A week went by, a thousand different scenarios of murder, death and suicide, all boiling in my brain. From the time I came to until the time I collapsed, pain so deep my blood was on fire, burning its way down each artery and capillary like a toxic chemical, one my body tried to reject. I wanted to open every vein and bleed it out, just get it out of me, maybe then some release, some numbness, something other than...
I got used to the taste of gun oil. Slept with the barrel in my mouth every night, hoping that in a dream, I’d yank the trigger and never wake up. Yet I did. Every fucking day, I woke up, and there it was: the failure that was my life waiting for me: Good morning! Everything still sucks! It’s going to be a beautiful day to take the kid to the beach—oh, did I strike a nerve there?
I was at the bottom. One more day would have killed me. One more sympathetic phone call, one more “I’m sorry, Geoff,” one more “You’re better off without her,” one more “You just hang in there, okay?” would have been more than I could take. I hadn’t eaten in four days. The dog shit the floor. I didn’t care. Couldn’t remember the last time I walked her. Whatever. Nothing mattered anyway. Why wasn’t I dead yet?
I was about that far in my thinking when Dick called again.
“Hey, I really like this story. Can I put it in Bad News?”
“Are you fucking shitting me?”
See, he managed to leave that part out of the first phone call. That tiny little part that he was asking for a submission to his anthology, Bad News.
It’s probably best that he did. I never would have submitted to it, had I known. I would not have bothered. I was a beginning writer. I had all the confidence of a dead fish, and with the way the rest of my life was going at the time, it only compounded things. My non-existent ego was already pulverized by non-writing events, and I couldn’t handle the rejection one should expect when going in to play on a field that is populated by those authors you read in high school. You need a tough skin in this business—and at the time, I didn’t have any skin at alclass="underline" it was stripped raw, and every nerve was exposed. Rejections sting. Oh, you get used to it, after a while. You learn to roll with the punches. Some editors (particularly inexperienced ones) really rub it in, and I’ve had a few of those. I could not imagine Dick ripping my story to pieces, even if he hated it, but I could see him sending a rejection letter if he believed it was warranted.
Do you understand? Do you understand that I could not have sent that in, had I known it was a submission? Submitting a story always—ALWAYS—carries the risk of rejection, and at the time, that would be one rejection too many. It would have killed me. The final straw, the camel’s broken back. The 230-grain.
Perhaps it was chance, Dick taking an interest in my work at that time. Perhaps it was something else. I’d heard all of the slots were to be invite-only, that he was taking only two newbies. I also knew that my friend, Rain Graves, had been asked to be one of them. I never would have guessed that I was to be the other. Not in a million years. He could have taken Ryan Harding, or Mehitobel Wilson, or Keene, Oliveri, Huyck, any of those guys. It was inconceivable to me, that he would want a story from me. It was...it was worth setting the gun down a moment and signing the contract. It was worth telling myself that now, at least, I had to stay alive long enough to see the book released. And yes, I even smiled, because I thought: contributor copies.
I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in Satan. I don’t believe in angels. But if there ever was an angel that walked this miserable fucking planet, its name was Richard Carl Laymon.
He gave a kid a chance. A kid who, without the chance, would have either been in jail right now for two counts of first-degree murder, in a grave or in a mental institution writing a story in black crayon. He made me smile once, during a time when it was all I could do to get out of bed. If it weren’t for him, I would have no writing career. I believe that. Bad News was a major anthology. At the very least, it was major to me because I started submitting with a little more confidence, thinking, “Maybe Dick was right. Maybe I really can do this.”
I’m still prone to kicking myself in the teeth—especially when it comes to the writing. Every time I do, I hear Dick Laymon’s voice in my head. To me, he was a mentor, a father figure, a friend. My loss is not the same as Ann’s and Kelly’s, or the friends he’d known since Moby Dick was a minnow and Stephen King was trying to make ends meet. I know that. I cried for three days straight when I learned of his death, and every day for damned near a month after. Sometimes I still cry. I mourned his passing, Ann and Kelly’s loss and how I never got a chance to show him my first novel (which he blurbed, but we’re trying to stay under that three-quarters-of-a-million word mark, here, so I won’t go into it) or my first collection. That I never got a chance to tell him—
“You were right, Dick.”
To think about that still brings tears.
Even now.
Goddamnit.
Geoff Cooper
AN I HELP YOU?”
“Holy shit, he’s got a gun!”
“Terry, no!”
Jon had no time to turn before he heard gunshots. Two, maybe three. Someone screamed, someone swore. Something fell. Glass shattered, footsteps crunched wetly through broken liquor bottles.
He hit the deck in front of the cooler, quickly scuttled to the end of the aisle, hoped the shelves would conceal him. He felt vulnerable, exposed. From his position, Jon couldn’t see the men, but heard their exchange with the cashier: demands for money, hurry the fuck up, her pleas to not be hurt. The drawer dinged open. They demanded more, she had none, that was all—and she could not open the safe: she’d just started the job, was not trusted with a key. Over this, Jon heard someone else crying in hysterics over Terry: “Please, Terry, be all right,” she said. “Please, Terry don’t die. Hang in there, Terry. Terry? You listening to me, Terry? Don’t you fucking die on me!”
“Bitch, shut the fuck up before I put a cap in your ass too—you all whining and shit is pissing me off,” said another voice.
Both men were near the register, their attention drawn by the cashier, the drawer, and whoever was crying by Terry. Jon wondered if Terry was going to make it—whoever the hell Terry was.
“You! Into the office—show me where the fuck that recorder is. I see those damned cameras. And hey, yo—keep an eye on this bitch and the door,” he said to his partner. “I’ll be back in a second.” Jon heard them move, the jangle of keys, a door opening, then closing.
Jon wished he had his gun on him. It was illegal to carry in the State of New York without another special permit. He was lucky he had the gun in the first place: it was damned tough to get a pistol permit in this state. Since he bought it, he’d kept it at home, like a good boy, all the while knowing scumbags like this were everywhere, carrying illegally. He never dwelled upon it, put it out of mind, hoped he’d only need a weapon while at home. Yeah. Right. Lot of good it was doing him or anyone else there.
There was only one robber in the front of the store now, threatening the woman crying over Terry. Jon figured this was the best time to move. But where?
Down at the end of the wall, there was a door leading into the cooler. If he could get back there, another wall between him and the robbers, he’d be safer. Unless they searched the store. He didn’t think so—they were going after the security camera tape now, and would probably be gone in a few minutes. If he stayed here, there was a chance of his discovery, and these did not seem like the type of guys who wanted a whole bunch of witnesses. Terry—poor bastard—had already been shot. God knows what was going to happen to the cashier and the woman crying over Terry’s body. Would they kill them, too? Jon didn’t know, but wouldn’t put it past these scumbags. Regardless, they wouldn’t appreciate another witness—particularly a guy. He had to move: staying here was stupid.