Miss Sloviak emerged from the ladies’ room, hair reestablished, cheeks rouged, eyelids freshly painted a soft viridian, smelling of what I recognized as Cristalle, the fragrance worn both by my wife, Emily, and also by my lover, Sara Gaskell. It smelled a little bitter to me, as you might imagine. Miss Sloviak looked down at the luggage on the cart, and then at Crabtree, and broke out into a broad, toothy, almost intolerably flirtatious lipsticked grin.
“Why, Mr. Crabtree,” said Miss Sloviak, in a creditable Mae West, “is that a tuba on your luggage cart, or are you just glad to see me?”
When I looked at Crabtree I saw, to my amazement, that he had turned bright red in the face. It had been a long time since I’d seen him do that.
CRABTREE and I met in college, a place in which I’d never intended to meet anyone. After graduating from high school I took great pains to avoid having to go to college at all, and in particular to Coxley, which had offered me the annual townie scholarship, along with a place as tight end on the starting eleven. I was and remain a big old bastard, six-three, fat now and I know it, and while at the time I had a certain cetacean delicacy of movement in the wide open sea of a hundred-yard field, I wore quadrangular black-rimmed eyeglasses and the patent-leather shoes, serge high-waters, and sober, V-necked sweater-vests my grandmother required of me, so it must have taken a kind of imaginative faith to see me as a football star with a four-year free ride; but in any case I had no desire to play for Coxley—or for anyone else—and one day in late June, 1968, I left my poor grandmother a rather smart-assed note and ran away from the somber hills, towns, and crooked spires of western Pennsylvania that had so haunted August Van Zorn. I didn’t come back for twenty-five years.
I’ll skip over a lot of what followed my cowardly departure from home. Let’s just say that I’d read Kerouac the year before, and had conceived the usual picture of myself as an outlaw-poet-pathfinder, a kind of Zen-masterly John C. Frémont on amphetamines with a marbled dime-store pad of lined paper in the back pocket of my denim pants. I still see myself that way, I suppose, and I’m probably none the better for it. Dutifully I thumbed the rides, hopped the B & Os and the Great Northerns, balled the lithe small-town girls in the band shells of their hometown parks, held the jobs as field hand and day laborer and soda jerk, saw the crude spectacles of American landscape slide past me as I lay in an open boxcar and drank cheap red wine; and if I didn’t, I might as well have. I worked for part of a summer in a hellish Texarkanan carnival as the contumelious clown you get to drop into a tank of water after he calls you pencil-dick. I was shot in the meat of my left hand in a bar outside La Crosse, Wisconsin. All of this rich material I made good use of in my first novel, The Bottomlands, 1976, which was well reviewed, and which sometimes, at desperate instants, I consider to be my truest work. After a few years of unhappy and often depraved existence, I landed, again in the classic manner, in California, where I fell in love with a philosophy major at Berkeley who persuaded me not to waste in wandering what she called, with an air of utter, soul-enveloping conviction that has since led to great misery and that I have never for one instant forgotten, my gift. I was pinned to the spot by this touching tribute to my genius, and stayed put long enough to get together an application to Cal. I was just about ready to blow town—alone—when the letter of acceptance arrived.
Terry Crabtree and I met at the start of our junior year, when we landed in the same short-story class, an introductory course I’d tried every semester to get into. Crabtree had signed up for it on an impulse, and gotten in on the strength of a story he’d written in the tenth grade, about an encounter, at a watering place, between the aging Sherlock Holmes and a youthful Adolf Hitler, who has come from Vienna to Carlsbad to rob invalid ladies of their jewelry. It was a remarkable trick for a fifteen-year-old to have performed, but it was unique; Crabtree had written nothing since then, not a line. The story had weird sexual undertones, as, it must be said, did its author. He was then an awkward, frail young man, his face all forehead and teeth, and he kept to himself, at the back of the class, dressed in a tight, unfashionable suit and tie, a red cashmere scarf tucked like an ascot into his raised lapels when the weather turned cool. I sat in my own corner of the room, sporting a new beard and a pair of little round wire-rims, and took careful notes on everything the teacher had to say.
The teacher was a real writer, too, a lean, handsome cowboy writer from an old Central Valley ranching family, who revered Faulkner and who in his younger days had published a fat, controversial novel that was made into a movie with Robert Mitchum and Mercedes McCambridge. He was given to epigrams and I filled an entire notebook, since lost, with his gnomic utterances, all of which every night I committed to the care of my memory, since ruined. I swear but cannot independently confirm that one of them ran, “At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.” He wore a patrician manner and boots made of rattlesnake hide, and he drove an E-type Jaguar, but his teeth were bad, the fly of his trousers was always agape, and his family life was a semi-notorious farrago of legal proceedings, accidental injury, and institutionalization. He seemed, like Albert Vetch, simultaneously haunted and oblivious, the kind of person who in one moment could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate-glass window, requiring twenty-two stitches in his cheek.
It was in this man’s class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder—from what I’ve since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rocking of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease. The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep. This is in my opinion why writers—like insomniacs—are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.
But these are observations I made only later, over the course of many years’ exposure to the workings of the midnight disease. At the time I was simply intimidated, by our teacher’s fame, by his snakeskin boots, and by the secrets of the craft which I believed him to possess. The class covered two stories every session, and in the first go-around I held the last slot on the schedule, along with Crabtree, who, I noticed, made no effort whatever to write down the axioms that filled the smoky air of the classroom, nor ever had anything to contribute to the class beyond an occasional terse but unfailingly polite comment on the banality of the work under discussion that afternoon. Naturally his aloofness was taken for arrogance, and he was thought to be a snob, in particular when he wore his cashmere scarf; but I had noticed from the first how bitten were his nails, how soft and unimposing his voice, how he flinched whenever someone addressed him. He stayed in his corner, in his ill-fitting suit, looking forever pale and faintly queasy, as though our company disgusted him but he was too kind to let on.
He was suffering from the disease, I suspected—but was I?
Hitherto I’d always felt certain of my own ability, but as the weeks passed, and we were burdened with all the inescapable shibboleths and bugbears of the trade of writing—knowing what was “at stake” in a story, where the mystical fairy-fire of epiphany ought to be set dancing above a character’s head, the importance of what our teacher liked to call “spiritual danger” to good characterization—the inevitable overshadowing of my own effort by cool Crabtree’s made it impossible for me to finish anything. I stayed up all night long at the typewriter for the week before my story was due, drinking bourbon and trying to untangle the terrible symbolical mess I had made out of a simple story my grandmother once told me about a mean black rooster that
