The one Sunday morning ritual I allowed myself was buying a copy of the Minneapolis Herald, which I would devour before starting my work. First the Business pages, followed by the front section where I gleaned business trends from feature stories and wire service dispatches from around the world. And then, if neither my workload nor conscience weighed too heavily, Sports and lastly the Arts section.
On that Sunday morning in April, at Copernicus Coffee, at my rooftop table with the barges lumbering past, my workload was lighter than usual, and I progressed leisurely through the newspaper. Though Business and the front section contained little I hadn't already read at the office during the week, I still read every article closely, seeking details I might have missed earlier. Then it was Sports, where the local football pundit speculated on the Vikings' upcoming college draft and the headline said the Twins won again, with Puckett going deep for the second straight game. Then I breezed through Arts, past a preview of upcoming Hollywood blockbusters and a fawning profile of a hot young TV actor and a full-page preview of a major Chagall exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. But that final section contained little of interest, and as I turned the last page, ready to resume work—my quarterly update of Jigsaw Software Solutions—the Books page grabbed my attention.
Books. Sad to say, pleasure reading was abandoned soon after I started at Preston Jeffers. No Sinclair Lewis, no Jack London, no Poe, no Sherlock Holmes, and certainly none of those obscure writers Wheatyard had insisted I explore further. For me books had simply dimmed, the urgency to read anything I could get my hands on having faded months before. I might have blamed my neglect on the dearth of literary coverage in the two newspapers I regularly read, the Wall Street Journal and the Herald—negligible other than business primers and executive biographies in the former, and middlebrow novels by local writers in the latter—but that would be disingenuous. I had no one to blame but myself.
As I flipped past that last page I barely spied, at the furthest edge of my vision, a strangely familiar name. Wheatyard.
I quickly turned back, with a double-take that would have made Moe Howard proud, my eyes riveted onto the sidebar where, halfway down the column under the heading "New in Hardcover," I was stunned to read the following:
Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard: Longing Dissolute Midnight. Columbia Press, 833 pages.
No further description was given, nor was one needed. Clearly it was the finished version of the manuscript that Wheatyard pressed on me when we first met, in the previous June at Cellar Books, right after he denigrated Sinclair Lewis. The book that initiated our brief friendship.
No further description was necessary, for the characters—de Mille's old cast of thousands—and outrageous situations and impossible plot transitions and elusive but ultimately compelling themes all came rushing back at the very moment I read that odd and instantly familiar title.