The problem was what to write. In my first attempt, I tried describing the time they planned to rob the American Legion post of all its guns, only to be cheated out of the chance when the building burned down the night before the caper was to be pulled off. I say I tried writing about it, but all I came up with was a bunch of crap. I realized I didn't know how to approach my brother and his world. He and all he'd been had flowed through my veins for so long that when I stopped to think about who and what he was, I drew a blank. I knew what colors he was, but since I couldn't separate them, they all merged into a big white blank. Just try to describe the color white to someone beyond saying it's all colors in one.
I tried a first-person narrator — a girl who'd been jilted by one of the guys. That didn't work, so I tried being one of their parents. Absolutely nothing. Next I filled three sheets of paper with Ross and Bobby stories. Some of them made me laugh; others made me guilty or sad. Remembering everything made me obsessed with the idea of getting a bit of their world down on paper. Nothing was going to stop me.
It's funny, but in the beginning I never once thought of making something up and using my brother and his gang as characters in my story. Ross had been such a strong presence in my life and had done so many wild things that I'd never considered upstaging him with an action or thought that came strictly from my own head. Yet that's what happened. While driving across campus one Saturday night, I saw a bunch of tough guys strutting down Main Street, all duded up for a big night on the town.
How many times had I watched my brother brush his long hair into a perfect shining swirl, slap on a gallon of English Leather cologne, and wink at himself in the bathroom mirror when he was done? «Looking good, Joe. Your brother is look-ing good!»
I thought about it for a while and, sitting down at the typewriter one afternoon, opened the story with those same words addressed to an adoring little brother who sat on the edge of the bathtub watching him prepare for. . I had no idea of where to go from there.
It took me two weeks to write. It was about a bunch of toughs in a small town who are getting ready to go to a big party at a girl's house. Each boy has a little section of the story, and in turn tells you about their lives and what he thinks will happen tonight when the party gets going up at Brenda's.
I never worked on anything so hard in my life. I loved it. I laid each story on top of the previous one as gently as if I were building a house of cards. I shifted them around and around incessantly for best effect and made my teacher mad because I turned the assignment in a week after it was due. When I was done, however, I knew I'd written something good, maybe even special. I was really proud of it.
My teacher liked it, too, and suggested I submit it to a magazine. I did; over the months it made the rounds of all the major and minor places. Finally Timepiece — circulation 700 — took it. Payment was only two contributor's copies, but I was overjoyed. I had the cover of that issue framed and put it up on the wall in front of my desk.
Three months later a theatrical producer in New York called and asked if I'd be willing to sell him the world rights to the story for two thousand dollars. Amazed, I was on the verge of saying yes when I remembered stories of writers being gypped out of carloads of money by conniving producers; so I told him to call me back in a few days. I found a copy of Writer's Market in the college library and got the names and telephone numbers of four or five literary agents. I explained the situation to the first one I called and asked her what I should do. By the end of the conversation she'd agreed to represent me, and when the man called back from New York, I told him to arrange everything through her.
You know what happens when you sell a story to someone: they push it and pull it and turn it inside out. When they're done eviscerating it («shaping it up,» they like to call it), they put it in front of the public with a line in the program that reads something like «Based on an original short story by Joseph Lennox.»
The producer of the play, a tall man with bright-red hair named Phil Westberg, called me just after he'd bought the story and politely asked how I would approach it as a play. I didn't know anything, so I said something dumb and forgettable, but he didn't want to hear what I had to say anyway, because he had it all planned out. He began to tell me his plan, and at one point I took the telephone receiver away from my ear and looked at it as if it were an eggplant. He was talking about «Wooden Pajamas,» but they weren't my pajamas. The short story began in a bathroom, the play at the big party, which instantly cut out about four thousand words of my work. The protagonist in the play was thrown in as an afterthought in the story. But Westberg knew what he wanted, and he sure didn't want much of what I'd written. When I finally got that through my thick skull, I skulked away into the night, never to hear from «Phil» again — until he sent me one free ticket for opening night a year and a half later.
Phil and his gang went on to use my story as the basis for the wildly successful (and depressing) play, The Voice of Our Shadow. Among other things, it is about sadness and the small dreams of the young, and besides running for two years on Broadway, where it won the Pulitzer Prize, it was made into a halfway-decent film. I retained a small but lucrative percentage of those subsidiary and world rights, thank God.
The hoopla over the play began in my senior year in college. I thought it was great at the beginning and horrible from then on. People were convinced I had written the whole thing, and I spent most of the time explaining that my contribution had been little more than, well, microscopic. On opening night, I sat in the audience and stared at the young actors playing Ross and Bobby and those other guys and girls I had known so well a hundred years ago in my life. I watched them being changed and distorted, and when I walked out of the theater I ached with guilt at the death of my brother. But did I ache to tell anyone what had actually happened that day? No. Guilt can be molded. It is a funny kind of clay; if you know how to handle it right, you can twist and knead and form or place it anyway you want. I know that is a generalization, but it is what I did; and as I got older, I had less and less trouble rationalizing the fact that I had murdered my brother. It was an accident. I had never meant for it to happen. He was a monster and had deserved it. If he hadn't brought up the subject of masturbation that day. . It all helped me to punch the bare, ghastly fact that I had done it into the shape I wanted.
Within a few months I had more money than King Tut. I was also exhausted and embittered by the same well-meant questions and the same disappointed looks on faces when I told them no, no, I didn't write the play, you see. .
When I discovered that my university offered a six-week course in modern German literature in Vienna, I jumped at the chance. I had majored in German because it was hard and challenging and something I wanted to become very good at in my life. I was convinced I would be able to surface again all clean and absolved after a few months of sacher torte, outings on the Blue Danube, and Robert Musil. I arranged it so my six weeks there would come at the end of the school year, which would allow me to stay through the summer if I liked the town.
I loved Vienna from the beginning. The Viennese are well fed, obedient, and a little behind the times in almost everything they do. Because of this, or because the city is exotic in that it is far to the East — the last free, decadent stronghold before you roll over the flat gray plains into Hungary or Czechoslovakia — all my memories of it are washed in a slow, end-of-the-afternoon light. Sometimes even now, even after everything that has happened, I wish very much that I was back there.
There are cafйs where you can sit all morning over one cup of wonderful coffee and read a book without anyone ever disturbing you. Small, smelly movie theaters with wooden seats, where a couple of sad-looking models put on a «live» fashion show for you before the feature goes on. I had a favorite gasthaus where the waiter brought dogs water in a white porcelain bowl with the name of the restaurant on the side.