The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (37 page)

“Karl Marx,” he said.

I was impressed. I knew Marx was the father of Communism, an ideology that was still viewed as tantamount to Satanism in those days when the chill of the cold war could make you dive under a desk at the sound of the noon fire siren.

“Cool,” I said.

“What have you got there?” he asked me.

I showed him what I was carrying. I think it was
Dandelion Wine
by Bradbury. He pushed those weighty glasses up on his nose and studied it. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, as if remembering, and when he opened them proceeded to rattle off the entire plot.

“Sounds like it would have been a good one,” I said.

“Yeah,” he told me, “it's alright—fantasy with a dash of horror meets the child of Kerouac and Norman Rockwell.”

“Cool,” I said, not knowing what he was talking about, but recalling him correcting the math teacher on more than one occasion.

“Hey, you want to read something really wild?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said uncertainly, thinking about the first time I was dared into smoking weed.

He closed the book in his hand and walked to the end of the aisle. I followed. Three rows down, he turned left and went to the middle of one of the stacks. Moving his face up close to the titles, he scanned along the shelf as if sniffing out the volume he was searching for. Finally, he stepped back, reached out a hand and grabbed a thick, violet-covered book from the shelf. When he turned to me he was wearing a wide smile that allowed me to see through his strange exterior for a split second and genuinely like him.

“There's a story in here called “The Metamorphosis,” he said. “Just check it out.” Then he laughed loudly and that pouch of flesh that caused the other kids to call him
The Sultan of Chin
jiggled like the math teacher's flabby ass when she ran out of the room, embarrassed at her own ignorance in the face of Bettleman's genius.

He handed it over to me and I said, “Thanks.” I turned the book over to see the title and the author and when I looked up again, he was gone. So I spent that sunny winter afternoon in the West Islip public library reading Kafka for the first time. That story was profound in a way I couldn't put my finger on. I knew it was heavy, but its burden was invisible like that of gravity. There was also sadness in it that surfaced as an unfounded self-pity, and underneath it all, somehow, a sense of humor that elicited in me that feeling of trying not to laugh in church. I checked the book out, took it home, and read every word of every tale and parable between its covers.

It took me a long time to read them all, because after ingesting one, I'd chew on it, so to speak, for a week or two, attempting to identify the flavor of its absurdity, what spices were used to give it just that special tang of nightmare. Occasionally, I'd see Bettleman at school and run a title by him. He'd usually push his glasses up with the middle finger of his left hand, give me a one-line review of the story in question, and before scuttling hastily off to square the circle, he'd let loose one of his Sultanic laughs.

“Hey, Bettleman, ‘The Imperial Message,'” I'd say.

“Waiting for a sign from God that validates the industrious drudgery of existence while God waits for a sign to validate his own industrious drudgery.”

“Yo, Bettleman, what do you say to ‘The Hunter Gracchus'?”

“Siamese twins, altogether stuck. One judgment, one guilt, both unable to see their likeness in the other which would allow them to transcend.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Then in the first days of spring, I came across a story in the Kafka collection that I will admit did have a true influence on me. Wedged in between “The Bucket Rider” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” I discovered an unusual piece that was longer than the parables but not quite the length of a full-fledged story. Its title was “Bright Morning,” and for all intents and purposes it seemed to me to be a vampire story. I read it at least a half dozen times one weekend and afterward couldn't get its imagery out of my mind.

I went to school Wednesday, hoping to find Bettleman and get his cryptic lowdown on it. Bettleman, it seems, had his own plans for that day. He sailed into the parking lot in the rust Palomino, three-door Buick Special, he'd inherited from his old man and didn't stop to park, but drove right up on the curb in front of the entrance to the school. When he got out of the car, he was wearing a Richard Nixon Halloween mask and lugging a huge basket of rotten apples. He climbed up on top of the hood of his car and then, laughing like a maniac behind the frozen leer of Tricky Dick, started beaning students and teachers with the apples.

Although Bettleman's genetic mishap of a body prevented him from being taken seriously by the sports coaches at school, those primate arms of his were famous for having the ability to hurl a baseball at Nolan Ryan speeds. He broke a few windows, nailed Romona Vacavage in the right breast, splattered a soft brown one against the back of Jake Harwood's head, and pelted the principal, No Foolin' Doolin', so badly he slipped and fell on the sauce that had dripped off his suit, dislocating his back. Everyone ran. Even the tough kids with the leather jackets and straight-pin-and-India-ink tattoos of the word SHIT on their ankles were afraid of his weirdness. Finally the cops came and took Bettleman away. He didn't come back to school. In the years that followed, I never heard anything more about him but half expected to discover his name on the Nobel lists when I'd run across them in the newspaper.

The Kafka collection didn't get returned to the library until the end of the summer. I'd run up a twenty-dollar late fee on it. In those days, twenty dollars was a lot of money, and my old man was pissed when he got the letter from the librarian. He paid for my book truancy, but I had to work off the debt by raking and burning leaves in the fall. Under those cold, violet-gray skies of autumn, the same color as the cover of the book, I gathered and incinerated the detritus of August and considered Kafka and the plight of Bettleman. I realized the last thing that poor bastard needed was Kafka, and so when my labor was completed I put the two of them out of my mind by picking up a book by Richard Brautigan,
In Watermelon Sugar
. The light confection of that work gave me a rush that set me off on another course of reading, like “The Hunter Gracchus,” in frustrated search of transcendence.

The hunt lasted throughout most of my senior year of high school, taking me through the wilds of Burroughs and Kerouac and Miller, but near the end, when I was about to graduate, I found myself one day in the stacks of the public library, returning to the absurd son of Prague for a hit of real reality before I went forth into the world. To my disbelief and utter annoyance, I discovered the book had been removed as soon as I had returned it at the end of the summer and never brought back. In its place was a brand new edition of
The Collected Stories of Franz Kafka
. I paged through the crisp, clean book, but could not find the story “Bright Morning.” The incompleteness of this new volume put me off and I just said, “The hell with it!”—much to the dismay of the librarian who was within easy earshot of my epithet.

I went to college and dropped out after one semester, bought a boat and became a clammer on the Great South Bay for two years. All this time, I continued to read, and occasionally Kafka would rear his thin head in a mention by another author. These were usually allusions to “The Metamorphosis,” which seemed the only work of his anyone ever mentioned.

One night on Grass Island out in the middle of the bay, a place where clammers congregated on Saturday nights to party, I ran into a guy I knew from having spoken to him previously, when I'd be out of the boat, with a tube and basket, scratch raking in the flats. If we were both working the same area, he'd take a break around three o'clock when the south wind would invariably pick up, and wander over to talk with me for a while. He was also a big reader, but usually his tastes ran to massive tomes like the Gulag books, Mann's
The Magic Mountain
, Proust.

That night on Grass Island, in the gaze of Orion, with a warm breeze from off the mainland carrying the sounds of Lela Ritz getting laid by Shab Wellow down in the lean-to, we were sitting atop the highest dune, passing a joint back and forth, when the conversation turned to Kafka. This guy from the bay, I don't remember his name, said to me, “I really like that story, “Bright Morning.”

“You know it?” I said.

“Sure.” Then he proceeded to tell the entire thing just as I remembered it.

“Do you have a copy of it?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “I'll bring it out with me some day for you.”

The discussion ended then because we spotted Lela in the moonlight, naked, down by the water's edge. Lela Ritz had the kind of body that made Kafka seem like a bad joke.

In the days that followed, I'd see that guy from time to time who owned the book, and he'd always promise to remember to bring it out with him. But at the end of summer, I'd heard that he'd raked up the beringed left hand of a woman who, in June, had been knocked out of a boat, caught in the propeller, and supposedly never found. The buyer at the dock told me the guy gave up clamming because of it. That fall I returned to college and never saw him again.

I went to school for my undergraduate and masters degrees at SUNY, Binghamton, in upstate New York, where I studied literature and writing. It was there that I met and worked with novelist John Gardner, who did what he could to help me become a fiction writer. His knowledge of literature, short stories, and novels was encyclopedic, and when I was feeling mischievous, I would try to stump him by giving him merely a snippet of the plot of, what I considered to be, some obscure piece I had recently discovered: Bunin's “The Elaghin Affair,” Blackwood's “The Willows,” Collier's
His Monkey Wife
. He never failed to get them, and could discuss their merits as if he had read them but an hour earlier. Twice in conversation I brought up the story by Kafka, and on the first occasion he said he knew it. He even posited some interpretation of it, which I can't now remember. The second time I brought it up, in relation to having just read his own story, “Julius Caesar and the Werewolf,” he shook his head and said that there was no such piece by Kafka, but if there was, with that title, it would have to be a horror story.

What was even more interesting concerning the story during my college years, and really the last time I would hear anything about it for a very long time, was an incident that transpired at the motel where I lived with my future wife, Lynn. The Colony Motor Inn on Vestal Parkway had a string of single rooms that sat up on a hill, separated from the main complex of the establishment. These rooms were reserved for students, long-time borders, and the illegal Chinese immigrants who worked at the motel restaurant, The House of Yu. It was a dreary setting in which to live on a daily basis—a heaping helping of Susquehanna gothic. The maintenance guy had one arm and an eye patch, and two of the maids were mother and daughter
and
sisters, whose
other
job was slaughtering livestock.

Lynn was in nursing school and I was doing my literary thing, spending a lot of time writing crappy stories with pencil in composition books. The room we had was really small, and the bathroom doubled as a kitchen. We had a toaster oven in there on the counter, and we cooked our own food to save money. In the mornings I'd shave onto ketchup-puddled plates in the sink. The toilet was also the garbage disposal, and it wasn't unusual for me to try to hit the floating macaroni when I'd take a piss. That bathroom had no door, just a sliding curtain. Right next to the entrance, we kept an old Victrola, and if one of us was going in to do our thing, for a little privacy, we'd spin the “Blue Danube Waltz” at top volume.

When the weather was good and the temperature was still warm, we'd walk, in the mornings, down to the motel pool at the bottom of the hill. Lynn would swim laps, and I would sit at one of the tables and write. If we went early enough, we usually had the spot to ourselves.

On one typical day, while Lynn was swimming and I was hunched over my notebook, smoking a butt, trying to end a story without having the protagonist commit suicide or kill someone, I heard the little gate in the chain-link fence surrounding the pool open and close. I looked up and there stood this skinny guy dressed in a sailor's uniform, white gob hat tilted at an angle on his shaved head, holding a Polaroid camera. He said hello to me and I nodded, hoping he wasn't going to strike up a conversation. I watched his Adam's apple bob and his eyes shift back and forth and immediately knew I was in for it.

He came over and sat at my table and asked to bum a smoke. I gave him one and he lifted my matches and lit it.

“That your girl?” he asked, nodding toward Lynn as she passed by in the water.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Nice hair,” he said and grinned.

“You on leave?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Got a big bunch of money and a week or so off. Bought this new camera.”

“Where you staying?”

“Up on the hill,” he said.

“They usually don't rent the places up on the hill unless you're staying for a long time,” I said.

“I made it worth their while,” he told me, flicking his ashes. “I wanted to be able to see everything.”

I was going to tell him I had to get back to work, but just then Lynn got out of the pool and came over to the table.

“Ma'am,” he said, and got up to let her sit down.

“Well, have a nice day,” I told him, but he just stood there looking at us.

I was going to tell him to shove off, but finally he spoke. “Would you two like me to take your portrait?” he asked.

I shook my head no, and Lynn said yes. She made me get up and drew me over to stand against the chain-link fence with the Vestal Parkway in the background.