The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Read online

  I will damn well be remembered here.

  Now, Spike’s a contender, but entre nous he let himself get all bent and distracted because he so wants to play with the cool kids. Poor baby, he doesn’t only want to be like them.

  Not only does he want to be them, Spike wants more.

  He wants them to like him.

  In his dreams poor Spike sees himself hanging out with the likes of Lethem and George Saunders and Jonathan Safran Foer and them, as if, when Spike finally sells Fucked All Over Town, he kind of thinks one of his idols will rip through it at one sitting and tweet about it and text all the others, like he’ll call Spike personally to read him the rave review he just wrote about it for The New York Times. Like Spike’s gonna hear Jay McInerney or somebody reading it to him on the phone, although he also mailed it to Spike and Spike is reading it on his phone instead of listening to The Man’s words in his very own voice. In Spike’s dreams somebody gives him a book party and all the cool kids come; they’ll make friends and pretty soon he’ll be out running around with his amazing boon buddies that he wants to have even more than he wants to win, and they’ll all get drunk together and talk about how bad they feel about David Foster Wallace being dead. I love Spike but in spite of the title his prose is, face it, a tad too fussy to make the cut, but who am I to tell him that?

  Now, Charlee, Charlee is an airhead, ergo no threat, which brings it down to me and my ostensible boyfriend Stan.

  Too bad he’s a macho jerkoff with an ego so big that he can’t see past the end of his dick, which, unfortunately, is his writing utensil of choice.

  So Committee/Donor/whoever, keep your eye on me.

  My name is Melanie Patricia Lerner and I’ve been writing since I was four years old. Not only am I pretty good at what I do, I’m fit, I work out. I start with pushups and crunches at four a.m. and the gears in my head go running along ahead of every word I type and every mile I swim, both day and night. The Mel-machine keeps rolling 24/7 no matter what you throw in front of it, so get out of my way, I never give up and I never run down. In terms of posterity and my place in The Museum of Great American Writers, I’m telling you now and when we’re done here I’ll put this in writing, just in case I get hit by a truck.

  No speeches and no flowers. Display all my books cover out, with plastic sleeves to keep the jackets from fading. In my exhibit, put all the things I care about: sweet little Melly’s first laptop, my grandmother’s copy of Catcher in the Rye and podcasts of every TV and online interview I make after I win the Pulitzer Prize, which. About my prizes. I want them in my own personal author display, not junked in with all the others out there in the hall; also, please hang up my blazing skull headset in the case next to the entrance, along with my favorite pair of boots.

  And the plaque you screw to the wall by the door? On the plaque, you should put: MELANIE L. SHE WAS TOUGH AS FUCK.

  Charlotte Eberstadt

  Oh, Mr. X, who brought all these wonders to life for your people and honored Spike and me and the others with the chance to see it all first and firsthand, I want to thank you, but before that, there are a couple of things. First off, you should know that I am a POET, so a little respect here, please.

  I thought your museum would be inspiring. I mean, it’s a very great honor, being rescued from downtown Iowa and flown in to serve the arts. I was so excited! I thought I could sit down in your Great Hall and gnaw poetry out of my bleeding fingertips, and Mother would stop nagging about my nails. I thought, OK, there’s a lot of history here, and we are history.

  We are history.

  God, I love that. Is that my first line?

  Second line: Look at me!

  Poet-in-waiting, chasing the gemlike flame—this place is so big—I think I see it! Unless that’s Tinker Bell twinkling down there at the far end of the Edna St. Vincent Millay gallery, which I must confess I’m finding rather thin. She had a glamorous life but she wasn’t a very nice person, you know? Plus, is this her stuff, or is it only copies of her stuff that somebody sold you because you can afford it, and they sold you fakes?

  Walt Whitman’s shaving mug, really? If it isn’t, what am I doing here? Looking for posterity. So, that light down there, is that it?

  I sing posterity beckoning. Does that sound OK? Believe me, it had better be beckoning, after what I went through to make it here.

  Later:

  I look for the day of reckoning …OK, Charlee, that blows. You are coming up empty here.

  I could spend a lifetime on this poem and never get it right because, between the intention and the act, guess what? There falls the shadow. Something’s terribly wrong in this place. Imagine, all the space and time and all that money wasted, I mean, how many of these people does anybody read?

  Move over for me.

  Face it, Mr. Donor, everything and everybody in your Museum of Great American Writers is dead. Except me.

  Well, me and Spike. Oh, and Melanie, I guess, and Stan, who, frankly, Stan smells bad, in addition to which, he’s mean. So, look. You could make something of this place if it was about living, struggling artists like me. Plus, Is that really Maya Angelou’s real writing desk I’m looking at, or did somebody sell you a fake?

  I’ve tried and tried, but I just don’t feel the vibe.

  I know I sound ungrateful after everything, I expected to sit down here and commit art, but I can’t wait to get out! I want to be out where it’s still happening, not ossified like your dead poets under glass. I want to get down and dirty with Spike, and when he and I are done with each other, I’ll tell him good-bye, but in a nice way so I can go somewhere and write without being distracted by dummies of Miniver Cheevey and all them, who, face it, are totally dead.

  I’m ready to dive headfirst into the gemlike flame, and I won’t come out until I’m famous, OK?

  Are you listening, Mr. Donor? This is your last warning. If you don’t come get me right now, I’ll just sit here in wax James Baldwin’s lap throwing matches at T. S. Eliot until either he melts or you personally come in and lead me out of this terrible place.

  The Committee

  “Called to order at 1700. Present are …”

  “That’s enough. We’re meeting to resolve a situation.”

  “What situation?”

  “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

  “Shut up, Etherington.”

  “Four mindless MFAs running wild in the galleries. Donor’s focus group.”

  “Judging our efforts.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what are we supposed to do about it?”

  “Something. Discuss.”

  “I’m sick of discussions, I …”

  “This is a mistake.”

  “Face it, the whole Museum’s a mistake.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “It’s true. And now The Donor is …”

  “Pissed.”

  “And we are going to do about it … What?”

  “It didn’t have to be this way.”

  “You said it. For instance, I wanted …”

  “Yeah, but that’s not what I wanted, I …”

  “Enough.”

  “If we’d only done what I …”

  “We did what The Donor wanted.”

  “That’s not what he thinks.”

  “We did too many things that too many people wanted.”

  “Now, nobody wants it.”

  “If only we’d done what I wanted.”

  “So, are we supposed to do what these kids want?”

  “Is that what he thinks?”

  “Nobody knows what he’s thinking, only that we made him mad.”

  “We don’t care what he thinks. The issue is making him think he’s getting what he wants.”

  “Trouble is, it isn’t!”

  “Nobody gets what they want.”

  “Don’t go all existential on us.”

  “Shut up. Do you not get that The Donor is in charge of this?”

 
“Then why is he so pissed off?”

  “Billions, and it isn’t what he really wants.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. What The Donor wants, The Donor gets.”

  “He doesn’t think so.”

  “Neither do I. I thought it would be more literary.”

  “Well, I thought it would be more dignified.”

  “More commercial.”

  “More promotable.”

  “More profitable.”

  “He thought it would be more Early American.”

  “Early American?”

  “Never mind. Now, about the business at hand …”

  “Hemingway foyer. Depression Steinbeck. Styron Forties Melancholia room, that kind of thing.”

  “I thought it would be more contemporary.”

  “I thought it would have a great manuscript library. Emerson papers. Like that.”

  “The public doesn’t care about manuscripts.”

  “I thought The Museum would be universal. About art.”

  “Art isn’t universal.”

  “What is art, anyway?”

  “Let’s don’t go there. Not today.”

  “The public doesn’t care about art.”

  “What does the public care about?”

  “Showmanship.”

  “You’re so smart, you tell us. What is showmanship?”

  “Giving the public what it wants.”

  “What does the public want?”

  “We’ve been through that. Moving on, about the …”

  “Solution: we give the public what it wants. Discuss.”

  “We’re sick of discussions.”

  “ … kid focus group. Shut up and listen.”

  “No more discussions!”

  “Shall we vote on that?”

  “THAT’S NOT OUR PROBLEM TODAY. It’s this beta test The Donor’s got going. Who makes up his mind for him, us or these piddling MFAs?”

  “Us, us!”

  “Which means we have to …”

  “Don’t worry, the Subcommittee’s handling it as we speak. We have a …”

  “ … present a solid front. Etherington, that’s enough!”

  “Wait. We have a Subcommittee?”

  “Yes, and we’ve got an …”

  “I said, Enough! As chair, I’m cutting off discussion. What The Donor wants …”

  “ … The Donor gets.”

  “ …. installation going in …”

  “And our job is to make him think he’s getting what he wants …”

  “ … out there in the courtyard as we speak.”

  “And if these kids come back negative, we take care of it. Agreed?”

  “Move to vote on the question.”

  “Adjourned.”

  The Donor

  I thought it would come out better, but, great new writers of the future or not, they’re only kids! The two guys ran into each other at an intersection in the Futurist corridor. **Kersplat!** They tangled and went rolling through the archway into the Wilderness displays, and now they’re duking it out with Jack London’s pikes and knives on Camera 3. They’re in there slashing and poking and destroying history, and not a guard on the place to break them up. Stop, you little bastards, cut it out! This is terrible! They just trashed the Natty Bumppo exhibition, one of my few favorites! Do they not know that they’re ruining their chances to join the Great American Writers here? My eager, talented, handpicked focus group is wrecking what little I had left of my original dream!

  Meanwhile that willowy poet child is at the far end of the Middle American extravaganza, sobbing her heart out on the Emily Dickinson chaise and I am thinking what God thought when He called the shot on Sodom and Gomorrah. Who, with his hopes crumbling, would not?

  Besides, instead of doing what I sent her in there to do, that trashy leather girl is swaggering around in the BOOK TO MAJOR MOTION PICTURE AMPHITHEATER like a rock-and-roll music star while my miserable excuse for a docent sits on his fat butt down there in my office with his back to me, scrawling on a legal pad instead of stopping those destructive kids or, for Pete’s sake, dialing 911. He just keeps on scribbling with that moronic grin, gnawing on his tongue every time he rips off another page and I can’t do a thing about it because I’m 1,693 miles away, in case this goes south and there’s a blast. At this distance, all I can do is watch while his crumpled, garbagey prose slithers across my flat screen Navajo 9X12 because here in Chicago, glued to my remotes, I’m essentially helpless, with no staff on site and no way to intervene, so I’m powerless.

  Except for the red plunger by my chair, which I’m strongly tempted to push.

  Look at those self-important, talented kids I hired, which was a great honor. They’re running wild because my docent’s asleep at the switch and the only other people in the building are The Committee, whom I do not trust, up there in the observation booth, thinking they’re perfectly safe. It’s egregious. They’re disgusting. Every one of them!

  Even God would push the plunger. But wait! What’s this?

  Camera A just picked up activity down in the Realist Writers’ Courtyard. Looks like some kind of—wait, it is!

  A statue. I didn’t order that! Five men are rolling it off a truck onto a forklift as we speak.

  Now the man in the bucket truck is attaching padded ropes so the crane operator can hoist the figure to its feet.

  As the ground crew tugs the ropes, the felt blankets drop, revealing a rather handsome …

  It looks like a … Why, it’s a …

  I didn’t order that!

  Handsome bronze. A handsome bronze is going up in the main courtyard without my … Not a bad looking fellow, now that I think about it, but this is nothing I approved. I wasn’t even consulted. Plunger time! But wait. Who is he, and why did I not see sketches or site plans? It’s some great writer, I suppose, although it looks a little bit like … but what great writer wears a topcoat like mine and wears a homburg that looks just like mine, and who else carries the Gucci briefcase with a special holster for my click-n-switch sword cane, just in case? This is so …

  Oh!

  Very well, then. Kudos to you, Committee. And thank you very much.

  Now, moving on. Camera One: the willowy girl has pulled herself together. Looking around for some paper and something to write with. Lady, not that manuscript. Lady, not Emily Dickinson’s pen! The young studs are still grappling in the Great American Northwest, the lean one has the one I like in a hammer lock, must send Docent in to pull them apart before they …

  Rethink. Forget this bunch. There are plenty more where they came from, if these two fight to the death, let them. Which, come to think of it, would make an interesting spectacle for the Grand Opening. Maybe with the next pair …

  Excellent!

  Note to self: order bronze light bulb above that great bronze head in the courtyard, signifying Idea.

  I know how to save my museum and guarantee that it will do me credit, and looking at the statue in the courtyard—handsome bronze!—I know it’s credit that I deserve.

  See, businessmen like me know all there is to know about the Great American Way, and now that I’ve watched these kids in action, I know exactly what to do. In our great country it’s not really about who wins and who loses. It’s all about the race.

  Tomorrow I dispatch The Committee to cover every writing program, workshop, and small press reading and poetry slam in our great nation, with orders to recruit the attraction I should have put in place on Day One.

  The exhibit that makes sense of all the literary things collected here.

  At the end of the day, instead of being my dream diluted and deferred, The Museum of Great American Writers will be a commercial sensation, and a credit to my name. For the Grand Opening, which I predict will take another year to prepare, we’ll have the greatest show on earth. In addition to moldy relics of the great and not-so-great American dead, The Museum of Great American Writers will feature a living writer in every room.

&nbs
p; We can keep wannabes in every room in all those galleries 24/7, pacing, typing, deleting, whatever writers do. Plenty of cannon fodder in those writing schools. We can throw in some other contests to amuse our paying guests: pair them off in bouts of drinking, dancing and bar-fighting, love triangles and bad breakups, even gladiatorial tilts, because the great American public needs to know everything about the ugly underside of the American writing game.

  Millions will stroll past my live exhibits just to handicap the winners, and millions will keep coming back, watching their favorites make it into rooms labeled Submission, Rejection, that kind of thing, and we’ll let our public place bets at every step along the way. And if your pick gets axed at Rejection?

  Come on down again! You can always get yourself a winner next time, and if we throw in a small cash prize … Then there’ll be the elimination rounds, with the Publication room for the few and for the very few, a spot in the Museum’s Awards Corridor, next stop, the Late American Wing. From there, as I understand it, it’s only a hop and a skip, some schmoozing and a couple of murders, to the Rotunda and—for the best of the very few, a photograph of the winners with yours truly by that handsome statue in the courtyard, and—wait for it—a spot on the Wall of Fame.

  —Postscripts, 2011

  High Rise High

  The situation at the school is about like you’d expect: total anarchy, bikers roaring through the halls pillaging and laying waste; big guys hanging screaming frosh out of windows by their feet, shut up or I let go; bathroom floods and flaming mattresses, minor explosions and who knows how many teacher hostages; this is worse than Attica, and the monster prom that puts the arm on Armageddon is Saturday night. The theme is Tinsel Dreams; expect wild carnage fueled by kid gangs sallying forth to trash your neighborhood and bring back anything they want. Who knows how they got out of the citadel? Who can say exactly how they get back in?

  An interesting thing has happened. Nobody’s cell phone works inside the walls. Worse. The land lines have been cut so you can’t phone in.

  Then there is the problem with the baby. See, this Bruce Brill, he tries to get down with the kids, you know, call me Bruce, but the kids call him the Motivator? He’s always, like, “Come on, if you want to, you can get a C,” big mistake trying that on Johnny Slater: “Why are you holding back like this? You could go to MIT!” Well, that and his stupid play. OK, this is what you get for pissing Johnny off. He and his gang have snatched your pregnant wife, they broke into your house while you were scrubbing your hands in front of English class, we’ll Macbeth you. Johnny is holding pregnant Jane in the woodworking shop while his seven best buds rig the table saw to rip her fuckin in half. Boy, you should hear her scream. Listen, when Mr. McShy the band teacher begged them to let her go the seven of them did, yes they did smash sensitive Eddie McShy’s Stradivarius over his sensitive head; while he weeps and the pregnant lady screams for help, Johnny uses the splinters to pick his front teeth.