I Wish I Was Like You Page 8

  “It’s five dollars,” I said to a silver ponytailed man who wore a Rolex.

  “Oh, hey, yeah, I know the author,” he said.

  “It’s a fundraiser.”

  The man snickered and waved to his wife, who had ducked her head to sneak by and was now occupying a seat in the second row. She glanced at me, laughed, and kicked off her Italian loafers.

  About half of the crowd ignored me when I asked them to pay. During intermission, while the rich deadbeats milled about in the alley downstairs, sharing joints, I complained to Vaughn about his so-called friends.

  “Never mind,” he told me. “They’re rolling in Microsoft money.”

  “Then they should pay.”

  “No, no, no. We want their support. We’re building goodwill for the company, for the future.”

  “What purpose does it serve,” I said, “if they won’t pay for anything?”

  “They might pay someday, or they might serve on the board and bring in wealthy patrons.”

  “Will they pay?” I asked.

  “Maybe.”

  Following the performance several of the deadbeats left without congratulating Vaughn. The silver ponytailed guy made eye contact with me and tossed a dollar into the collection box. He stepped away and traipsed after his wife, who was clutching the handrail and picking her way carefully down the stairs. I assumed her Italian loafers had reduced her feet to giant blisters.

  “Saving up for a Porsche?”

  I wish the shouted insult had come from me but the young woman who said it was standing there, full lips smirking, deep-set gray eyes sparkling with contempt, nostrils flared. She pulled a fifty-dollar bill from her bag and dropped it into the box.

  “Fucking nouveau riche,” she said.

  “Thanks!” I smiled, an actual smile, without forcing it.

  “Thank you,” she said and shook my hand. “This was good. My name’s Daisy Parrish, by the way.”

  “I’m Greta. Garver.”

  “So, what do you do, Greta Garver?” she asked. “Are you an actress?”

  “No, uh,” I fumbled. “I’m kind of a writer.” I didn’t know why I said it.

  “I thought so!” She looked me up and down. “I can always spot a fellow fucking scribe. Well, see you around, Greta.” Even then she surrounded me with warmth and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her as she walked away.

  After that fundraiser, Vaughn became a full-fledged mentor. He told me where to buy curtains and chairs. He told me which novels to read and where to find them used. Most were available at a rambling bookstore near Broadway, run by a woman who read everything in print and didn’t mind adding an extra title or two if I bought something. She also shared her therapist’s latest diagnosis with customers, as well as detailed coverage of changes to her prescription medication and an ongoing report on the family that caused her mental illness. No matter how obscure the book, she could locate a copy in the metro area.

  On Sunday mornings Vaughn stayed home with his latest crush. I walked up Broadway to a café where I could read a newspaper and enjoy a giant biscuit-like scone with black, rich coffee for two dollars. The front window was a good place to wait for the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to come sashaying along arm-in-arm in full regalia.

  Reading became my solace, an entry point to a universe where I didn’t have to explain the difference between beige and yellow paper. Where poverty was glamorous because it was temporary.

  Bit by bit I began to write sketches, brief descriptions at first, scribbled over coffee on Sunday mornings. From there I moved on to one-page stories, then longer pieces. At some point I made the mistake of showing one of these to Vaughn.

  “You know, you could write reviews and short articles for the Weekly,” he suggested.

  True to my nature I had no desire to put my skills to use. The idea of having to research a subject of no particular interest to me, for pay, seemed like a death sentence. The fiction I read was an escape from the things I had to do every day to survive. I tried not to connect my love of reading with the real world.

  Daily I walked the few blocks to work and back with no fear. Rundown as it was, my neighborhood was among the busiest in the city most hours. In trouble I could have screamed and attracted the attention of Vaughn and his friends within seconds.

  On these walks I made a point of moving faster when I passed alleys. The wet cobblestones gleamed and shadows sprouted from behind trash dumpsters. Another layer seemed to ooze and spread just below the shadows. Whenever I sensed the heavy darkness rising across the brick walls and trying to climb out onto the street, I tucked my chin and kept my eyes on the ground ahead of me all the way home.

  Despite the tedious nature of my job, the time passed quickly. The two-year anniversary of my arrival in Seattle signaled an acceptance of adult life although I didn’t feel grown up. On bad nights I wondered what the hell I was doing. This is when Lee Todd’s voice would come to me.

  “Nobody wants to know the boring little details of a person’s life, Gretchen. Think about it. When you read a book, you want to know who gets killed and why, and where the money’s buried. You don’t care where the hero shops for cuticle scissors. This is the difference between the gritty fiction grownups want to read and the soft soap of ladies’ magazines.”

  I hadn’t read crime fiction since I walked out of Lee Todd’s office and quit community college. Every time I spied one of those lurid covers at a bookstore—blond dame cowering in a torn slip with the shadow of a man rising against the wall—I cringed. The blowhards who wrote those books could only conceive of the kind of woman they wanted to fuck, a dame, a broad, a manicured pet they could toss around.

  The whole point of those stories was to underscore how men were the center of the universe. On the rare occasion when a detective novel sported a girl protagonist she was bright, plucky, and fuckable, and she had to suffer in unspeakable ways before she got her revenge. If an actual heroine was featured on the cover she was naked, resting on her knees and lifting her head like an alert terrier.

  Everyone I met at readings and bookstores confirmed what I wanted to believe. Crime fiction was for hacks. To be a writer was to aspire to the literary world of traditional book awards and fellowships and retreats.

  Gradually I began to write complete short stories. When I thought they were good enough to be published, I started mailing them to magazines.

  The more I heard Lee Todd’s voice in my head, the harder I tried to prove what a hack and a loser he was. He could cling to his meager accomplishments in crime fiction, I told myself. I was aiming for the real thing.

  I think of my second year in Seattle as the season of rejection slips. Working at Copy-Z, the one advantage was free copies of manuscripts. I could never have afforded to pay for all of those copies.

  The more stories I mailed out, the more rejections I collected, dozens of them, and then hundreds. As soon as I had five negative replies to a submission I would revise the story and send it out to another five venues. Slick fashion magazines that only published twelve stories per year, highbrow small press magazines all the university students were trying to get into, and everything in between. The answers drifted back from all corners of the country. No, no, no, no, and no.

  I was discouraged but not destroyed. In my heart I still felt an odd, niggling sense that I was going to do something. I was going to be recognized for something. All I had to do was find the right editor at the right magazine and a bright, flickering, secret world would open up to me. Sure it would.

  Chapter Nine

  “If you introduce a plot twist it has to be as impressive to the reader as it is to the central character, or you risk earning the reader’s contempt. Don’t let your protagonist’s fate hinge on some obscure little event. It’s got to be big, or you’re wasting your time.” – Lee Todd Butcher, RIP

  Eve Wallace. To save my life, I couldn’t remember half the dickheads I met during my first two ye
ars in Seattle. But I would remember Eve Wallace. The discouragement I came to associate with her name finally killed my writing ambition. Like I said, I’d written plenty of stories and received plenty of rejections. Hers was the coup de grâce.

  Who knows what made me think I had a chance, let alone convinced me I was going to win a competition against real writers. It was pure, stupid ego striking out one last time. It was a manic phase, a fit of hubris.

  “Writers are assholes, all of us,” Lee Todd once explained to his less than rapt crime fiction appreciation class. “No matter what we say about ourselves. No matter how shy or humble we pretend to be. Writers want to be published and win all the prizes and make all the money, and screw all the beautiful women, and everybody else can go to hell.

  “Writers think they’re entitled to success because talent as grand and undeniable as theirs ought to be recognized and rewarded. All of that strutting and posing, it comes from fear. It comes from having to explain, every day, why they’re wasting so much time basically typing without pay.”

  If Lee Todd was right, this is the true nature of every writer: a rampaging megalomaniac in a one-bedroom apartment; a shambling alcoholic in an outdated T-shirt; a god in his own mind. It takes a lot of misery to kill a writer’s ambition because, in a way, ambition feeds on misery. Hunger, loneliness, ignorance you can actually feel in your soul no matter how many books you read, all of it demands counterbalance. After so much failure a little success ought to come naturally. It took a few years working a shitty job, and the dawning knowledge that I’d probably never have any other kind, plus a truckload of rejection slips—and a crucial, failed, final attempt at glory—to kill off my ambition.

  Lee Todd drilled a hole in each of his students and called us on our bullshit. Being young, we didn’t listen. When he said our work was crap and we would starve and it wasn’t worth it, some secretly believed, Oh, but I’m the exception. Okay, I secretly believed it. His assurance that I didn’t have the talent to write fiction only convinced me he didn’t know what he was talking about. I stubbornly looked forward to a special destiny for those few years after I landed in Seattle, getting up to write before my shift at the copy center and wasting my weekends revising, revising. I believed in my uniqueness every time I mailed out a manuscript.

  My publication credits never materialized. Yet I clung to the ultimately mortifying conviction that, someday, I might be singled out for recognition. All I had to do was stick with it. All I had to do was get a story published. All I had to do was win an award of some kind. Then everyone would notice my writing and invite me to join a workshop in some bucolic corner of upstate New York where I would become the most promising young author in the world, overnight. Editors would toast my success. Agents would fistfight one another to sign me. Lee Todd would hear of my success and cry himself to sleep. A personal assistant would take my manuscripts to a photocopy center where some starved young woman would snarl and try to cheat the cash register while copying my masterpieces.

  The last time I ever felt this way, the final season of my grand self-delusion, ended courtesy of Eve Wallace. The occasion was a contest. The prize was a thousand dollars, enough to pay my rent for three months.

  After so much grunt work, my days haunted by people who couldn’t fill out a two-line request form without help, I was beyond hunger. Apart from my insane writing ambition, in private I was becoming desperate in a sad and sweaty way, and anybody who glanced at me could see it.

  I started to see every random event as a sign. When the contest appeared out of nowhere, I was foolish enough to think even the judge’s gender was fortuitous. I allowed myself to hope. I ignored Lee Todd’s wisdom, again.

  “Hope is a dangerous thing in a cynical person,” he said the second time we drank together. After we had started seeing each other and before I decided to dazzle him with a story he would wish he’d written. The fading middle-aged lumberjacks and cowboys at the bar, the sunburned and painted women with crow’s feet, the sawdust on the floor and the nauseating aroma of cheap beer underscored his words.

  “What’s your name, again? Gretel?” He chuckled and winked at me.

  “Ass-bag,” I said.

  “Don’t believe in things, Gretel. You’ll only hate yourself in the morning. Take it from an ass-bag who knows.” He drained his glass and when I kissed him he almost slid off the barstool.

  To accompany my submission to the big contest, I wrote a groveling, insincere cover letter. I praised the city whose grant writers raised the money for a literary award. I paid tribute to council members and art patrons for adding to the ‘vibrant atmosphere’ of contemporary Seattle. Worst of all, I expressed my deep admiration for the judge, a woman I’d never heard of before. This was the first time I heard of Eve Wallace, and we wouldn’t meet for some time to come.

  According to her bio note, Eve attended the Iowa Writing Workshop and Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. She claimed to be the recipient of an undergraduate award I didn’t recognize, and the former editor of a small press magazine I thought I might have seen (but couldn’t afford) on the shelves at Elliott Bay Bookstore. She offered no specific publication credits, only a standard statement about her writing appearing in ‘numerous magazines.’

  The minute I read the call for submissions I knew this was it, the moment I’d been waiting for. I started working that minute, making notes, sketching out the action and characters.

  My story was about a dog groomer, a divorcee with emotional scars, set up by her employer on a blind date. Her companion for the evening turned out to be a man with an inexplicably large head who tried to force a gift on her. His offering was a scrap of fur stolen from a lab at the zoo where he worked. Their date consisted of driving around town looking at houses over-decorated for Christmas. The night ended with the woman alone in her bedroom, clutching the scrap of fur to her heart.

  During the weeks it took to hammer this story into shape, I was almost fired from my job at the copy center. For months I’d been writing before my shift at work, and on the weekend. The rejection letters continued to pile up in my living room like wallpaper samples, pages on every surface drifting in various directions. The pressure to prove myself in my own mind was making me testy and belligerent. A regular customer complained to Desiree, who told me to check my attitude. When you’re stealing money from someone it’s hard to keep a straight face through her ignorant demands that you shape up, but I needed the job.

  Tam and I continued to split what we referred to as ‘overspill.’ She read the second draft of the story I wrote for the contest and said it had too many characters. I took her advice and killed five of them.

  “Keep the Filipino chick who runs the dog grooming salon and kill the dad who buys lottery tickets, he’s stupid,” she told me.

  “The dad’s a lot like my dad,” I admitted.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said. “But see, I think you’ve got a blind spot there, an autobiographical blind spot. You want to win this thing, ditch the dad.”

  I wanted to win. This contest had become a big deal. I ditched the dad.

  Then I did a foolish thing. In my head I made a bargain. Of course I thought I would win. Of course I would, and then my real life would start. So I made a deal with Lee Todd because I didn’t believe in the devil. I promised, if I didn’t win this thing, I’d say fuck it all. I would admit Lee Todd had been right about me all along. I didn’t have talent. I was just another loser who wanted to feel special and had latched onto fiction writing because it looked easy.

  “Know what’s really easy, Glenda? Being a writer. Know what’s hard? Writing. It sucks. You have to give up your playtime. You can’t party anymore because you have to write. You can’t get laid because you have to write. Believe me, it’s a lot more fun being a writer. Because you don’t have to do a goddamn thing.” The guy could talk about this stuff all day.

  I worked every comma and semi-colon of my story to the brink of collapse. I slaughtere
d my darlings again and again, cutting and pasting together each new draft from my crummy banged-up Webster. Revising, rearranging, editing, polishing.

  The day finally came when I thought my story was ready. Not only ready but golden and brimming with a beauty that could not fail to be recognized. I revised my ass-kissing cover letter to include more asses and I kissed them all.

  I decided not to risk the postal service. (I’d once had sex with a guy who claimed to know two major drug dealers who did their best business at the post office.) I placed my story in an envelope and took the #7 from Capitol Hill west to lower Queen Anne.

  The office housing the arts department was halfway up Queen Anne Hill, in a renovated school building. A person could turn gray and die waiting for a bus up the hill, so I walked. By the time I reached the office door I was sweaty and sticky, also ravenous. My stomach gave a husky growl as I walked in, loud enough to elicit a glare from the overgrown, dimpled child behind the front desk.

  His nameplate identified him as Mervin. His new pullover and immaculate corduroy trousers identified him as a mama’s boy.

  “May I help you?” he asked.

  “I’m here to turn in my story, for the literary prize,” I said. I looked around because Mervin was staring at me.

  “You could have mailed it,” he said with an underlying harrumph.

  “I’m on my way to lunch nearby,” I told him. “With my agent.”

  All of this was clearly bullshit and he must have known it, of course. For one thing, there were no literary agents in Seattle. My writing had been rejected by fifteen agencies in New York and L.A. One secretary asked me not to contact her company again after I bombarded the office with five samples and a series of ever-more elaborate introductory letters.