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???????????????????The Plot Thickens: A Writer's Dream???by Cecilio Morales
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A gaunt, bearded man in a red turtleneck sits before a panel
of five professors, a doctoral committee assembled to hear the
defense of a thesis: a novel. Such events are the equivalent of a
celebrated lawsuit in the sleepy university town. Colleagues,
students, and townies fill a spectator's gallery, as the novelist
submits his work to the panel's judgment. It is a dark story of
human despair and the futility of existence told through the
squalid life of poverty, racism, and betrayal of an immigrant
from Tobago -- the paradigmatic "etranger." The narrator is the
gun with which the protagonist will kill himself; all tenses are
in the present; the gun, an inanimate object, expresses no emo-
tion, offers no reflections, no conjectures: only cold fact.
Chapter Two. A university town newspaper shows the photo of
a handcuffed black man being escorted by police to his arraign-
ment. He is identified as an immigrant from Tobago, arrested for
disturbing the peace at the home of his ex-girlfriend. A long
story there, which unravels over time, becoming the town's chief
talk: an out-of-wedlock baby abandoned by the drug-crazed mother
-- also from Tobago -- to be found by the father ... more news at
eleven. Next.
A man and a woman walk hand in hand down Fifth Avenue,
chattering with animation and warmth. Both sport a tweedy look,
just warm for early Spring in New York, studied casual ensembles
designed to put the observer at ease, but only enough to confirm
that they are not the stereotypical Bloomingdale's-rich of New
Yorker magazine ads. Professors? No, novelists in Manhattan to
discuss future projects with their agents. They stop at every
bookstore display from 30s to the 50s: Brentano's, Rizzoli's, and
the publishing houses' -- Doubleday, Barron's ... they're window
shopping, but not for books. "Look there's Gary's book ... right
there, third to the left from yours." Who's up, who's down. Who's
selling, who's not. Who's panned and who's praised. Village Voice
says "Smoking Gun" -- a doctoral thesis in the form of a novel --
has begun the career of "the next Susan Sontag"; kiss of death --
it's the author's fourth, his last? The couple laughs. Oh, poor,
poor whatzisname ...
They meet in the quad: the man who'd been in New York and
poor old next-Susan-Sontag.
"Congratulations on the Voice piece. Your work troubles me
to the core."
Next-S-S smiles. "Thank you. You're the Catholic writer,
right? Priest?"
"Married. Two kids."
"Ah ... well, look forward to your defense."
In another part of the town a black man from Tobago buys a
gun. He has been just released from police custody on a first
offender's suspended sentence; he'll straighten out, just as he
promised the judge, but he has to do only one more thing first.
Cut to couple's enclosed deck. They remember how it started.
A man in the newspaper, then poor Next-S-S; he embellished and
neo-neod the story into a cross between Calvino and Pynchon that
Next S-S would love to hear called "Joycean." Her book, a farce,
was a secret satire built on "Smoking Gun." She set the events in
a convent. Sure, Muriel Spark had been there before. So had
Boccaccio before Spark, but he didn't get to laugh all the way to
deposit the movie-rights money. And then came Gary ... now the
couple roared, for Gary was there. Gary took the convent story,
which he picked up off her bookshelf one party. "Exciting idea!"
Had never heard of poor Next-S-S, much less the fireside gossip
at writer's workshops about the neo-neo project that was to
become "Smoking Gun." Gary wrote "Smoking Gun" with a happy
ending. He was in every drugstore in America, had been 3rd on the
New York Times' Top Ten for 22 weeks: "Tobago Steel." There was
talk of a mini-series.
Chapter whatever: near-murder at the Cathedral had the
"Catholic writer" not spotted something funny in a side altar. A
man from Tobago, toting a gun, raises it to aim and fire. The
writer seizes it by the barrel. "Trying for first degree mur-
der?"
He exclaimed in an islander accent.
"Come to the atrium. Want a cigarette?"
Rains, pours. At the end of the conversation -- lost job,
can't get baby girl back, unfaithful bitch is back with cokehead
boyfriend -- writer jots down names and numbers. "You need help."
The man from Tobago stares stolidly at him -- the equivalent of
rolling one's eyes at the obvious.
The Summation:
"What we have here, first of all, is a failure: Smoking
Gun."
A man rises from the audience and yells out something fast
and unintelligible. He points a gun at the speaker, "Catholic
writer," prompting three security guards to rush at him and
wrestle him into handcuffs. Ignoring the melee, the speaker
continues, addressing the doctoral committee.
"He fails because he is not human. He has neo-neoed his
humanity into cold, calculated literary pyrotechnics. His passion
has ... no, wait, let him hear this ... nothing to do with the
man at the center of Smoking Gun. His passion arises only in
defense of his book, his novel, his doctoral dissertation, his
footnote in the literary journals. He is willing to trade my
life, as well as his protagonist's, for words on paper. That's
why he fails."
The speaker used the prosecutor's pointing trick as he
turned at poor handcuffed Next-S-S, whose eyebrows were knit
upward diabolically. Then he waived in dismissal, which the
guards took as a signal to remove their prisoner from the cham-
ber.
"The next element is Wimples, the sardonic take-off. The
author is my wife, but although this may bias me in her favor I
have the advantage of insider knowledge. The work is well-
written, compassionate as only humor can be. But we all happen to
know that the writer shamelessly and purposely wrote a highly
derivative tale with the main aim of milking Hollywood for all
it's worth. Half of humanity's literature has trod the same path.
Forgivable. I think it was the Arcipreste de Hita who remarked
that there are only three stories and three characters: 'the
relation between God and man, man with himself, and man and
nature.' The rest is embroidery. We do not live in an age of
Gothic absolutes, but my wife deserves the benefit of their mer-
cies if the committee deems to call her work a literary misde-
meanor.
"Finally, we come to Tobago Steel, the work by my good
friend Gary, the only one in which our hero -- who I understand
is in the audience -- actually meets a happy ending. Gary be-
lieves in happy endings and perhaps his faith -- echoed in the
phenomenal commercial success of his work -- attests to the
possibility that Mr. Tobago Man himself may yet stride out of
this or another august chamber as the protagonist of his very own
happy ending. In real life.
"Because real life, ladies and gentlemen of the committee,
is what I have brought to you here. I have not brought you a
novel. I want you to know why right off: because novels about
writing, in real life, are terribly boring."
He stood in place, let his mouth curl into a warm, generous
smile that brought light to the blue eyes behind his glasses and
even sparkled off the silver in his hair.
-end-
Copyright (c) 1993 by Cecilio Morales