The Complete Polysyllabic Spree

  You see the profound effect that literature can have on a life? Who says it’s all a waste of time? If only I could produce one book that left someone with that kind of ferocious grievance. If you have read one of my books, you probably feel cheated out of however much money it might have cost you, and you’ll certainly begrudge the time you wasted on it. But even at my most bullish and self-aggrandizing, I can’t quite make myself believe that I’ve actually wrecked someone’s life. Any documentary evidence to the contrary will be gratefully received.

  A selection from

  CITIZEN VINCE

  by JESS WALTER

  Eighty-seven bars in greater Spokane, serving three hundred thousand people. One taxicab company: eight cabs. So on a Tuesday morning just past two a. m., last call, the economics are clear: more drunks than the market can bear. They leach out onto the sidewalks and stagger and yawn to their cars – those who own them and remember where they’re parked. The rest walk from downtown to the neighborhoods, scattering in all directions across bridges, through underpasses, beneath trestles, up hills to dark residential streets, solitary figures beneath thought bubbles of warm breath and cigarette smoke. Rehearsed lies.

  Vince Camden concentrates on his own thoughts as he walks sober and rested among the drunk and tired. Stout downtown brick and brownstone give way to low-rent low-rise strips – karate dojos, waterbed liquidators, erotic bookstores, pawnshops, and Asian massage – then a neighborhood of empty warehouses, rail lines, vacant fields, and a solitary two-story Victorian house, an after-hours cards and rib joint called Sam’s Pit. This is where Vince hangs out most nights before his shift begins at the donut shop.

  Vince was only in town a few months when Sam died. Thirty-seven. The new owner is named Eddie, but everyone calls him Sam – it being easier to change one’s name to Sam than to change the faded Pepsi sign on the old house from SAM’S to EDDIE’S. Just as old Sam did, new Sam opens the Pit when the rest of the city closes, after Last Call. The place works like a drain for the city; every morning when the bars close, the drunks and hookers and lawyers and johns and addicts and thieves and cops and cardplayers – as old Sam used to say, ‘Evergodambody’ – swirls around the streets and ends up here. It’s why the cops don’t sweat the gambling and undercounter booze. It’s just nice to know that at three a. m., everyone will be gathered in one place, like the suspects in a seamy British drawing room.

  The Pit lurks behind high, unkempt shrubs, the only thing on a block of vacant lots, like a last tooth. Behind, a rutted dirt field functions as a parking lot for Sam’s and a factory showroom for the half-dozen professional women who gather here each night for last tricks. Inside, pimps play cards and wait for their cut.

  Gravel cracks beneath Vince’s shoes as he angles for Sam’s Pit. Six cars are parked randomly in his weed-covered field, girls doing business in a couple. A car door opens fifty feet from Vince, and a woman’s voice skitters across the weedy lot: ‘Let go!’

  Vince stares straight ahead. Not your business.

  ‘Vince! Tell this guy to let go of me!’

  Beth’s voice. At the door, Vince turns and walks back across the lot toward a tan Plymouth Duster. Inside, Beth Sherman is wrestling with a guy in a white turtleneck sweater and a navy sport coat. As he walks up to the car, Vince can see the guy’s pants are open and that he’s trying to keep Beth from getting out of the car. She swings at him with the frayed, dirty cast on her right forearm. Barely misses.

  Vince leans down and opens the car door. ‘Hey, Beth. What’s going on?’

  The guy lets go and she pulls away, climbs out of the car and past Vince. He is amazed again how pretty she can be, triangular face and round eyes, bangs cut straight across them. She can’t weigh a hundred pounds. Odd for a woman in her line of work to actually look younger than she is, but Beth could pass for a teenager – at least from a distance. Up close – well, the lifestyle is tough to hide. Beth points at the guy in the car with her cast. ‘He grabbed my ass.’

  The guy is incredulous. ‘You’re a hooker!’

  ‘I’m in real estate!’

  ‘You were blowing me!’

  Beth yells around Vince at the man: ‘Do you grab your plumber’s ass when he’s working?’

  Vince steps between Beth and the john, and smiles disarmingly at the guy. ‘Look, she doesn’t like to be touched.’

  ‘What kind of hooker doesn’t like to be touched?’

  Vince can’t argue the premise. But he wishes the guy had just kept his mouth shut. He knows how this will go now, and in fact Beth steps around him, fishes around in her pocket, and throws a twenty-dollar bill in his face.

  The guy holds up the twenty. ‘I gave you forty!’

  ‘You got half,’she says. ‘You get half your money back.’

  ‘Half? There’s no such thing!’ He looks up at Vince. ‘Is there such thing as half ?’

  Vince looks from Beth to the guy and opens his mouth without the slightest expectation that anything will come. He looks back at Beth and their eyes catch long enough for both of them to note.

  About Beth Sherman: she is thirty-three, just leaving ‘cute’, with brown hair and eyes that dart from attention. Her dislike of contact notwithstanding, Beth is well respected among the working women at Sam’s, mostly for one big accomplishment – she quit heroin without methadone, cold fucking turkey, exactly nineteen months and two weeks ago, on the very day she found out she was pregnant. Her boy, Kenyon, is a little more than a year now and he seems fine, but everyone knows how she watches him breathlessly, constantly comparing him to the other kids in the park and at his day care, looking for any sign that he is slow or stunted, that her worst fears are realized, that the junk has ruined him, too. And while she is clearly on her way out of this life – she fired her pimp, in writing – Beth continues to turn tricks, maybe because there are so few ways for a high school dropout to support herself and her son. Anyway, she’s not the only hooker at Sam’s who introduces herself as something else. It’s a place full of actresses and massage therapists, models, students, and social workers, but when Beth says she’s in real estate, people actually seem to believe it.

  When he first arrived, Vince purchased Beth’s services (he tried a few of the girls) and found himself intrigued by her cool distance, the way she bristled under his hands. Then one night six months ago, she and Vince drank two bottles of wine and spent a night together without the exchange of money. And it was different – alarming and close. No bristle. But since then everything has been out of sorts – Beth not wanting to charge him, Vince wary of becoming involved with a woman with a kid. And so they haven’t slept together in three months. The worst part is that it feels like cheating to be with the other women, and so Vince is in the midst of his longest stretch of celibacy that doesn’t involve a jail cell. The whole thing has proven to him the old axiom among the professional class: Free sex ruins everything.

  In the parking lot, Beth stalks away from the angry, unsated john – her tight jeans beneath a coat that stops midriff. Vince watches her go, then takes one of the bags of dope from his pocket, bends down, and holds it up to the window. The Bible says that even the peacemaker deserves a profit. Or it says something anyway.

  After a second, the guy shrugs and holds up the twenty. ‘Yeah, okay,’ he says. As they exchange dope for money, the guy shakes his head. ‘Never heard of a hooker who didn’t want to be touched.’

  Vince nods, although in his estimation the world is made of only such people, pot-smoking cops, thieves who tithe 10 per cent, society women who wear garters, tramps who sleep with stuffed bears, criminal donut makers, real estate hookers. He remembers a firefighter in the old neighborhood named Alvin Dunphy who was claustrophobic. Died when a burning apartment building collapsed on him. Thirty-eight.

  OCTOBER 2005

  BOOKS BOUGHT:

  None

  BOOKS READ:

  Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story – Timothy B. Tyson

  Candide –
Voltaire

  Oh the Glory of It All – Sean Wilsey

  I want to take back some things I said last month. Or rather, I don’t so much want to take them back as to modify my tone, which is a pretty poor show, considering that writing, especially writing a column, is all about tone: what I’m essentially saying is, don’t read last month’s column, because it was all wrong. I was way too defensive, I see now, about my relative lack of literary consumption (two books, for the benefit of those of you who are too busy busy busy to retain the minutiae of my reading life from one month to the next). Shamefully – oh, God, it’s all coming back to me now – I tried to blame it on all sorts of things, including the London bombs, but the truth is that two books in a month isn’t so bad. There are lots of people who don’t get through two books a month. And anyway, what would happen if I had read no books? Obviously, I’d lose this job (although that’s assuming one of the Spree noticed). But apart from that? What would happen if I read no books ever? Let’s imagine someone who reads no books ever but polishes off every word of the New Yorker, the Economist and their broadsheet newspaper of choice: well, this imaginary person would do more reading than me, because that’s got to be a couple of hundred thousand words a week, and would also be a lot smarter than me, if you use that rather limited definition of smart which involves knowing stuff about stuff. The New Yorker has humour in it and also provides an introduction to contemporary fiction and poetry. So the only major food group not covered is starch: in other words, the classics. And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you’re a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I’m beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun. Persons of Letters have to read things like Candide or they’re a few letters short of the whole alphabet; book lovers, meanwhile, can read whatever they fancy.

  I picked up Candide because my publishers sent me a cute new edition, and though that in itself wouldn’t have persuaded me, I flicked through it and discovered it was only ninety pages long. Ninety pages! Who knew, apart from all of you, and everybody else? A ninety-page classic is the Holy Grail of this column, and when the Holy Grail is pushed through your letter box, you don’t put it on a shelf to gather dust. (Or maybe that’s exactly what you’d do with the Holy Grail. Is it ornamental? Has anyone ever seen it?) Anyway, I have now read Candide. That’s another one chalked off. And boy, does Voltaire really have it in for Leibnizian philosophy! Whoo-hoo! Now, there’s a justification for reading Candide right there. Many of you will have been living, like Leibniz, in the deluded belief that all is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds (because you believe that God would have created nothing but the best), but I have read Voltaire, and I can now see that this is a preposterous notion that brings only despair. And it’s not only Leibniz who comes in for a kicking, either. Oh, no. Corneille, the Jesuits, Racine, the Abbé Gauchat, Rousseau… Just about everyone you’ve ever wanted to see lampooned in a short novel gets what’s coming to them. You lot are probably all familiar with the Abbé Gauchat, the Theatines, the Jansenists and the literary criticism of Élie-Catherine Fréron, but I’m afraid I found myself flicking frantically between the text and the footnotes at the end; I was unhappily reminded of the time I had to spend at school reading Alexander Pope’s equally mordant attacks on poetasters and so forth. Literary types will tell you that underneath all the contemporary references, you will recognize yourselves and your world, but it’s not true, of course. If it’s this world you’re after, the one we actually live in, you’re better off with Irvine Welsh or Thomas Harris.

  The trouble with Candide is that it’s one of those books that we’ve all read, whether we’ve read it or not (cf. Animal Farm, 1984, Gulliver’s Travels, Lord of the Flies). The meat was picked off it and thrown to the crowd in the eighteenth century, and… I’ll abandon this metaphor here, because I suspect that it must inevitably conclude with digestive systems and the consumption of ancient excrement. The point is that we are familiar with silly old Dr Pangloss, just as we know that some animals are more equal than others. Satires and allegories tend to have been decoded long before we ever get to them, which renders them somewhat redundant, it seems to me. Panglossian is the sort of word you might find from time to time in the Economist and the New Yorker, and in any case, if ever anyone lived in an age that had no need for a savage debunking of optimism, it is us. We believe that everything everywhere is awful, all the time. In fact, Voltaire was one of the people who first pointed it out, and he was so successful that we find ourselves in desperate need of a Pangloss in our lives. Bitter footnote: just after I’d finished my cute hardback, I found an old paperback copy on my shelves (unread, obviously): a hundred and thirty pages. Oh, the pain! I’d never have read – or paid, as you have to think of it in this case – three figures. I was tricked, swindled and cheated by my own publishers, who clearly scrunched everything up a bit to dupe the innocent and the ill read.

  Book length, like time, is an abstract concept. Sean Wilsey’s Oh the Glory of It All is a good four times the length of Candide, and I enjoyed it probably four times as much, even though all book logic suggests that the reverse might have been the case. I’m sure young Sean would be the first to admit that there’s some sag around the middle, but like many of us, it’s lovable even at its saggiest point. And also, you never once have to laugh at the pomposities of the French Academies of the eighteenth century, a prerequisite, I now understand, for any book. (In fact, publishers should use that as a blurb. ‘You never once have to laugh at the pomposities of the French Academies of the eighteenth century!’ I’d buy any book that had that on the cover.)

  Oh the Glory of It All is a memoir, as those of you who live in the Bay Area may already know; Wilsey was brought up in San Francisco by squillionaire socialites, although after his parents’ divorce, the silver spoon wasn’t as much use as he might have hoped: his mother devoted her time to saving the world, and dragged Sean off around the world to meet the Pope and various scary old-school Kremlin types; meanwhile his dad married a scary old-school stepmother who treated Wilsey like dirt. (Hey, Dede! You may be a bigshot in a little bit of San Francisco, but nobody has ever heard of you here in London! Or anywhere else! I’m sorry, but she got me so steamed up that I had to get back at her somehow.) He got chucked out of every school he attended, and ran away from a creepy establishment which didn’t allow you to utter the names of rock bands out loud.

  American lives seem, from this distance at least, very different from European lives. Look at this: Sean Wilsey’s mother was the daughter of an itinerant preacher. She ran away to Dallas to be a model, an escape funded initially by the nickels from her uncle’s jukeboxes and peanut machines. She was dragged off to California by her angry family, and while waitressing there she met a US Air Force major who married her on a live national radio programme called The Bride and Groom. She split from the major, dated Frank Sinatra for a while, married a couple of other guys – one marriage lasted six months; the other, to the trial lawyer who defended Jack Ruby, lasted three weeks. She got a TV job and she had a fan club. And then she married Sean’s dad. We don’t do any of that here. We don’t have itinerant preachers, or peanut machines, or Sinatra. We are born in, for example, Basingstoke, and then we either stay there, or we move to London. That’s probably why we don’t write many memoirs.

  Timothy B. Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name is a memoir, too, although it’s not the peculiarities of his life that Tyson is writing about, but the point at which his experiences intersect with recent American history. Tyson was brought up in Oxford, North Carolina, where his father was the pastor of the Methodist church; in 1970, Robert Teel, the father of one of Tyson’s friends, and a couple of other white thugs murdered a young black man, and after the contemptible trial, wherein everyone was found not guilty of everything, there was a race riot, and great chunks of Oxford got torched. Young Tim Tyson grew up to be a professor of Afro-A
merican studies, and Blood Done Sign My Name is a perfect reflection of who he is now and where he came from: it’s both memoir and social history, and it’s riveting. Tyson has a deceptively folksy prose style that leads you to suspect that his book will in part be about the triumph of Civil Rights hope over bitter Southern experience, but it ends with a coda, a visit to a club in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1992 to see Percy Sledge: Tyson’s black friend is denied admission. Yes, 1992. Yes, Percy Sledge, the soul singer.

  Blood Done Sign My Name is uncompromisingly tough minded, righteous and instructive (there is a terrific section unravelling the taboo that surrounded black men sleeping with white women), and it’s not about people singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and holding hands until black and white live together in perfect harmony. On the contrary, Tyson is very good on how the history of the Civil Rights movement is being rewritten daily until it begins to look like the triumph of liberal good sense over prejudice; nothing would have happened, he argues, without things being set on fire. ‘If you want to read only one book to understand the uniquely American struggle for racial equality and the swirls of emotion around it, this is it,’ says one of the reviews on the back of the book. Well, I have read only one book about the uniquely American struggle for racial equality, and this was it. But I will read another one one day soon: it would seem strange, and perhaps a little perverse, to allow a white man to provide my entire Civil Rights education. I mean no offence to the author of this memorable book, but he’d be the first to admit that Afro-Americans might have something of interest to say on the subject.