Benny, it quickly emerged, did not so much not want to talk about his father as not want to talk about anything else, the problem being, rather, that he did not like having to temper the wind to the shorn lamb.
“See, what happened is,” said Benny, “my dad read a letter from Roald Dahl to Kingsley Amis saying write for kids, that’s where the money is. So he did, and there was, it just wasn’t enough.”
The more money there was, the more thousands of nauseatingly cute letters or, more recently, e-mails poured in from kids, kids who imagined that world peace could be achieved if we all just sat down and popped popcorn together. Or swapped knock-knock jokes. Or played ping pong. Why can’t we all just act like cute little kids?
A fifth of Jack Daniels into the day, Mr. Bergsma could not be guaranteed to ignore and discard. Dear Tommy, he would reply genially, Thank you for your interesting suggestion. I will pass the proposal on to Mr. Milosevic. Yours, J P Bergsma.
Only to get, meanwhile, in a mud- and bloodstained envelope, a heartrendingly charismatic letter from some kid whose whole family had been blown up when he was nine, a kid who had walked 500 miles through a warzone carrying only a battered copy of Automatika for comfort, a kid who had stowed away in a truck and now lived, sans papiers, on the streets of Paris, the whole couched in an uncomplaining stoicism, a nonchalant wit and erudition, which put the luckless Benny to shame. Mr. Bergsma would organize, at immense personal inconvenience and expense, a school, lawyer, bla. Doing irreparable damage to the personal fortune whose accumulation was the whole point of writing for kids in the first place.
The result being that Benny could never have music lessons, go to computer camp, go to private school, anything.
Gil could see why this might be somewhat disillusioning to fans of the series. While somewhat chilling and egotistical as such, anyway, though, it was the kind of thing he would definitely have expected of the embittered alcoholic son of the author of a cult series for kids. Very New York.
“Couldn’t he hire someone?” he asked.
Benny said that his father’s life was a ruined landscape of burned-out deals.
Gil would have been happy to crash at this point, but Benny, far from moving gracefully on, seemed to see a roommate as an economical substitute for a therapist.
Once, for instance, Benny elaborated, when Benny had just been accepted for admission at Choate, Jake Rabinowitz, a top entertainment lawyer, had negotiated a movie deal which included the right to two first-class tickets to the premiere.
Total dealbreaker.
Mr. Bergsma: “What is this. What the fuck is this.”
JR: “I got them to agree to first-class tickets to the premiere.”
Mr. Bergsma: “Look. I don’t want this. I never asked for this. I don’t want to clutter up my head with this crap.”
JR: “The contract does not require you to attend the premiere.”
Mr. Bergsma: “I don’t want to get into all this crap about what I want or do not want. I am trying to write a fucking book. You have now used up bargaining space, you piece of shit, you have squandered leverage, for something about which I do not give a fuck. I want this out of the fucking contract. I want a Crap. Free. Deal.”
Given that the whole issue of the premiere had been raised, given that it was not possible just to get on with the fucking book, given that it was necessary to discuss, Mr. Bergsma discussed the sort of thing he would have discussed had he chosen to discuss. But his lawyer, it evolved, would lose face if he went back to the other side with points the client actually cared about, such as fixing up a fixer-upper in Pittsburgh, rather than issues that were recognized as deal points by his industry peers.
Mr. Bergsma: “Look. I’ve managed a bar. I’ve had to fire people. I never do that without giving people a chance. What I say to people is, I didn’t fire you, you fired yourself.”
So that was that deal.
Benny cracked another beer while Gil made friendly Iowan noises to endorse the mild humor of the story.
Mr. Bergsma had hired all kinds of people — lawyers, agents, accountants, assistants, you name it — and they kept willfully firing themselves. To the point where he would explain the value of a fixer-upper in Pittsburgh from the get-go. You can get a house for as little as ten grand, he would explain. The value of it, obviously, is not simply the monetary value of whatever would otherwise have had to be paid for, the value is the amount of crap Mr. Bergsma’s mind would otherwise have had to be clogged up with at a time when he might otherwise have been writing a fucking book.
Somehow, though, instead of picking up the ball and running with it, people began pre-firing themselves. To the point where Mr. Bergsma just had to do everything himself.
Benny went on, for illustrative purposes, for another 15 deals, winding up 10 hours and 30 beers later, at eight a.m. Eastern time (seven a.m. Central), not because more, much more could not be said, but because his audience was semi-comatose. What it all explained was why Benny was forced to sublet space in his loft.
“Not that I’m not glad to have you, dude,” said Benny. “It’s just the principle of the thing.”
“Dude,” said Gil, “I’m wrecked.”
He sprawled on the bed beside the stranded backpack. Darkness claimed him.
With the wisdom of hindsight, it’s interesting that Benny had this wealth of privileged information at his disposal for 27 years, while Gil, when he went into action, had had a mere smattering for little more than a week.
In the morning, or rather late afternoon, of Gil’s second day in New York, he woke to find Benny incensed. A wall of the bathroom had this longstanding moldy seepage from the apartment upstairs. The seepage had now developed into a perceptible flow. It was the kind of thing Gil would have assumed was just normal in New York, but apparently a barrier had been crossed.
He would have liked to go back into Manhattan for pancakes, but an Iowan does not like to leave his fellow man in distress.
“Dude,” he said, “hey, look, I’ll go upstairs and see if I can fix whatever.”
Gil’s father had thought every boy should build his own treehouse; while not typical of Iowa, this is more easily achieved on a five-acre property with several 150-year-old trees than in a Manhattan apartment. Gil and his four brothers had each had a tree, and had, needless to say, engaged in cycles of competitive upgrading over the years, learning skills, as his father pointed out, that would stand them in good stead all their lives.[3] As now.
Gil had, obviously, brought his tool kit from home. He took it from the backpack and went upstairs and knocked on the door and a dude within told him to fuck off, which is so New York.
Gil talked on with the candid friendliness of the native Iowan. Presently (and he was too new in town to know how unthinkable this was) the dude opened the door a crack, leaving the chain on.
3
If you have never thought of a treehouse as requiring plumbing and electricity, it’s probably because you have never seen treehouse-construction as a competitive sport. You don’t come from a family of boys, is the inference.