Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

“Okay, kid.” He handed me the quarter. I felt it to be sure it was real, and put it in my pocket. “Close your eyes,” he said.

“Why?”

“All you got to do is hold on to my finger. Close your eyes.”

It seemed very strange. Hold a finger for a quarter? Close my eyes? I was an honest kid. I had his quarter. I held his finger.

“Now I’ll give you another quarter. Keep your eyes closed.”

Four bits? Who was this guy? I had struck it rich, but something was weird. “Now grab my finger again.”

He guided my hand and laid his finger in it, except I knew this wasn’t his finger. It was hot and snaky. I’d never held a snake, but I was sure it felt like this. He moaned a little. I let go when we heard some voices in the hallway. And he sprinted out of there, leaving me alone. He never gave me the second quarter. He was back on his bike when I left the building. He shouted to a friend of his walking up the street, “This kid jerked me off for half a buck.” I wanted to tell him he never gave me the second quarter, but I kept my mouth shut. I was disappointed, humiliated, and ready to go to Broadway for an egg cream at the Russian’s. The experience was traumatic. I’d been exploited, my innocence stolen. But what city kid wants to hold on to innocence? This was a real experience. I learned something. I’m straight as a road in Nevada. I learned that you’ve got to be alert. The delivery boy still owes me two bits, and I’ll never get it. The real trauma was the loss of the beauty of the single span George Washington Bridge.

Now I have written a novel. I can hold the thick of a manuscript in my hand. It makes me feel full and empty at the same time. I am a writer. Am I a writer? I call it The Steps Of The Sun , a title from Blake’s Songs of Experience . These pages are a Faulknoid exploration of the time of the Robeson riots in Peekskill, New York. I think it is great. I think it is junk. I have written a whole novel. My erstwhile Prof. Baxter Hathaway likes it a lot. I am a writer, no I’m not.

Vladimir Nabokov agrees to read it. He never reads student work. Everyone is surprised. I should be more flattered than I am in my ignorance and arrogance. We have a meeting in his office. His wife, Vera, is always there. Nabokov is famous in his classes for diatribes against Dostoevsky, and singing admiration for Chekov. What will he think about my Steps Of The Sun? I knock on the door and enter the dusty office in Goldwin Smith Hall. Vera and Vladimir are almost smiling. They sink me into a dilapidated beige velour easy chair, where my butt settles to the floor. Nabokov, his body a tall, slim edifice, his narrow face grizzled, distracted, severe in expression, leans over me from a high stool. I have seen him at Taughannock State Park, nimbling through the woods with his butterfly net. He is a respected lepidopterist, a taxonomist. All novelists I think must be perhaps taxonomists. Will I ever get to be a novelist/taxonomist? Below him I feel pinned into the chair like an object of his lepidoptery. Or I’m a helpless muzhik called in to face the lord of the manor. At the end of the room Vera leans against the desk. She does all the talking. I am defenseless, miserable, as if I’m paralyzed into the chair of the tallest dentist in the world.

Vera prefaces the onslaught with what is almost a kindness. “The talent is there, but…” and then all I hear is “crude” “comic book prose” “dull repetition” “read Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson…” Vladimir nods and occasionally issues a sound like air escaping from a valve. The comments are intended to be helpful, but I am not ready to accept help. Praise is what I need to hear. I want Vladimir Nabokov to help hoist me onto the first rung of the literary ladder. Once the opposition is silent I excavate myself clumsily from the chair, and retrieve the yellow carbon copies of manuscript with his scribbles on it. He even initialed them. Hardly holding back the tears that saturate my anger I stagger down the stairs away from Nabokov’s office back into the life of a non-entity, knowing I will never write again.

Young ego is resilient. I sent the manuscript to Harcourt Brace, to a competition for a fellowship they gave to first novelists. They wanted references from three people who had read the work. Nabokov was one of the three people who had read it. I used his name without first asking his permission. This was presumptuous and impudent, and Nabokov was furious. Vera screamed at me that Vladimir was an important writer, a professional. (He was writing Pnin at the time, serialized in the New Yorker. ) How could I just use his name without permission? “Come on. A name is a name,” I said. I had somewhat reconstituted my cojones . “They asked for the names of three people who had read the manuscript, and you are one of the three.” How hollow that sounded. My explanation did nothing to mitigate Nabokov’s outrage.

It took several years for me to acknowledge that Nabokov was a great writer. I’d got a letter back from Harcourt Brace saying that two out of three judges so far had favored my manuscript. They wanted to know more about my writing ambitions and my philosophy. At the time I was ecstatically in love with Pat Bell (aka Jingle) and we were fumbling young into marriage. I believe a lot of the delirium got into my response to Harcourt Brace. I forgot to sign the letter, and sent a signature separately on the next day. They finally turned me down. I don’t know if I missed because my “philosophy” was goofed up by love, or because, as I suspect, Vera wrote to them to withdraw the name of her Vladimir as a reference.

“Zis iss all excess,” says my very own Dr. Strangelove whenever my mom takes me to visit the clinic at the Medical Center on Broadway and 168th Street. He grabs my belly fat with his one mobile hand and pulls on the flab. “Zis iss all excess,” he insists. I am happier when my mother calls it “baby fat.” This doctor, whose name I will never remember, conducts the “therapy” for my long recovery from bulbar polio. This form of polio affects the upper spinal chord. The doctors say I was one sixteenth of an inch from brain dead. You be the judge. The virus grabs my vocal chords, my metabolism, and my swallowing mechanisms. Even these days when I try to swallow, food threatens to burp up through my nose. My metabolism slows enough with the disease that I put on a lot of weight, but at a certain point it seems obvious that I will survive. By the time I am in the fourth grade my mother has settled me into the clutches of Dr. Strange-love. He must have been working with drug companies to develop a diet pill. When I first see the film I am sure Kubrick modeled him on my guy, down to the accent and the withered arm. I expect Peter Sellers at any moment to come out with the line, “Ziss iss all excess.” That Henry Kissinger is the model makes sense, but my doc is the whole package.

At a certain point my mother, who has no money to pay for my therapy, signs me up through Strangelove for an experimental drug program. My metabolism is bunged up enough so I am gaining a lot of weight. I must look like a great subject for a trial course of diet drugs. The good doctor puts me on various doses of benzedrine, and other amphetamines. Later in life, when I voluntarily take “speed” the effect is too much like the Strangelove “prescription”. Once I was grown I rejected speed as a recreational drug of choice. “Zis iss all excess,” he says, as I stand for photos for some medical journals. He grabs the flab on my chest. “Vee can eliminate ziss. Vee remove zee adipose tissue sroo a cut under here.” He indicates the location under my tit with the scratch of a long fingernail.