When your funds have diminished to nearly nothing, when your friends refuse your phone calls and slam the door at the sight of your face on the doorstep, when you are rejected, rebuffed, and snubbed at every turn, consider eating peyote and then walking, backward, with your eyes closed, on a busy freeway …
Guy sits at a table in Senor Pico’s, waiting for the Galtons to show, keenly aware that this is his last shot. He finally talked to Susan Rorvik after spending weeks chewing his nails down to the quick, and she explained that they needed to meet, to talk. He half expected her to stipulate someplace picturesquely subterranean, a cafeteria on lower Mission maybe, packed with bleak souls, fruitless lives, and botulism. He was pleasantly surprised when she suggested that they meet the next day at Aquatic Park.
By then all the hopeful rhetoric he’d peddled a year ago had turned into a psalm of maltreatment and neglect, the money I spent, the time I wasted, the risks I took.
He told her about his deeply disillusioning experiences with publishers.
He told her that The Athletic Revolution was going out of print and that he’d arranged to buy three thousand extant copies before they were pulped and have them shipped from a New Jersey warehouse to his place on the Upper West Side.
He told her how his landlord there wanted to evict him because he was running a business out of his apartment.
He told her that his mother was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and his father was reeling. Reeling.
He told her Randi was about to leave him.
He told her about the legroom problem on the flight from New York.
He told her that the Portland weather was causing a fungus to grow on his private parts.
Great talking to her, and he’d see her tomorrow.
The next day he waited for her at the edge of Fisherman’s Wharf, eating clam chowder from a hollowed-out loaf of sourdough, wearing a Mets cap and a creased corduroy sports jacket with a folded newspaper stuffed into one of the pockets. He looked thin, tired, unshaven, grimy, travel-weary, like a man awakening from uneasy dreams at a YMCA or aboard a Trailways bus. He saw her approaching from the direction of the Wharf, cutely dressed in her waitress costume.
He’d done it. It had been fucking hard to get a decent hearing for a book proposal in the present environment; apparently the field of Symbionese Studies was rapidly growing very crowded. Quite an existing library had sprung up in the last year or so, and firsthand reflections didn’t necessarily mean you’d cornered the market. They might have missed their moment. But he’d done it. He showed up, he sat down, he talked. He ate a lunch that required four separate forks. He pretended he’d read Steal This Book. He shared a cab with a man who rejected Gravity’s Rainbow. There was interest. They’d definitely showed an interest.
They were walking through Fort Mason along a footpath on an embankment overlooking the enormous vacant docks and empty warehouse streets below when Susan had advised him that Teko had changed his mind about the book, again. Just a breezy whim that first blew him to one side of the issue and then back to the other? The money I spent, the time I wasted. “What does he want to do then?”
“What does he want to do then?”
“I sometimes think the only thing he really believes in is the revolution.”
Oh, Jesus, please. Teko? Revolution? Come on. Had he sent Guy to Havana? Hanoi? The jungles of Central America? Is that where he’d wanted to make contact, establish relations? No, Guy had been dispatched to Rockefeller Center. Teko wanted what every kid snug under the blankets with his secret wishes wanted, the cover of Rolling Stone. If Guy lifted up that serving wench skirt, would he find Susan’s head stuck up her ass? He actually reached for it, grabbed the material between thumb and forefinger. She snatched it away angrily.
He underhanded the hollow crust of bread down the embankment. It bounced and rolled. For whatever reason, he’d gotten hooked on the SLA: couldn’t stop helping them, flaunting them, bragging about them, denying them, scolding them; trying to manipulate them, reform them, fold them into his peculiar reality. They’d seen it; they’d conned him, gotten more and more and just a little bit more out of him.
Susan kept the meeting short and sweet, wouldn’t explain a thing. She said goodbye on the Marina Green, surrounded by people with Frisbees, dogs, and wicker picnic baskets. Overhead, a seaplane climbed, ungainly on its fat pontoons, astonishing as always.
Drove them himself. Laid out all that dough. Smashed up his own car with a sledgehammer to get Allstate to pay for their trip home. Now they were jerking the last post out. He felt the vertigo of his sudden plunge.
Now he waits. While he does, he drinks two frozen margaritas. Actually, what he orders each time is a margarita and a shot of Cuervo, taking a head-throbbing slug from the frozen drink and then dumping the shot in to strengthen it. Well, so, this is how he’s been feeling lately. A person is entitled. He has a drumming headache, he’s extremely photosensitive these days, one of his kidneys is making him feel as if someone’s hit him in the side with a baseball bat, his anterior cruciate ligament is on the cusp of saying “¡adios!” and his nose seems to be rotting from the inside out. In addition to which he’s noticed that the angle at which his erection hangs from his naked body has increased markedly, from a taut twenty-five degrees to a droopy forty-five degrees.
In other words, Guy is exhausted. Again. Knowing what he knew, no sensible person would have touched the SLA again with a ten-foot pole, but Guy just couldn’t lay off. Saw himself signing his name to a contract, saw fame, saw respect, saw another popeyed portrait leering out from the dust jacket of a book. Saw commercial potential harmoniously wedded to radical credibility. Saw six (!) figures (!!) — winged, already aloft, and heading out the window in the manner familiar to all readers of the funnies, though how the hell could he have known that? He himself flew hither, he flew yon, and when all was said and done, the undertaking was worthwhile even if it had come to naught. Because what is life if not an adventure? What is achieved if nothing is risked? Huh? Now all he has to do is convince himself of that, but first and foremost he is exhausted.
He sees them moving toward him through the dark and he rises, slightly unsteady on his feet. All he’s had to eat are a couple of bowls of tortilla chips. Not a problem. The menu at Senor Pico’s is so heavy with cheese, beans, and ground beef he’ll have sopped up all the booze by the time they take the troughs away. This is his first eyeful of Lydia, and he sizes her up as she walks over. Sees the mom who’d give you a pretzel stick and a glass of tap water when you came over after school. The lady who knows the levels of all the bottles in the liquor cabinet, who knows offhand exactly how many crescent rolls are in the bread basket, who’s been keeping an eye on things no less vigilantly than any old Amsterdam Avenue housewife leaning on a dirty pillow set up on a front room windowsill.
“Hello!” He waves.
Hank comes across as the same old hail-fellow-well-met type, but Lydia fixes Guy with her eyes and extends a hand in his direction as if there were a loaded.45 in it. So naturally he grabs it and gives it an eager yank like the slick little bastard she already thinks he is. (Of course, he and Tania had some pretty good chats about old Mom. Tania had used adjectives like suspicious, bigoted, selfish, rude, intolerant, self-righteous, narrow-minded, rigid, hidebound, authoritarian, punitive, and unforgiving. Sounded to Guy like a malignant version of the Scout Law.)