How to Murder Your Novel

I was in a bad place when I met B. A converted motel, sectioned off into studio apartments, furnished with a bed, a chair, and a mini-fridge. There wasn’t room for anything else. The chair slid into a nook next to the closet where I put my computer, and I stacked a microwave oven and a rice cooker on top of the fridge. I had a portable television that was a piece of junk, a novelty TV with a tiny screen. I’d sit on my bed and drink beer from the bottle and watch basketball. I should have started with my address: 66 Blackbird Roost, apartment #13. That’s really all you need to know.

This story takes place in a mountain town surrounded by forest surrounded by desert. The kind of place where one feels hemmed in at all times. I’d moved from Los Angeles, where I’d slept on an air mattress in the living room of a barista I worked with (and had a crush on) who was sleeping with a homeless street punk named Nimrod. Prior to that, I’d shared a berthing compartment with sixty sailors onboard a diesel-powered submarine chaser in the United States Navy. As shitty as the apartment was, it was mine and no one else’s. I could do whatever I wanted whenever I pleased, and for that I was grateful.

I was twenty-five years old—the year of the paradigm shift. For the first time in my life, I felt compelled to compare myself to others, a long list of people that included famous writers long dead, people I’d gone to high school with and no longer cared about, and my new peers in the shitty writing program in that terrible mountain town.

But I want to tell you about B before he was famous. There are two things you need to know about B back in those days. The first is that was he was a poet. I don’t know if his poems were any good. I don’t recall any lines that stood out, and as far as I know he didn’t send his work to literary magazines or presses. He said remarkable things and was always getting into situations the rest of us in the program found amusing. Stories circulated about the things he said in class or his antics in bars. It seems childish now and I suppose it was, but every writing program needs a clown and he was ours.

Clown is probably not the right word. B would certainly object to it, because the second thing you need to know about B is that he was legally blind. He had one good eye and one bad, and the bad eye was fixed on something none of us could see. When he laughed and turned his head just so, he looked crazed. B was always getting thrown out of bars because the bartender didn’t like the way he looked.

Whenever B was given the boot, I’d leave with him in a show of solidarity. We’d go to a liquor store, buy a couple 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor, and take them to the alley behind the bar. We’d drink the beer as quickly as possible, throw the bottles to the ground, and grind the glass with our boots until the alley resembled a constellation of bad decisions. We were much too old for this sort of thing, but it cemented our association together, at least for the time being, because we would not remain friends for long.

B couldn’t drive a car and he walked all over town in every kind of weather. I’d see him on the street or in the English department and wave hello, but he wouldn’t see me until I was practically on top of him.

Of course he was a poet. He wasn’t suited for anything else—or so we thought at the time.

*

Our department was lousy, the instructors atrocious. The faculty was made up of third-rate hacks that had no interest in communicating what little they knew to their students. They lacked the knack for nurturing and had no useful contacts so there was a great deal of hostility between the students and the faculty.

I was, perhaps, despised more than other students. I had come to the school to study literature, not writing, but the faculty was inept across the board. Rather than analyze Henry James novels for another year and a half, I switched my emphasis to creative writing my second semester in the program. There was nothing prohibiting me from doing this, that’s how bush league the school was, but it irked the writing faculty because none of them had selected me for their workshops. I was in a hardboiled phase, writing stories about mobsters and hitmen. I can’t say I blame them.

It was B’s last semester in the program and I wanted to see him in action, so I enrolled in the poetry workshop he was taking. I wasn’t a poet, nor did I care for the form. But I’d been a minor player in the LA spoken word scene and was a decent performer. At the very least, I owned my words. I had been around the world and felt as if I knew a bit more about it than anyone else in the program. This was a shortsighted assessment, but I wasn’t wrong either.

*

Although he was a poet, B’s true passion was basketball. Of all my colleagues in the program, he was the only one who would watch basketball with me at the cowboy bar near my apartment where I wrote my crime stories. B could only be served in the worst places, which wasn’t good for either of us. But his passion for the sport wasn’t simply as a spectator. He loved to play the game, and that was something to see.

Our department had a coed team that was so bad we were run off the court by everyone we faced. We were not conditioned to play in that high alpine air, except for B, whose stamina was legendary. Because he couldn’t see well enough to pass or shoot, he’d put his shoulder down and truck anyone who got in front of him until he was standing directly underneath the basket and heave up a layup that would clank off the rim. It was up to the low-post players like me to get in position for a put-back. There was nothing easy or graceful about any of it.

Our team included a power lifting poet from Kingman, a performance artist from Phoenix, and a short story writer from Tucson who taught me more about how the game was played then any coach from my youth. We tired easily and had no substitutes on the bench. In the second half, teams would run up the score.

One time we faced a squad of chubby Navajo women who all wore glasses. Sensing an advantage, we took the floor with something like confidence. Every player on the opposing team could shoot the three and run all day. They annihilated us.

We resolved to do better. We recruited a linguist, an essayist, and a cowboy poet, who was an excellent defender. We assembled twice a week at the outdoor courts whose lights clicked off at ten o’clock at night. B practiced the way he played, and our new teammates didn’t know what to make of his rough style. Those who were inclined to cut him some slack because he was essentially disabled never made the same mistake twice. B was a pesky defender (defense, as any coach will tell you, is all about desire) but it was when he had the ball in his hands that he was truly aggressive. You either got out of the way or you got clobbered. Tempers flared. The beer we drank throughout practice had something to do with that. I loved the feeling of playing outside after dark. No matter how things were going when the lights clicked off, plunging the court into darkness, we all let out a collective sigh that held all the disappointment of childhood. Try putting that in a poem.

Because we were adults, we didn’t have to go home to dinner, homework, or lonely nights in front of the television. We went to the bar and drank like champions, deservedly or not, and then because the bars in our mountain town closed at midnight, we found other trouble to get into.

*

I enjoyed the poetry workshop more than my other writing classes. My crime stories weirded out my fiction colleagues but our poetry instructor liked the spoken word pieces I turned in, which intrigued my cohorts in the poetry class. Perhaps there was more to this sailor who drank too much and was unhealthily obsessed with the New York Knickerbockers. Like most young people with an inflated sense of one’s own talent, I craved validation and attacked my assignments with vigor.

I revised some of the more popular pieces I’d performed at the café in LA where I’d hosted an open mic night. I even wrote some new ones: irreverent haikus about LA, a life that felt a million miles away from the one I lived in the mountains. These were well received and soon the poets from the workshop started hanging out after basketball practice, and many interesting entanglements ensued. It didn’t take long for these escapades to move from the sheets of our beds to the pages of the poems submitted to the workshop, all of which, it goes without saying, were awful.

All writing programs are incestuous and ours was no different. While our colleagues poured out their feelings on the page, B refused to participate. He viewed the sexual shenanigans in the past tense (We slept together) and insisted that any other verb tense (We’re sleeping together) (We will sleep together) as speculative and presumptuous. This did not go over well with the poets, who insisted on a fierce monogamy, as if our writing program was a spaceship hurtling toward a new planet that we, the shitty writers and worse basketball players, had been chosen to populate. We had a great deal of fun with this metaphor, so much so that B made it the subject of his final submission for the workshop. The instructor hated it, the poets turned on us, and by the end of the semester, we no longer waited for class to end before we started drinking.

*

Our lives in that awful place were defined by how close we lived to the train tracks that cut through the center of town. If you lived on the east side, you had to factor in time spent waiting for trains to pass when going to the university, which was on the west side. Each year a passing train killed an inebriated student, and it’s a miracle it wasn’t us. B lived in a cul-de-sac whose backyard abutted the tracks. The majority of the trains carried freight from east to west and vice versa and barreled through town without slowing down, rattling the cups and dishes in B’s cabinets. Over at Blackbird Roost, I couldn’t feel the train but I could hear it. Its low mournful whistle kept me company at night. The sound infiltrated our dreams and the poets struggled to keep it out of their poems. Everyone, it seemed, loathed the trains.

The bar closest to the tracks was also a package store that did the bulk of its business in the hour before last call. It was not uncommon for B’s final order to be a cocktail of Goldschläger and Rumplemintz—a concoction he called a Dead Nazi—a pint of bourbon, and a six-pack of beer. He’d raise his shot glass in praise of the disgraced political leader du jour, and send it down the hatch. Then he’d call my name like a point guard setting the defense and we’d trudge to the tracks.

The station was once the center of commercial life in our mountain town, but now it was just a row of squat stone structures, some given the historical treatment, some not. The latter were shuttered and in disrepair. The last of these had a raised concrete platform about four feet off the ground that extended from the building to the very edge of the tracks and was covered with a kind of trellis. This was our drinking spot. It even had a name. Someone had spray painted the word “POOP” on the wall and B dubbed it the poop deck. This appealed to my affinity for nautical nomenclature though I could not describe the purpose of a poop deck, then or now.

We’d pass the bourbon back and forth and talk about whatever drama had seized our workshop that night. B loved to throw sand in the gears but expressed wonder, even annoyance, when the machinery stopped working. Inevitably a passing train would thwart our conversation. We’d be deep into a conversation about art, the mistakes of the past, our uncertain futures, when a train would come roaring through the station. The force was tremendous, its power terrifying. I would by lying if I said I didn’t feel destructive urges out there on the poop deck, inches away from that powerhouse of iron and steel. You didn’t have to get the timing right or expel a great deal of energy. Just close your eyes and topple into the teeth of the train, let those steel wheels grind your body to pieces on the tracks.

These were feelings. We all had them. Sometimes B would put them into words and I’d steer him away from the edge, box him out so to speak, in a show of bohemian camaraderie. This was especially true after things took a dark turn in the workshop. Something transpired between B and one of the poets. A consensual sexual encounter had turned ugly, something that came as no surprise to those who had played basketball with B. Shortly after the incident, B was shunned from poetry functions, which, to be perfectly honest, was no big loss, a blessing in disguise, choose your own cliché, but true all the same.

*

I didn’t enjoy my time in the Navy. Though I was never a poet, inside those cracker jacks was a creative spirit that yearned to break free of the military’s inflexible discipline, the harshness of which was surprising and revelatory. The Navy taught me how to make the most of a bad situation. It taught me the wisdom of making a ritual out of routine. It taught me to be tolerant of my shipmates, a great many of whom were idiots. You get the idea.

So after B left the school to go back to wherever he’d come from—he was dodgy about personal details—I deserted the poetry squad and basketball divas to work on the hardboiled novel I’d come to the mountain town to write. It was a detective novel set in LA—total trash—but I went at it with the same sense of purpose that my colleagues sat down to write their shitty Great American Novels that not even the professors they paid to evaluate their work would read.

My story was about, well, it’s not important. No one read it and no one ever will. But I wrote my story over a stretch of winter nights that got longer and colder as the semester dragged on. I don’t remember the books I read or the work my peers produced, but my reluctant detective, imbued with B’s anarchic spirit, remains fixed in my memory.

I finished the novel a few days before Christmas. It had been snowing heavily all week. The snow melted during the day and froze again at night, which was followed by more snow. I walked along the tracks to the bar, my boots crunching through layers of ice and snow, while the most recent dusting blew bewitchingly in the cold mountain wind. I’d done it. Whether the novel was good or bad was beside the point. I’d made something and no one could take that away from me.

*

The last time I saw B I was living at a new address—56 Calle Contenta—not far from the basketball courts where we used to practice. I turned my creative thesis in early and dedicated myself to finishing on my own terms. And why not, I told myself, I’m a novelist now. I can do anything.

In an effort to stay out of the bars, I smoked a lot of marijuana, listened to the CDs B had left for me, and read paperback crime novels. (Detective novels were bullshit, I’d decided; anti-heroes were where the action was.) Mostly I dreamt about the things I’d do when I returned to LA. I was already working on a screenplay. I was thinking these tiresome thoughts when B appeared in my backyard. He looked more crazed than I’d remembered. He’d been spending a lot of time in the desert and his skin looked raw, like he’d found a way to store sunlight in his face and convert it into energy.

“We’re making a run for the border!” he said.

He had a friend with him, a character with sunburned cheekbones and a wardrobe full of clothing in earth tones. Our town was full of people like this. Mountain bikers, rock climbers, white water rafters. Outdoorsy types who drank expensive beer and would talk about their gear for hours.

“Huh?” I said.

B laughed in a way that felt cruel. I felt called upon to defend myself, to tell him about my plans to go back to LA; but truth be told other than purchase an old Ford Thunderbird from a colleague in the program, a writer of perfect stories that would bore you to death in sixty seconds, I had no plans, only desires, but not enough of them to call it ambition. Let’s call them urges and leave it at that.

I didn’t believe B was going to Mexico. What did this man who was so poor with boundaries know about borders? I said as much, but all he did was laugh. I knew that laugh, I’d reveled in it when it was directed at the fools he refused to suffer, but the dynamic had shifted. Now I was the fool. Perhaps I’d always been one.

I offered B a hit off my bong, which was shaped like a microscope, but he refused, insisted he had to go. Then he left.

For many days afterwards, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d disappointed B somehow, that he’d brought his friend to my house to show him something, a glimpse of our old intensity, and I’d fallen short of his expectations. I eventually came to think of his visit as a signal that one of us was lost. For many years I thought he was the one, but now I know better.

*

I wanted to end this with a story about B, something to show that one of us had changed and the other had grown, which is not the same thing, but I lost faith in that paradigm a long time ago. B, I realize, never had it to lose.

A few months ago I found myself back in that wretched little town. The power lifting poet had bought a bar, which is perhaps the best use of a fine arts degree there is, and I went for a visit. He had top shelf whiskey, pool tables, and a little stage where someone was reading poetry. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

I went to all the bars that B and I used to frequent. The cowboy bar. The sports bar. All those shitholes were still there. Toward the end of the night I hatched my plan. Instead of going to the poop deck to smash glass and howl at a train, I checked into a two-star motel and woke to the sound of someone snoring in the room next door. I took the phone book out of the nightstand and tore it half. I tossed the A through Ms in the trash, and took the other half to my rental car. I drove to the hardware store and bought a packet of razor blades. They won’t sell you just one.

I went to campus and waited in my car until the library opened. I asked the librarian behind the counter where they kept the school’s graduate theses and followed her directions. I told another librarian what I was looking for and he pointed the way to the shelf where my shitty detective novel had been hibernating all these years. I ran my fingers along the spines until I came to my name, and I admit it was a thrill seeing it there, a feeling I don’t expect to ever have again. I pulled the volume down from the shelf and flipped it open. I razored the manuscript free of its binding and pulled the pages out. I swapped my novel with the pages from the phone book, closed the cover, and slid my thesis back onto the shelf. I’ve never robbed a bank or gotten away with murder, but believe me when I say I know what it feels like. I left the library with a feeling of having transgressed against myself, or a version of myself, one imbued with a purpose I no longer believed in. I disposed of the novel—it doesn’t matter how—but its unmaking was every bit as thrilling as completing the book had been, long, long ago in that terrible mountain town.

***