Bright, Precious Days

21

“ONE DAY I WAS A TEACHING ASSISTANT in Iowa City,” Phillip said, “and then suddenly my picture was in the Times Book Review and I’m on the Today show.”

They were at KGB, an East Village bar known for its literary readings and authentically rude, Russian-style service. Russell had invited him to hear Jack Carson read, and afterward, as the rising star disappeared into the throng of admirers, Phillip was garrulously apologizing to Russell for his long-ago breach of contract while revisiting the days when he, too, had been a celebrated new fiction writer.

“As soon as the semester ended, I moved to Manhattan, flew to Hollywood on a first-class ticket and hung out with River Phoenix at the Viper Room three nights before he croaked out on the sidewalk. On the one hand, it all seemed perfectly natural, my just deserts, a slightly belated recognition of my innate talent and hard work. Of course, I’d always believed I was an unappreciated genius. On the other hand, I felt like a complete fraud, overpraised and unprepared for the role I’d been thrust into: a wunderkind, the voice of a new generation. And I wondered why it wasn’t me who’d OD’d outside the Viper Room, given the amount of coke I’d snorted that night. I’d dabbled in coke before, but now that I had money and a modicum of celebrity, I was hitting it way hard. The first time I ever did coke, I knew I’d found my drug, my own best self. I felt normal, like I could walk into a room and imagine that I belonged among other humans without any degree of self-consciousness. So it seemed in the beginning, and for years to come. Eventually you figure out it makes you more self-conscious and cleaves you entirely from the great majority of your fellow humans, who are not doing coke all the time, and forces you to lie reflexively and incessantly, calling your agent at ten in the morning to cancel a lunchtime reading in Philadelphia because, you claim, you have a sudden attack of diverticulitis, not because you’ve been awake all night doing blow with a waitress from Bar Tabac. Eventually you’re lying before the fact, bailing on any event that isn’t likely to involve coke, and lying after the fact, apologizing for the missed dinner, the missed birthday, the missed deadline.”

Russell could see a group of young women registering Kohout’s presence; they were too cool to fuss about it, though he could sense they were annotating the sighting among themselves.

“Still, I was maintaining, in a way. You tell your agent and your putative editor the second book’s going great. Pages soon, any day now, really good stuff. It’s amazing how many people are willing to be lied to. It takes a village, right? It almost makes you believe in the innate goodness of humanity, experiencing the credulity of the species. The more famous you are, the more your mendacity will be indulged. Women — you hate to say it; it sounds sexist, but fuck it — seem to be particularly afflicted with the will to believe, with the capacity for gratuitous hope, particularly with regard to promises of reform.”

Glancing over at the other side of the room, beneath the Soviet-era posters, Russell could see a ripple of hilarity passing through the scrum of bodies around Jack.

“Meantime, the screenplay’s gone through three drafts and a dozen script conferences and your Hollywood agent is taking longer and longer to return your calls. Eventually, of course, there’s the intervention. You remember that, I guess?”

Russell nodded. How could he forget? Ambushing Phillip at ten in the morning at his apartment. For Russell, it was an eerie and unwelcome reminder of his first such operation, though the paraphernalia was different, rolled-up bills and razor blades instead of needles and spoons, heroin having been Jeff’s poison. In the end they’d failed to save Jeff, but only because he was already infected with HIV, and the thought that he could have acted earlier tormented Russell through the years, which was one of the reasons he consented to take part when Phillip’s brother had called him. Russell, Marty Briskin, Phillip’s former girlfriend, Amy, who had the key to let them in, the brother and his roommate from Amherst, plus the drug counselor, an earnest bearded empath in Birkenstocks and hemp trousers. Russell could imagine the horror, through Phillip’s eyes, of being awakened after just a few hours of ragged sleep, to find this jury of his peers ensconced in the wreckage of his apartment, which still reeked of cigarettes and spilled vodka, the coffee table cloudy and streaked with coke residue. A waking nightmare for sure. The brother was the point man, shaking him awake, first gently and then more vigorously. When he realized that they weren’t going away, he staggered into the bathroom and spent fifteen minutes in the shower. The Hollywood agent weighed in for precisely nine minutes on speakerphone, talking about doing coke with various movie stars before clicking off to get on a call with another movie star. Phillip denied everything, of course. He didn’t have a problem. A little recreational use. The assembled company shared terrible stories of perfidy and malfeasance; carrots and sticks were deployed, and eventually he agreed to the two-month stay at Silver Meadows.

“It was actually a relief,” Phillip said, “when it all came crashing down, and all my undeserved success had been punished. Once I detoxed, I saw the experience as the subject of my next book. And even though you had the right of first refusal, we all knew I could get more money elsewhere, and honestly, I knew you were too much of a gentleman to hold me to my contract.”

“Is that supposed to be flattering?”

“I’m just trying to explain — no, I’m trying to apologize. In the end, you were lucky you didn’t have to publish that piece of shit, although I have no doubt you would’ve made it a better book. As it was, my so-called editor at HarperCollins didn’t edit at all. The problem was, I didn’t believe in the redemption I was selling. My commitment to sobriety was more tactical than spiritual. And I’d failed to notice the rise of the memoir as the preeminent literary form of the nineties.”

“If you’d called it a memoir,” Russell said, “it might have done better.”

“It would have. Look at James Frey. People wanted to think the degradation was real, never mind that memory’s totally unreliable — an addict’s memory most of all — that addicts are liars first and foremost, the fact that most novels are memoirs and most memoirs are actually novels.”

A young woman crashed into their table, spilling most of her drink on Phillip. She gaped at him and said, “I know who you are.”

“If only I could say the same,” he said.

Jack Carson sat down at the table, having divested himself of his fans, and after a few minutes, Phillip got up and disappeared with the young woman.

“Be right back,” he said.

“That guy’s so full of shit,” Jack said.

Russell was beginning to fear that this was indeed the case. There was no sign of Kohout when he bailed twenty minutes later.