Mullen's was the last of the old-time campus taverns, the last not to turn into a blaring sports bar with a hundred TV screens or a pretentious fake-upscale place with varnished furniture and long rows of lovely but never-opened bottles lining the gleaming shelves.
Instead, Mullen's was dark and dank, the only décor a couple of neon beer signs advertising untrendy brands and, in an honored spot behind the bar, a framed photo of Al Capone waving to the camera as he was hauled off to the federal penitentiary. Beyond the bar were two aisles flanked by plain tables and benches which were designed for drinking and little else, the tables inscribed with generations of carved-in names and initials and dirty pictures, all preserved for posterity in layer after layer of shellac, the words and pictures immortalized like primeval insects entombed in amber.
As I stepped inside, my eyes strained to adjust from the brilliant sunlight to the low-wattage fluorescents within. Wheatyard sat at a table near the back of the room, books and papers already spread around him. But instead of a book he stared intently at the layered names in the tabletop, one hand grasping a sweating bottle of beer. A second bottle was conspicuously absent.
He looked up, recognizing the question on my face.
"Yeah, I know. I'm not reading a book. But this is just as interesting. This is purely independent writing. This is free expression."
"'Debbie does Danville?'" I said, reading the largest inscription upside-down.
"Okay, they're not the most high-minded statements. But people carved these words because they had something they needed to say. They didn't care who would eventually read it, or that they'd never make any money off of it. They felt the urge to express themselves, so they did."
"You have to wonder why." I waved down the bartender, calling out my order of a cheap PBR from across the room.
"Exactly. Like this one. I'm guessing this is the phone number of some guy's ex-girlfriend. Why would you go to the trouble of leaving a number for some stranger to call? You wouldn't if it was your own number, or if you cared about the person whose number it is."
"Spite?"
"Spite." He nodded. "They probably just broke up, and he's so bitter she dumped him that he's leaving her phone number all over town, hoping some pervert will call her up and harass her. Her number's probably back there in the men's room, too, and god knows how many other places. I'm fascinated that somebody can be hurt so badly that they'll go to such lengths to hurt the other right back. Kind of sad, actually."
His benign tone surprised me. I figured he had known plenty of bitterness in his own life, and might identify with the guy in his imagined scenario, empathizing rather than pitying. But then I realized the scenario was exactly that—imagined. I voiced my objection, saying he didn't necessarily know the truth of the matter.
"Yes, of course I don't know the real truth. It's all just imagined. I don't know about the person—maybe not a jilted boyfriend, or even a guy—who carved this phone number any more than you do. But I've got a bit of hard information, and know a few things about human nature, so it's not that hard to fill in some plausible details. That's the way I write, and that's the way you should write."
That subject again. I had never given writing any serious thought, and having just spent two years in business school to bolster my financial credentials, it didn't seem wise to distract myself in some foolish attempt at writing fiction. I had to concentrate on finding a job, pursuing leads, networking. My lease would soon run out, with the likelihood of moving back home with my parents increasing ominously with each passing day. I couldn't just waste my time sitting around and writing a story about some guy who carved his ex's phone number into a bar table.
I saw my beer sitting on the end of the bar where the bartender had left it. I walked away from the table.
"I don't know why you keep pushing me to write," I objected as I returned, beer in hand. "I'm not a writer. And I've got to find a job soon."
"Fine," he said, sounding almost hurt. "If that's all you want out of life, then by all means go find yourself that job. Get a wife, buy a house, have kids, a minivan, the whole shebang. Do something that only a couple hundred million people have done before."
I didn't like his tone. Though it seemed he had forgotten the whole hated-editor thing, here we were again, still at odds. Diplomacy was needed.
"Don't get me wrong. I love reading—"
"Sure you love reading," he interrupted. "Otherwise you wouldn't spend so much time in used book stores. Or talking to a struggling writer."
Struggling. He saw himself as struggling. This was something.
"You love reading," he repeated. "So why don't you want to try writing?"
I didn't reply right away, so he went on.
"You love music, right? When I called you before, I heard some postpunk stuff in the background."
"fIREHOSE."
"Right, fIREHOSE. They’re the guys from the Minutemen, right? You love that music, so deep down haven't you always wanted to pick up a guitar and play? At first you'd play just like your heroes, but eventually you'd branch out wherever the muse took you."
"That's true. I've always wished I could play guitar."
"So why is writing any different? Sure, you'd start out writing exactly like Sinclair Lewis, satires about the pettiness of small-town Midwestern life, but once you had been at it for a while you'd stretch out and do your own thing."
He had a point. Once I had wished I was Pete Townshend, then later Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, all big names, before my tastes obscured and it became Glenn Mercer and Ira Kaplan. But no matter whom my guitar god of the moment happened to be, the one thing that never changed was the nagging desire to play the instrument itself.
I remembered waking up from dreams in which I stood on stage and somehow, magically since I didn't know how to play, firing off a soulful and note-perfect solo to the nodding satisfaction of a quietly appreciative audience. No Bic lighters waving in the hazed air of a sold-out arena, though; instead I'd see just one person standing, chin down, eyes closed, overtaken by the ethereal, fleeting notes I was putting out.
Familiar chords from the jukebox suddenly caught my ear, and I paused to listen while Wheatyard renewed his studious consideration of the table carvings. It was R.E.M.'s "Half A World Away", a soaring, majestic song that I'd seen make guys—both cynical bohos and hardened finance majors—stop dead in their tracks, awestruck. I realized Peter Buck was another of those guitar heroes.
My life had always been marked by a paralyzing lack of initiative; I was attracted to countless girls but couldn't bring myself to talk to any of them, I loved music but never picked up the guitar. In romance I had no excuses, but with the guitar I could weakly insist that my perfectionism would make me want to play like Hendrix right from the start, and since that would obviously never happen I would never try at all.
But with writing I had no excuses either. I loved literature and admired writers who brought ideas and words to life; I understood how words fit together, knew which sentences sounded right and which didn't. With music, there were the forbidding mysteries of chords and harmonics to learn and master, but I already knew the basics of writing. It was just a matter of working at it. I could cobble together a readable short story the very first time out—I remembered my undergrad rhetoric class, where my classmates really enjoyed some of my stuff—unlike the guitar, where no sane person could ever stand to listen to the painfully off-key notes I strangled out.
So I could write if I wanted to. It all depended on whether or not I wanted to, and I wasn't sure if I did.
"But I think it is different," I objected, weakly. "Isn't it possible to enjoy an art without expressing yourself through that medium? I mean, I'd like to play guitar and express myself musically, but maybe I don't feel the same way about writing."
"Well, of course that's possible. But you'll never really know one way or another if you never even try. You might think you want to play guitar, but until you finally pick it up and learn a few ba
sic chords, you'll never get the chance to feel music bottled up inside you, just lingering there nervously on your fingertips waiting to burst out. Once you release that burst, you'll know you've found your true calling in life, the only thing that matters, the thing that everything else is secondary to. That's what I've found with writing. It's my passion. I can't imagine doing anything else."
His words resonated with me. Everything in my life was so routine, my steady progression through a bachelor's degree and a few years of work and then a master's. I didn't feel passion for any of it. I hadn't found my true calling. No matter what I was doing at any given moment, whether school or work, I could easily imagine doing something else—anything else.
Though he strayed from the subject I sought—just who the hell he was and how he ever got to where he was today—his insights on the writing process gave me a few hints about his character. I was about to delicately steer the conversation back to him—What else have you done?—when the friendly conversation at the next table suddenly veered to an argument over the merits of Freud versus Jung, and something he heard made him abruptly sit up in his chair.
Maybe Freud was one of the characters in his latest novel, or one of his protagonists underwent intense psychotherapy, which wouldn't be out of the ordinary for any fictional person he dreamed up. But he snapped out of his philosophical reverie, instantly alert.
"Crap. What time is it?" he said urgently.
"11:30," I said, looking over his shoulder at the clock behind the bar.
"Dammit, I'm late," he said, hurrying his books and papers together and shoving them into his bag, a canvas paperboy type with News-Gazette faintly stenciled on the side. "I had to be over at the English Building at 11:15."
Punctuality wasn't like him at all, nor the implied legitimization of the English Department as an official authority. He seemed to resist authority, never bowing to the professors, critics and editors who could have furthered his writing career. From what I saw, he was determined to succeed on his own terms, doing everything his own way, with even his definition of success being unique. Now here he was, worried about being late for an appointment at the local bastion of the literary establishment. He never seemed concerned at being late for any of our meetings.
I realized, during the few seconds it took him to pack up, say a quick goodbye and hurry out the door, a few pages flying from the paperboy bag in his wake, that something was going on with him. I sat for a few moments, wondering what it might be all about.
Overhead, R.E.M. trailed away, and the jukebox eased into instrumentation that was just as shimmering and even more upbeat, but when the vocals began I was disheartened to no longer hear Michael Stipe's plaintive croon but instead Morrissey moaning, "We hate it when our friends become successful." I wasn't a fan of either Morrissey or the Smiths, his old band, and though I immediately realized the detached narration was completely fake—the self-pitying sentiment was totally his—I couldn't understand what he meant. People should be happy for friends when good things happen to them, if they're truly friends.
As I stood, I picked up one of the sheets from the floor. It was letterhead which had been crumpled up and then uncrumpled, as if he trashed it after reading a few lines, had second thoughts, uncrumpled it and read it through, apparently finally valuing it enough to keep it.
The heading bore the imprint of Columbia Press.
"Dear Mr. Wheatyard," the letter read, "We have received your manuscript 'Longing Dissolute Midnight' and quite frankly we have never read anything so convoluted, confused and directionless. The prose is feverish, the grammar fractured and in violation of virtually every accepted rule, and the vast array of characters unwieldy and overwhelming."
After reading that, I would have crumpled up the letter too. For a writer, this had to be worse than getting a form letter. I'm sure Wheatyard must have preferred actual written rejection letters, because even if he didn't care at all about the editor's criticisms, he probably would have been curious, in a perverse sort of way, to see if the rejection contained any new forms of small-minded philistinism. He was enough of a contrarian to diligently accumulate negative comments as a curio collection, like grandmothers collect Hummel figurines.
But these criticisms seemed particularly harsh, even to someone of Wheatyard's defiant and hardened sensitivities. I wasn't surprised that his first reaction was to destroy the letter. But when I read further, I saw why he had second thoughts.
"That was our first reaction," the letter continued, "as well as our second and third reactions. But something about your narrative stuck with us, and upon further reading the novel finally, utterly resonated. The themes which you explored were very challenging in complexity, but you wove them together extremely well.
"Your manuscript shows exceptional promise, and we would be very interested in discussing publication with you. However, please be advised that your manuscript will likely require significant editing prior to publication. We would work very closely with you in the editing process.
"Please contact us at your earliest convenience ... Sincerely, So-and-so, Editor."
Finally, a possible breakthrough for Wheatyard. Possible, in that I didn't know how he'd take the suggestion of editing, or how much he valued going it alone versus getting his work published.
I returned to our table. The one beer I had allowed myself, the $2.00 luxury that probably supplanted a decent dinner, sat half-finished and warm. Finishing it now would have been worse than leaving it. I gathered my things, folded up the letter and put it safely into my backpack, and headed toward the door.
"He's a freak," the bartender, a mop-haired guy with sideburns, said as I passed.
"Huh?" I replied to this unsolicited and impertinent comment, from a guy who looked like he had just stepped off the cover of a Flying Burrito Brothers album.
"In here all the time, and always freeloading. Says he'll write me into his next book for a free beer. As if he even has any books anyway."
In reply I only nodded—while thinking this cowpunk knew nothing about him—and continued to the exit.