In the course of a dozen dizzy weeks, three leading magazines took his pieces for publication. His work was that contradiction in terms: creative nonfiction. Back then, people still called them personal essays. Russell Stone wrote them to amuse Grace Cozma, the rising star of the Arizona writing program, winner of the coveted Avignon residency, and-still bewildering-ten-time visitor of Russell Stone’s own bed. Grace had told him, with an electrifying squeeze of the ribs on her way out the door to France, that letters during her year abroad would not be unwelcome, providing they amused her. So he wrote her long rambles, as if they were life itself.
He described his run-ins with Southwestern drifters. He told her about the old desert rat who ran a collapsing gem-and-mineral shop not far from Saguaro West. The man claimed to have once done some “groundbreaking work in geology,” swearing to Stone that he was just $10 million short of producing a working prototype of a lightning farm that would “shoehorn the Wahhabis out of the West Wing once and for all.”
Russell polished up the mordant letter to Grace and mailed it to a famous glossy, on a long-shot lark. When-craziest of fantasies-the magazine took the story, Stone went back to his letters to Grace and polished up another.
In his second piece, he recounted his fast-food-lunch conversation with a Tohono O’odham former EMT who’d just received a two-year suspended sentence for being up on the roof of a clinic with four buddies, a couple of pairs of defibrillator paddles, and a box of 200-gram tubes of paddle gel. “We weren’t doing anything, really.” The second reputable magazine Stone sent it to jumped on it.
The third essay transcribed Stone’s meeting with a narrow-eyed vagrant outside El Con Mall who wanted Stone’s opinion on nerve regeneration, water-powered cars, and the Pseudo-Baldwin. The man warned Russell not to cross him: “I can put the word out to a continent-wide street-person network that’ll make your life hell from Miami to Vancouver We’ve even got contacts in the European Union.” At Grace’s urging, Russell submitted the piece to the Valhalla of New York literary weeklies. The day the impossible acceptance letter arrived, he called Grace in France. They giggled at each other for half an hour.
The secret of these pieces lay in the hapless narrator: bewildered victim of the world’s wackiness. “I seem to be the kind of flavorless, neutral guy whom the truly hard-core outsiders in this life claim for one of their undiscovered own.” The reporter was exactly that goggle-eyed Midwestern rube ripe for conversion whom Grace always found so unwittingly hilarious.
Overnight, these three pieces changed Russell Stone’s life. The magazine payments let him quit his desperate community newspaper job and write essays full-time. Agents called, wanting to represent him. An editor at a major New York house wrote to ask if he had enough pieces for a book.
Public radio commissioned him to write a piece for an omnibus program broadcast on 350 local stations. He wrote and performed a brief burlesque about trying to understand the musings of his Hindu dermatologist, whose sentences began in the Physicians’ Desk Reference and ended in The Ramayana. The producer declared him as droll a voice actor as he was a writer, and offered another ten-minute spot whenever Stone wanted.
“Bravo,” Grace wrote. “How much did they pay you? Enough for a transatlantic ticket and a week of B and B’s?”
Then a letter came, nestled in a batch of reader maiclass="underline"
Dear Mr. Russell Stone,
The Tohono O’odham Nation faces many challenges. You have just added to them. Charlie Melendez is a decent young man who got in trouble. You’ve profited by mocking both him and our people.
I hope your writing will be less destructive in the future.
Sincerely,
Phyllis Manuel, San Xavier District
Stone agonized for several days over an apology, which he mailed out just before the fan-mail bag delivered a new land mine:
Mr. Stone,
I’m not sure why anyone would laugh at a man who is mentally ill. But I’m willing to forgive you, if you can help me find my father, Stan Newstetter, the man you call “Stan Newton” in your story, “Ear to the Network ”
Stone had to confess to Mr. Newstetter’s daughter that he hadn’t really met the man outside El Con, but in a strip mall somewhere in the vast retail wastelands along Speedway, the precise coordinates of which he’d failed to write down. When Julie Newstetter wrote back and asked why he’d said El Con, he had no answer except the name’s comical sound.
A month later, Charlie Melendez tried unsuccessfully to take his own life.
So you know this story: Lord Jim, or a plot to that effect. Not that Stone collapsed all at once. I see him shriveling gradually, over many years. He never told anyone about the letters-not his mother, not his brother, not Grace. He wrote another radio piece, this one about his Jack Russell terrier’s misadventures in obedience school. The producer found it less biting than the first. Stone set to work on a fantasia on his phobia of Adam’s apples-about his recurring fear that they were subcutaneous creatures trying to escape. Grace loved it; pure Stone, she decided. But he couldn’t bring himself to publish the essay. It just seemed so pointlessly, weirdly personal.
He started a wry, detailed description of his mother’s obsession with food supplements. He lingered over her enthusiasm for DHEA, with which she pared herself down to four hours of sleep a night. He described how kavalactones got her elected to the school board. But four thousand words into the portrait, he realized he couldn’t possibly publish it, let alone mail it to Grace. He couldn’t imagine what he’d been thinking, ridiculing his own flesh and blood for anyone to read.
He wrote an account of Pima County estate auctions. Every magazine he sent it to rejected it as polite and lifeless. He composed several short nature features involving no people at all. When even the nature magazines asked him to liven up his accounts with a little quirky presence, he lost heart.
Grace, back from France, called him from New York. She was having trouble finishing her novel. Come out, she begged. Just for an escapade. Or at least send something fresh to read. “Something to unfreeze me. You know: the stuff you do. The wicked stuff. The grotesques. Everybody I’m reading is a patronizing bore.”
He closed his eyes, gripped the phone, and laid out his sins for her, like a literary prize. He told her about Stan Newstetter. She laughed at him, harder than she’d ever laughed at his stories. Book-club moms were podcasting their teenage daughters’ first sexual forays, and he was beating himself up for misrepresenting street people? He was crazy. Worse: he was threatening to become tedious.
He told her about Charlie Melendez. She couldn’t understand. “You didn’t make that man hurt himself. He volunteered everything.”
He confessed that he hadn’t run the piece past Charlie before publication.
They argued. She hung up on him. He vowed he wouldn’t pick up for her the next couple of times she called. She never gave him the chance. Eighteen months later, her novel was published. It included a hilarious portrait of a small-town reporter terrified that his human interest stories were returning to haunt him.
He went back to his community newspaper job. But his interview subjects no longer opened up to him. After half a year, he lost all ability to put together a basic lifestyle feature. He considered returning to grad school, to train as a political correspondent or economics reporter.
He could no longer read anything even vaguely confessional. Intimate revelations or domestic disclosures creeped him out. He dosed himself with popular science and commodity histories-how the spice trade or the cultivation of the bee set mankind on an unforeseen destiny.