jack’s hard-boiled wisdom truly was: the absent father and abusive stepfather, juvenile detention, the fast-food jobs and bar fights. It was all there in the stories. It was all his.
The applause was prolonged and clamorous, and many who were sitting rose to their feet. Russell knew it was a great story—no one could have convinced him otherwise—but it was exhilarating to hear Jack read it and to see the response, almost unmediated by preconceptions. He was actually a powerful performer, his obvious reluctance lending weight to the reading. The audience knew they’d heard something special. The Times had prepared them to be impressed, but it hadn’t necessarily prepared them to be physically moved.
As for Jack, he looked stunned, as if he didn’t know what to make of all this. He nodded and blinked, waved once and then retreated to the signing table, where his new fans pressed in on him.
Russell chatted with the staff and examined the shelves while Jack signed books, finally extracting him after more than an hour. The young drug courier, Cara, followed him out to the street. Astrid Kladstrup, who’d been smoking on the sidewalk, sidled over to join their group. “That was amazing,” she said to Jack, who merely grunted as a taxi pulled to a stop beside them. Clearly a city girl, Cara opened the cab door and thrust Jack into the backseat, sliding in beside him and pulling the door closed. But the maneuver failed to discourage Astrid, who slipped around the back to the opposite door of the cab and inserted herself on the other side of Jack, forcing Russell to claim the front seat.
He gave directions to the Fatted Calf while Cara explained to Jack that he really should have had his party at KGB in the East Village, before launching into a speech about her other favorite bars and clubs, babbling melodiously, filibustering her rival. She was still talking when they arrived at the restaurant. This battle for Jack’s attention, and the youth of the crowd upstairs, made Russell feel suddenly old and weary. He stayed just long enough to introduce Jack to some of the other writers on hand, then struggled down the stairs against the incoming tide of bodies, leaving Jonathan to keep an eye on the star of the evening.
—
The publicist showed up at the office just before noon the next day and stepped into Russell’s office to give his report. “You missed the whole second wave, which was pretty fucking crazy. Nancy Tanner got hammered and danced on the bar, and these two girls got in a catfight over Jack, and then sometime around one-thirty he disappeared with Dan Auerbach.”
“Who’s that?”
“Guitarist for the Black Keys. Anyway, I got a message from him at four-thirty this morning. Hard to understand, between the accent and the slurring and the music in the background, but I think he was looking for cash.”
“Definitely time to send him home to Tennessee.”
“Well, you might want to rethink that. The 92nd Street Y just had a last-minute cancellation and they wonder if he wants to share the bill with Richard Conklin on Monday night. Actually, it was Conklin himself who requested him.”
“Jesus,” Russell said. For all his belief in Jack, he was kind of amazed at the rapidity of his rise, and slightly worried about how the young author would handle it. He had a lot of issues to begin with, and Russell wasn’t sure that his previous life on the ragged edge of American civilization had prepared him for the ordeal of literary celebrity. “Tell them if we can find him by Monday and he wants to do it, they can have him.”
15
“WOW, I FEEL LIKE I JUST CLIMBED OUT of the Wayback Machine, this is, like, so eighties. Isn’t that David Byrne over there? It’s like any minute now we’re going to see Keith Haring and Basquiat slouching around.”
“I know, it’s like my nose is twitching. I suddenly feel this overwhelming urge to tease up my hair and do some blow.”
“It’s not like cocaine ever went away.”
“It did for some of us, honey.”
“Is the man of the hour finally clean?”
“What, Tony? That’s the whole point of this show. It ought to be subtitled My Thirteenth Trip to Rehab Finally Did the Trick.”
“Actually, I was shocked to hear he was still alive.”
“The way I heard it, Arkadian saw him staggering around the Lower East Side in rags one night, took him home and paid for a stint at Hazelden.”
“That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard about Gary.”
“Not really. He’s making fifty percent on every canvas Tony sells from here on out; plus, he bought masses of the old paintings for next to nothing while Tony was detoxing. And those are the ones everyone suddenly wants. Basically, it was totally in character for Gary.”
“Oh, look, isn’t that Dash Snow? He’s so hot.”
“So hairy, you mean.”
“Speaking of the recrudescence of drugs.”
“The what of drugs?”
“It just means drugs are back.”
“I keep telling you, they never went away. Every twenty-two-year-old in this city has a dealer on speed dial.”
The one with the too-blond hair and the Pee-Wee Herman shrunken suit, sensing that she was eavesdropping, turned and glared. “Can I help you?” he said.
“I don’t think so,” Corrine said, retreating into the crowd and trying to find Russell, who was supposed to meet her here.
The artist was hidden inside a distant scrum of bodies, a nimbus of LED light and clamoring, interrogative voices.
Eventually she spotted Washington, who was chatting up a pretty Asian girl in a neon green mod dress with intricate tattoos mimicking sleeves. He appeared momentarily discomfited when he saw Corrine, but quickly recovered his composure, kissing her cheek.
“This is my friend Corrine Calloway,” he said, clearly at a loss for the girl’s name.
“I’m Jenna,” she said.
“I was just giving Jenna a little art historical context. Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, Futura 2000.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Corrine said. “You have the real pedagogic instinct.”
“I just love the eighties,” Jenna said. “You guys are so lucky you were around then.”
“Yes, they were…memorable,” Corrine said. “Except that, they say, if you can remember them, then you probably weren’t there.”
Momentarily puzzled, Jenna forged on. “I mean, the whole club scene, Area and Danceteria, and the graffiti thing. That must’ve been so cool.”
Corrine hadn’t been to the clubs in question and hadn’t been all that fond of the graffiti thing at the time. She remembered when every urban surface was covered with strange names and slogans, and how it had reflected the dread and menace that was the psychic weather of the city back then, the visual equivalent of boom boxes and car alarms, the backdrop for muggings and murders. Subway cars entirely obscured beneath the colorful malignancy, which in her mind seemed to have something to do with their thoroughly erratic schedules and tendency to break down mid-tunnel. And even the color was quickly swallowed up by the pervasive pre–cata
lytic converter filth in the air, an encompassing sootiness that turned chartreuse to mustard, pink to burgundy, white to gray. In time, this girl’s tattoos would suffer the same fate.
“Remember those paintings on the sidewalk that were like crime scene outlines of bodies,” Corrine said. “Like the ones police draw at murder scenes? And everybody assumed they were real, because it just seemed like, of course. There was so much fucking crime.”
“Richard Hambleton,” Washington said somewhat smugly.
She suddenly realized they’d had this same exchange just recently. “Yeah, well,” she said, “I’ll take your word for it. He knew what he was doing. That guy had the zeitgeist down cold. I remember coming across those and thinking, Yeah, this is how we live and die in New York. That was the eighties,” she said, turning to the young woman in green. “Looking over your shoulder all the time, convinced that you’d get mugged or killed. Having your purse or gold necklace snatched on Fifth Avenue. Waking up in the middle of the night with some junkie trying to pry apart the bars on your bedroom window. Watching people you knew die of AIDS. But otherwise—fun.”
“That was very eloquent,” Washington said after Jenna fled.
“Just trying to provide some sociological context to go with your art history,” she said. She wondered what Luke would have made of her commentary and wished he could have heard it.
“You lived on the Upper East Side, for Christ’s sake.”
“I got around,” she said.
“Yeah, right. Between Park and Madison. Who did you know who died of AIDS?”
“Are you seriously asking me that?”
“Oh, shit, sorry,” he said.
The subject of Jeff having been raised, if only obliquely, she said, “It might interest you to know that I once rescued Tony Duplex from a drug den on Avenue B.”
“You’re red-lining credulity here, honey. If you’d said a poker game on Avenue A, I might have almost believed you.”
“It’s true. Jeff called me one night. They were being held hostage by a drug dealer who they owed a lot of money. I had to deliver cash.”