"Okay in the end. I told him I'd do him when I tour with the paperback."
At about 11:00 P.M. the hotel bars of big American cities fill up with men who don't necessarily spend much time in big cities: conventioneers, business trippers. You are therefore at liberty to observe what the big city does to them. Not that much, really. The big city turns up their volume dial; it floods faces with heat; it makes them young and bad and lewd (how the waitresses roll their eyes). The metropolis makes them overdrink, of course; the Smoke makes them smoke, too, some of them: they light up with a flourish and tell everyone how long ago they quit… Richard sat smoking and drinking in the corner: the corner he had painted himself into, with his smoking and drinking. Smoking and drinking were what he liked to do. He was approaching the point where smoking and drinking were all he liked to do. Beyond that point lay the place where smoking and drinking would be all he could do, anyway, stupefied, entirely immobilized, by smoking and drinking. Nevertheless, he felt good (he was smoking and drinking), and if he stayed up late enough he could call Gina and tell her that things weren't going at all badly, what with the Lazy Susan sale, and now the Dub Traynor Interview and this further dissemination of Untitled.
With so many biographies down him Richard knew what America was capable of doing to British writers. Timid rubes who crossed the Atlantic, timidly blinking, were immediately swept up in the indigenous panic of make-or-break. They twirled right out of control, like Dylan Thomas and Malcolm Lowry, done in by dread and drink. This appeared to be Richard's strategy. Or else (this was Gwyn's) they rigged themselves up with temporary personalities, new smiles, new laughs, so it felt okay to walk the streets all night waiting for the reviews in the papers, like Broadway impresarios. Then the fever of transformation ends, and they go back where they came from and become reasonable again. And so what? But the question is: who are they leaving behind? If America can do that to frowning bookworms from middle England, what was America doing to Americans-who, on the whole, hadn't spent three years at twelfth-century universities with Paradise Lost on their laps, and who had no Home Counties to come from or go home to. They never had a lifetime elsewhere to protect them from it, from America and the fever of possible change. Lie awake in the big city and you can hear it like the beady scrape of cricket wings in the Miami night-the nasal insect drill of need and neurosis.
Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.
It looked like another garage sale-thrown, this time, by a troglodytic kindred of petty thieves and welfare hustlers. The old car seat to sit on, the old cardboard box to put your paper cup on, the grunge-drenched carpet, the leprous wallpaper … it could only mean one thing: a radio station. Or, much more specifically, RPT4456 4534, and "The Dub Traynor Show." Richard was undisquieted. The BBC, where he sometimes went, for something like #163;11.37, and talked about book reviewing or biographies or anything at all to do with little magazines, was just as rough, in its way. Cruelly lowering surroundings: this was the thing about radio. Radio knew it would always be heard and not seen and could let itself go; it was okay-people understood; radio would never have to cringe in apology and pain, under the general gaze. So Richard accepted the atmosphere, but not without internal comment. If the imperfect-the half-made, the failed, the let-gone-is what you sympathize with, then you will find much with which to sympathize. He was given a cup of unbelievable coffee. Dub would be with him soon. Dub, who, according to Gwyn's publicity boy, was a very serious guy and a great reader: he loved modern prose. The night before Richard had extracted a copy of Untitled from his mail sack and, feeling briefly stratospheric, cabbed it round to Dub's West Side address. Probably Dub wouldn't have had time to read it all, but Richard was looking forward to what he got so little of: a response. Furthermore, his mail sack felt appreciably lighter. Experimentally hoisting it onto his shoulder that morning, Richard thought that his retch of pain was, in retrospect, detectably quieter: appreciably more subdued.
The girl who had provided him with his coffee came through and told Richard that there was, of all things, a problem: the local baseball team, that very hour, was announcing its intention of changing sponsors.
Richard looked at her expectantly.
"It's a big story here. Dub will be having to deal with it. Just bear with us."
In came Dub, with his chinos and his bearded preoccupation and his strictly localized charisma. He nodded and shook hands and then led Richard into the gloom of his booth, which consisted of an Okie kitchen table under the usual mess of radiobiotics. Dub had the copy of Untitled in front of him, under a heap of press releases and folders and legal pads. He kept touching his eyes, with thumb and forefinger, and then blinking glutinously.
Settling himself, Dub flicked a switch, and murmured, "We're having to take all this …?
"What Max has done here," a voice was saying, dully, dutifully, "for the ball club, from a business standpoint, has been from our . .. standpoint .. . has been real good business-for the ball club."
"Sorry," said Dub, "but it's a big deal here. Have you been to Wrigley Field?"
"No. Should I? What is it?"
"It's the ball park. It's sixty years older than any other ballpark in America. The slopes, the hardboard. It's sad there, as it should be. Even the best teams lose fifty games a year. That sadness gives the game its poetry. Like no other. Look at the writers it attracts. Lardner, Malamud …"
He flicked the switch again. Another voice was saying, "We like to think that Coherent is tops in our product category. And that that success will be reflected back on to the ball club." Then the original voice was saying, "And so what's good for Coherent will hopefully, for the ball club, also be … be good."
With a nod to Richard, Dub said briskly, "That was Coherent VP Terry Eliot and Fizz Jenkerson talking at Wrigley Field. We'll have more on the sponsorship switch, after some messages, and I'll be talking with the British cult writer Richard Tull. I was going to be talking with another British writer, Gwyn Barry, but we've been switching too, and now it's Richard Tull. Say," he said, "do you like great musicals? All-"
"No," said Richard.
Dub looked up from his mike.
"I don't like any musicals."
"… Well, if you did, all this week there's a sweet brunch-and-matinee deal at the Ashbery. For just twenty-five dollars you get the hit show and an all-you-can-eat grande bouffe right across the street at the Carvery, extras and service charge not included. Now doesn't that sound good?"
"But I don't like musicals."
"It's not-it's a message."
"What?"
Once more Dub fell to touching his eyelids as a voice was saying, "The problem was not any problem with Ultrason, who've been real good for the ball club. The problem … well it's not a problem, because it's good, is Coherent, is the Coherent deal, which is more … which is better. For the ball club."
"Don't you wish sometimes," said Dub, "that writing were just like sports? That you could just go out there and see who'd win? See who's better. Measurably. With all the stats."
Richard thought about it. "Yeah," he said.
"And I hear," said Dub to his mike, "that the ball club's transfer play is already being reenergized in the trading pits of La Salle Street. Do you have a little doggy?"
"No," said Richard.
Dub looked up, apparently appalled by this admission. He raised a palm, saying, "Well if you did I'd really recommend the Fenceless Fence from Perter Pets at forty-nine-ninety-five. This way you put pooch on a non-tangle leash with a range limit set by you. He'll like it. And so will the neighbors."