“We won’t have to. It’s all right.”
He started to walk away. “It’s Charlie; don’t forget.”
There was Art, and there was survival, and sometimes they were mutually exclusive.
The voice came from a swirling matrix of white mist that twisted inside the shoppe. We won’t forget. And the door slammed. And the shoppe was gone. And the grubby young man turned once more onto Jamshyd Avenue; and was, in a moment, a part of the crowd, and a part of the Infinite Dark Mass.
With a grateful nod to the writings
of Michael Moorcock.
All the Lies That Are My Life
Art, someone said, is meant to clarify and elucidate complex experience.
This story is intended as clarification and elucidation. The topic under discussion is friendship. As I warned earlier in these pages, this is the long one that forms the core of the collection. It is 22,300 words in length, and it has taken me about twelve years to write it. No, I don’t mean I’ve spent the last twelve years working on this piece to the exclusion of all others… I mean it’s been perking and getting itself born for that long. I knew bits and pieces of it a long time ago; but other parts I simply wasn’t old enough or self-aware enough to understand.
I’m not saying I’m any smarter now than when I first went at this idea. What I am saying is that some stories refuse to let you at them until they’re sure you know what the hell you’re doing.
(Later on in this book there’s a story I wrote before it was ready to be written. I’ve included it because it’s a recent work and I want it in print; but before this book makes the transition from copyedited manuscript to galleys I’ll try to thrash the bejeezus out of that story in hopes I’ve learned enough in the last two years to make it come right. If not, you’ll read a crippled thing. I don’t have to tell you which one it is: you’ll know.)
This is my most recent writing. It tries to deal with just what we mean when we say of someone else, “He’s my friend.”
One time I was arrested and canned for being an “outside agitator” in Valdosta, Georgia. I was not alone; there were quite a few other “outside agitators” who also got swept up by the Laws. But I suppose it was my assertion that I could not possibly be an “outside agitator” because I was a member of the human race, a citizen of the world, just another link in the chain, that prevented me from paying the fine like the others, and being carted to the state line for instant dispersal. They decided to hold me for a few days, just to teach me a lesson.
And sitting there in the Valdosta slam, I complained to the innkeeper that I hadn’t eaten all day and I. d like something plain and downhome. After he stopped laughing he advised me that brunch had long since been served and that I’d have to wait till that night for the sumptuous county-provided meal.
In the next cell was an old man who’d been hauled in for pissing on some woman’s garden. He never told me why he’d taken it upon himself to nourish the flora in that way.
He dug around in his pockets and came up with a half-eaten Power House candy bar. He offered it to me, and I took it. There was no reason why he should have done that, but he did it, and I thanked him. Several times I thanked him.
For a few minutes there in Valdosta, Georgia, that old man was my friend.
Another time, just recently, a man who had been a close friend for eight years, who had assured me that when and if I needed his assistance he would be there, who had always talked a very courageous talk, who came to my home and who shared meals with me, who acted (in all ways that required no demonstration of risk) as if he were my friend… betrayed me in a court of law, while under oath, renouncing what he had said in sworn deposition… and all to the end of trying to cripple a lawsuit it took me four years of my life to get before a judge and jury.
The pain of listening to him dissemble, there in that courtroom, was infinitely greater than the pain inflicted on me by the original injustice, by the days, weeks and months I have lost trying to get justice, by the vast sums of money I have expended trying to counter powerful opponents. During the time he testified I felt the pain of watching a friend die. Despite his perfidy, I won… and won big.
I can only suppose he did it out of self-interest, out of lack of courage, out of fear. Nonetheless, I now realize he could never have been my friend.
So what is friendship?
My answers to that question are no more formidable than my answers to the questions what is love or what is art?
It redefines itself each time the question is confronted. But this I do think is true: there is an element of risk in friendship. It is a quality that defines itself in terms of love and loyalty as the readiness to inconvenience oneself at risk of something valuable. And that seldom means money. It means the skin goes on the line.
I think that’s right.
But maybe not.
In this story a writer delivers his own obituary. Some of that last will and testament is mine. Some is not. The narrator and the protagonist are partially me and partially a close friend of mine, a man I’ve called friend for over twenty-five years. The two of us are purposely intermingled, and large chunks of pure invention have been added to both. This is fiction, not personal memoir. Try not to read too much one-for-one into the bits and pieces of this work.
Writers take tours in other people’s lives, and readers must be canny enough to understand that some writers like to playa mean little game of misdirection when it looks as if they’re inviting entry into the private back rooms of the writer himself.
They buried Jimmy Crowstairs today.
My closest, oldest, best friend: the world-famous fantasist, Kercher Oliver James Crowstairs.
They put him down the rectangular hole this morning, and I was one of the dozen people inside the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes. Also in there among the select few was an ex-President of the United States, for whom I had not voted; also two actresses, one of whom, though age thirty, keeps being cast as late teens beachbait, despite her excellence as a serious thesp, mostly on the basis of her chubby cheeks and a pair of breasts—if you’ll pardon the pragmatism—only slightly smaller than Bosnia and Herzegovina; the other one I didn’t know, but she made a good impression on me when, as we were walking up the hill to the grave from the limos, she graciously waved off a small knot of ghouls seeking her autograph; Jimmy’s publisher, whose chief claims to fame are his rejection of Jerzy Kosinski’s first novel on the basis that it was morbid and depressing, and his ongoing participation as a panelist on a television game show now into its seventh year of syndication; Jimmy’s sister, eight years his senior, whom he had not spoken to for over twenty years and to whom he referred as SylviaTheCunt, all one word; a great bear of an English novelist, a French film director who wore clothes so elegantly it made everyone else feel like breadline standbys, a plasma physicist from Princeton who’s up for the Nobel this year because of his major breakthrough in magnetic containment fusion; and two married couples Jimmy considered close friends, mostly because they proved to him, as living examples, that it is possible for Man and Woman to cleave together under the same roof, bound by The Paper (as he constantly referred to it), without emotionally disemboweling each other. How many is that? Counting me, that’s thirteen. Well, okay, thirteen, not twelve. Even so, it was a select cadre of mourners.
Set apart by black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes from the vast throng of his fans and idle groupies of the great, the near-great, the celebrated and the hemidemisemicelebrated.
History tells us that when Victor Hugo died on May 22nd, 1885, over two million Parisians followed the pauper’s hearse he had specified from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheon, where he was buried.