Chapter 6 ...Pop!

By Gary O'Brien

So, flash forward about a week. There I sat at the Marriott Orlando’s lobby bar waiting for the “platformed” writer, Marquee Boy, the Marques of Weight Name; this Christopher Naughten to arrive and dazzle me with his shit.
And to be honest, he did have an amazing story to tell. The trouble was, he told more than a decade ago, and after that he became a mere mortal like the rest of us.
Naughten had spent his formative years in his native South Africa trying to escape Apartheid, not as a victim of slavery and suffering but as a conscript to the machinery that kept it going. Yes, Naughten was one of many privileged, white schoolboys who went right into the army during the early eighties. The way they handled it at the time was, you were white, you were male and of age, you went in whether you had an objection or not. Most of these boys, Naughten among them, were thrown into the race war before they even had a chance to find out who they were. Before they knew what hit them they were taught to shoot straight, and hardened and corrupted with violent hatred.
He managed to escape the military machinery finally by fleeing to England, the homeland of his father-in law, where he set up house with his wife and daughter and declared himself an exiled conscientious objector. In so doing, Naughten began glazing over every aspect of himself that had been South African, covering it with a firm British upper crust.
He also set the literary world on fire for about five minutes. You may remember his book White Kaffir. It was his truly harrowing, classic story of loss of innocence, of shooting plastic bullets at unarmed township residents at the tender age of eighteen; of the horrible awakening to the fact the system he was sacrificing himself and his soul to sustain, was a murderous lie that was doomed. It was published in 1989 and earned him a Pulitzer nomination. He wrote it while continuing his education at Oxford University at the age of twenty-seven.
Now divorced, he bounced around the news bureaus of the London Times, New York Times and The Washington Post, before slipping into obscurity. Following which he wrote for a travel magazine and was mounting a comeback of sorts. And as many writers do at some point in their careers, now he lived in New York City.
Her first words of encouragement on why I should accept Naughten into my heart and into my project had nothing to do with his very real literary triumph. (I must admit I was in tears reading parts of White Kaffir, for all the right reasons) In fact, she didn’t even mention the book by name, letting me know right away she never read a word of it.
No, apparently what won over Lyzanne, aside from his name which still rang familiar to her, was the fact Naughten recently attended an AIDS benefit and march with the entire staff of the Schnedz Literary Agency.
He walked with them in the event despite the one-hundred degree heat. I checked the company website: he signed with the Schnedz Agency the Monday following.
I had to wait until my project was purchased before she put my listing on her website. I had been signed for nearly a year before she got around to it. She said she had to make a sale before my listing went up: company policy. Here this guy didn’t even have a project and she made damned sure the whole world knew the bastard existed and she was representing him. He hadn’t published a word in book form in a decade and a half.
Part of me could not help but be impressed. This was the author of White Kaffir, coming to see me about collaborating.
“The unmistakable smell of tires burning, the whiff of sweat, and the dust in our eyes; and the pools of vibrant blood sullied in tan, tan earth; these are the things about our afternoon in Soweto Township that will never leave me.”
Lyzanne told me Naughten’s flight was scheduled to land in Orlando at 8 p.m. She set it up for us to meet in the lobby bar at 9 o’clock, giving him time to freshen up. Here it was 9:30 and he still hadn’t breezed through.
When he did, he more or less liquefied from his cab onto the premises all rumpled khaki and tan behind a white oxford button down, leather loafers. Plump, sweaty, drunk, a newly lit Camel dingling at the corner of his mouth, he carried a cloud of sound, Aramis, B.O. and booze.
A real estate helmet hair was clacking alongside. She was a perfumed heifer on dagger heals dressed in calories, jabbering to him in pealing Southernese as a bellhop and her rolling caddy of accessories followed in hot pursuit. Her orbiting nipples protruded in pre-rut arousal through a sheer, floral blouse. I had to admit she looked inviting like a trampoline, all tick-calved and in estrus, as she was.
Cheeky bastard. She had the wedding/engagement combo going on the appropriate finger and I know he wasn’t married to her.
Following the acquisition of card keys, they made more introductions and niceties that ricocheted off the marble floor of the lobby for the benefit of everyone. Like, yeah, we just met on the plane. We’re two intelligent, respectable adults now going to our separate rooms in this hotel, and not off in a corner somewhere to hump each other stupid for about five seconds. Their pleasant, screaming banter could be heard through the metallic skin of the elevator as it ascended through the ceiling.
I was in for another wait but I made the best of it. I figured, they got off on her floor first, get into her room, off comes the blouse, down (or up,) comes the skirt, wham bam. He wipes off, zips up, goes upstairs, showers, changes, and now he needs a drink and another smoke. At which point he will check his watch and remember our little, scheduled meeting. If you timed everything else out, you could really break it down, find out what kind of staying power he had.
I got the impression from his grand entrance there wasn’t much depth left to the man after that. Now I would know all.
And so it went. By 9:53 p.m. I had my answer. He was a minute man, at least that’s how much time he donated to his airplane acquaintance, if she hadn’t gone ahead and polished his Skippy in the elevator.
He had opted for a white Izod polo shirt over a pair of baggy, faded jeans, oddly enough, a pair of Reebok tennis shoes.
We shook hands despite my instincts, and I said; “Christopher?”
“It’s Chris, Gary. Christopher’s the man on the dust jacket, and I can’t fucking stand him for the moment, since he hasn’t done anything in a while.”
Camels and a lighter came down on the shiny mahogany. He orders the first round.
“A drink for my friend,” he said.
“Guinness, pint.”
“Excellent choice, Gary. Make that two.”
“A friend of mine calls it Irish mescaline,” I said.
“And so it is,” said Chris with a smile and now not such an asshole, for the moment.
“So how did you meet Lyzanne?” I asked as we waited for the foam to settle and the bartender to top off the pints. Oh look at that, they even had those neat, little spoons to prevent them from frothing over on the pour. Nice touch.
“Well, I had heard marvelous things about the agency and I popped ‘round for a chat with her one day. Turns out she and I have a common interest, which is attending functions.”
“I set her crew up with a limo and rented a suite following the big AIDS awareness event. What a fucking madhouse. Great bit of networking though,” he said taking a sip.
You never know quite how to broach these subjects. Most people living in New York City either know someone who has died from AIDS, or have several close acquaintances infected with HIV. Joking about either the disease or events surrounding it can set people off. I got the feeling there was more than meets the eye with Lyzanne attending an AIDS benefit, though. She never struck me as a giving sort of person. I was curious.
“She’s big into that, I mean, donating for the cause and whatnot?” I asked uneasily.
“Christ no. She’s as bad as I am. Carry it under the subheading ‘setting the right tone in the biz’. She networks at these things, has to be seen there. Beforehand I went down to Washington Square and got a $250 bag of the best fucking smoke you can get your hands on these days. I don’t know what made me do it, but my instincts were right. Everyone was ripped. You should see her when she’s stoned. It really is hilarious. She starts mooning about her days at Cornell. Bloody awful,” he said.
“But then that’s to be expected. That husband of hers is a complete…,” he went on.
“So you haven’t known her that long?” I said.
“What can I say, Gary. The tart didn’t know I was alive until four weeks ago. It was a brilliant little bit of strategy.”
“Well you have your credentials. You have…”
“Don’t bloody say it.”
“What?” I asked.
“If I hear the words White Kaffir, I am going to lose my fucking mind. That’s all there is to it, so I’m just asking you, as a courtesy, not to say it.”
“Well, it’s just that…”
“No, Gary. It’s just that nothing. You don’t know what you’re talking about, so please don’t say it.”
Before I could get the next word out he was off on a tear that came out so effortlessly you knew right away it ran slick as grease all the time.
“White Kaffir, when are you going to write another White Kaffir? When Christopher when? It’s been ten years, Christopher, it’s been twelve years Christopher when?”
I put up a finger. I wanted to at least express how deeply some of his vivid descriptions touched me. How personally connected to the story he made the reader feel with its brutal honesty.
“You grew up in the south Gary, correct?”
I nodded. Surprised that he had done some homework on me.
“Now, for some unfathomably stupid reason, for some spastic colon of the mind imagine you draft a proposal for a book about your time on the Atlanta, Georgia police force, about the days you spent splitting blek skulls, and you called it White Nigga.”
There was a young black couple down the bar. The man was preparing to come over and pound the living shit out of Naughten, who couldn’t have been more oblivious if he were wrapped in cellophane and whale grease. He just kept on.
“And everyone loves it, especially the name,” he said, “White Nigga.”
His accent was showing now; the South African one. “White” became “whoite” and “black” became blek, or blick. There used to be a company that made volleyballs, I believe, that went by the name Voit. After a few minutes this became his word for white.
“I was never a cop,” I said uneasily, but loudly enough so the young brother heard me; adding, in pure chicken-shit fashion “…or a Klansman.”
“I’m saying for the sake of argument, so you understand where I am coming from.”
“Okay? Shoot, and I mean that metaphorically.”
“You get a contract by the most prestigious house in the world. You write it, and it breaks just about every record that has ever been.”
He had sense to start whispering here, but even the hushed, slurred voice seemed louder than a scream.
“Everywhere you go people stop you and say, how wonderful White Nigga was, (Neeeegah) and how bloody moved they were that you wrote White Nigga and when for the love of God are you going to write your next White Nigga?
“Do you see what I am driving at?”
“So…”
“So you go back to your old neighborhood, and no one will even look at you, blek or whoite. You are Whoite Neeegah. You have become a title to story you wrote in graduate school, Gary, that started as a bloody assignment. You have come to symbolize everything about a movement that would have nothing to do with you in the first place, a movement you didn’t necessarily want to be a part of. You just wanted the fuck out.”
“So you didn’t pick the title?”
“Good God no.”
“Who did?” I asked. I really had liked the title. It said it all.
“Somewhere between my professor and my agent, the name came up, and I didn’t fight hard enough to stop it. It was a line in the book.”
“Really?”
“When I told some of my friends I wanted out, that I wanted to go to London rather than stay in the bloody army, that’s what they called me, a useless white Kaffir.
“I look back at it all, and sometimes I think I didn’t even write the book. There are passages in it that just aren’t me; I think, Christ I was never this foolish and sentimental. Who the bloody Hell was this person?”
“You didn’t write that line about seeing the blood in the soil outside of Soweto?”
He merely ordered another Guinness and a shot of Old Bushmills “two blek-Bush” for each of us.
“The less said about that nonsense the better, aside from which we were supposed to be talking about you and your book,” he said gulping back his shot.
“Have you read any of it?” I said before hitting mine.
“Not a word. I understand it started out as a non-fiction?”
“True.”
“So you know what I am talking about. And that title, Good Christ!”
“Yeah, Rape Flight.”
He had to cover his mouth and nostrils to keep the Guinness from streaming out of his face before he could swallow it.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. Every time I hear it, it cracks me up. It’s just so cynical. It really should be a parody. You’re already halfway there with the title, Gary. Turn it into a spoof.”
That was a shot across the bows if I ever heard one. I let it pass. Would there be others?
“From what Lyzanne tells me, the publisher thinks you’re actually having him on; perhaps you don’t like the deal you got so you made it as outrageously stupid as possible when you turned it in,” he said.
“Why on earth would I do that?” I asked.
“Well, to break your contract and keep the advance.”
“Jesus, there are easier ways to make two grand, Chris. I could work at a frigging lawn service for a month, edging, trimming and mowing. I think the Mexicans actually would treat me better than that fucking publisher.”
“Well, fear not Zapata. I have arrived to save the day. Or so Lyzanne believes.”
“I gotta tell you, Chris. The fact the publisher told her something before they told me and then she told you without even mentioning it to me, more than pisses me off. Can you understand that?”
“Lyzanne is one of these wonderful people impressed by status, or celebrity of any sort, Gary. But then you already know this. Aside from which she couldn’t get hold of you for three weeks, and you weren’t calling her.”
Now he was not only annoying me, he was also speaking the absolute truth which would make it even more difficult for me to hate him in the end, which is something I needed to do to carry my plan out. I needed to hate the hell out of this bastard and I didn’t yet. We would have to work on that. I steeled myself with the very real notion, that for every awful truth he related to me about her, he was building a similar list of things to relate to her about me. On my growing plate of resentment I underscored the fact that Lyzanne was impressed by status that Chris over here, had in British weight tonnes, while I was left with none of that precious commodity.
And once again, her “not being able to get a hold of me” was all about me not crawling over glass and insult to talk to her, not waiting on the phone for her to pick up while she spoke with a ‘marquee writer’ on the other line. Not being disconnected four times and calling a fifth despite the obvious. She hadn’t sent the first e-mail, nor placed the first call to my number even after I had essentially fired her and tried with all my might to get her to sue me. Yet, conveniently, even that was twisted around: our lack of communication – though she had made NO attempt - was all my fault. If Lyzanne Schnedz were photographed squatting naked at the Washington Mall, urinating in the reflecting pool, Gary O’Brien would get arrested for it. It would all fall back on Gare-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
“So tell me about it,” he said breaking me out of my reverie.
I outlined the book for him in broad strokes, which took five minutes.
It’s a book about a flight attendant raped by the pilot and co-pilot, who had set the plane on autopilot so they could have their way with her while the stunned navigator and crew chief looked on. So she struggles to get some satisfaction out of the airline and the crewmen begin hunting her down and she has to off them one by one in order to get free of it.
“And this is NOT a spoof on the genre? Is that what you’re saying?”
I then described how the work had been a non-fiction proposal, based on my cousin’s very real experience aboard a now-defunct airline.
This morphed into fiction when the class-action was settled as I wrote the book. Then things got out of hand. Trying not to whine like an infant, I went on to relate how the bludgeoning suggestions from the publisher wore on me until I agreed with every last one of their hints, and now the book was a cluster-fuck tossed salad of ideas and agendas; something so hideous even they couldn’t stand it anymore.
“So what you have created is a three hundred page work of satirical protest aimed at the industry itself. How nobly Quixotic of you, Gary. Let me be the first fellow writer to thank you for your kind service done for us all and buy you another drink.”
I nodded, swilling the last of my previous pint.
“Now let me ask you how that absurd gesture of yours has paid off in the slightest? As Dr. Phil says, ‘how’s all that anger working out for you?’”
And now I did hate the man. That tipped the scales. Not that he wasn’t correct, in fact, he was spot on target. I had produced an ugly, self-indulgent work of bitter satire without even knowing it, which made it – well- just plain bad, not well done. The reader didn’t know where he stood in the joke, after all. How childish and thoughtless of me. Oh well. Let me splay open an artery here on the bar.
It was the arrogance that got to me; this plastic-bullet shooter of rioting civilians, and later let’s feel sorry for him in his moral misery so he can write a God damned best-seller. The pious as hell literary agent, all swept up in the sanctimony of her heritage, is so impressed with a publishing credit she can’t realize she signed a Nazi as a client, a goddamn Nazi!
But then he’s a weight name, see? A marquees writer. What a fucking crock of shit. Newly envenomed, now I had purpose. What I was about to do really wasn’t that bad at all, when you thought about it.
For all that we are about to receive…
I thought about the folks in Soweto. I thought about the young blek couple down the bar, who, somehow, managed to maintain their cool. Yeah, this would be just fine. I could have humanized him more. I could have looked at the three dimensional person that he obviously was. Sure, he played up the bad-ass angle, as all guys do at the bar, but there was nothing to indicate he hadn’t written those lovely, conflicted words at a younger age. But I have to admit it was easier to think of him as a prison guard at Auschwitz, and so I did for the moment. After all, he was the enemy now. Had declared his intentions with all the noise of an AK-47.
Here he was, flying his fat fucking ass down here to roost, to steal my work. It would start with barbed insult, laced with truths that were designed to get me feeling as if he were here to help. He was the picture of the weight name, asshole, marquee writer. Lyzanne the stupid hag, was lulled by the fact he rented them all a limo at an AIDS march. A rented fucking limo at an AIDS march! The worst sort of limousine-liberal hypocrisy! I had a picture of her weeping for her college days after this bastard got her high. Her bemused employees sharing uneasy grins; wine stained carpet in a rented Park Avenue suite; people “of weight” in the industry vomiting into ornate sinks carved in pink dolomite; Mr. Naughten’s long-awaited return to literary circles; his re-coming out party.
Yes, this would be possible in the strictest, technical sense. But was he up to it? Or would he feign exhaustion and set off to sleep after his elevator sex? The only way was to challenge his manhood, which should be easy enough. Then the question became: was I up to it?