Bright, Precious Days

19

OFF-SEASON, THE TRAIN OUT TO MONTAUK was almost empty, the faint residue of sweat and stale beer the only reminder of summer hordes.

They’d changed trains in Jamaica, Queens, and racketed along past the brick apartment buildings and the duplexes, tactfully dodging south of the bedroom communities of Long Island, the golfing and horseback-riding enclaves of the wealthy along the North Shore, rolling through the aluminum-sided postwar suburbs housing homicidal teens, philandering plumbers, dandy mobsters, as well as presumably others who never featured in the New York tabloids, the vegetation taking over as they got farther from the city and the homes of commuters were replaced by summer homes, passing through the leafy utopia of Southampton, with its shingled mansions behind privet hedges, shimmying onward to Bridgehampton and East Hampton and then out along the narrow isthmus of scrubby sand dunes that barely connected Montauk to the Hamptons.

Montauk was the farthest extremity of Long Island, the end of the road. It had once been an island and still felt remote from the gilded summer communities to the west. Each fall as the ocean cooled, the striped bass followed the churning biomass of baitfish pouring down the coast from Maine and Cape Cod across Long Island Sound to Montauk Point. Not long after the summer tourists departed, the town was taken over by campers, recreational vehicles and Jeeps sporting huge toothy tires, with custom rod and cooler racks mounted on their front grilles, piloted by sportsmen from mid-island and upstate and Jersey who stood on the beach throwing vaguely fishlike plastic plugs with fearsome treble hooks into the surf, apex predators in pursuit of Morone saxatilis.

The locals tended to be more enthusiastic about visiting fishermen than about the summer people; especially unwelcome in this Irish community were the hipsters, scruffy chic invaders from the East Village and Williamsburg attracted by the working-class authenticity their presence was diluting. Overlapping with this group, if not quite coextensive, were the surfers, who swarmed the beach at Ditch Plains every year in increasing numbers. Class warfare was palpably simmering in the salty air. As a fly fisherman, Russell would be suspect, an elitist with a wandlike rod throwing dainty feathered hooks. For his part, Jack wanted no part of this hoity-toitiness. Where he came from, dynamite was part of the fisherman’s arsenal, but in this case he would settle for a stout spinning rod.

Russell’s friend Deke was waiting for them at the station, slouching against his rust-pitted 60-series Land Cruiser, a relic of the Reagan administration; inevitably when Russell saw this dilapidated vehicle, he uttered the phrase “It’s morning in America.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Jack asked.

“A vapid slogan from my youth. Come meet Deke.”

Introductions and manly handshakes were exchanged. The inside of the Toyota Land Cruiser was even more depressing than the pockmarked exterior, littered with fast-food debris, newspapers, shotgun shells, fishing tackle and cigarette butts. It looked as if some tweaker had been living out of it for weeks.

Russell had known Deke since the eighties, when he was an A and R man for Atlantic Records. He’d flown too close to the sun on wings made of cocaine and had eventually crashed here on Long Island Sound, where he’d reinvented himself as a fishing guide. He already owned the boat, and fishing was, as he said, the only thing he was good at besides scoring dope.

“I used to have a good ear, too,” he told Jack as they pulled out of the marina in his unnamed boat, a twenty-six-foot center-console Parker that had once boasted upholstery and working gauges. “But you know, once you hit your thirties, it’s hard to keep on top of it. You gradually lose your feel for it, lose your grasp on the balls of the zeitgeist. The new bands are kids barely in their twenties and you’re suddenly feeling nostalgic for the fucking Smiths and the Clash and Dinosaur Jr.; then before you know it, you’re the fucking dinosaur. There were the great ones, like Mo Ostin and Seymour Stein, who go on and on, but basically it’s a young man’s game.”

“The drugs must’ve been good, though,” Jack said.

“Oh yeah, the drugs were amazing. That was the air we breathed. All access pass.”

“So, my man, what was, uh, your drug of choice?”

“Hell, I liked ’em all, though I have to say that it was crack that finally kicked my ass. I’ll tell you what was probably the greatest experience of my life, before it wasn’t, was chasing the dragon. Line it up, a little rock of crack, two pellets of smack. Oh my God, that was the fucking ultimate.”

Jack nodded, as if this were a perfectly reasonable assertion. “Gotta love the speedball.”

“I don’t think anything ever made me so happy in my life,” Deke said. “And you — what’s your poison, man?”

“Well, you gotta understand where I come from, crystal meth’s like mother’s milk. It’s practically the family business. I mean, hell, cookin’ speed and makin’ shine were the only jobs some people in Fairview ever had. So meth was in my veins, so to speak. But the kind of nastiness I’ve seen down in those hollers would have turned a weaker man to the Lord. In my case, I just moved my business upmarket to coca products and opiates.”

“Jesus,” Russell said. “I’m trapped on a boat with the fucking Glimmer Twins.”

—

It was a perfect day, bright and cool, with wisps of cirrus drifting through a steely blue firmament, nudged by a western breeze. They bounced up the north side of the point over Shagwong Reef and rounded the eastern tip of the island, turning south. On one side the lighthouse, a relic of George Washington’s administration, was perched on the cliff above the waves, two hundred yards closer to the encroaching surf than it had been when it was built; on the other, three thousand miles of ocean stretching all the way to Ireland.

Five or six boats were clustered a couple hundred yards off the point. Deke gave them a wide berth and cruised down along the south beach, where the surf casters were spread out along the shoreline, some of them casting, most just standing on the beach with their rods at the ready, waiting for signs of life.

“When the blitz is on, they suddenly multiply,” Deke said. “Line up shoulder-to-shoulder along the shore, casting into this seething cauldron of bait and bass. The surf casters are like the birds — they suddenly show up, swarming where the bass come up, like they’re summoned by some mysterious instinct, or maybe by cell phone. For six weeks these fucking guys abandon their lives and sleep out here in campers and shitty motels. And they hate us — the guys in the boats.”

Deke cruised past the huge radar dish, the lighthouse’s ugly modern twin, built during World War II, Deke said, when German submarines regularly popped up here. Deke followed the shoreline all the way down to Ditch Plains, the surfing beach, where a few stalwarts in wet suits were bobbing on their boards. Russell pointed out the old Warhol estate.

All at once the birds materialized over the tide line off their bow, dozens of them diving and rising over the swells like flags flapping on a battlefield. Deke gunned the boat and raced toward the feeding frenzy, slowing as they pulled in close and maneuvering for position as the other boats aimed for the same two acres of disturbed water, where thousands of fins slashed the surface, the gannets plunging into the water for the bait and the gulls skimming the surface for the scraps, the oily smell of the anchovy slaughter mixing with gasoline exhaust.

“Holy shit,” Jack said. Deke got him set up in the stern while Russell took the bow, casting into the maelstrom and hooking up on his second retrieve. The fish took eighty yards of line before he was able to turn it. Looking back, he saw that Jack was also into a fish. It was another ten minutes before Russell got it to the boat. Deke came around to help him bring it in and unhook it, a fat, shiny fifteen-pound striper that he lifted by its tail and dropped into the water.

“What the fuck,” said Jack, who by this time had lost his fish. “You’re lettin’ him go?”

“Catch and release,” Russell said. “The code of the fly fisherman.”

“Shit, man, that’s like gettin’ all the way into a girl’s bedroom and then just tuckin’ her in and kissin’ her good night. I just don’t get that at all.”

“There’ll be more,” Russell said. “What happened to yours?”

“He tried to wrestle it in, broke the line,” Deke said. “That’s all right; we’ll get the next one.”

The bait had moved with the current up the shore. Deke followed the birds and the boats to the next blitz, finding an opening and planting Jack in the prime spot, instructing him on his cast. Russell decided to wait until his friend got one on before he started in again. The water was seething with boats and fish and birds, all of them frenzied in their own ways. Jack flubbed his first two casts and caught Deke’s shirt with the third.

“Slow down,” Russell said. “Take your time.”

He kept casting and reeling as fast as he could, failing to connect with anything. “What the fuck?”

“Slow down your retrieve a little,” Russell said.

“You know I’m gettin’ fuckin’ tired of you always tellin’ me what to do.”

“All right,” Russell said, retreating to the front of the boat to fend for himself, hooking up on his first cast and brooding as he played the fish, his feelings mutating from stunned to hurt to angry. Ungrateful prick. He wasn’t so obtuse as to think this was about fishing. But he’d plucked this kid from obscurity, and his judgment had been vindicated, for Christ’s sake. He hadn’t gotten any credit for the sentences he’d sharpened, the paragraphs he’d trimmed of fat, and he didn’t want any, but neither did he expect this kind of resentment. He landed the fish on his own and unhooked it without bothering to look back to the stern.

Eventually, Jack hooked another one, after they’d moved the boat again, and Russell abandoned his post in the bow to watch the end of the fight, resisting the urge to tell him to stop bulldogging the goddamn fish, letting Deke carry that weight. And when the fish was finally in the boat, it turned out to be a whopper, at least twenty pounds, bigger than the two Russell had caught.

“Of course I want to fuckin’ keep it,” Jack said, in answer to Deke’s question. His exhilaration seemed to clear the air.

“Nice work,” Russell told him.

“Thanks, man. Look, I’m sorry for snappin’ at you like that. I was just gettin’ frustrated.”

“That’s okay,” Russell said, although a certain formality set in between them, Jack at several points soliciting his advice, Russell congratulating him on each fish he brought to the boat. At the end of the day, at the dock, they both asked Deke to join them for dinner at their hotel, a former crash pad for commercial fishermen and hookers that had been renovated, and redecorated with a surfing theme. Russell convinced the chef to cook Jack’s bass, and Deke held forth on rock-and-roll excess, all the compliant beauties and tequila sunrises on Mustique and mountains of glistening blue-flake Colombian cocaine. He became rhapsodic on this last subject. “It was the color of topaz, as iridescent as a fresh-caught false albacore,” he said. “It was the color of the eyes of the first girl I ever slept with, a Swedish exchange student who appeared like an angel in my high school and, for some reason I will never understand, chose to bestow her gloriousness upon me. It was the color of munificence.”

This rhapsody reminded Russell of a passage from Sheilah Graham’s book about Scott Fitzgerald, in which everything about the author, from his eyes to his lips, was described as being blue.

“Don’t you miss it?” Jack asked, sipping his fifth vodka and soda.

“Miss what?”

“You know. The drugs. The life.”

“Only every fucking day,” he said, looking mournfully at his Diet Coke, his own blue eyes glazed and shiny like ponds in the desert landscape of his ruddy face. “You never lose the desire, the compulsion, the yearning. Instead, I go to a meeting every day.”

As if to compensate for Deke’s sobriety, Russell and Jack drank far too much, and passed out almost simultaneously in the room with twin beds, beneath vintage black-and-white photos of surfers in Maui.

The next morning, at breakfast, they eventually found a subject of conversation in their guide.

“Fuckin’ guy’s like the bard of cocaine,” Jack said. “If the Medellín cartel ever needs an ad campaign, I got the man for the job.”

“I’m still trying to decide what made him harder, the coke or the Swedish girl.”

“Oh, I can tell you that. It was for sure the coke.”

On the train back to Manhattan, Jack broke a long silence to tell Russell that he’d signed on with Martin Briskin. Up until this point, Jack hadn’t felt the need for an agent, letting Russell handle rights on the first book. While it was inevitable that Jack would sign up with someone, Russell couldn’t help feeling a little put out, not least because Jack had picked the great white shark of literary agents, the man who treated publishers as mortal enemies.

“Briskin’s one of the top guys, for sure,” he said.

“I just got a lot comin’ at me,” Jack said.

“I understand.” Perfectly reasonable — but still it felt like the end of something. For almost two years, Russell had been Jack’s advocate, his liaison to publishing and New York and the wider world beyond.

“He got The New Yorker to take a story. It’s coming out next month.”

“What story?”

“A new one. You haven’t seen it.”

Russell sat back, absorbing this information. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

“Next month?”

“Yup.”

“Do you want me to take a look at it?”

“I’ll for sure send you an advance copy.”

Up to this point, Russell had placed most of Jack’s stories in literary magazines; The New Yorker had rejected two of them. And, more significantly, he’d edited all of them before they were submitted.

“Great fishin’,” Jack said, as they parted on the platform at Penn Station.

“It’s something special,” Russell said.

“So I hope you’re okay with the Briskin thing.”

“I can’t say he’s my favorite agent. But I’m happy for you about The New Yorker. I just would have loved to have seen the story before he sent it out.”

“I needed to do it myself,” Jack said. “I needed it to be mine.”

“Well, of course. All the stories have been yours.”

“But I needed it to be really mine, to sound like me. Sometimes I feel like you’re manicurin’ my prose. Makin’ it yours.”

“I want it to sound like you. You’ve got a voice — not that many people do. The last thing I want to do is stifle it. I’m just trying to make sure the voice comes through. Clear away the clutter.”

“If you ever saw the trailer I grew up in, you’d know that clutter’s part of my deal. I’m just sayin’ when you cut three sentences out of a paragraph—”

“It’s just a suggestion. You can always ignore it.”

“It’s not that easy. You’re this big-deal New York fuckin’ editor. I’m a hick from the sticks. And I have fuckin’ issues with authority figures, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Russell. I’m grateful as hell for everything you’ve done.”

“That sounds like the prelude to a kiss-off.”

“No. I just need you to let me be myself.”

“I thought I had.”

“You’ve been great, man. You believed in me when nobody else did.”

“I still do.”

They hugged awkwardly.

“Okay,” Jack said. “We good?”

Russell nodded. He felt mournful; it was the end of something. But there was nothing to be done. He had often imagined that someday his children would make him feel this way — that all his efforts to launch them into the world would be appreciated but, in the end, unwanted.

“Share a cab downtown?” Jack asked.

“Sure,” Russell said, realizing that for perhaps the first time in their association he had no idea where Jack was staying or with whom.

—

The next day he got a call from Steve Israel, a rare book dealer who’d been a class ahead of him at Brown. Steve had turned his English lit degree into a lucrative business. It amazed and occasionally irritated Russell that selling first editions of Hemingway and Joyce had enabled Steve to buy a brownstone on the Upper West Side.

“Yesterday I got a call I thought would interest you,” he said. “Bookseller in Nashville says he has the original manuscript of Jack Carson’s short story collection, heavily annotated with your notes.”

“Where the hell did he get it?” Russell asked.

“I was a little suspicious, but he claims he bought it directly from your boy. Apparently, he needed some quick cash.”

“Oh Jesus. What do you think the guy paid?”

“I can tell you what he wants — five thousand.”

“That sounds a little high.”

“Not if Jack wins the National Book Award, which I hear is possible. Plus, the extent of your annotation makes it a historically interesting document.”

“Well, I don’t need the fucking thing.”

“I just thought I’d tell you it was out there. And I wanted to offer you first crack. Let me just say, as a friend, that he faxed me some pages and I found them fascinating. You have a reputation as a real blue pencil guy, but some people might find the extent of your work…well, almost a form of coauthorship.”

“What are you saying, Steve?”

“I’m just wondering if you want this floating around out there. Or if he does. Carson is on his way to becoming an important American author and skeptics might say this calls his achievement somewhat into question.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Just trying to give you a heads-up here, Russell.”

“If I hadn’t known you all these years, I’d say it sounds like you’re trying to blackmail me.”

“I can’t even believe you’d use that word, Russell. I could sell this thing for a handsome profit with just one phone call. I called you first because I thought we were friends. And because I’m telling you I think you should consider getting this off the market.”

“I’m sorry, I’m just a little upset. It’s nobody’s fucking business how I edit, but obviously I’d rather not have this in circulation.”

“Well, if you’re lucky, it will find a private buyer who just sits on it until Carson’s really famous.”

“Steve, let me think about this and ring you back. I’ve got to take this call.”

“Suit yourself,” he said.