After the Workshop Read online

  Table of Contents

  OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN MCNALLY

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART TWO

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  PART THREE

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  PART FIVE

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  PART SIX

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  PART SEVEN

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN MCNALLY

  Ghosts of Chicago (stories), 2008

  America’s Report Card (novel), 2006

  The Book of Ralph (novel), 2004

  Troublemakers (stories), 2000

  For AKB

  It plagued us all during our time at Iowa, the question, there was no escaping it.

  Did I, we all wondered constantly about ourselves, have a future as a writer?

  —WILLIAM LASHNER

  I WAS A MEDIA ESCORT.

  That was how, twelve years after graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I was earning my keep. I worked freelance, negotiating my fees with publicists at the major publishing houses, but I was occasionally thrown work by a woman named Barbara Rizzo, who had escorts waiting, like operatives, all across the country.

  My duties?

  I picked up writers, novelists mostly, from the Cedar Rapids Airport, drove them to Iowa City, dropped them off at the hotel, took them to their various media interviews, made sure they arrived at their book signings on time, and then drove them back to the airport the next day. If they wanted, I would join them for dinner or drinks (all of which I would bill to the publisher), but this rarely happened. Most writers, exhausted by early flights and bloated itineraries, were happy enough to hole up in the hotel and order room service—that is, until the next time they needed me to take them somewhere, even if the destination was a block away.

  The only time I ever met other media escorts was at BookExpo America, the annual conference at which nearly every publisher, large and small, launched their forthcoming books to the world; and every year at the BEA, way off in one of the far-flung corners of the convention center, the media escorts announced their annual Bull’s-Eye Award. The Bull’s-Eye was given to the author who had been the biggest pain in the ass to escort. The original idea was to hold a mock-award ceremony during which a laminated shooting range target would be unveiled, with a photo of the author’s head glued atop the silhouetted torso, but this proposal was wisely nixed. The name of the award—the Bull’s-Eye—stuck, however. Naturally, the winning author would never be informed of his or her honor.

  One year the award was given to a feminist icon who terrorized all her media escorts, mostly middle-aged women, and referred to them, regardless of age, as “girl.” Another year it went to one of the hip young writers—his first book has a title too long for me ever to remember it correctly—for making absurd requests, such as the time he insisted that the bookstore play a recording of humpback whales during his event, or how he refused to give anyone, even the poor schlub driving him around, a straight answer.

  “I have pancreatic cancer,” he told one escort in St. Louis named Marissa, whose own father had recently died of a malignant brain tumor. “I have only ten weeks to live,” he continued, remaining poker-faced, “so please don’t mess up anything tonight, okay? I want this to be a special event.”

  The Bull’s-Eye Award was Barbara Rizzo’s very own creation. I liked Barbara, but whenever I worked for her, she would harangue me for not owning a cell phone (“You need to go out there today and get a cell phone. Will you do that for me? Tell me you’ll do that for me!”), or for not having a better network of contacts in Iowa City (“What do you mean you don’t know a good masseuse?”), or for not owning a bigger car (“When are you going to upgrade, Jack? Have you seen the new Hummers? You really should take the day off and go look at the Hummers, Jack.”). She sent out frequent lists of dos and don’ts. The dos included, among other things, vacuuming your car before picking up a client, shaving (for men), and wearing pantyhose and a skirt (for women). The don’ts list specified that we shouldn’t tell the authors our problems (“Don’t get personal with the clients!”), we shouldn’t ask to borrow money from them for parking (“Always bring change for meters!”), and that we were never, under any circumstances, to engage in any form of sexual activity with a client (“We’re not THAT kind of escort service!”).

  Over time, I broke nearly every “do” and “don’t” on Barbara’s list, culminating with the night I did shots of Absolut with Sherry LaGris, author of Planet Penis, a best-selling book about the male-centric world we live in. We ended up in her hotel room, in her bed, and we had sex—drunken sex that included me getting poked in my right eye with an elbow and Sherry falling head-first off the bed during one of my more enthusiastic thrusts—and yet all appeared as though it were going to be okay (that rarest of things: an uncomplicated fling) until she confessed that I was the first man she’d slept with since her husband of twenty-five years had walked out on her for her negative (“But honest!” she insisted) portrayal of him in her book. Naked, slightly woozy, I tried to comfort her. “Now, now,” I kept saying. “Everything’s going to be all right.” The next morning, our clothes reeking of cigarette smoke and sweat, Sherry perfunctorily signed my copy of Planet Penis on our way to the airport. “Good wishes,” she wrote and scribbled her name. I made sure she got through security without a hitch, but only after I had borrowed five bucks for airport parking.

  Fortunately, Barbara Rizzo never found out about this particular breach of protocol, and she even invited me to attend the BEA in Chicago, all expenses paid, for providing the best anecdote about that year’s Bull’s-Eye Award winner, Maria Castaneda. Maria Castaneda, best known for her derivative magical realist novels, was the darling of multicultural studies across America. Her books were assigned in hundreds of courses on Latino/Latina literature, courses on feminist theory, and courses about both “real” and “imagined” borders, whatever that meant. She commanded large speaking fees and had even convinced her publisher to bring out a book of her poetry, a slim volume titled You Seek Answers to Questions I Have Not Heard.

  In order to win the Bull’s-Eye Award, you needed to garner the most votes, and in that particular year, Maria Castaneda won it hands down. According to the other escorts, she had been dismissive of the groups of young girls, mostly Latinas, who came out to see her (“Cheerleaders,” she called them, rolling her eyes); she had berated bookstore workers for not recognizing her upon sight, and then mumbled insults under her breath when these same workers, after learning who she was, didn’t treat her with the proper reverence; she insulted their cities (“This sure is an ugly place. Where am I again?”); she barked orders at her media escor
ts and then, like a family pet, curled up in their backseats for naps, no matter the distances they were driving; she made at least two media escorts come to her hotel room and massage her feet.

  At BookExpo, in front of a small crowd of media escorts, along with a few curious passersby, Barbara Rizzo stood in front of a microphone and eloquently enumerated the long list of complaints filed against Castaneda. Rizzo read the list as though it were a string of accomplishments, encouraging her escorts to applaud after each deed. And then Barbara called me up to the microphone to tell my story.

  My grievance was, in the larger scheme of things, a small one: Maria Castaneda wanted me to take off my baseball cap while I was in her presence. Since Barbara Rizzo herself wouldn’t have approved of the baseball cap, I revised my complaint, claiming that she berated me for not wearing a tie and insisted that I wear one the next time she saw me. I wasn’t comfortable with my modified anecdote, so I hurried quickly through it, taking listeners up to the point where I had finally—gratefully—dropped Maria Castaneda off at the airport, wishing her a safe flight to her next destination.

  “But when I got home,” I said, “I decided to look up all her books on Amazon. And that’s when the idea came to me. I spent the next ten or so hours setting up different accounts, using all the credit cards I owned, so that I could log on ten negative reviews for each of her books. And then I emailed all my friends to do the same. By the end of the day, Maria Castaneda’s books each averaged one-and-a-half stars!”

  My fellow escorts roared; they were eating it up.

  “And then I started leaving comments about her every time I found a blog that mentioned her,” I continued. And I was about to regale the audience with some of the nastier comments I had left on blogs, many of which were libelous, when I saw Barbara Rizzo peering warily up at me, and I remembered that I hadn’t told her this part of the story. Some of the other escorts were giving me looks that suggested I’d pushed my reprisal a little too far, so I quickly wrapped up my speech.

  “Just a few blogs,” I added, shaking my head. “Nothing too awful.”

  My speech petered out here, and I stepped away from the microphone, but as I climbed down from the small platform, I saw Maria Castaneda. Arms crossed, she stood at the back of the crowd, glaring at me. Was it really her?

  “Look, look,” I said out of the corner of my mouth to the people closest to me, “she’s here. I think it’s her, at least.” But no one paid any attention. I was either speaking too softly, or everyone was embarrassed for me. Had I gone too far? I wondered. Was I a terrible person?

  The next time I looked, Maria Castaneda was gone, swallowed by the herd of anonymous conventioneers—or perhaps, like a character from one of her own novels, she had stormed out of the building and, buoyed by humiliation, floated up through the earth’s atmosphere, never to be seen again.

  PART ONE

  There are no second acts in American lives.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  1

  MOST PEOPLE FAIL to recognize the moment they’ve touched the ceiling of their potential, that point at which they’ve reached the height of their intellectual prowess or the summit of their popularity. It can happen anywhere, at any point in their life—away at college during a study session the night before a final, or on a high school football field while catching the game-winning touchdown. For some poor souls it happens as early as grade school, often inconspicuously: surrounded by friends on the blacktop on the first day back to school, or saying something funny in class that makes even the teacher smile. And then, after that, it’s all downhill.

  My swift rise began when the director of the famous and often-maligned Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a man named Gordon Grimes, awarded me a much-coveted Teaching-Writing Fellowship. The TWIF, as it’s called, was a plum appointment given only to the most promising writers in the program, and much to my own surprise, I had been deemed one of them. A month later, my short story “The Self-Adhesive Postage Stamp” appeared in The New Yorker. The following year, as I was finishing my thesis, that same story was reprinted in the most prestigious anthology, The Best American Short Stories. Success on that scale altered the way I came into contact with the world around me: Walking felt like floating, street lamps buzzed extra bright, and every song drifting through the open window of an apartment or automobile became the soundtrack to my life. I was twenty-four years old. The world—the publishing world, at least—was mine for the taking!

  But then an odd thing happened. I never published another word.

  I stayed in Iowa City after graduation and worked on my novel. I worked feverishly on it those first few years after the Workshop, maintaining the single-minded focus of a bee in a hive. On those rare nights when I would sneak away from my novel and go to the Foxhead, I was surprised to learn that the new students recognized my name when I wrote it on the chalkboard wait list for the pool table. (In full disclosure, I would write my entire name on the board—Jack Hercules Sheahan—and although it sometimes took an entire game of eight-ball before the student made the connection, we became fast friends once the tumblers of who I was and where I had published clicked into place.)

  “Hey, you wrote ‘The Self-Adhesive Postage Stamp,’ didn’t you? Dude. I friggin’ love that story. You turned the civil-service-job short story on its ear. On its friggin’ ear!”

  I had even fallen into bed, on two separate occasions, with Workshop women who wanted to sleep with someone whose work had appeared in a magazine they themselves hoped one day to publish in. One of the women lived in a dingy apartment about to be condemned, composing poetry on an electric typewriter that sat atop a stack of stolen milk crates while she sat cross-legged on a dubiously stained sofa purchased at Goodwill. (I later learned that she had gone to Berkeley as an undergrad and received a hefty monthly allowance from her trust fund, though you wouldn’t have guessed it from some of her poems with titles like “Scabs” or “My Mother’s Pimp” or “Chemo Dreams.” Her name is Pauline Frost. Maybe you’ve heard of her.)

  But my celebrity—small and dismal as it was—was short-lived. Five short years after I had graduated, no one knew who I was; no one had heard of my story “The Self-Adhesive Postage Stamp”; and if the occasion arose to tell a fresh-faced Workshop student my name and casually mention my publication, they regarded me with suspicion, as if I were making it all up—a crazy local trying to infiltrate and taint their exclusive little circle of talent and promise. What I realize now but didn’t—couldn’t—grasp back then was that my peak had come when the complimentary copies of Best American Short Stories arrived in the mail. I ripped open the padded envelope before I could get back inside my apartment, just so that I could see my story reprinted alongside acknowledged masters of the form. And that was my peak right there: holding that book open and staring down at a series of artistically strung-together words that had sprung from some elusive part of my own brain.

  Twelve years after I had graduated from the Workshop, I was still living in Iowa City. I had become friends with the Foxhead’s regulars over the years—non-writers who grudgingly suffered the Workshop students whenever they burst through the front door and talked loudly (always loudly) about Jonathan Franzen or Mary Gaitskill or drunkenly scribbled Barry Hannah quotes on the bathroom walls. These men (all the regulars were men) used to ask me how my novel was coming along, but eventually they forgot that I had been working on one—that, or they knew deep-down the sad truth: I had given up my dreams, as they had given up theirs. I knew that Joey, who always sat near the pay phone as if he were expecting a call that never came, had once played guitar in a pretty good local band; and that Sand Man, who took a stool at the corner of the bar for a bird’s-eye view of the pool table, had won a few major eight-ball tournaments in Vegas in the early 1970s; and that Larry McFeeley, who lived on a steady diet of Slim Jims and Hot Tamales, had been a weight lifter of Olympic caliber, breaking the state’s high school records for both the clean-and-jerk and the snatch. “It happen
s to the best of us,” they might have told me if I’d asked them how someone so promising could fall so far—but I never mentioned the novel again, and they quit asking. We all just silently, mercifully, let it go.

  2

  IT WASN’T OFTEN that two authors came to town on the same day, but if could juggle it, I would agree to pick up both of them, and that’s how this story begins: On a gray snow-promising day in early December, I took on two such jobs when I should have taken only the one.

  The first author scheduled to arrive that morning was Vanessa Roberts. Her niche was the quasi-literary novel, mostly ones about child abuse, and she had just published her first memoir, The Outhouse, a hundred-and-twelve-page tale of how she and her younger brother fondled each other for the first time while visiting relatives who lived in a house with no indoor plumbing. The press release, which I quickly flipped through at the Cedar Rapids Airport while waiting for her plane to land, described The Outhouse as both “shocking” and “explosive.” I opened the book, looking for the dirty parts, but then quickly shut it when a priest walked up next to me, also waiting for a passenger to arrive.

  “Father,” I said and smiled.

  He glanced over at me, frowned, then looked back up to the monitor that gave arrival estimates. Even though I was a lapsed Catholic, I still felt inexplicable twinges of guilt and reverence around priests and nuns. I also felt the desire to start confessing my sins, something I hadn’t done since my eighth-grade confirmation, which was the last time I had stepped foot inside a church—any church. I wanted to ask him if he thought there was any relationship between the implosion of my career and my cavalier attitude toward God, but when I turned back to inquire what parish he presided over, I realized that he wasn’t a priest at all. He was just an old guy wearing a white turtleneck underneath a dark sport jacket.