Chickenhawk: Back in the World

We hadn’t seen Bill and Emmy since Spain and we’d never met their two young daughters, Nell and Luisa. Emmy invited us over for dinner almost every Saturday. Sometimes we went out to dinner while Jack babysat. I remember those evenings as exciting times in a boring world. Bill was working on a novel about vampire bats, something his new agent had encouraged him to write. He’d written a series of books about a Vatican detective; a series about a Gypsy detective, one of which was called Gypsy in Amber; and a book called The Indians Won. He wasn’t making a fortune, but he was making a living. The vampire bat book was his first serious attempt to hit the big time.

At one of our dinners with the Smiths, I met Bill’s agent, Knox Burger. Knox was in his fifties then and looked like Gerald Ford. He limped a little from a birth defect and used a cane. Knox struck me as a wry guy and I enjoyed being around him. I asked him one night, “So, Knox, what is it that literary agents do, actually?”

“Bill writes the books. I sell them,” Knox said.

Being a neophyte business tycoon, I saw everything in terms of overhead, profit margins, contracts, and advertising. I understood Bill’s operation: he worked in a corner of his bedroom (low overhead), he turned blank paper (no breakage) into books (high profit margin), and Knox handled the business side of it (instant business acumen). It appealed to me. My operation cost a fortune to maintain, and my sanity to manage. My product was sickeningly breakable, and of dubious value. I envied Bill.

When we went to Bill’s, he’d show me his latest stuff. I liked the vampire bat novel. Bill had asked me how one of his characters could discover, in a maddeningly incremental way, thousands of bats flying toward him. I told him how a device could be made with a bundle of tubes, each tube tuned to a different bat frequency. Bill used it to increase suspense as a horde of bats descended upon the character.

Bill was also working on a novel set in Russia and had a map of Moscow taped on the wall behind his typewriter. The Russian book was a pet project he’d been working on for years. He’d even invested in a five-day trip to Moscow to get a feel for things. I read the first chapter several times as Bill made changes. When he wrote an opening with three faceless corpses in a Moscow park, I thought it was a throat grabber.

I told Bill the mirror business was driving me crazy. We’d just had a robbery. One of our trusted employees had hidden in the factory when we closed, loaded up our delivery van with mirrors, and driven it through the goddamn door.

The employees were driving me nuts, I told Bill, and Abe and his dad, I said, were definitely tuned to a different frequency. They took me with them to buy a warehouse because it had a giant overhead crane system they needed to handle pallets of glass. Ben, Abe’s father, looked around, grudgingly admitted the building was okay, except for “that thing. That—” he pointed to the crane he was dying to own, “that thing, Abe, it’ll cost a fortune to tear that out.” Abe nodded sadly. The broker and the owner panicked.

“Tear it out!” they said, seeing a done deal evaporating because of this loopy old man. The broker looked at the owner and back, said, “Maybe we could lower the price a bit—to take care of the removal expense?”

Ben turned around, looking interested. “Maybe. But it would cost twenty thousand to get rid of that…” he pointed at the crane again, “thing.”

The broker and owner went to the back of the warehouse, had a conference. Abe and Ben whispered and snickered. The broker came back and agreed to knock twenty thousand off the price. Ben said, “Okay, Abie, if you want the place, we’ll buy it.” The broker and owner sagged with relief. On the way back to the office, Abe and his dad giggled like kids. I don’t get it. I mean, I get it—they saved twenty thousand—but I don’t care. These guys are like aliens to me, I said to Bill. I’m learning this stuff, but I hate this business.

“Why don’t you get out of it?” Bill said. “You can write. Write about Vietnam.”

I can write? Bill thinks I can write? Bill got me fired up at the idea of being a writer. I even set up my typewriter in my bedroom in the heat of inspiration. It was futile. I couldn’t get past the first page. My life was making mirrors and trying to sell them.

The mirror business ground on monotonously, a series of problems that, once solved, left me feeling unsatisfied. I had bouts of uncontrollable anger. I broke my hand when I punched our bedroom door.