The halogen bulb of JCO’s industry attracted the moths of novelists manqué, old infants no longer so terrible who’d given up the ghost of authorial fame in mid-life, instead finding peace in the green-enough pastures of TLS and The London Review of Books. These gentlemen and gentle ladies inadvertently began their Sunday reviews of JCO’s latest eructation with a winking bow to her promiscuity on the page, which depending on individual temperament or even the mood of the moment, could be a swipe or a grovel.
Bud thought her ageless, gazelle-necked, bug-eyed flap photos never really did synch with the characterization of her work. (He saw her as a Victorian figure on display in the Quality Lit wing of Tussaud’s, alongside other prodigies of indefatigable overprolificity: Cartland, Simenon, Dumas, King.) He gathered from reviews read over time that Oates’s thing was ultraviolent, hypersexual Gothic. With each long novel and long short story, the writer apparently upped the ante of outlandish narrative, her new releases storming the marketplace sometimes three at a time like soccer thugs intent on breaking the skulls of the books that came before them. The complex, superheated plotlines that Bud was able to skim from reviews placed her indeed in the prinicipality of the Grand Guignol soap. It was the vexing habit of the woman’s fiercely loyal critics to provide bizarrely fussy précis of whatever book they’d been engaged to appraise — much like competing technical manual writers vying for the prize of Best Instructions in the matter of operation of delicate scientific equipment. When it came to Shakti Oates, Mother Goddess of fertility, they shared a freemason-like covenant, a moral-ethical philosophy binding them together in an erotomanic rigor of thoroughness and objectivity. The sheer meticulousness of their endeavors launched them — obliviously — into cultism. It was a hobby of Bud’s to read all of her reviews, though sometimes just finishing them was daunting, as if her prolixity had gone viral, paralyzing the very coolies vested in carrying the palanquin.
As a novelist, Bud wanted — needed — to study and profit from her example. The woman was some kind of witch. Her defamers were legion yet, in the end, through devilry, the nastiest cavils were massaged into batty, ecclesiastical pronouncements placing her squarely among the Immortals. So, aside from said carpings — the periodic hoots, hisses, graffiti, buckshot and urine-splashing afforded any writer worth their salt (cf: obsolescent belle-lettres blogsites) — the Oatress was critically bulletproof. She was a member of good standing in that country club Bud only dreamt of one day belonging, with its tenured, critically sun-kissed topnotchers: Auster, Vollman & McEwan, Cormac McC & Lorrie Moore. . though Bud did remember that JCO’s memoir of her husband’s death* got respectfully slammed in the Times Sunday Book Review (front cover, no less!), second-fiddled to The Year of Magical Thinking. Well, you can’t have everything. Anyhow, Joyce was no Joan. Joan had another book out about the death of her daughter — take that, JCO! When it came to LA freeways, fires, & losing loved ones, Didion had the lock.*
When JCO bailed, the Central Library suggested T. Coraghessan Boyle or Neil LaBute; Steve wasn’t thrilled. He rallied on learning Salman was in town to do Bill Maher, but the logistics didn’t work & Salman sadly declined. In six hours, the auditorium would be filled. The hosts were starting to sweat. Norman Lear, Carolyn See and James Franco were rejected out of hand.
Steve had just given the (tepid) thumbs-up to Arianna, when Dave Eggers returned his call.
They met in 2009, when Dave won the $100,000 TED “Wish” Prize. (Steve emceed the ceremony and later became a big supporter of 826 Valencia.) Dave said he’d loved to have done the Q&A but was home nursing a sick child. But he said he managed to get in touch with another winner of the TED award, Karen Armstrong. Karen was a former nun, a scholar of comparative religion who created the Charter for Compassion, a project that was dedicated to promoting awareness of the universality of the Golden Rule in world religions. Steve actually met Karen a few years before on Necker Island. Richard Branson invited a whole group to bat around ideas that might further the cause of reducing hate and extremism. It was a great time: Steve already knew Bono and, of course, Lou and Laurie—& Aby Rosen and his wife, the socialite psychiatrist Samantha Boardman. He’d never met Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, or Queen Noor, who had an elegant, California girl beauty. Steve also knew Peter Gabriel, Peter Morton and Michael J. Fox (& wife Tracy) but had never met Sean Parker, who he really only knew through Justin’s neat performance in The Social Network. Steve and Oliver Sachs marveled at how they’d never met, & happened to be big fans of each other’s work, though admittedly, Dr. Sachs wasn’t entirely au courant with his new friend’s literary contributions. The actor-comedian-novelist’s biggest love connection on that Necker Island trip was Desmond Tutu. The bishop was brilliantly congenial, with sunny, elastic features and a comedian’s natural timing. There was something of the impish forest elf in him, and he smelled like an animal. He told Steve he’d retired and was “completely over the moon” about spending his days doing nothing but watching movies with his grandkids. He told him their favorite was ¡Three Amigos! and Steve chose to believe him. Why would the bishop lie about something like that?
Karen Armstrong was in LA and thrilled to pinch hit. She was perfect: Steve loved the idea of being interviewed by a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an organization founded by King George IV boasting Coleridge, Kipling, Hardy and Shaw in its lineage of Fellows. Rocking good company.
. .
Bud Wiggins sat in the audience listening, yet found it hard to focus — one of the downsides of ADD. He began a casual catalogue of his miseries.
He had zero savings and hadn’t sold a network pitch in years. His old school chum Michael Tolkin was an important ICM client, and Bud was convinced it was only Michael’s quiet interventions that had kept him on the ICM books. Back in the day, it’d have been Bud doing the good deed; back in the day, for about six months, Bud was hot. That was a long time ago, when Ovitzsauruses roamed the Earth, Arabs were the only billionaires, & Teri Garr didn’t have MS.
He was $200,000 in debt. His mother, the top earner at Neimans in Beverly Hills until she reluctantly retired at the age of 83, had managed to save over a million dollars. “That,” she liked to say, regally, “is your legacy.” Dolly was 92 now — op-ed sociologists were calling anyone over 85 “the old old.” The doctors had learned their trade too well; the old old had become a ruinous drain on the nation’s resources; the old old were very tough to kill. Dolly got nastier by the week. Like blood to a vampire, foulness gave her sustenance, and a certain élan.
Just this morning she’d railed against one of her Salvadoran caregivers. “I told her that she was now required to wipe my ass. Do you know why? Because I want her hands in my shit.”
Bud was 59 (the young old), and desperately eager to trade the burnt-out dream of Hollywood screenwriter for a new one, the dream of being a novelist. Since he was a boy, he’d thought of himself as a prose writer. Even a published one — when he was in his 20s, driving a limousine at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Bud wrote an article for New West magazine about what it was like to chauffeur the stars. He got fired for that, but gained confidence as a writer. He began writing long monologues in the voice of various habitués of a bar he frequented: Fast Eddie, wheelchaired as the result of a parking lot shooting; Aesop, the bearded hippie & sometime movie actor who went table to table selling turquoise jewelry; Soledad, the waitress whose bartender husband was shot and killed; Seymour, the bystander who got winged in the gunfight that killed Soledad’s husband, & squandered his settlement money on pinball machines. He was in the planning stages of writing a novel about those people, when fate intervened. He fell in love with an actress in a comedy group. They did improvisations in her living room and started to write up dialogue, scenes, & situations. They linked the sketches and a producer bought the results. A movie was made, and it didn’t really matter that it would never be released — for a while, they were an employable team. ICM gave their script to other writer-clients as the template to be aspired to.