The Grind was both throwback and trailblazer—throwback to the brainy, conversation-heavy café society culture of Paris of the twenties and trailblazer of the coffeehouse explosion of the nineties. The Grind was a pioneer, churning out hand-roasted coffee back when Starbucks was still just one tiny shop in pre-grunge Seattle, when McDonald's and 7-11 coffee were the accepted norm, and when espresso, if known at all, was mispronounced "expresso" and eyed with suspicion as being mysterious, effete and European.
The shop was tucked into a two-story outdoor shopping center, John Street Centre, which was half-timbered like a campus apartment building and also housed a burrito stand, head shop, video arcade, movie rental store and yet another copy shop. The Grind's atmosphere was unapologetically intellectual; literature and philosophy professors rubbed elbows with high-minded university physical plant workers while grad students sat at tables piled high with textbooks, cigarettes forever smoldering in the ashtrays between, handwriting-stuffed spiral notebooks strewn about as dissertations were conceived, belabored, abandoned and revived again.
I picked up coffee there occasionally on my way to class, but only to go. Something about the atmosphere put me off, intimidating me from staying. But it made sense that The Grind, even more than the book store, was Wheatyard's favorite campus haunt. His strange mixture of intellect and earthiness fit in perfectly.
"Medium Kenyan," I said, passing across the dollar-fifty that might have been better spent elsewhere. The scorching July heat wasn't ideal for hot coffee either. Though I could have contented myself with ice water from the dispenser in the corner, drinking water there just didn't seem right. And stimulant might be needed to get my mind up to speed with Wheatyard's, so coffee it was.
He was already there, sitting in the corner absorbed in a tattered copy of James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce seemed too obvious for him to be reading—not at all popular, of course, but familiar enough to the pretentious intellectual wannabes that Wheatyard disdained. I had overheard students around campus going on and on about Ulysses, like it was some sort of hipster Bible. I would have expected Wheatyard to set himself further apart from the crowd with his reading material, with some writer much more obscure than Joyce.
As I pulled out my chair he set down the book, but not to greet me or otherwise acknowledge my existence. Instead he stared at an indeterminate spot in midair, his features scrunched up and his lips moving almost imperceptibly. Though not greeting me might seem rude, I knew it wasn't intentional. It was something I had already gotten used to.
Finally, after I sat down, deliberately scraped my chair across the rough floor and made a great show of emptying my shoulder bag, he suddenly realized I was there. "Damn, this stream of consciousness stuff. I never get tired of it," he said, wonderingly.
"Your writing is nothing like that."
"No, I wouldn't even dare to try. I couldn't come close to Joyce anyway. Brilliant."
True, he wasn't Joyce. But his writing was better than he would outwardly admit, even if I didn't completely understand it. I didn't understand Joyce either, from the one hopeless chapter of his that I attempted.
"Anyway. Know anything about Guided by Voices?"
This surprised me into silence. This was the first time, in all of our talks, that he had mentioned music. He talked literature, of course. And history, philosophy, politics—though always within a literary context—but never music. I wasn't very familiar with the band, but knew they were obscure and cryptic enough for Wheatyard.
He fished around in the pocket of his coat—again a trenchcoat, in the July heat—and pulled out an unboxed cassette tape, which he tossed to me.
"That's for you. Really interesting. Cheap production—probably recorded on four-track, with lots of tape hiss—and some of the songs are so short that just when you're getting into them, they're suddenly over. Plus there's some experimental stuff slipped in that I don't really get. But the melodies are great, and so are the guitar riffs. The main guy, Bob, is definitely obsessed with the British Invasion. Sounds straight out of the Liverpool clubs in 1964, and sometimes he even sings with an English accent though the band's from Ohio."
"Alright, I'll give it a listen," I said, though I wasn't optimistic. It was disheartening that an erratic mind like Wheatyard—a guy who loved the meanderings of James Joyce—couldn't fully grasp what the band was doing. I also wondered if the short songs would put me off, since around that time I was particularly into the extended improvisations of Television and Yo La Tengo. And the cassette housing read only "GBV, ed. EGW" with no song titles, so I wouldn't even have a track listing for navigation. But I felt my reservation slowly ease into intrigue. Something about the idiosyncratic songs, as described by Wheatyard and a few articles I came across in music magazines, seemed to echo his fiction. I might not fully understand either the songs or the fiction, but both would be fascinating to explore.
"So, what are you writing now?" I asked, assuming he was always writing something.
"What are you writing now?" he retorted, although not in that repeat-the-other-person-to-annoy-the-hell-out-of-them way we all talked when we were kids. Instead, he seemed genuinely interested to know.
"Me? Writing?"
"You're not writing," he said, deflated, before rising up again with a renewed edge to his voice. "Why not?"
"I don't write much, that's all. Just sometimes."
"You should write all the time. As should everyone of above-average intelligence. And you're certainly above-average," he said, his grin showing he meant no insult. "Writing opens up the mind, cleans it all out, really helps you realize how you perceive and interpret the world."
I was surprised at his confident insistence. After all, I was a business major, and not from one of the talky, creative disciplines, but finance—hard numbers, ratios, formulas and HP 12C calculators. The only thing in the business school further from the humanities was the fill-in-the-blank, make-sure-it-ties-out field of accounting.
I perceived and interpreted the world by reducing everything to numbers, to measurable units that could be dropped into a spreadsheet and crunched into whatever conclusion was needed. Invest or don't invest, approve or decline, pass or fail—whatever answer I sought could be found with just the right amount of tweaks and assumptions. The only creative part of finance was the lies I thought up to justify my conclusions, the implausible leaps of faith that financial people had to make every day, telling themselves they could quantify any and every situation.
I didn't write, other than some diary-like trifles—a few middling paragraphs scribbled down when numbers briefly lost their luster.
"I wouldn't know where to begin," I said, defensively, hoping to put him off the subject.
"Sure you do." He was having none of my evasion. "Now, this stuff you write, just sometimes. Tell me about some of that."
"Well, I wrote something about driving out east and back. It never went anywhere."
"That's because you didn't let it go anywhere. Tell me about the trip itself, not about what you wrote about it."
"There's not much to it. I drove out to Boston to visit an old friend, drove straight through, all night. Stayed a few days, and drove back right after the blizzard."
"Now that has potential, right there. Take just a fragment of what happened along the way. When you drove all night, did you come across anyone unique? Like, say, a trucker at a rest stop, a cute high school girl at a driveup window, some asshole in an overpriced German sports car who cut you off and gave you the finger?"
His mention of a cute girl momentarily returned my attention to the counter across the room, to the girl who had just poured my coffee. I hadn't given her much notice at the time, being preoccupied with what Wheatyard might have to say. I now glanced toward her, covertly, suddenly admiring what I could see from the distance.
"Well, I caught a cold somewhere along the way," I said, returning to Wheatyard. "Lost my voice and could barely order breakfast at Hardee's, in some little town in upstate New York."
/> "From a cute high school girl?"
"Unfortunately not."
"That's too bad. Leering at a teenaged girl when you know you shouldn't but just can't help it has great literary potential. Nabokov wrote a great novel out of a similar idea, though Humbert obviously took it way past leering."
The literary references went right past me.
"At Hardee's it was a woman, middle-aged, maybe early senior citizen. Not worth leering at, from what I remember."
"Okay. Small town in New York, early morning, lost your voice, something greasy for breakfast. There, you have it."
"Have what?"
"The start of a story. Take those little details and go from there. Invent a backstory for her life. Think of a conversation you'd have, one that doesn't involve hash browns and crappy coffee. Think of something that might happen between you two."
"Or theorize on her secret relationship with Donald Duck."
"No, that's my gig." He shook his head. "Don't wade into that swamp until you've been writing for a while, until nothing else seems to work, until no other style seems right."
His hint at literary failure reminded me of what Don Eastman had suggested about Wheatyard's repeated rejections, and drew my interest, much more than conjuring a story out of some mundane encounter at a small-town Hardee's.
But he pressed on, skipping past the potentially fascinating subject of his past failures. He was so involved in telling how to make a finance major into a fiction writer that I didn't want to derail him by interrupting.
"Think of what might happen next. Maybe you intervene in an argument between her and her pimply-faced manager, defending her honor though you don't even know her. Maybe she quits on the spot, and her ride isn't due for a couple more hours, and you volunteer to drive her home, and pretty soon you're right in the middle of her strange little world."
All of that was moderately interesting, but I was already right in the middle of his strange little world—drinking coffee on a ninety-degree day in a trenchcoat, talking over the boisterous Kierkegaard conversation at the next table between two scruffy college lifers, the incomprehensible manuscripts and that decaying ranch house out in Tillsburg—and I wanted to know more about that, to make sense of it all. The fictionalized life of a Hardee's cashier in upstate New York seemed trivial in comparison. For me, that life was unreal, imagined, while the enigma sitting across the table from me was real, perplexingly real.
"Yeah, that might work," I said, hoping that flattery would ease him past the subject. "But tell me something. You obviously have an unusual writing style. I mean, I read Longing Dissolute Midnight, remember?"
I said this last part hurriedly, in mild panic. I didn't want him to think I had gotten any impressions of his writing from anywhere other than that one manuscript. I didn't want him to know I had been asking around about him.
"How did you ever develop this style? I mean, it's really unique," I added, hoping an appeal to vanity might open him up, though I had never seen him be vain. "Have you always written like this?"
"No, of course not. Only the mentally disturbed would write like this, right from the start."
"The mentally disturbed," I repeated with a smile. "Come on, you're too hard on yourself."
"I'm not knocking myself at all," he corrected. "I intentionally try to write the way the mentally disturbed think—thousands of totally unconnected people and objects and ideas that make no sense to so-called 'normal' people. But to those people who are considered 'disturbed,' it makes perfect sense. They make connections that the rest of us can't. Yet they're considered abnormal."
"McMurphy. Cuckoo's Nest. The crazy are the sane."
"Exactly. Ken Kesey got that exactly right. And he got the psych ward right, too."
I stared at him, not knowing what to say, not understanding his implication.
"The idea that people who think differently," he continued, "who don't conform, are considered dangerous to society. So they're called 'abnormal' and get locked up. Which makes our mental health system not much better than Stalin's gulags. Sure, we don't deliberately torture inmates, not that electroshock is that much better."
He was rolling now, words flowing easily, and I considered myself fortunate that he was so generous with his thoughts, despite the vaguely unsettling undertone. I held my tongue, only adding a brief comment now and then, to keep him going without interfering with my trivial insights. I refrained from mentioning that I had only seen the movie of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and hadn't read the book. That would have undoubtedly lead to another hectoring lecture.
"But you asked about my writing style, not Kesey and the great McMurphy. No, I haven't always written this way. When I started out in high school I was very conventional. Show a few characters, give backstory on each, have them talk a little, throw in a plot twist or some conflict between them, eventually resolve the dispute, and try to get some minor point across before wrapping up the loose ends with a tidy conclusion."
He paused, lifted his mug and took a swallow of coffee.
"But that was before…" His voice trailed off for a moment before recovering. Our eyes met for an instant before he turned away. He reached out and touched Ulysses, delicately, with the tips of his fingers. When he looked back again his gaze was flat, almost blank. "That conventional stuff didn't work for me—so boring, so mundane. I wrote exactly the way they taught me to. Thank god I'm done with all that nonsense."
Before? Before what? My mind raced to decipher his meaning but came up with nothing. Except...someone taught him to write, conventionally. So he started writing in high school, probably continued in college. This latest hint from him filled in a little further the portrait I was mentally drawing of his life. But to my dismay I sensed him drawing his narrative to a close, the last thing I wanted at that moment.
"Have you been published anywhere?" I said, trying to keep him going. I immediately regretted the question, realizing it was probably a sore subject with him, and feared it might silence him completely. Back then I didn't know that complaining about publishers has been the favorite pastime of writers throughout history.
Wheatyard, I learned, was no exception.
"Nope, no publications. Plenty of rejections, though, and only a few of those anything more than form letters. Only a few editors bothered to write back. 'Your work is certainly inventive.' 'We are impressed with the obvious amount of labor involved.' 'Your grasp of a dizzyingly broad range of topics is quite overwhelming.'"
"But..." I said, leading.
"But, 'It doesn't meet our editorial needs at the present time.' Or 'It's not quite what we're looking for at the moment.' Or 'It's not a good fit for the theme of our upcoming issue or any other theme we could ever imagine.'"
"And..."
"And, 'We encourage you to keep writing and submit more work to us in the future', 'I have enclosed submission guidelines for our next open-themed fiction contest', 'We wish you the best of luck in your future writing endeavors, elsewhere.'"
"Boilerplate stuff."
"It was only boilerplate when they bothered being polite. A couple of editors went beyond that, saying 'Please do not ever contact us again', and 'Legal action will be considered.'"
"Wow, that's harsh," I said, shaking my head. "For something as harmless as a manuscript."
"Well, that and a few followup phone calls. Okay, so I guess that one time I shouldn't have called a week after blind-submitting 500-something pages—should've given them a month or so. But I don't think any of those calls were very threatening. Sure, I yelled a few times, and mentioned something about their heredity, but it wasn't anything really out of line."
"Heredity?"
"Parentage, farm animals. You know."
"Aha," I said, feeling myself blush, embarrassed not by the crude implication but by the thought of addressing editors this way. Not that I had ever dealt with any editors, of course, but to a writer they were essentially employers. Or potential employers. I couldn't imagine mys
elf having a job interview go badly and then lambasting the interviewer, insulting his mother and probably getting escorted out the door by security.
Don't burn your bridges might be a cliché, but there's also some truth to it. That interviewer might have another job opening available a few months from now, so it was best to stay in his good graces. And that editor had more journals and books to publish. From what I understood, it was already hard enough to get published without alienating someone who might be able to help you in the future.
"None of them appreciate art," Wheatyard said with quiet indignation.
Oh, here we go, I thought. The unappreciated genius artist. I thought that was all just a myth.
"Don't think that I'm pitying myself when I say that," he said, seeming to read my mind. Presumably he had already experienced that reaction after complaining about his fate to others. "It's true. Editors are more interested in the bottom line, serving their precious customers, when they're supposed to be advancing the cause of great art. They're just playing it safe."
"I don't know much about publishing," I ventured, "but if an editor keeps publishing stuff that nobody wants to read, won't that eventually put them out of business? And leave you with one less place to publish your stuff?"
"Ah, yes, spoken like a true finance major," he sneered. "Rates of return, revenue maximization, shareholder utility. All those great numbers that keep romance and horror hacks steadily employed."
I sensed he was losing patience with me. He tolerated me and even seemed to enjoy having me around, but only as long as I deferred to his singular greatness. He could pass off my bowing at the altar of Wall Street, the free market and the Federal Reserve System, as a youthful indiscretion, seeing my interest in his writings and bohemian lifestyle as evidence that I might still be redeemed. He could dream that I'd eventually give up a career in middle management to pursue my latent creative impulses.
He could believe all of that, implausible as it was, as long I didn't question his basic beliefs, the foundation that his fiercely independent but rickety existence was built upon.
But now that I dared to look at things from the viewpoint of the despised editor, implicitly questioning why he continued to write such difficult and inaccessible fiction, he might have thought, for the first time, that I was beyond hope. That maybe I wouldn't advance in the world any further than a windowed office in a glass high-rise and a tasteful four-bedroom colonial on a suburban cul-de-sac.
Still, I thought I had a valid point. I was a moderately intelligent person, with bachelors and graduate degrees from a top university, but still I could barely comprehend his writing. Don Eastman understood it, along with some English professors I talked to, but books were their lives. They read difficult literature willingly and enthusiastically, considering it an intellectual exercise worthy of their time and effort.
But Eastman and those professors were a tiny minority. Most of the population, or what remained of a book-buying public, just didn't want to work that hard at reading. They wanted escape at the end of a long work day, a chance to unwind and be easily entertained, which is why those romance and horror writers he disparaged enjoyed steady employment. Few people wanted to read dense philosophical treatises with a cast of thousands of disparate characters.
Wheatyard clearly wanted to hear none of that. He wanted his work praised, his lofty thoughts celebrated, his genius recognized. He wanted none of the hard reality, of any mention of the conventional tastes of the public. Maybe he was a genius, just maybe, but there were few people who could recognize that fact even if it happened to be true. And he wouldn't compromise to connect with everyone else.
He didn't want that hard reality, the kind I trafficked in with my finance degrees and my future investment career. I felt like I was starting to lose him. If I was going to figure out this fascinating enigma during my last few weeks in Champaign, I'd have to keep feeding him that unreality.
These specific thoughts only came to me much later, but there, at The Grind, I still vaguely sensed the need for that unreality. Softening my tone, I quietly eased the subject away from editors and back to his writing itself, the cast of thousands and everything else. He seemed to take it well, his voice warming as he again chattered about fiction—his and that of others—and his anger vanishing.
FIVE