A Likely Story

Monday, January 10th

Absolutely insane! No more than twenty minutes after I phoned to make my appointment to see Hubert Van Driin at his office this Wednesday morning, Jack Rosenfarb called to say Craig, Harry & Bourke was “interested.”

A mingy word, that. A cheap, sneaky, self-protecting fake of a word. “Interested.” Interest is like smoke; it may mean fire, or it may dissipate in the wind.

“There’s a good deal of interest around the shop in your idea,” is the way Jack put it. “But the feeling is, we’d like to see something on paper.”

There’s nothing an editor likes more than reading words he hasn’t had to pay for. They’d all like to see something on paper. When I was first in New York...

Ah. When I was first in New York, what a wealth of things I did not know. Entire encyclopedias of awful truths were unknown to me. What I brought with me to the big city nineteen years ago was a truly awesome ignorance, a change of clothing, and the belief that my memory of a pink-walled garage surrounded by snow in sunlight was the most important thing on Earth.

That’s not how I would have phrased it then, of course. I knew I was a writer, I knew that much, and I knew I’d grown up in a small town in southern Vermont that was absolutely full to the brim with reality, and I felt I could snare that reality in a net of words, a great open-mesh net of all the words I’d ever learned in Vermont, that net I would toss with a masterly flick of the wrist over that pink-walled garage, and pull the cord, and I’d have it!

I think it worked, actually. I did office temporary work, and knocked out a few magazine articles to pay the rent on the studio apartment on West 101st Street, and spent most of my time hunched over the typewriter, putting the words down while that pink wall stood and gleamed in my imagination. Pink-walled garage out behind Bill Brewsher’s house, with the white snow around it in the sunlight. We got really good snow in Vermont, really white and glistening, not like this trash around here. Every time I thought about Bill, or Candy, or Jack and Jim Reilly, or Agnes, or any of them, I always saw them as bundled-up fevered darknesses in front of that shining wall.

The Pink Garage Gang was bought for two thousand five hundred dollars by the fifth publisher who saw it. Print order three thousand, no advertising, no publicity. No paperback sale, no foreign rights sale. No movie interest. From time to time they sent me royalty statements; the last one, eleven hundred dollars of the advance was still unearned.

By the time The Pink Garage Gang was published I was more or less making my living with my typewriter. No more novels, though. I actually didn’t have any more novels in my brain, I was too busy. Then, a few years ago, back in Vermont, a Burlington & Northern freight locomotive that somebody had forgotten to turn off or something got loose all by itself one night and trundled at a few miles an hour all the way up the state to the Canadian border before it stopped. All by itself. You may have read about it in the paper. It was winter, and everybody was in bed asleep, and the locomotive rolled slowly by, going north. It went right through my town. It was a moonlit night, and a few people here and there in the state looked out their windows, holding a glass of warm milk in their hand, and they saw the dark bulk of the locomotive go by.

For a while, I thought about that. I smiled sometimes, and thought about the locomotive basting a seam up through Vermont. God, that novel was real to me. I could see it, I could see everything in it, I knew everything in the world about that story. It was all so clear and detailed, I can still remember so much of it, that every once in a while there’s a split second when I think I wrote it.