Saroyan take...

Maskells Hill
Dear Michael de V, I always thought when learning to write that it was good idea to copy the style of other writers. That way one learns something about their style of telling. This story was a take on Saroyan and all in all it turned out to be a pretty good story in its own right, so I’ll pass it onto you and anyone else who visits this blog.

WHAT YOU KNOW

(Forgive me William Saroyan)

1962
A second cousin of mine called Joey, who thinks of himself as an up-and-coming writer of some substance, rings me up last week and suggests we go for a drink in this sleazy little bar where writers hang out on Fifty Second Street. The only time I ever hear from Joey is when he’s frustrated over something or other. I had a bit of time on my hands so I listen attentively to what he has to say and I guess I’m just thankful that it’s not going to be one of his personal visits to my room. Last time he visited he drank my week’s supply of Uncle Elbe’s moonshine whisky and puffed away my last packet of smokes.

“I’ve got writer’s block,” he tells me over the phone. “I’ve got this guy on a ledge ten floors up who’s threatening to end his empty life. I got this Irish cop trying to talk him down. You know the kind, cousin Bill? One of those sentimental Irish cops who still hears the sounds of Irish jigs in his head twenty years after he left Donegal.”

My second cousin is getting very upset because his character the cop, though well rounded, is not doing very well in the savior business. Joey can’t find the right words for the cop to say to talk the guy down from the ledge. To overcome the situation cousin Joey tells me that he calls in a new character. This time it’s the potential jumper’s ex-girl friend. He reads out over the phone what he has the cop tell the girl.

‘I’ve been workin’ at it for two whole hours ‘an ’nuttin’ I say gets troo. He jes don’t wanta listen. Ain’t nobody listens at-tall in th’ Big City, not even a jumper. But then who knows, goils being goils wit’ their tender hearts an’ lovely smiles, might jus’ talk him down. But den I ain’t holdin’ me breath goil, cos this guy is empty of hope, he’s lost his dreaming in a city that takes no notice of lost dreams. He’s got to woirk it out hisself. Nobody’s goin’ to woirk it out for him, they’re not. But, if you tink yer can do it goil, then the best of Irish luck to yer.”

Not bad hey, Joey says. I like those Irish accents. They make good reading. But this girl I bring is of a different mould. She got what it takes. I call her Charlotte. She comes from North Dakota where her old man is a potato farmer who’s lived out feast and famine and blizzards all his life and he’s passed the iron in his blood on to his daughter. Charlotte’s hot to talk him down. She remembers her boy friend’s soft side – his passionate words and hard body when they make love on his narrow iron bedstead in his sleazy little flat with the peeling wallpaper and where the gas-ring’s never worked properly and the cold water tap runs as much rust as it does water.

Joey is getting a bit hoarse in his telling. He’s beginning to sound a bit desperate. “I mean it’s good stuff up to then isn’t it? So, where do I go now? You’re the writer, you should know about these things. How does the girl talk him down?”

“Know thyself, know others,” I tell him.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” he says, “C’mon, be a good guy, they say you can find a plot in a used bus ticket. Be a Pal, where do I take this one?”

“You’re got to look in before you look out,” I tell him.

“You got to explain that to me personally,” he says over the phone.

So, because he is the youngest son of my second cousin once removed, Abraham, I go into the city and meet him at this writer’s joint on fifty second.

When Joey arrives he looks like he hasn’t slept a lot.His voice is edging on desperation,“How the Hell does this girl friend convince the guy’s life is worth living?”

I buy him a scotch on the rocks hoping it might help him and wait for him to drink it.
“Know thyself,” I tell him.

“F’Chrissake,” he says, “Where you going with that one? It’s the girl’s point of view I’m looking for. Gazing at my own navel’s not going to get me anywhere. I’ll tell you I’m desperate. I’ve got to get out of this one. This writing business is dragging me down.”

“Know thy navel and know other’s navels,” I tell him.

But he doesn’t take me seriously. He’s really on edge and lays his troubles on me for the following two hours, and because I’m a willful parasite I let him go.“It’s the issues I want to write about,” he confesses. “I want to write about suicides and crooked cops and wars and pestilence and poverty. I want to tell those rich sons of bitches that pay us peanuts for our labors what the real world’s about. I want to shake ‘em out of their apathy.”

I listen conscientiously and it’s skewed somewhere because his father is a successful scrap metal merchant who’s put his youngest son through college and is always grizzling about how his youngest son drinks too much and won’t join the firm. Joey lives in the loft above his parents’ garage and sponges off anyone who’ll give him a free lunch.

Joey’s still ranting when I leave him two hours later. He hasn’t been able to get any sympathy out of me so he’s switched his attention to an overweight cutlery salesman from Cincinnati and his spiky-haired New York girl friend that are as drunk as he is. When I get up to leave he doesn’t notice. He’s still trying to peddle his fantasies.
“I’m a writer,” I hear him say to his new found drinking friends. “I got this guy hanging fire over a two hundred foot drop an’ nobody’s come up with a way to talk him down. It’s a tough business, this story telling, but I’ll beat it you see if I don’t.”

At home - if you can call one room with lice infected wall paper, a single gas ring that doesn’t always work, a cold water tap that runs more rust than water and a hall-shared bathroom, home - I’m pretty well fired up. I sit down at my table, take the cover off my second-hand Remington and begin my next story. It’s called, Ten Storeys up and Writers’ Block.

It goes quite well for a while but the ending eludes me so I sit there staring at the peeling wallpaper for an hour or two until the phone rings. It’s the Captain from the Seventh Precinct. He tells me my would-be writer second cousin is dead. He tells me he jumped out of a hotel window down town. I tell him how shocked I am and I go back to my typewriter and finish the story.

Two weeks later I go to his graveside and whisper my story to him. “It’s about this guy, I say, who never got to know who he was and died because of it.”