Don DeLillo - Great Jones Street

"Many thanks," he said.

"What for?"

"For listening."

"I had to stop anyway to get the door opened. So it wasn't that much of an ordeal. Haven't seen you, Eddie. Pounding away at the old machine. Is that what you've been doing?"

"You called me Eddie. That's a gracious gesture and I appreciate it. Coming from you, Bucky, tops in your trade, it's not the kind of thing I'm ever likely to forget. Is there some coffee you can give me?"

"I haven't been able to find the coffee."

"I'd be happy to consume the dregs from an old cup that's just lying around unwashed."

Sorry.

"I'm in the middle of a dark period, practically black. It's one of those times in a writer's life when he or she just wants to fall into bed and pull the covers over his or her head. I'm dropping all my genres and going into a new one completely. The kiddie filth didn't pan out. I can't sell a thing. I can't make anything happen. It's all going sour and I'm just beginning to suspect the reason. Maybe I'll have more on that next time we get together. But for now suffice it to say I'm in deep trouble."

"How deep?"

"How deep is deep, Bucky? The very depths. The place where no sunlight reaches. The pressure hole of the great ocean trench. I'm surrounded by blind fish swimming all around me. It's colder than mountains."

"The pacing hasn't helped. Is that right?'

"There was a point there and I shouldn't admit this even to you, Bucky, but there was a point there when I actually did some running and jumping. I told myself it was exercise, exercise. But I knew deep down it was an extreme form of pacing, an attempt to reinvigorate the format. Now I'm back to conventional pacing again so maybe all is not total blackness just yet. I've written in many styles and in great quantity. I used to turn out material by the yard and they used to pay me by the yard. I don't know what's happened. I know I haven't priced myself out of the market. I know I haven't lost my willingness to work. But the fact remains I can't sell a thing lately. Rejections every which way. It must be an inner failing. Pornography caused the original trouble. That much I know. I got lost in P-ville and I couldn't get out with my professionalism intact. I'm just now beginning to understand the factors and motivations behind my lack of inspiration, for lack of a better word, but that's another story for another season. If there's anything I am, it's professional. Take that away and I turn into an amorphous mass of undifferentiated matter. There's a cruel kind of poetry to the market. The big wheel spins and gyrates and makes firecracker noises, going faster and faster and throwing off anybody who can't hold on. The market is rejecting me but I'm not blind to the cruel poetry in it. The market is phenomenal, bright as a hundred cities, turning and turning, and there are little figures everywhere trying to hold on with one hand but they're getting thrown off into the surrounding night, the silence, the emptiness, the darkness, the basin, the crater, the pit. But the son of a bitch won't get rid of me that easy. I'm a tenacious brute for my size. I'm an in-fighter who can hold his own, pound for pound. I know the ups and downs of this business like few men in my time. But I appreciate your calling me Eddie. This is a big thing to an emotional person like me, which is basically what I am, and I want you to know I'll remember. Everybody else forgets but I remember."

"I can't offer advice for your comeback."

"I'll tell you what you can do," he said. "You can find the coffee pot you used last time you made coffee and maybe there's some grounds left over in the ground holder and you can give me a paper napkin and I can saturate the napkin with soggy coffee grounds and just hold it under my nose and sniff it for a little while."

"Aside from everything else I don't think I have any napkins."

"The paper kind is what I need."

"Even if there are some, I haven't seen any coffee grounds lately."

"Fame, riches, greatness, immortality."

We sat through a long period of silence. Fenig tugged on the laces used to tighten the hood of his sweatshirt. He took his own pulse, right thumb on left wrist. He ran his tongue over the hair on the back of his hand. Then he made an odd sound. Warp. I leaned toward him.

"What's wrong?"

"Sick to my stomach," he said. "It's a characteristic of every dark period I go through. This is the absolute middle of it. The cold ocean trench. Not being able to start something new. Warp. It's happened before but never this bad. Genetically blind fish."

"Some water maybe."

"I'll be all right in a minute."

"You don't look good."

"Warp."

"Something to drink, Eddie."

"I'd better get upstairs. I thought it was sinking back into my stomach but maybe it's not. Upstairs would be best. Warp. I don't like to inflict my creative tensions on other people. Best if I went upstairs."

"Yes," I said.

The bed was a vast welcoming organism, a sea culture or synthetic plant, enraptured by the object it absorbed. As I headed deeper into mists and old stories, into windy images poised on the rim of sleep, I began to feel that the bed was having a dream and that the dream was me. One candle burned, this light not quite eluding my awareness. I was barely conscious, being dreamed by a preternatural entity, taken for a mind's ride into the mystery of things. It was all a question of control. I was being dreamed-smoked-created. The dream took form as a man asleep in a bed situated in the middle of a room in which a lone candle burned. This was not real but a dream and I was no more than the stale chemical breath of the dreamer.

The essential question was one of control. I went deeper now, struggling to produce a dream of my own, to return from those dim midlands with the fire of legend and sex contained in a thimble, safe for men to use. I was suspended in a double moment, trying to free myself, when suddenly a fierce noise broke over the bed, a wild ringing that lifted me through levels of consciousness out into the cold open room. Telephone. It seemed incredible and I merely stared at the sucking black shape. Each note seemed louder and more shrill, the protest cry of a thing that preferred its latent state. Telephone. I walked across the floor and picked up the receiver.

"What do you want? Who is this?"

"Bucky, how are you, Bucky?"

"Son of a bitch. Globke. Rat bastard."

"Bucky, Bucky, Bucky."

"Who else but you. Money machine. Sitting behind your fat-ass desk."

"Bucky, Bucky."

"Why'd you turn this thing on? I don't want a telephone in here."

"Bucky, Bucky, Bucky."

"Shit machine. Rotten globke bastard. You globke son of a bitch. You're a fucking unspeakable adjective, you know that?"

"They can fix phones from the office. They did it from their office. The phone company. It wasn't broke, understand? It was just turned off. So we had them turn it on."

"Manager."

"You've suffered untold agony. You're distraught, you're bereaved, your stomach is extra-acidic. It's only natural you fling out in all directions. I understand this. I wouldn't have it any other way. Yell at me. Exhaust your vocabulary of foul words. I said to Lepp before I got into the car and picked up the phone to call you, I said to Lepp I'd rather have Bucky unload all the verbal garbage on me, his personal manager, instead of on top of the media, where it could hurt us a little bit. But the point is I'm sitting right now in this automobile of mine and I'm looking at the lights of the George Washington Bridge as I make my approach from the West Side Highway and I'm thinking it all means nothing to him. I'm thinking he's sitting there in this dead person's apartment suffering untold agony and for what? On the other side of this bridge is America. Do you hear what I'm saying, Bucky, above the whiz-whiz of the cars going the other way? America is out there, just beyond this bridge, and it's full of people who are waiting to be told what to do. Here I am on my way to a high-powered business dinner at Irv Koslow's Steak Fantasia in Metuchen and there you are suffering untold agony and for what? They want your sound out there. They want your words. They want your arms and legs and unmentionables. That's what I'm thinking as I sit here in this twenty-two-thousand-dollar banana boat of mine. I'm thinking other things too. I frankly admit that. I'm thinking dollar volume. I'm thinking grosses. I'm thinking unit sales. You can sit there for just so long. The best thing for you is work. The tour. The road. The travel. The tour represents a survival all its own, Bucky, and I know you perceive that truth. They're waiting out there, just the other side of this bridge. It's America. The whole big thing. Popcorn and killer drugs. You can't just sit there."