heard applause.
I continued reading. “Poetry changed my life while I was still a teenager. Then when I grew older all books did. I read every novel I could find.”
The crowd applauded again.
“In college I saw plays and loved reading them, then eventually writing them. I had always written poetry or so it seemed. After graduate school I wrote screenplays. Writers are born, not made. Writing is a vocation, not a vacation. Thank you for listening.” I bowed. It was all true and I felt a sense of accomplishment as the crowd not only applauded but cheered. I saw hundreds and hundreds of happy faces sitting in chairs on the green manicured lawn that rolled out into the distance bigger than a football field and in all directions.
The audience seemed to care about everything I said. Some stood up when I was done and gave me a standing ovation just as I was promised. I was amazed at my own charm and sense of presence at that moment.
There was also a Q&A where the audience asked me about my work. We discussed my plays and how they were influenced by my notion that it was my mission to record the story of life and how it occurred on my planet—the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn. I told the audience how I could hear my characters specifically as they spoke and how their dialogue revealed who they were, their aspirations and their dreams, as well as their disappointments and failures.
I also told them that it was important to have my characters vibrate with insecurities. Hamlet was like that; so was Jay Gatsby, and my favorite film character, the charming and good-looking Edward “Fast Eddie” Felson in The Hustler. The most memorable characters always have a flaw that makes them vibrate with deep vulnerability. The audience participated with enthusiasm and great appreciation for all my work. They laughed at my quips and seemed delighted to know the inner workings of my craft.
“So, do you have any questions?” I heard a voice ask.
Joe and I were sitting on a grassy hill overlooking a river that stretched into the horizon. The crowd, the stage, the colorful banners were all gone.
“Where did everybody go?” I asked.
“Oh, they were only there for your speech. Your speech was over, so they left.”
“Just like that?”
“Oh yeah.”
“They seemed so enthused. Were they real?”
He smirked but then quickly changed his attitude. “They were for you.”
This explained nothing.
“So, questions?”
My moment on stage giving my speech had really moved me. “I really made it, then?”
Joe nodded. “Yes, you did. You are now in the Writers Afterlife. Congratulations.”
I smiled. I was happy and then I blurted out, “Am I famous?”
“No,” he quickly answered.
I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach.
“What else?” Joe asked. “Anything else you want to know?”
“Is my work admired?” I asked.
“No more than it was when you were living,” he said.
“That’s it? I mean all my hard work, all my dreams, all my dedication, and that’s it? I spent my life writing and I’m not famous?”
“Sorry,” he said, though I doubted he meant it.
“Will I become famous?”
“Hard to tell.”
“Was it because I died young? Or that I didn’t write enough?”
“Well, perhaps. William Butler Yeats wrote his greatest poem, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” when he was in his seventh decade. Voltaire wrote Candide when he was sixty-four. William Shakespeare wrote his greatest work after he was forty-four.”
“I’m forty-four.”
“You died at forty-four.” He forced a smile. “Any thing else?”
I was getting annoyed. “Hold on. Can you not rush me?”
“Take your time,” he said. He leaned back on his hands. We were sitting on a blanket. He looked around. I could tell he was bored.
“Am I boring you?”
Joe shook his head quickly and sincerely said, “Not at all.”
“It’s not fair.”
“Yes. Bad luck on your part. However, you did have your chance. John Keats died at twenty-six. Percy Bysshe Shelley hardly reached thirty and Lord Byron just passed thirty. And the list goes on for those who wrote wonderful things before forty-four including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dante. And don’t forget Dante was only fifty-six years old when he died. And Shakespeare was fifty-two!”
“Stop,” I said. “Forty-four is young. It’s too young to die.”
“Once again, compared with what? With whom? The Brontë sisters all died very young, and so did Jane Austen. Vincent van Gogh was only thirty-seven.”
“I don’t care how young these people are. In my world forty-four is young. Imagine what I could have written if I had lived another decade. If I had lived another two decades. I might have written a masterpiece if I had lived longer.”
“Perhaps,” Joe responded dryly. “But you’re dead, Tom. There’s nothing you can do about that now.”
“I could have eaten better, worked out more, prayed . . . whatever.”
“Not sure if any of that would have made that much of a difference in the long run. What’s a few more years in the larger scheme of things? Whatever you think you might have written or imagined you might have created if you’d had more time is irrelevant now. You were young at one time. You had the opportunity and you did write two wonderful novels and several terrific plays. Be satisfied with that,” Joe told me with an odd sense of empathy, as if he had been there himself.
“So, we agree that inspiration does hit many when they are young and some when they are old. Let’s move on, shall we?” He shrugged his shoulders and stood. “Okay, so my duty is to greet you, explain some details about the Writers Afterlife so you can move on into your future.”
“I have a future?”
He smiled. “Of course you do. You paid your dues. You will live rent free and nearly pain free. You will want very little, you will never get tired, you will never experience hunger, you will never miss anyone. In other words, you will lose all the awful things human beings suffer, for the rest of eternity.”
I almost bought into his sales pitch but one part bothered me. “You said I will live nearly pain free. You said ‘nearly.’”
Joe shook his head. “That’s right.
