The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Page 9

  We do what we have to. We open the door that we’ve all been avoiding. It leads to the ultimate dead end.

  A placard on an easel just inside states our condition. Stan and Mel, Charlee and I are in that very special place the world reserves for writers. It’s called:

  THE WAITING ROOM

  Waiting is all we are.

  Stan crashes on this sprawling hydra of a visitors’ bench, with seven carved settees fanning out from a central post. Carved busts like figureheads mark the end of every seat.

  Portraits, but of—who?

  Pacing, Mel studies them. “OK, this looks like Joyce Carol Oates but isn’t, and this one looks like what’s-her-name that wrote The Devil Wears Prada-type memoir about working for J. D. Salinger? And—owait, where is Salinger, is he in the main gallery, and does he have a whole hall to himself? He deserves a shrine, and … Ack, here’s Bret Easton Ellis. So, is this the salon des refusés? or what?”

  “More like the vestibule of the uncreated.” Why am I so tired?

  “Don’t, Spike.”

  “No. We belong.” Stan goes all crown prince on us, yelling, “INSIDE.”

  Charlee does her wafting, drifting thing, for she is a poet. “Like we’re God’s focus group.”

  “This isn’t a temple, Char.”

  “In a way, it is. And we’re …”

  “Nobody. Until we become somebody.” Would I step on my grad school lover’s head to be remembered here?

  Stan snarls, “Shut up! They could be listening.”

  “Well, if you’re listening, bring the damn keys!”

  Posturing for the hidden camera, my Charlotte murmurs, “So much history.”

  I think, We are so few.

  The Donor

  I had a dream, I have money. I dreamed until I saw it clear, and it was perfect. Then I announced.

  They came at me with a committee and everything went to hell.

  Six of my billions went into my tribute to our nation’s unsung heroes, the place is almost finished, but they came at me with a committee, and nothing is like I thought.

  One man’s vision counts for nothing in this world.

  Our nation’s capitol would be the perfect site. We have the Air and Space Museum, we have the National Art Galleries, I found a spot for The Museum of Great American Writers right in the middle of the National Mall. I sketched my dream building and paid a guy to paint it in oils. Then I went to see The Man.

  The President’s man had the temerity to turn me down. “Not right for Independence Avenue,” he said, but money talks. The President took an interest. It was flattering. It threw me off my guard, and the next thing I knew, every city and big small town in the country threw its name in the hat, like sub-teens entering a beauty pageant. So before I settled on Boise, I had to visit them all.

  Now, I made my money in munitions. I make my own decisions and I make them fast. You know what you’ve got and when a problem comes up, you don’t ask. You tell. The President’s man sent me out looking for another city. He appointed a site manager, nothing but the best. He hired an architect. She hired more. The Committee met.

  Some fool said, “Let’s start by making sure we’re all on the same page,” and it’s been downhill ever since. Do you know what it’s like, bombing along in your Learjet with The Committee wrangling until the windows frost over and your brain fries? Do you know what it’s like, knowing there are two more planes full of jabbering opinionaters hard on your tail?

  I hate them, I hate all the bloviating and I hate this consensus thing, like their Committee is in charge of making up my mind. Get the hell out of my mind.

  Look what they did to my dream! All I ever wanted was to honor my idols, Dink Stover and Mark Twain and the guy who wrote Silas Marner that we all read in high school that made such a big impression on me. Oh, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the greatest American writer of them all, By the shores of Gitche Gumee … but The Committee …

  I give them the classics and they smother me with the new. The pretentious fuckers turned up their noses at everybody but Twain. They tried to tell me this guy George Eliot that wrote Silas Marner wasn’t American! They had the nerve to claim he wasn’t even a guy. I had a dream. It was ten years in the building, and now this. They have boiled down my personal tribute to our country’s greatest writers into some kind of Hungarian Goulash. Who is this Gary Shteyngart anyway?

  E.g. in the matter of the Rotunda, they railroaded me. What’s so great about a bunch of nineteenth-century ditherers instead of the truly great writer I wanted honored here: JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. The Last of the Mohicans, do you not agree with me that he is great? Oh, I got my Cooper portrait and a Mohican chief’s headdress the dealer told me he’d worn but the COOPER CORNER is stuck in some alcove at the far end of the Middle American wing, and the statue in the lobby? Not my dream.

  When I grew up we read the classics, I mean, “Hiawatha” and William Cullen Bryant, who is this Robert Lowell anyway, did this Amy Lowell, his fat, cigar-smoking mama, rope him into poetry to keep the business in the family? And the Henry James Room? In high school we read “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” which I personally wanted in the diorama in the Middle American Wing. Instead The Committee got the entire James family, which does not include Jesse, in wax, and if you ask me, it’s an effete piece of crap. Every time I laid out an idea, The Committee came back at me with The Canon, The ostensible Necessary Names, and I never heard of most of them, and the ones I have heard of? I don’t approve.

  I had a dream, and you fools came at me with all these newfangled-come-latelies that mean nothing to me, but in the course of many arguments and even longer wrangles, The Committee prevailed. A Committee is like a dinosaur. It isn’t very fast and it isn’t very smart, but when it steps on you, it mashes you flat. The Committee always gets what it wants. Well, not this time. Who, I ask you, is picking up the tab?

  Me. It’s my money, and money talks. They want newfangled? Well, I’ll newfangle them.

  I went to one of these sandbox Play-Doh Creative Writing Programs that everybody takes on about, and I got me some shiny new MFAs with the sticker tags still on. In terms of Great American Writers according to The Committee, these kids are the newest-fangled of the new. MFA means Master of Fine Arts, if you want to know.

  Like Longfellow and George Eliot and Washington Irving needed any stupid writing school.

  My four just-hatched MFAs are in there right now, inspecting, so let’s see what these writing students make of The Museum of Great American Writers. What they make of The Committee’s idea of greatness, as in whether they think it’s inspirational or make fun of it or destroy what’s left of my dream. And You can’t hear me, people, but I am watching.

  Depending on how it goes down with them, I decide.

  Either the place plays well and I let this sad, corrupted dream of mine stand in the ruined state it got dragged into by The Committee, or I trigger the hundreds fuses set by the workers from my factory, which I can do from here.

  I’m a self-made man. I make my own decisions, and I make them fast.

  I emptied all my warehouses to prepare. My night people packed the walls in every corridor and gallery in the place with my complete inventory, nuclear and pre-nuclear, and if I don’t like the way The Museum of Great American Writers plays for these kid writers, I blow the place to hell.

  The Docent

  Look at them posturing for the hidden cameras, all puffed up and self-important, like it’s only a matter of time before their puerile screeds turn into gold and their place in history is assured. They look thirteen! Naive little twards, do they really believe they matter here? Listen to them yelling, “Bring it on!” like I am the dull servant and they are masters of the universe. Do they not know what they are? The Committee’s cuddly gerbils, two slick literary GI Joes and one Punk Barbie and one Poet Barbie in their trendy, struggling-writer clothes. They, and not I, will run the literary Habitrail, not because they’re good. Because they’re cute.<
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  They, and not I, Wilfred Englehart, will be in the Museum’s promotional video, stars of the viral podcast, three-minute commercials and a selling five-minute spot scheduled to burst onscreen in every cineplex, airport waiting room, hotel lobby, club and sports bar in the land, because the object of this empty exercise is not what these pretty children think. Nobody wants them to observe and report, nobody cares what they think and they’re certainly not on The Committee’s Wait List, coming to a pedestal near you. Like their pretentious scribbles will be honored here.

  They’re nothing but glossy marketing tools, fated to be kicked offstage with half the exhibits in this temple to art. Left behind by the parade of Great American Literature as it marches on, into posterity and beyond.

  The Museum advertises Great Writers, but, if you want to know the truth, they aimed for the red-hot center of literature and missed.

  Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, F. Scott Fitzgerald indeed! And whose idea was Louis Bromfield or for that matter, Edwin Arlington Robinson and who, I ask you, is Pearl S. Buck? There are, believe me, millions of unknown, unsung, unread writers far more deserving of places in this Museum.

  Such as myself.

  When I finish my Perpetual Novel, that I am writing for the ages, which I started in graduate writing school in the Seventies and will continue adding to every mortal day for the rest of my life, the world will know. At ten pages a day it’s slow, but sure. I will have a place here. Maybe even a whole hall. Genius is recognized. Unfortunately, posterity is on hold until history discovers me, an event that has to wait until death writes FINIS to my tome, although I keep a safe deposit box with a printout and INSTRUCTIONS TO BE CARRIED OUT ON MY DEMISE.

  Ten pages a day, seven days a week, month in, month out, it’s been forty years since I wrote THE BEGINNING to my Magnum O, thousands of pages and I’m still in Era One: The Dawning, the project is that ambitious, the writing is that grand.

  You see, my novel is about the history of the world, told from the point of view of a column of stone.

  You wondered about the origins of certain phenomena—the Easter Island faces, the Costa Rican Balls. Add to that my fabulous narrator, the noble, omniscient Colombian Column, which stands a stone’s throw from the world’s greatest river, the unfathomable Amazon.

  My protagonist is brilliant. Mysterious. Column doesn’t interact, he’s too deep.

  He thinks.

  Like me. If it wasn’t for that wretched buzzer, I’d love to sit down and read you my best bit—it’s when the Vikings … Oh, never mind. The children down there are impatient. The big, messy one is swinging his arms, hurling small objects around The Waiting Room, and I have to go before he breaks something.

  Instead of communing with my noble Column, I have to abandon Art and go downstairs and read the blather printed on this ridiculous card. It’s The Committee’s insipid Welcoming Speech. Gifted, intellectual unsung writer that I am, I have to spout their illiterate platitudes, which are, essentially, a pitch. My position here in The Museum of Great American Writers is to sideline Art and waste myself on VIP tours—celebrities who have millions to give, media magnates, rich industrialists, visiting heads of state, day after depressing, despicable day, and instead of working on my Perpetual Novel or saying what I really think of this marble travesty, I have to read it off a card.

  Stanley Krakowski

  Fuck you, pretentious little fucker in your pretentious five-button vest.

  I was not about to stand there listening, I mashed the flat of my hand in his face and grabbed a key. That makes me the first one into one of their holy galleries, and, shit.

  Is this as good as it gets?

  I mean, why make people run through several stupendously boring rooms before they get to any place that isn’t just books, is this a museum or what? In terms of exhibitions, who wants to waste time wading through a bunch of bookshelves to get to the good part?

  Books are so boring that I wanted to curl up under a showcase and take a nap, but fortunately I came around a corner and into this great big treasure house of stuff.

  THE HALL OF LITERARY OBJECTS. So, cool!

  It took forever to get here, but I don’t care. It’s totally worth your dime. Look, they’ve got Herman Melville’s underwear, and here’s the typewriter Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street on and holy fuck, that’s Grip the Raven, all stuffed and glaring at me with beady glass eyes and they’ve got its beak open because it’s croaking on a loop, you guessed it: “Nevermore,” but wait! If that isn’t Edmund Wilson’s puppet stage over there in that tall glass case … OMG, there’s a life-sized animatronic Edmund Wilson standing behind that mini-stage, push this button and he does his puppet show. Although, next to the mini-dioramas, e.g. Margaret Mitchell watching Atlanta burn, it kind of palls, to say nothing of the oceanic dioramas with figures sloshing in a perpetual wave in the Nautical Ell. You get to see Hart Crane jumping off a boat, and a mini-Katherine Anne Porter on her Ship of Fools with her hand clamped on her chest like an admiral going down with his ship, and look!

  There’s Flannery O’Connor’s favorite peacock. Dead, but looking real as life, although it doesn’t squall when you punch it, and where did they get this roll of toilet paper labeled notes for On the Road?

  Are those really James Whitcomb Riley’s baby teeth, and how did Edward Gorey’s shrunken head collection end up here, in hatboxes built to come with? You could spend a lifetime in this place, but, come on. A feather from a head-dress belonging to Louise Erdrich, really? Chopsticks once used by Amy Tan?

  Then I find a waxwork of James Patterson standing at his very special table, and everything clicks into place. And here’s Stephanie Meyer, very lifelike, plus Charlaine Harris, kaftan much? and Harold Robbins, he’s old, if he isn’t dead, but still good, so these are the bestsellers, but not the ones I admire. I mean, OK, that’s the woman who wrote The Ya-Ya Sisterhood, but who the fuck are Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz?

  No time to waste glomming a bunch of stupid junk left behind by people that don’t count. This is the wrong fucking hall for me. I belong right up there in the pantheon, wherever that is in this overgrown pack rat’s palazzo, because I am Stanley Fucking Krakowski, right?

  To win this, I need to swing wide and take large steps, gut myself with a Bowie knife if I have to, whatever gets their attention. Write flash fiction in my blood, anything to focus this rich, anonymous Donor guy on me. So get this, peeps.

  You’re looking at the Next Big Thing. Time to cut through the crap here and get with the real writers, and I am not talking Herman Fucking Melville or any of the old dead guys, they’re all over, right? I mean the ones everybody knows about because they’re hot on the web right now, because in this game, it’s all about branding, for instance this Snooki has gazillion following on Twitter just like James Franco, everybody in the universe has heard of Chuck Pahalniuk, who is my personal idol that I emulate and owe a huge debt to in my work, which I want him to blurb it when it comes out. See, before this is done, the name of Stanley Krakowski is gonna be right up there on the marquee with Dan Brown and that guy who wrote The Silence of the Lambs, and everything and everybody else goes out the window until I see the name Stanley Krakowski high above Times Square, I want to see it circling the city’s tallest building in big block letters that light up and they should be thirty feet high.

  Now, I can beat out good old Spike and Charlee without baring a fang, no problem, but sexy Mel is another thing. We’re definitely together, as in, might even get married. Well, we were. Sorry, I’m leaving her behind. I feel bad about it but writing is a dirty business, like, it’s dog eat dog, so if I have to, I’ll do what I have to, because that’s what Great Writers do.

  See, I’ve scoped this situation and I’m pretty sure that this is a Mortal Kombat deal. The one that comes out ahead in this Museum of Great American Writers is the only one that makes it out alive, and if Spike and I have to duke it out at the end, knives or bare hands, to keep from getting kicked off the isl
and, no problem. I just cracked Raymond Chandler’s pistol out of the Weapons Case and I am locked and loaded for bear.

  Destiny’s wall is out there somewhere. It has one thing only posted on it, and it’s my name.

  Melanie Lerner

  Truth? THE HALL OF READINGS raises questions. Are those the world’s best animatronics behind the velvet ropes, or do they have real Joyce Carol Oates and real Toni Morrison really standing up there at lecterns in their own special alcoves, surrounded by their manuscripts and doodles to say nothing of first editions, and are they really reading aloud from their works at this very moment, just for me? It’s wonderful and exciting and distracting seeing them like this but frankly, it creeps me out. I wouldn’t mind giving a reading for somebody besides my boyfriend and the manager of the bookstore, but the idea of standing up there reading and reading and reading day after day, following with a Q&A for the unwashed masses filing through The Museum of Great American Writers …

  Not so much.

  But if that’s what it takes to make it up there on the Great American Writers list, I’m down with that. Whatever it takes, and believe me, I’ve got what it takes. One look at The Wall of Fame in the foyer and I got dizzy, I could hear every bone in me humming, I want that. When the docent guy opened the door on THE MEMORY PALACE, I was off like a shot. On my way in to NOBEL-IN-WAITING ROOM with a special niche for Philip Roth, I ran through a corridor called AWARDS ARCADE, which was daunting as hell because every shelf is filled with glittering prizes. I saw everybody’s Pulitzers, Presidential medals, National Book Awards, along with all the Edgars, Golden Quills, and you-name-its and won by Great American Writers in the past hundred years, and that’s not counting Oscars, Tonies, trophies from other media, but first and foremost, they got the Nobel Prize medal from every American who ever won a Nobel Prize.

  Trophies like that make a writer like me all greedy and anxious, and if you think that makes me ashamed?

  It makes me sure.