Bright, Precious Days

14

NO LESS THAN THE FARM, the city is attuned to the rhythms of the seasons, although here the autumn, rather than the spring, is the season of rebirth and renewal — the start of a new year for Gentiles no less than for those who celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the time to shake off the torpor and idleness of August and send the children back to school, where they will start fresh, make new and interesting friends and perform even better than last year; a season of restaurant and gallery openings; the time when the fashions of the following year are unveiled on the runways as the gingko leaves turn yellow, Fashion Week giving way to the New York Film Festival, the opening of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philharmonic and City Ballet, the big charity galas and later the art auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s and Phillips de Pury, which will tell us how rich the rich are feeling this year. It’s also, less profitably, the season when publishers roll out their biggest and most promising titles.

Before leaving for lunch, Russell stopped in to see Jonathan, who was just across the hall. “When do we see the Times?”

“Any minute now.”

Jonathan’s office was sparsely decorated, the walls bare except for the poster advertising Carson’s book and another for Arcade Fire.

“You heard anything?”

“My source tells me we’ll be happy.”

They were waiting for their advance copy of the following Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, which reportedly featured a review of Jack’s book. The fact that they’d sent a photographer to take his picture in Tennessee two weeks ago was a positive sign, and Jonathan had been told the reviewer was a novelist of stature, which was also a good sign, although Russell wasn’t entirely thrilled that he was a southerner; it was like the way the Times almost inevitably assigned women to review other women.

“In the meantime, he’s missed his last two interviews.”

“Did you call the hotel?”

Jonathan nodded. “Not picking up.”

“I probably should’ve seen this coming.”

“Maybe this could work for us,” Jonathan said. “The whole bad-boy, poète maudit angle.”

“We’re trying to get people to write about the work,” Russell said. “About what’s on the page. We’re trying to sell literature here.” He realized even as he said it how pretentious this sounded, but he believed it. He just wasn’t sure if he could convey the concept to this twenty-eight-year-old, who was wearing a vintage Naked Lunch T-shirt under an open flannel shirt. “I don’t want Jack branded as some meth-addled cracker right out of the gate. He’s already susceptible to the inevitable stereotyping: Southern writers are almost always relegated to their own ghetto of exotic decadence.”

In a more general sense, Russell objected to the cult of personality, to the fake idea of authenticity, to the notion that the intensity of the life somehow certified the work, all the holy drunk/genius junkie bullshit that equated excess with wisdom, cirrhosis with genius. Blake had a lot to answer for, in his opinion. The road of excess leads to rehab, or the boneyard, more often than it leads to the palace of wisdom. He believed that literature was accomplished in spite of excessive behavior, not because of it.

“I’m fucking tired of this idea that getting drunk and/or doing smack turns an MFA candidate into a genius.”

“But you’ve got to admit, chief, a lot of writers and artists are drunks and junkies.”

“I don’t admit that at all. I don’t think the proportion of literary alcoholics runs any higher than that of alcoholic plumbers.” Not for the first time he wondered where Jonathan found such tight jeans — were they sold like that, or did he have them taken in? And how did you get into the damn things?

“I don’t know,” Jonathan said. “Jesus, I could make you a list, starting with Christopher Marlowe. Most of the writers we both like were drunks or addicts or both. Just look at the modernists — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner. Raving alkies. Not to mention the Beats. Most of the writers on our list are pretty fucked-up and emotionally unstable.”

“They’d be better and more productive if they got their shit together. Tender Is the Night would’ve been a better book if its author hadn’t been drunk half the time and wired on Dexedrine the other half.”

“If you say so, Dad.”

“Hey, I’m not moralizing. I’m just saying let’s not confuse cause and effect.”

“What about Burroughs?”

“His subject was drugs and derangement, so I guess we have to make an exception there. Ditto Hunter Thompson.”

“So what do we do about the fuckup in question? About Jack?”

“Keep calling. If you can’t reach him, I’ll go over to the hotel room after lunch.” He realized that if he sounded a little vehement on this topic, even overwrought, it probably had a lot to do with Jeff, who’d been slouching at the back of his mind all morning: His dead best friend, the genius junkie, was posthumously developing a cult all his own. Sales of his books were steadily climbing. It seemed like such a damn waste. Sometimes, still, it would hit Russell hard, how much he missed him. How angry he was at him still for not being around. No one had ever completely replaced him. Corrine said he should go to therapy. But then, she had Jeff issues of her own.

After lunch he searched his file cabinets and found the article that had so enraged him about Youth and Beauty, although, despite the fact that it had been his practice to make carbons of all his letters, he couldn’t find the copy of his seething epistolary response. The clipping was from the April 1991 issue of Details:

Those who imagine that the guardians of high culture sit in the clouds, like gods, disinterestedly paring their fingernails while passing judgment on the literary offerings laid before them, should consider the canonization of Jeff Pierce as his posthumous novel, Youth and Beauty, slouches into bookstores. August voices from The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Village Voice have all breathlessly retailed a version of the archetypal tabloid narrative: young, talented, tortured artist, too sensitive for this world. Listen carefully to the faux-stentorian tones of critical consensus and you can hear, underneath, the screaming of teenage girls at a pop concert. (Of course, Pierce helped shape the narrative with his Keatsian title.) Nowhere in print, until now, will you find the opinion that he was a preppy junkie whose worldview was doubly circumscribed, by privilege and by addiction….

“Can I talk to you about the party?” Jonathan asked, leaning in the doorway.

“How’s it shaping up?” Russell asked, relieved to set this screed aside.

“Getting bigger by the minute.”

Russell didn’t really believe in publication parties, or at least he didn’t believe in paying for them, because he didn’t think they helped to sell books; basically, it was just a sop to the author’s ego. But Jonathan had talked him into doing one for Jack after his reading at 192 Books, and now that the TBR promised to come in strong, it looked as if it was going to be the event du jour. The reading and party would take place on Monday, the day after most civilians would see the Times. All week, people had been begging to be added to the list, and Jonathan was now worried that both of their chosen venues might prove to be too small. The bookstore wasn’t much bigger than the bathroom at Nobu, and the party room above the Fatted Calf, a kind of speakeasy for friends of the owners, which Russell had managed to book at an insider’s price, was even smaller than the bookstore, but Russell thought it was perfect.

“It should be a fucking zoo,” Jonathan said.

“That’s fine,” Russell said. “Far better than a half-empty room. Let’s put on an extra bartender, though. Nobody minds being jammed up against a bunch of their peers or literary celebrities unless they can’t get a drink.”

“Richard Johnson from Page Six RSVP’d this morning.”

“That’s surprising.”

“I think a lot of this is coming from the Web, Gothamist and Gawker and some of the bloggers. And then, strangely enough, there’s a Web site called Tweakers.com that serves the speed-freak community, and they seem to have registered the fact that a couple of the stories deal with meth. They just posted the details of the reading.”

“Methheads have their own Web site?”

“Several,” Jonathan said, shaking his head as he walked to the door.

“Jesus. Who knew?”

For twenty-five years, Russell had been trying to understand and channel that mysterious force alternately known as buzz or word of mouth, and now it seemed to have mutated into this new digital form.

It was always a little mysterious, what made some books pop and others evaporate. This week he’d sold rights in Spain, Germany and Italy, which basically meant that Jack’s advance was covered and everything from here on was profit. Exactly how Russell liked to do it.

Jonathan rushed back into the office, waving several sheets of paper. “I’ve got it!”

“And?”

“It’s a rave….I’ve only skimmed it, but it’s basically a blow job. Here, listen to this: ‘Jack Carson’s characters are the demon spawn of Faulkner’s Snopes family and Carver’s lumpen proles, the descendants of Walker Evans’s Depression-era subjects, trapped deep in the sunless hollers of Tennessee and Kentucky. Their American dream is a nightmare of cruelty and inbreeding compounded by privation; moonshine and meth their only escape, and yet Carson manages to invest their struggle to survive with a kind of stoic grandeur, and even, at times, to celebrate their inchoate yearning toward the light….’ ”

“Jesus, let me see that,” said Russell, practically tearing the review from Jonathan’s hands.

—

The afternoon before the party, Russell was looking over the reorders for the book, which were strong, when Corrine called, all worked up about a hard day with the bureaucrats at the New York City Housing Authority. She was trying to get permission to set up a food giveaway in the parking lot of a housing project in Brooklyn. “I don’t know whether to be somewhat encouraged or thoroughly discouraged.”

“Well, if you don’t know, honey, I’m not sure how I would.”

“Do you realize you call me honey when you’re exasperated with me? I think you do it because you feel guilty that you’re exasperated and it assuages your conscience.”

“I can’t say I’m aware of this alleged tic, nor do I believe it.”

“All right, I’ll stop bugging you. I’ll see you at home.”

“Not till late. Tonight’s Jack’s book party, remember?”

“Oh, right. Do you want me to come?”

“If I were you, I’d skip it. Looks like it’s going to be a real hipster ratfuck. I won’t be too late, I hope. If he wants to go out afterward, I’ll send Jonathan.”

—

In hopes of getting the guest of honor to the church on time, Russell decided to pick him up at the hotel himself. He arrived at the Chelsea just before six; when Jack didn’t answer the call from the lobby phone, he asked at the desk, where they had no information on Mr. Carson’s whereabouts. Why, Russell wondered, had he put him up in the same hotel where Sid Vicious had murdered Nancy Spungen? He turned and walked out the door and down the street to the Trailer Park Lounge, where he found the missing person huddled over a drink, looking exceedingly mournful sitting on his stool.

“I don’t guess this was a real good hidin’ spot,” he said when Russell sat down beside him. His hair pointed in several directions and he had a greenish pallor. The kitschy bar and grill with its Elvis memorabilia had become Jack’s home away from home in the city. It was his kind of joke: a real redneck in a fake redneck bar.

“You’ve done better, certainly.”

“I don’t think I can do this.”

“Sure you can.”

“I can’t get up and read my stories to a bunch of smart-ass New Yorkers.”

“Just look at it this way — most of the characters in your stories could kick their asses all the way to New Jersey.”

“Most of my characters are dumb crackers.”

“I wouldn’t call them dumb. They actually seem very savvy to me. If they were competing on Survivor, these New Yorkers wouldn’t stand a chance. They’d get kicked off the island in a heartbeat by your boys and girls. I’ll tell you a secret about smart-ass New Yorkers; ninety percent of them are former hicks who landed here utterly clueless after being the least popular kids in their high schools. The popular ones stayed back home, where they were wanted.”

“Just fuckin’ shoot me now.”

“Have another drink.”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

After another vodka, he seemed slightly less terrified.

“What are you going to read?”

“I have no fuckin’ idea.”

“Well, let’s think of something. Read the story you think is least likely to go over with this audience, and I bet you it’ll bring the house down.”

“I need some blow,” he said.

“Well, sorry, but I used up my last gram about twenty years ago.”

“Somebody’s comin’,” he said. “I have to wait.”

“A dealer?”

“A friend,” Jack said.

Russell pointed out that the reading started in ten minutes, but Jack wouldn’t budge until his friend arrived — a petite, voluptuous brunette with a gold nose ring who introduced herself as Cara.

“You got the stuff?” Jack asked.

“Come on,” she said, walking off toward the bathrooms.

Russell finally got them both into a taxi ten minutes after the reading was supposed to have started, somewhat fretful about Jack’s condition. He seemed just as drunk as before, only now he was twitching and chewing his lower lip. As they approached the bookstore on Tenth Avenue, they could see a milling throng on the sidewalk. The chatter of the crowd subsided as Jack emerged from the cab and shuffled through the gauntlet, Russell guiding him with a hand on his shoulder, apologizing as they pushed forward into the mob. “Got the reader here. Sorry, coming through. Excuse us….”

There probably weren’t more than a hundred people, but the place was packed to capacity, half seated in the chairs that had been set out and the rest standing, crowding the floor as the stragglers from outside struggled to get in. Astrid Kladstrup, overdressed for the occasion in a tiny black cocktail dress, waved to him from the back. He couldn’t believe it had been a year since he’d taken the keeper of Jeff’s Web site to lunch, or that he’d managed to resist her.

It was as good a crowd as Russell had ever seen here, and the atmosphere was charged with anticipation. The audience seemed convinced that they were in on something special, pleased with themselves for being here and anxious to have their expectations fulfilled. Russell wished he could tell Jack that the crowd was with him — that they wanted him to be someone they could say later they’d seen at the very beginning, that they’d follow him almost anywhere tonight as long as it was novel — but Jack was enduring the pleasantries of the owner and the staff. He looked as if he’d just crawled out of bed after sleeping off a terrible bender — his hair an unruly mess, his face drawn and gaunt.

He was fucking perfect.

When he started to read, the crowd collectively leaned forward; Jack was mumbling, and speaking so fast that it was difficult at first to make out the words, even for Russell, but a helpful staffer adjusted the mike and a hush fell as he started again. He was still mumbling, and occasionally slurring, but it was just possible to make out most of what he was saying.

He read “Family First,” a story about a young woman from a small Tennessee town who is sexually abused by her father and runs away to Memphis, where she eventually ends up working for an escort service. Years later she gets an outcall for a trick at a motel and arrives, only to find her father waiting there, and she shoots him with the pearl-handled revolver she stole from his truck the night she ran away. We have already learned that this is a girl who knows how to hit what she shoots at, and though she wants to kill him, and we want her to, she shoots him through the thigh and walks away, leaving the pistol behind on the bedside table.

The climactic action all happened in less than a page — what had once been three pages describing her thoughts and feelings, until Russell had cut and pared much of it away, saving the essentials and exposing, as he saw it, the hard, adamantine core. It was all there, but Jack had told too much in his original draft, hadn’t trusted his material, when, in fact, he’d already set it all up and provided everything the reader needed to know. And Russell, as he saw it, had shown him what was already there, and how to overcome his fear of not making his case explicit, and had cited the eternal cliché that less is more. He didn’t want credit, but he knew he was right, and he was grateful that this incredible material had come to him so that he could help to make it what it wanted to be. Even the draft he’d first read, cluttered with exposition, had had that vertiginous liftoff that he always wished for at the end of a story, the simultaneous feeling of rising out of the mundane comprehension of our mortal experience and the sensation as we rise of looking down into the abyss, an intimation of redemption — or damnation — that was all the more powerful for being left almost unspoken, and now the audience felt it, too; the combination of the story itself and how clearly the crowd was validating his assessment of its worth made Russell’s eyes well with tears, as did, perhaps, the knowledge of how hard-earned Jack’s hard-boiled wisdom truly was: the absent father and abusive stepfather, juvenile detention, the fast-food jobs and bar fights. It was all there in the stories. It was all his.

The applause was prolonged and clamorous, and many who were sitting rose to their feet. Russell knew it was a great story — no one could have convinced him otherwise — but it was exhilarating to hear Jack read it and to see the response, almost unmediated by preconceptions. He was actually a powerful performer, his obvious reluctance lending weight to the reading. The audience knew they’d heard something special. The Times had prepared them to be impressed, but it hadn’t necessarily prepared them to be physically moved.

As for Jack, he looked stunned, as if he didn’t know what to make of all this. He nodded and blinked, waved once and then retreated to the signing table, where his new fans pressed in on him.

Russell chatted with the staff and examined the shelves while Jack signed books, finally extracting him after more than an hour. The young drug courier, Cara, followed him out to the street. Astrid Kladstrup, who’d been smoking on the sidewalk, sidled over to join their group. “That was amazing,” she said to Jack, who merely grunted as a taxi pulled to a stop beside them. Clearly a city girl, Cara opened the cab door and thrust Jack into the backseat, sliding in beside him and pulling the door closed. But the maneuver failed to discourage Astrid, who slipped around the back to the opposite door of the cab and inserted herself on the other side of Jack, forcing Russell to claim the front seat.

He gave directions to the Fatted Calf while Cara explained to Jack that he really should have had his party at KGB in the East Village, before launching into a speech about her other favorite bars and clubs, babbling melodiously, filibustering her rival. She was still talking when they arrived at the restaurant. This battle for Jack’s attention, and the youth of the crowd upstairs, made Russell feel suddenly old and weary. He stayed just long enough to introduce Jack to some of the other writers on hand, then struggled down the stairs against the incoming tide of bodies, leaving Jonathan to keep an eye on the star of the evening.

—

The publicist showed up at the office just before noon the next day and stepped into Russell’s office to give his report. “You missed the whole second wave, which was pretty fucking crazy. Nancy Tanner got hammered and danced on the bar, and these two girls got in a catfight over Jack, and then sometime around one-thirty he disappeared with Dan Auerbach.”

“Who’s that?”

“Guitarist for the Black Keys. Anyway, I got a message from him at four-thirty this morning. Hard to understand, between the accent and the slurring and the music in the background, but I think he was looking for cash.”

“Definitely time to send him home to Tennessee.”

“Well, you might want to rethink that. The 92nd Street Y just had a last-minute cancellation and they wonder if he wants to share the bill with Richard Conklin on Monday night. Actually, it was Conklin himself who requested him.”

“Jesus,” Russell said. For all his belief in Jack, he was kind of amazed at the rapidity of his rise, and slightly worried about how the young author would handle it. He had a lot of issues to begin with, and Russell wasn’t sure that his previous life on the ragged edge of American civilization had prepared him for the ordeal of literary celebrity. “Tell them if we can find him by Monday and he wants to do it, they can have him.”