The Line That Deserted Him
a short story
by Angus Brownfield
***
Published By
Copyright © 2011 by Angus Brownfield
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The Line That Deserted Him
The drinker closest to me had no dignity left. He wore a suit that might have come from a Post Street clothier, but had been slept in, and from where I sat you could imagine cooties in the seams. In another day we would have called him a bum.
The one on the right, The Mark, was moving up in the world, undoubtedly the world of Montgomery Street. The merchandise on his body was well picked but not quite top of the line. One more raise and watch out.
I tuned in to their conversation when I heard The Mark say, “Why would I want to know about your life?”
“It’s exemplary,” said The Bum, “not in the sense that word’s usually meant, as in ‘worthy of emulation,’ no, I mean it’s worth knowing about so that you, my fine-feathered drinking companion, do not end up like me.”
I didn’t hear a snicker, but I saw a smirk on The Mark’s face. The smirk said, ‘I end up like you? Are you kidding?’
“I understand your skepticism, mon frère, but I assure you, at just your age—you’re twenty-nine, yes?—I was on top of the world. I’d just finished a book tour, last stop right here, City Lights Bookstore, for a reading. Not quite the sensation Allen Ginsberg caused, but a petite sensation nonetheless.”
Still with a trace of smirk, The Mark wanted to know The Bum’s name. He hadn’t responded, except for a momentary diminution of the smirk, to the guess of his age, by which I ascertained The Bum had hit within a year.
“My name,” The Bum said, “is worth a Manhattan.”
The bartender looked at The Mark, The Mark glanced over at me, for a reading on whether he was being played for a chump (I batted not an eyelash), and finally, with the slightest shrug, he signaled and the bartender tended.
The Manhattan decanted from the shaker, the bartender looked inquiringly at me. I wasn’t going to miss the show, so I signaled another gin over with a twist. Like any good bartender, he removed my glass and took down a fresh one, installed a new lemon twist, after running it around the rim, and poured, without measuring, a pretty decent well gin.
Meanwhile, I caught The Bum’s name. If he was the author he claimed to be, he’d been on top of, if not the world, at least the world of post-modern fiction in the US. ‘The second coming of Jack Kerouac,’ one critic said. ‘With a tad of Thomas Wolfe thrown in,’ said another.
The Bum bent slightly, to meet the drink coming to his mouth, as if to compensate for a shaky hand. He set the glass on the bar with a satisfied “ahh” and said, “I gather you don’t know me from Gigantopithecus; well, you may be forgiven, being from the School of Business. Not Berkeley, not Stanford, let me guess: The Wharton School.”
Now The Mark was definitely hooked. Either he was flattered by a wrong but clever guess, or The Bum had nailed it. The smirk fled, replaced by a slight grin rippling through The Mark’s facial muscles.
“I had sold a book that became, surprisingly, a best-seller. I had another book being vetted at a very reputable publishing house, and I was but a few chapters away from finishing a third. It was my triptych, or that’s how I billed it, trilogy being so other time, other place. I had a two book deal for the second and third, with an advance which, for someone of my métier, was gargantuan.
“Now you may assume that this was where hubris set in, marking the beginning of my downfall. No, bubelah, it had not. Au contraire, I was very nervous. I prayed to the muses not to let my light go out, nor to let drink or lechery or pride spoil my gift. I got up every morning at five, made coffee, and worked five hours. I didn’t assume that the editors at my publishing house were greenhorns with an exalted sense of their importance, I took their suggestions to heart. I bought my mother a Volvo—her driving more suited to a battle tank than a car; I figured the Volvo would save her injury when she must finally plow into something substantial.”
The Bum stopped here and polished off the Manhattan. He held up his glass to signal the bartender, The Mark nodded and the bartender responded. I was content to nurse my gin, trying to eavesdrop discretely. It was fairly easy, there being no other customers in the place; no one plugging the juke box nor rattling the dice cups.
With the second Manhattan in front of him, The Bum continued:
“I first came to this very bar the day I learned my second book was going to press. I was happy as a frisking lamb, and in the midst of my happiness I had an inspiration for a short story. To be more precise, an opening line popped into my head, a killer line of dialog. It was to be delivered by a down-and-outer sitting in a bar, trying to cadge a drink from a more affluent patron. After hearing that line, no man with whom you’d hoist a tankard would deny you a drink.”
A serious look of skepticism crossed The Mark’s face, tinged with an anxiety that he’d let himself be played for a fool. He glanced over at me and I let him know, with a shrug and a slight raising of the eyebrows, that I wasn’t in on the scam, if there was one.
The Bum turned his head towards me as well, and I saw in his face the hope that I wouldn’t mess up his opportunity, but nothing of venality, nothing to suggest that this was, indeed, a scam.
“This wasn’t the line you delivered to me, I assume,” The Mark said.
“No. Unfortunately.” He paused, his shoulders sagging, as if reliving a difficult moment. “You see, I had one drink too many that night—something I rarely did in those days. The next morning the line had gone missing, for in my alcohol euphoria I hadn’t written it down. At first I thought it would come back to me. Being the greatest single line of dialog I’d ever conceived, it had to come back. I breakfasted chez moi, reluctant to start writing, not listening to the news, not looking at a newspaper, keeping my mind as clear as possible. Rien. Nada. Niente. I tried a nap, thinking in sleep would be where my subconscious would surrender this gem. On waking I found it still eluded me.
“That first day I went for a walk, foreswearing window shopping, staying away from familiar haunts—I just walked. I brushed past panhandlers, dodged bicycle messengers at intersections, shunned newsies and feather merchants. When I arrived home, I took out a notebook, turned to a fresh page, picked up a pen, and waited. A smidge of anxiety crept into my heretofore confident mien. I’d been deserted by my muse. Nothing.
“When the phone rang that afternoon, I threw a pillow over it. I was wretched by this time,
despairing. Nothing like this had ever happened to me.
“Then it struck me: I would reconstruct the scene of the crime. I came back to this bar. Luckily the stool I sat on was vacant. I took possession of it. The same bartender was on duty—not Jack, here, a fellow who’s long since moved on—and I asked him to make me the same drink, a perfect Manhattan. I tried to remember how I’d paid for the drink: immediately? telling the bartender to run a tab? showing a credit card? I couldn’t remember, so I asked the bartender. ‘You ran a tab,’ he said. ‘You’re sure,’ I replied. ‘Yup.’
“Then I remembered the juke box had been playing, Barney Kessel doing ‘I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.’ I jumped up, put a coin in the machine and punched in the tune. Then I sat down and drank, Barney picking away behind me. I rolled the chilled mixture over my tongue, but the taste produced no associations. Nor did the frost on the cocktail glass, nor the napkin beneath its base. I concentrated very hard. Had I had one drink or two when the inspiration came? I decided two. I ordered another, but I was careful to finish the first.
“Maybe it had been three, four, five. So I had that many, and again was looped. The line had not come back to me.”
The Mark motioned another round. He was aware I’d been listening, so he included me in the round. I nodded and smiled a thank you. The Bum popped the Maraschino cherry into his mouth. “I like Manhattans,” he said, “you get some nourishment with the alcohol.”
“Go on with your story,” The Mark said.
“Oh, well. Let’s see. I neglected my appearance, I stopped writing, I never finished the third piece of the triptych. My agent told me the publisher was threatening to sue me to take back half the advance. I told him to tell the publisher to go to hell, I would deliver someday.”
“All over one little line of fiction?” The Mark asked.
“Not just a line of fiction. The experience of its deserting me shook me to my core. It revealed to me something about man’s inability to communicate with his own psyche. It said my subconscious had something against my ego and was punishing me in a way most cruel. I felt like George Foreman must have after losing The Rumble in the Jungle. I had no faith left in myself.”
“Have you tried doing something else?” The Mark asked.
“I was a janitor for a while,” The Bum said. “I tried driving a taxi. I even dashed off a bodice ripper under the pen name Mandy Hatten. It was a clinker and no agent would represent me. I tried suicide one night, but I managed to make it to the street before collapsing, and a good Samaritan saw me and called an ambulance.
“I turned out to be the answer to her prayers. She was a Rescuer, you see, and I, beyond all doubt, needed rescuing. She took me in, tried to talk me out of alcoholism, believed that True Love—which she manufactured at once, in the cause of her need—was going to miraculously convert me. ‘Find that line that deserted me,’ I told her, ‘and I will worship you until I draw my last breath.’ Naturally she couldn’t. She read up on famous authors, looking for a model for me to emulate. For every writer she found who sounded worthy of emulation, I countered with a suicide, a drug addict, a drunk, a consumptive wreck, a quitter.
“In the end I drove her away. I won’t tell you how I drove her away, but it was despicable behavior, and my self-esteem slipped ever lower.”
The Mark stared at his drink. The Bum stared at his. I stared at mine. The bartender contemplated his stock of booze behind the bar. The silence lengthened.
“I’m getting depressed,” The Mark at last said.
The Bum replied, “You’ll be even worse depressed if you ever let happen to you what happened to me. Never find yourself in the position of pinning all your hopes on something so elusive as a string of words you failed to write down.”
“Like, just get on with it,” The Mark said, supplying his own moral to the story.
“Exactamente. Figure, if you plug away, if you write a million more words, or close a thousand more deals, something as shining and sweet as what slipped away will find its way into your work.”
The Mark gathered up the change in front of him. He left a tip for the bartender and slipped a ten in the direction of The Bum. The latter nodded as his gesture of appreciation.
When the door closed behind The Mark, The Bum looked over at me and said, “How’d I do?”
“Better than when you pulled it on me. But I’d give a hint of how you drove away the poor woman who loved you. The barest suggestion of sadism or other perversion.”
The bartender nodded in agreement.
“For example?” The Bum said.
“I don’t know,” I said; “you’re the writer.”
END
(If you enjoyed “The Line That Deserted Him,” you may also enjoy another short story of mine, "The Spare Husband" .)