Okay, Polatkin wasn’t writing Shakespeare, but he did write an interesting screenplay, maybe even a good one. But as he’d feared, the studio had notes. They wanted to change a few things so Polatkin flew to Hollywood, met his town-car driver, and was driven to a meeting room in L.A. Sherwin kept thinking of Survivor’s eighties hit, “Eye of the Tiger,” as twenty studio executives shuttled into the room. The director, angry because his other project had been scuttled, rolled in late, stuffed his face with a muffin, and said, while spewing food, “This screenplay is seriously flawed, but it’s nothing we can’t fix.”
The director was wearing cargo shorts. Sherwin was convinced that nobody over the age of thirty-three should ever wear cargo shorts.
For the rest of the day, the director and the executives made suggestions and demands: “The hero can’t die. Get rid of the William Blake shit. And you need more action, more fistfights and fucking. Maybe you could write a scene where the hero fucks his girl in the ash after a fire. The hero could leave ashy handprints on his girl’s back — on her whole body. That would be primal and hot. Jesus, it would be poetry.”
Polatkin fought for his screenplay’s survival, but it was a pathetic and lonely battle. He was a writer-for-hire and was contractually bound to follow studio orders or he would be fired and replaced. So, feeling hollow and violated, he took careful notes as a roomful of businessmen wrested art into commodity. He thought of how much he had always loved movies and how, for most his life, he’d had no idea how they were made. He thought of the boy he had been, sitting in that dark theater with Karen, the girl from high school, and how innocent it was. Not perfect, not at all, but better — cleaner — than this meeting. How had the boy who loved movies become so different from this man who wrote them?
And then Sherwin saw the latest issue of The New Yorker, crisp and unread, on the table. He had just published his first short story in the magazine. It’s every fiction writer’s wish to be published in the same magazine that has published Cheever, Munro, Yates, and ten thousand other greats and near-greats and goods.
“Hey,” Sherwin said. “I’ve got a short story in that New Yorker.”
The director flipped through the magazine, coughed and sighed, and said, “You should let me be your editor because you would win the fucking Pulitzer if I were in charge of your career.”
The room went cold and silent. The professionally cold studio executives couldn’t believe that any human being, even a film director, had said something so deluded and imperial.
Polatkin was baffled. No, it was worse than that. At that moment, something broke inside him. He didn’t know it at the time, but he’d fractured some part of his soul. He only realized the extent of his spiritual injuries a few months later. While writing nine drafts of the screenplay, Sherwin — who had already taken out the concept of the first escape fire set in U.S. Forest Service history — discovered that he could not take the William Blake out of a book whose title and themes were based on Blake’s poetry.
“I can’t do it,” he said to the director. “The book is about Blake. How can you take Blake out if the book is about Blake?”
“Fuck Blake,” the director said. “And fuck this book. Do you think this book is the fucking Bible? Do you think it’s sacred? Jesus, we’re making a movie, and that’s more fucking important than this book. I’m going to make a movie that’s ten times — a hundred times — greater than this fucking book. So are you going to take out the fucking Blake or what?”
“I can’t do it,” Sherwin said.
“Then fuck you. You’re fired.”
It was easy to fire screenwriters. But Sherwin was not just a screenwriter. He was also the author of a book of short stories and two volumes of poetry, and he still wanted to explore the notion of heroic self-sacrifice, so he decided to write a series of sonnets dedicated to smoke jumpers. At his home in San Francisco, he sat at his computer and stared at the blank screen. He sat, silent and unworking, for hours, for weeks, for months. Every time he tried to write a word, a metaphor, a line of poetry, he could only hear the critical voices of the studio executives and the director: The hero can’t die. Get rid of the William Blake shit. Sherwin had fallen victim to his own imagination. He couldn’t create anything on the page, but he was fully capable of creating fictional and aural ghosts who prevented him from writing.
Desperate, he decided the computer’s advanced technology was creating the impediment. He decided to go back to the beginning — to the Adam and Eve of writing — the pen and paper. Yes, he tried to write by hand. He reasoned that if Herman Melville could write Moby-fucking-Dick with an inky feather, he could write one measly goddamn sonnet with a felt tip pen and graph paper. But he could still hear the executives and director talking. The hero can’t die. Get rid of the William Blake shit. He was suffering from Hollywood-induced schizophrenia and couldn’t produce a word. Polatkin had always mocked those folks who’d claimed to suffer from writer’s block. But now, he was a writer …
Who could not produce one goddamn word.
The poems had migrated like goddamn birds.
And no matter what you may have heard,
Writer’s block causes physical hurt.
The fool couldn’t wear a goddamn shirt
Because the cotton scratched, bruised, and burned
His skin. His stomach ached; his vision blurred.
What happens to a soul that’s shaken and stirred?
What happens to a writer who can’t write?
Who flees his office and drives through the night,
In search of some solace, some goddamn streetlight
That will illuminate and give back his life,
His odes and lyrics? The desperate fool tried
Every workshop trick. The agnostic fool cried
To God for relief. God, can a man die
Of writer’s block? Well, the fool did survive
… the early and most painful stages of his creative disease.
Sherwin grew numb. He became strangely complacent with the idea that he would never write again. Oh, Sherwin still loved words, but he found other ways to play with them. He discovered the magic and terror of crossword puzzles. He read dictionaries and encyclopedias that promised to help him solve the most difficult ones. He soon became good at crossword puzzles. By testing himself using the same crosswords the best puzzlers solved in competition, Sherwin learned that he was probably one of the best five hundred crossword puzzle solvers in the English-speaking world.
He’d become that good after only six months of part-time work. How good could he become if he dedicated himself fully to the task? He figured that by living even more frugally than he had for the last decade, he had enough cash to survive for one more decade. So he decided to become, for lack of a better term, a crossword monk. But instead of praying, instead of keeping a diary, instead of transcribing by hand every page of some holy book, Sherwin made lists of words, the most common crossword-puzzle answers:
AREA
OLE
ERA
IRE
ERE
ESE
ELI
ENE
ALE
ARE
ALOE
ATE
EDEN
NEE
ALI
ALA
ETA
AGE
ESS
IRA
ERIE
ACE
ANTE