Iceberg Tempting Read online

  But somebody had gotten my attention.

  Chapter Six

  “Yaaa factor at six, Captain,” Mr. Sulu said.

  “Steady as she goes.”

  Essentially that’s what had happened. Yaaa was still there between Maria and me, it just wasn’t overwhelming, not so much upper case unless other stresses were added to it. Stresses like life, like two feet of snow in early January that stuck around until March, like that job that was still sucking the life force out of me; stresses like some asshole slashing my tires.

  I figured the Yaaa factor from 1 through 10, one being so low as not to notice it, six being a little edgy, like don’t give me anything more right now. I was at six.

  ***

  Back to the gym. My pal Jimmy the Lifter was there, which was good. I bench-pressed a moderate weight, just maintaining, so my body didn’t go straight to hell while I dealt with all of this other complexity.

  “Howzer book goin?” Jimmy asked, between sets. He knew about my third novel.

  “Done,” I said.

  “Good for you! Howzit feel?”

  “I’m conflicted, Jimmy. Glad it’s done, but now what do I do? Goof around with short stuff, or leap into the big one again? Ya know?”

  “Add more weight,” he said.

  And wasn’t that the truth.

  ***

  Fuck that book, I thought. Just fuck old Number Three. Leave it be, it’s out there, get on to new stories. No more rewrites for that one. No more tweaking. It was what it was, and if New York didn’t want it, then maybe it wasn’t that good, and I should listen to them, the assassins. So I did what I could to forget about it.

  ***

  Back in my other life, the boring one in which I daily arm-wrestled my computer into submission, my pal Lou was checking on me. We sat in GG’s, at the bar, right after work.

  To explain Lou: he’s six feet-six, and large, Charles Barkley large. In basketball terms, nobody drove the lane on this man; he’d drop the offender in his tracks. On that screwy softball team from work, I was the center fielder, he was the first baseman. Lou was a big damn target. He’d have been a star, if only he could catch the ball. But that’s another story. He had a honker of a nose, and twice it had been significantly bent, probably more; it had a fine zigzag to it, and sometimes I wondered how he could breathe through it.

  Lou was a Bears fan. Every citizen of Chicago was and is and will be a Bears fan. No dichotomy, no divisiveness like with the Cubs and the White Sox; nothing half-assed about the Bears. Everybody loved them. Conversely, since the forced exit of Michael, and everybody knows which Michael, nobody much liked the Bulls any more.

  Lou and I didn’t talk about baseball, not too often, except in theory. Being a Chicago baseball fan was as religious and polarized as breakfast had been with Maria. More so. I’m a Cubs fan, Lou’s a Sox fan. To keep the friendship, we shut up about it.

  “So how’s it going with that Maria?” Lou asked.

  “We’re dating,” I answered, leaving the interpretation to him.

  “Just so’s you’re gettin’ some. Should I give you the sex ed lecture, use a condom, don’t forget to blow it up to see if it’s solid, okay?” He was joking, of course. Who was Lou to talk about rubbers? He’d married his high school sweetheart, had three or four kids so far.

  “Blow up your own rubbers,” I said. Mine were lubricated, and I had no intention of finding out what they tasted like. The way things went with Maria, I was lucky I got one on at all, and sometimes I didn’t. And doesn’t that just add to the old Yaaa factor.

  Lou knew about my writing. Hell, anybody who knew me knew about it. “Just don’t want anything to happen to your next great novel. I wanna say I knew you when.”

  “If anything, she inspires me, Bud.”

  “This is good.” He shifted, the uncomfortable shift. “She isn’t too…nutty for you, is she?”

  And there it was, out in the open. “She’s sensitive, Lou. That’s not nutty.”

  “I got infinity in the pool,” Lou said.

  “Pool? There’s a pool already?” I thought we’d been discreet.

  “How long this is gonna last. That’s the pool. Call me a romantic, but I got forever. For a buck.”

  “Thanks for your support, but I have no idea, myself.” But the fun parts could go on, yes, it was okay with me, for infinity. And indeed that was a scary thought, YAAA factor up to seven there for a minute, then down again.

  But nutty? Did everybody think she was nutty? Lou, ya jerk, who’re you to call my girl ‘nutty’?

  And who was I to talk about nutty, anyway?

  ***

  I’ve watched all of these recent movies with goofy writers in them. ‘Finding Forrester’ has this old writer who wears his socks inside out, because they feel more natural that way. ‘Wonder Boys’ has the main guy typing in his lucky pink chenille robe. So let’s just address the issue of clothes and nutty writers.

  There’s the stuff I wear to work, clean shirts and trousers and somewhat comfy but businessy shoes. Then there’s the clothes I wear outside, out of my safehouse, pretty much the same as the work clothes, except that the pants turn into Levis, and sometimes down to sweat pants, if it’s a quick dash to the store or to pick up a video. There was the wedding and funeral suit; for a while there I had actually owned two of them

  There’s gym stuff, and ball playing stuff. I’m still wearing T-shirts from ten years ago. One of my favorites was ‘Gamecocks.’ Women in the gym usually looked at me like I’m a creep when I wore that one.

  And then there’s the clothes that I wear when I’m writing. Yesterday’s work shirt. Old game shorts or sweat pants that don’t bind up or chafe, in case I need to sit there for sixteen or twenty hours. Old, old comfy wool sweat socks with absolutely no elasticity left in them. And my Bears slippers to keep the feet warm in the winter.

  Then I just go to sleep like that, sometimes in bed, often in my chair, in front of the computer and the TVs. All right, I’ll confess. There were three TVs on three different channels, and my computer, all going on at the same time. I find it stimulating.

  See, no goofy clothes there.

  Maria had her own routine when she painted. She usually got naked, and put on a home-made smock. The top half of it was some T-shirt material, bottom was terrycloth, so she could use it to dab on her canvas, or to wipe her brushes. There was not much of a backside to it, like a peek-a-boo hospital gown. She usually sat her bare ass down on a leather stool, and then painted until she couldn’t, often going all night long. I didn’t understand at first why it seemed so hot in her apartment in Oak Park, not until I saw her in the act of painting.

  Hey, you've just got to get comfy when you do this thing, okay? Let’s look in your closet some day.

  ***

  I almost forgot, spring training was coming to a close, and the Cubs were having a fine spring. They had hitting, which was normal for the Cubs, and they had pitching, just a little of it, which was unlike the Cubs. That, and no serious injuries for a whole season, and like I said, hope was there. If one was a Cubs fan and it was spring, there was always hope. It didn’t disappear until June, at least.

  I hadn’t been to a home opener at Wrigley Field since 1984 when I was a kid, and the Cubs owned the city that year, and went to the playoffs, and won their first two games at home in a five game series. One more win and they would have been in the World Series. Then they went to San Diego, and lost three in a row, and it was over again for a few years. That was the closest they had gotten to the World Series since 1945. 1989 and 1998 they were again in the playoffs, but they were wiped right out in the first round.

  I called the ticket office for two for the opener. Hahahahaha, they said. Or words to that effect. I could accept that. Sometimes you just have to move a little quicker, like the year before.

  ***

  Maria and I went out to dinner, and to have a celebratory drink or two over her commission. We were in Murphy’s, across the str
eet from the Cubs Park bleacher entrance, half a block from where I grew up. This was Lake View, oft spelled Lakeview, now called Wrigleyville by people who weren’t from there.

  Something had happened to my old neighborhood. It had been discovered, and the jury was still out on whether this was good or bad. In the Thomas Mann sense, I couldn’t go home again, but face it, between the pain of adolescence and the absolute vanilla plainness of the place twenty years ago, would I want to live here again?

  Probably.

  The neighborhood had gotten livelier. Sure, parking was a bitch; it had been that way when I was a kid. But the folks were a lot more interesting, I thought. There were many pain-in-the-ass Yuppies, the dreaded Young Urban Professionals, the folks who held the Future of America. Their presence and their money drove up the rent and caused apartment buildings to be converted into condos all over the place. The Yuppies also represented improvement: instead of urban decay coming to Lake View, there was restoration in the old, and there was an advanced and surprisingly interesting phase of urban architecture in the new. The neighborhood was getting better.

  Lake View had also gotten a little gay, which was just fine; but assaults on the gay population had increased, and other types of crime were up, too. There were more armed robberies, more muggings on the street, more breaking and entering, all directly related to that influx of new money. I knew this because I still read the Lake View neighborhood paper, The Booster.

  My older brother had been a Booster Boy when he was a kid. When somebody delivered the Booster, it made him a Booster Boy. I supposed that a girl could be a Booster Girl, though the concept lost that euphonious alliteration that I loved so much. I never felt the need to be a Booster Boy, though I’d had a short fling with the Tribune when I was twelve, until my bicycle was stolen, just half a block away from where we were sitting, in Murphy’s.

  I explained all of that to Maria, her of somewhat rural Connecticut, and she laughed at how urban and urbane I was, mired in North Side nuance. “Booster Boy?” she said. “How strange!”

  I burgered as she enjoyed Fettuccine Murphy. We were discovering that our respective palates could coexist here in the real world. Sitting near the front, by the monster plate glass window with MURPHY’S painted on it, neon MILLER and BUDWEISER signs looking through it, again the dichotomy, the yin and yang of our world, Ford or Chevrolet, White Sox or Cubs, all of that.

  Maria looked out the window, and said, “Damn.”

  “What, Babe?” I asked.

  “Hold on, be right back.” She put on her coat, and walked outside into March coolness. I watched from the window as she went up to some guy in a trenchcoat; he’d been standing there about fifteen or twenty feet from where we were sitting. He was much larger than her. Maria talked to the man, and shook a finger at him, and it wasn’t friendly. He walked away, sort of hunched over, conveying defeat to all who were watching, all one of me. Then Maria came back inside, and sat down.

  “Sorry,” she said, and offered nothing more.

  “Can I ask?”

  “It’s nobody. Sometimes he follows me, that’s all. He’s harmless.”

  “What?”

  She sighed heavily. “It’s nothing, really.”

  “Is this the old stalking boyfriend routine?”

  “He was never a boyfriend.”

  “I was kidding.” Apparently she wasn’t. “You mean this guy follows you around?”

  “Yes and no. Sometimes, he’s just, well, there.”

  “Ever call the cops?”

  “I told you, he’s harmless. Can we change the subject?”

  “Tell you what, Babe, the next time I see him, I’m the one having a few words with him.”

  “Oh, Butch,” she said, and tried to make like nothing had happened. But I could see that she was pleased underneath that nonchalance.

  No more was said about the creep in the trench coat. She’d tell me when she was ready. But she seemed to view him more as a nuisance than a threat. I just didn’t want creepy guys around my Maria.

  My Maria? Ha. I’d actually thought that. How oddly possessive of me.

  Chapter Seven

  All of this relationship stuff didn’t just happen overnight, as they say. Here we are, a ‘we’ sort of, maybe. I liked Maria, and she liked me. YAAA factor down to five or six. We got together two, three times a week. Sometimes I spent the night at her place, sometimes she was at my apartment in mysterious and romantic Bucktown.

  I was concerned about the expense of these tires, the ones that were developing holes in them. I started parking in different places around the neighborhood, two, three blocks away, in self-defense.

  I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure it out what was causing the flat tires. First, to understand parking in Chicago: you parked for free on the street, first come, first served. Watch out for no parking signs, and for driveways, and for fire hydrants. Nothing was reserved, unless it was wintertime. There were lots of winter rules in the city; some were written, most weren’t. In a big snowfall, for example, the smart guy didn’t take the space that somebody had dug out and had put a kitchen chair or cement blocks or anything else in it. Park there at your own peril, but count on a broken antenna, at least. I saw a refrigerator in a space, one time. Now that was marking one’s territory.

  Maybe I’d parked in somebody’s space. But there hadn’t been a big snowfall, not for a while. So why was somebody slashing my tires? Who was doing it? And what’s the real message, here?

  ***

  It was Gracie, my video store screwing buddy, on my answering machine.

  “Hi, Stevie, I found a copy of ‘Putney Swope,’ you said that you’d been looking for it for five years, how’s about Saturday night? And,” long and telling pause, “other surprises.”

  Well if that wasn’t about half a dozen of my favorite things: Gracie’s incredibly compact body--no, I bet I didn’t mention that she was five feet two, maybe less--and that cute and tight and playful doesn’t begin to cover the physicality of Gracie. Combine that with ‘Putney Swope,’ the most politically incorrect movie of the sixties, if not in the history of man, and I hadn’t seen a copy available, not ever. Throw in a Logalbo’s pizza and a couple of cold Michelobs and it was my idea of heaven.

  Gracie was a night of adult Chuck E. Cheese.

  And I’m conflicted, damn, I really really really wanted Maria, but I wanted this, too.

  I didn’t return the call. Call me a coward.

  ***

  Maria was painting the cleaning woman’s portrait. She told me a ton of technical things as she got ready to paint, about different types of canvas, and how she had prepared this particular one and treated it and had put something on it akin to an undercoating.

  “Gesso,” she said. “Like a white paste. I gesso the canvas, and paint won’t bleed through to the back. Or turn yellow.”

  I was imagining the Ziebart guy of Rusty Jones, the businesses that kept Midwestern cars from rusting to nothingness. “And the point is?”

  “The painting will be nice and bright in five hundred years. If it was kept in a controlled environment.”

  Five hundred years, I thought. Relative immortality.

  She continued, “I have the painting about eighty percent finished in my head before I start. I know what paint, and brushes, and what order. I know the angles and the light and the shading and the attitude and the depth and the mood.”

  “And the other twenty percent?”

  “Chance.”

  Now there’s an organized mind.

  ***

  When I write, I dread the interruptions of the real world. Nobody should ever bother me when I’m hunched over my word processor.

  Here comes the story, in waves. I feel an overwhelming need to write until I can’t. My brain is suddenly racing and my fingers can’t get it done fast enough. I type like a madman, transcribing words as they flash by. The story is always coherent in my brain, but my typing is terrible, with errors all
over the place. I keep going with the story, knowing that I can fix the other stuff later. Pressing forward, I write until there is nothing left.

  When it’s happening, there’s nothing like it. I get chills like a ballplayer who’s just made the play of the game. I laugh and cry with my characters. I’m literally living in my mind, experiencing everything that they do. When the waves are there, I’m compelled to ride and write for as long as the story lasts. That can be upwards of sixteen, twenty, twenty-four hours straight. Usually I skip meals, and go to the john only when necessary, and then I take a pad of paper and a pencil along so that nothing got away. Sleep? Some other time, when the story wasn’t there.

  Then I look at what I’ve written. The spelling is awful. There’s bad grammar and syntax that sucks. Punctuation is wrong and mostly nonexistent. Point of view shifts wildly from him to her to the omniscient and back again. I’m in the present and the past and the future, and most of it is wrong. But there it is, a story, this miracle that wasn’t there a few hours ago. Then I start to fix it, ten times, two dozen, a hundred and more times in rewrite. I’ll buff a story until it is perfect.

  I wrote four days in a row without sleep one time, seventeen thousand quality words within 96 hours, almost one-third of my second novel. I think I lost eight pounds that time. Another time I managed forty thousand words in two weeks, and I felt like I had a hangover for a week after, like my mind had been fried.

  And when I’m finished, when the wave has passed, I return to normal. It takes a day or two. I re-enter the real world, eat and sleep and start to catch up. I emerge from my mind, a surfer having experienced the perfect wave.