Absolute Gentleman

Man walks into the coffee shop, and he’s talking before the door closes behind him. I think he’s talking to me, so I turn toward him. He says he’s got shaft work to do at the old Eagle Building. It takes three or four seconds to realize he’s talking to the old guy with the newspaper. The old guy’s in here all the time, holding his newspaper like he’s got a giant moth by the edges of its wings. He sits a bit away from the table, which seems like an accessory to his daily scene, and his legs are comfortably crossed. He should be wearing a robe and a pair of slippers. He’s not that old, though. I’m figuring he’s a buyout retiree, or maybe he’s one of those half-retired consultants.

The man continues his talking with the obvious joke that comes after saying you’re working in a shaft, but the old guy has already begun his greeting and response to his first statement, so the joke hangs out there, lost. I can see in his eyes that he wants to try it again, but decides against it. I want to tell him that the joke came too close to the tail of his first statement – that he was overzealous in his plan – and that his delivery suggested he had made this statement about “getting the shaft” four or five times before he even got to the coffee shop, or else he practiced it in the truck on the way over, or his wife said it to him while chasing her flaxseed oil capsule with a glass of orange juice, leaning on the door jamb in the entryway of the kitchen, and she delivered it so perfectly that he knew it had to be his line for the day. She’s home with a baby and a sick kid all day, so when would she possibly use it anyway?

The old guy must have retired from the same kind of work: shaft cleaning, duct work, or maintenance, something filled with dirt, grease, and labor, because he knows the man – puts an ee on the end of his name like he’s had a beer with him once or twice. The man’s name is Rick or Jim to me, but he’s Ricky or Jimmy to the old guy. It occurs to me that he’s Ricky or Jimmy because the old guy’s in a good mood. My father would call me Frankie when things were going particularly well for him, or else it was an irritated, booming Frank, a sound like a stab in the air, a salad bowl thud off the kitchen counter, or a hard thigh to the corner of the coffee table.

The old guy says, “Nah, I’m not going in today. But they’re serving lunch again this year to the guys.”

“Yeah? They had that thing catered last year. What a spread.”

“Yeah, but you need a ticket.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, you need a ticket this year. I’m not going in, but I got a ticket. I’m going in for that lunch.”

“I don’t have a ticket.”

“You’ll be filthy from all that shaft work anyway. I’m just going in for that lunch and going home to relax.”

The old guy shakes the giant moth in his hand to get enough momentum to turn the page of the newspaper without much trouble. I’m not sure what he thinks he’s reading, but he’s been turning the pages too fast to give proper attention to even one article. This might be just a routine for him. The newspapers read the same things every day, anyway. They’re reality Mad-Libs, and the reporters are filling in Proper Nouns every morning. Shaft goes to the counter to get his coffee. It’s too small a space to guarantee he’s out of earshot, but I have to say something to the old guy.

“Is it possible to get another ticket?”

“What’s that?” the old guy folds down the side of the paper he had gripped in his right hand.

“I was just wondering if you could get another ticket.”

“No, no, no. They don’t give out these tickets to just anybody. It’s a catered meal, and they cook up only a certain amount of food. Nope, got to have a ticket, son.”

I turn away, half to think about it and because the old guy’s still got the corner of the paper folded down. I want him to know the conversation’s over for now. On my right, the store manager is opening cardboard boxes one at a time. They’re filled with bags of coffee beans, travel mugs, and French press carafes she’ll have to stack on the shelves. I don’t want to turn back to the old guy, so I count twenty-seven boxes of merchandise she has to verify, unload, and display. She and I have spoken about this before – how she has no business doing this since she’s the store manager. There are teenagers behind the counter steaming the milk and grinding the beans. Her reasoning changes every time: the manager is responsible for inventory, she’s likes doing this kind of work, the girls who work the counter are nicer to look at. The answers get more personal each time, so I don’t ask again. I don’t care what the girls look like behind the counter. All I’m interested in is the coffee. If it’s fresh and it’s fast, the girls could look like bag ladies.

Shaft is back with his coffee, “Take care,” he says on the way out. The old guy sits behind his newspaper and says nothing. He’s been on this page longer than the others. I’m sitting in front of a large window that overlooks the parking lot, so I can see Shaft get into his truck, do something I imagine is finding a proper place for his coffee, and start the engine.

Back inside the old guy begins to get up to go, takes a last sip of whatever he had to drink, and lays the folded newspaper down on the table. I turn back in his direction, and pretend to look out the window on his side of the coffee shop. I want to see the page the newspaper is opened to, because he’s been on that one page for a comparatively long time, but I don’t want him to know I want the paper. I don’t want this guy to think I want anything from him.

Medeski, Martin, & Wood‘s latest record, Radiolarians I, is the first of a three-record project. The project is named after a single-cell organism that is marked by an often beautiful skeletal frame. Some mutations of the organism have only the skeletal frame and nothing in the way of an internal structure other than a ‘spine’. I’m not a scientist, obviously, but the concept of creating art with the Radiolarians in mind fascinates me. MMW created this record by establishing the basic outer structure of a musical composition, its shell or spine, if you will (cliché); taking that basic structure out on the road to flesh it out together live; then returning to the studio to record the polished pieces. The result is a beautiful, although I think it’s, at times, too structured, collection of music.

What if writers did the same thing? What if a writer sat down during a session and wrote a story or piece of a novel from start to finish, without any deep consideration for pointed insight or introspection, letting the plot meander until it reaches a satisfactory ending; then take it out on the ‘road’ to open mikes, writing salons, atop soap boxes on street corners; and finally return to the writing desk to rewrite, fleshing out the skeleton of the piece to create something seemingly finished.

What if you arrived at the open mike, writing salon, street corner, etc. and riffed on keywords of your freewrite, your rough skeleton as you’re reading the piece aloud, and you recorded what you read – your riffs. You could try out your new material, improvising where you felt necessary, and return to your desk to complete the piece.

You could keep audio files of your riffs, but never write them down. You could riff on different aspects of the initial skeletal piece and create as many variations of your story as you wanted. It could become strictly an organic performance piece.

Or you could collect the variations of the same story into a collection of prose, and readers could see your mind at work. They could know the truth.

I can’t find my last issue of Tin House and it’s frustrating, but only because I needed it to reference how ridiculous so-called political writing in literary magazines has become. The new issue of Tin House features a segment called “The Political Future,” an oh-so-timely page filler that shares the political opinions of writers with us.

Big deal.

In fact, the issue is a bit of a tease, as it claims work from Charles Baxter, Lydia Davis, Junot Diaz, George Saunders, and Francine Prose, et. al, when all it ends up being is a bunch of little paragraphs about what these writers think of our political future. No new fiction from them or anything, just their political opinions. What a disappointment. I mean, I like hearing from these writers just like the next person, but I can do without their views of the political future. To me, they really have no credibility or real knowledge in this area, and it seems they’re preaching to the liberal choir, anyway. The poet, Bruce Weigl, did a reading during a Vermont College Post-Graduate conference, and during his shuffling of papers, looking for the next poem, he mumbled something about that “fucking liar George Bush.” The audience of sheep gave a few “WHOOs, etc.” but my thought was, “Just stick to the poetry, buddy…” and “Enough with the Mickey Mantle shirt already…I understand: You’re a fan. I get it…But Yankees don’t have names on the backs of their jerseys, so your shirt with the MANTLE 7 on the back, the one that you wear every day, is a bit overkill…A lot like the ‘fucking liar’ pseudo-propaganda you’re laying on us when you should just read your poetry…”

I like the work of fiction writer Stephen Elliot, and I told him so a few years back. He and I maintained an e-mail correspondence for a while, during which he asked if my work was political in nature. I thought No, should it be? Shouldn’t political writings be done by political scientists?

Everyone’s entitled to his or her opinions, I know this, but politics needs (need? My first instinct is singular, but I’m thinking about it and it’s driving me crazy) to be kept out of literary magazines. If publishers of these literary variety magazines want to make an impact, write some serious and DIVERGENT political commentary and make it available through public and university research databases. What Tin House did in their political issue is just about worthless. I’ll read a story by George Saunders with political undertones, but I couldn’t care less where he or any other writer stands politically. I really don’t.

This morning I pulled into the Starbucks parking lot, thinking, “Why has that pick-up truck so callously taken my usual parking space?” Next to the truck was a man, early 40s, a permanent ruggedness and film of light grime on him as if he worked in construction or carpentry. He was talking to a teenager, a boy about 17, iPod in his pocket, headphone earpieces dangling from the cuff of his sweater. It wasn’t obvious they were father and son until the man’s hand reached out and held the back of the boy’s head while saying something to him. Then the father pulled the boy close to him and they hugged, each seemingly exerting the same amount of energy and enthusiasm in hugging the other.

I went in to get my coffee, and when I came out, only the boy remained. He was all baggy pants, tousled skater-boy hair; looked like the kind of kid who didn’t communicate much with his parents. But when I came outside and saw him get into his car and drive away, I was struck by the thought, or the hope, because that’s what kind of story I want it to be, that his parents were divorced, that he lived with his mother, and he drove to Starbucks this morning to sneak a visit with his father.

I run a nonprofit writing center, Word Street, that provides free tutoring and writing instruction to kids, and one thing I like to do to raise money is get writers to come to lovely downtown Pittsfield, Massachusetts to read for the people. This year it was Lydia Davis and Amy Hempel on April 17. These two amazing women came to my town to read for free. Lydia lives close by, in a converted church in upstate New York, and I met her through an interview I did for a literary magazine. I contacted Amy through a college and had been emailing back and forth for about a year.

A few years ago, during one of those gratuitous and uncomfortable conversations you have with people just because they happen to be standing in front of the wine table, I mentioned to two directors of another writers’ organization here in the Berkshires, one that also hosts writers who do readings, that I wanted to get Amy Hempel to read for Word Street. They told me not to bother. “Hempel doesn’t read in Massachusetts,” they told me. “We already tried.” Did I mention Word Street is in Massachusetts?

I went to Williams College to hear Rick Moody read a few years ago, and after he finished reading some excerpts from Demonology, I watched the aforementioned wine table blockers bee line to where he was sitting, like vultures on a dead carcass, to get him to do a reading for them.

Maybe that’s why people don’t like you. You think?

I’m wondering off topic, though, like Montaigne on his fourth glass of a nice Rivesaltes.

The reading was fantastic. In fact, it was like going to a small club to hear your favorite band play and find that they decided to try out all their new material on the audience. Lydia and Amy went on stage (separately) with folders and papers and drafts and polished stuff and made everyone feel something.

We had planned to go to the Brix Wine Bar for dinner afterward, and that made me a little nervous because it’s so expensive. We, of course, were picking up the tab for Lydia and her husband, Amy and her friend…God, I forgot her friend’s name, but she was Ukrainian or Bulgarian or French or something — she had an incredible energy, was intense and feisty, and wrote screenplays, I think, and all you had to do to rile her up and send her off on a rant was mention Americans and their government.

I sent the group to the Wine Bar ahead of me, as I had to finish cleaning up after the reading, what with all the blood everywhere. “You will be joining us, won’t you?” said Lydia.

“Yes, dahling. I will be joing the party of…” what? the “party” went from six of us, seven or eight…to something like fourteen when the final count was taken.

We had an after-party a few years ago when Dave Eggers and Jim Shepard came to do our benefit. We set up a volunteer recruitment booth in the lobby of the theater, and the volunteers at the volunteer recruitment booth were instructed to give special after-party passes to those who expressed interest in volunteering at Word Street. The plan flopped, because the after-party was filled with people I haven’t seen at Word Street since the reading, and they drank the cases of free wine we got from a local liquor store.

I raced to Brix to find it closed. Sigh of relief: Word Street wouldn’t be spending $1000 for dinner that night. The crowd went across the street to the restaurant in the hotel where Amy was staying. I walked in and had to find an extra seat to stick on the end of the table. I was elated, though. We didn’t make a lot of money that night, but I got Amy Hempel and Lydia Davis to come to Pittsfield, and now I was having dinner with them.

I read what Chuck Palahniuk wrote about meeting Amy Hempel for the first time, about it being somewhat of a disappointment, but there’s nothing disappointing about her. She’s funny, charming, and brilliant — and during dinner she whispered to the person sitting next to her “Would you switch seats with Frank so that I may sit next to him…”

The food was terrible — flat out terrible, but what does any of it matter when you are the one Amy Hempel bends her head toward when there’s conversation to be had? The only distraction was the woman (not really a woman, more like a girl), 19 or 20 years old, never saw her in my life, French accent, Yoda-type speech and pretentiousness (“From North Adams, I am not”), one of those permanent scowls on her face, asking Amy to buy her drinks because the restaurant made a regular practice of carding annoying jackasses at the table.

So here Amy is, getting drinks for her, and the girl keeps apologizing to Amy for having to get the drinks. Across the room security is eyeing the girl, waiting for her to take a sip so they can bust her, Amy’s friend is cursing the security guard, calling him a fascist, and all I’m wondering is who brought this idiot. Did she pay for her ticket for the benefit? Am I paying for the drinks she’s getting through Amy Hempel?

It’s like the other day at Starbucks. Woman from the adjacent Quiznos comes over with a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and asks for a shot of vanilla for her Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. The ‘Bucks girl was like, “Are you kidding me, Moron?”