Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

“Mom, I think I’m gonna go to bed.”

“ Terrible taste in women. His father fooled around puhlenty . What was her name— Diandra . He went from bitch to nut . She was smart, the first one, $45 million she got. And she was right to sue again. She should sue a third time. Serve him with papers right when he’s taking his last breath .”

“Night, Mom.”

“We need to find you a Diandra — or a Jamie McCourt. A divorcée . The divorcées are good because most are dying for a good fuck . I don’t care who they are as long as they’re monied . Go for an old one . A dowager . Do you know what a dowager is? I’ll pull out my Neiman’s customer book and we’ll go shopping for dowagers . How about the fag’s mother? Cooper. His mother’s, you know, a Vanderbilt . Gloria. How does it go, what they say about people on top? They fuck their way to the bottom! That’s where you are, let her fuck her way to the bottom, that’s when you grab her. She had a son, you know that, don’t you? He jumped out a window just to get away from her. Why don’t you go out there, Bud? Fly out there and give her a run for her money. Cause she’s got to be as old as I am. In the meantime, go find Jamie McCourt .”

He said goodnight to Marta and went straight to his bathroom for a bowel movement. He’d been constipated ever since Brando Brainard said he got the job. His body was in shock.

Bud sat there with the iPad. He unfroze the Franzen, which was the last thing he’d been looking at — Franzen on YouTube had become a weirdly addictive pastime. In this particular screed, the bloated, bestselling litterateur smirkily held forth on “overrated writers,” casually shitting on Forster and Graham Greene. Bud noted JF’s three-day grizzle gave him a smug, Craig’s List coker’s mien, reminding the over-the-hill aging scripter of those contestants who were certain they’d win The Dating Game — or maybe more like a death-row interviewee, one of those high-IQ serial killers talking on an A&E doc about the 11 undergrad guys and dolls he decapitated then raped back in the Santa Cruz glory days. He said Graham Greene’s so-called important books like The End of the Affair were basically shit but maybe that was a function of being Brit vs. American, and how there was a lot of American writing that Brits didn’t get either — writers like, oh, George Saunders, and, uhm, his pal Dave Wallace. . again, he shit on his good friend! Not only deftly tucking him into a minor peer’s camp but insinuating that DFW didn’t have the universality — even in death, especially in death — of Jonathan Franzen! “They consider George and Dave to be, I don’t know, puerile, or bratty, or too broad, or annoying. .”

The gall of the man nearly gave Bud a hard-on, but instead, he squeezed out a few pellets followed by a record-breaking, sustained trumpet of gas — a personal best.

Bud ran a bath and printed out the attachment Biggie emailed, a two-page newspaper article entitled “Between Scylla and Charybdis.” Scylla & Charybdis… the names were familiar. He’d google them later.

Instead of getting in the tub, he sat at his desk and flipped through a book called The 90-Day Novel . After his meeting with Biggie, Bud drove down to the beach and treated himself to an early dinner at a Thai place off the Promenade. Then he strolled to Barnes & Noble, where a placard by the escalator announced an “author’s event.” He took his seat in a crowd of studious-looking wannabes. It seemed strange to him that instead of writing a self-help book for burgeoning novelists, then going on to write fiction, Alan Watt did things in reverse; he wrote an acclaimed novel (in 3 months, of course), then took the self-help guru route. The author entered to applause, his ease in front of a crowd attesting to a former career in stand-up. He thanked his publicist, who sat in the front row, then began thanking the bookstore staff by name as if there to accept an award. The 90-Day Novel was published by The 90-Day Novel™ Press, the sign of an entrepreneur at work. The book was in 12 weekly sections, further broken down into Day 1 through Day 90, each with its own epigram by Mailer, Maugham, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Hesse, Jung, Pearl Bailey, & the like. It even included a “story structure analysis” of the author’s own novel, Diamond Dogs , winner of France’s 2004 Prix Printemps for Best Foreign Novel. Bud hadn’t heard of Diamond Dogs , nor had he heard of the Prix Printemps, nor any of the authors that provided blurbs, including the writer of the cover quote, “Frank B. Wilderson III, winner, 2008 American Book Award.”

Bud put the book down and picked up The Paris Review .

He opened it to an interview with Jonathan Franzen, who was being asked about the influence of Don DeLillo on his work.

FRANZEN

I don’t think my pages read like his, because I had a preference for rounder letters—

c’

s and

p

’s. I think of him as being more into

l

’s and

a

’s and

I

’s.

INTERVIEWER

C

’s and

p

’s?

FRANZEN

I kept seeing a plate of food with beet greens and liver and rutabaga — intense purple green, intense orange, rich rusty brown — and feeling a wish to write sentences that were juicy and sensuous.

INTERVIEWER

Do you mean the sound too?

FRANZEN

No, the way they looked, the roundness of

b

’s and

g

’s, the juiciness.

It depressed Bud that he hadn’t thought of letters that way, having shapes and colors like food. He would never be able to talk about vowels and consonants with such sensual, specialized knowledge; he’d never be asked anything in The Paris Review , not even for his thoughts about The Wire or Mad Men . Bud felt all about l ’s and o ’s and s ’s and e ’s and r’s— like a loser .

Bud understood there were certain things he would simply have to accept. He might never finish, let alone publish a novel, and if he did, the odds of collecting an award — even a Prix Printemps —were stacked against him. He would never be asked to discuss his life and his craft at the Aspen Ideas Festival. He would never give a TED talk or be profiled in The New York Times Magazine . He would never be extolled, asskissed and fussed over in the pages of Interview by special people like Marina Abramovi´c & Antony Hegarty; he would never hang with Patti Smith and Johnny Depp, nor would they gift him with photos of Genet’s scrotum or original letters from Rimbaud’s gunrunning years or uncracked ampoules once owned by Hunter Thompson. Lil Wayne would never refer to him as “my artist,” and Ellen would never give him a frivolous, on-air gift. He would never be asked to deliver a commencement speech, like Franzen’s boon friend David Foster Wallace. He’d probably never hang himself either.*

He watched some old Britain’s Got Talents on YouTube. Everyone amazed. Everyone astonished. Everyone was unforgettable. Everyone was making their mark, everyone was being launched from the filth and petty madness of anonymity into eternal stardom, everyone had rounded letters and rutabagas. Everyone was a pauper and ventriloquist-assisted frog prince, plucked from the sewers of minimum-wage schlepdom and installed in castle keep of the Immortal Kingdom of (at least) 10,000,000+ Hits, a finger would hit the playback machine, their mouths would open and just a few soulfully sung notes later they’d each be born aloft on a magic carpet of judges’ tears and thunderous standing ovations, relocated from the Götterdämmerung of murderously American small towns and deadend English villages, whose very names elicited a doom of mental retardation, perma-poverty & quicksand obscurity, from those sickening black holes to the supernovae pastures of galactic e-Lysiums & beyond. Bud was old enough to remember that astonishing bit of television history when Jennifer Holliday sang “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going”—now every week there were chubby adenoidal 11 year-olds vomiting it up on Good Morning America , and vomiting it pretty well. God wasn’t dead, epiphany was. The Internet had bestowed the thumbnail-transcendent Epiphany Channel; giddy passion plays of two-minute portable pop-cult fairytales ruled, with their hyperlinks of fall and rise/rise and FAIL/rise & rise mythos, appiphanies the new opiate of the people.