Talk to Mike Grotsky on the Fictionville blog
I was still diddling around the World Wide Web when the phone rang. This time I answered it, ready to jump in with both feet if it was a sales call. That’s not a bad way really to let some shit go and it’s a lot safer than doing it on the road or with some other shmuck in a bar. So I answered and for a second I was disappointed when I heard Major Magpie’s voice. He was an old school buddy who had risen in the world (an inane expression to my mind because I never accepted the idea of rising or sinking – hey this life was a short tour and whatever works for you is fine by me but don’t give me that goal oriented jive, I ain’t buying). Now he was a PR flack for a cable network and he was working on something at the U.N. I had seen his name in passing in an article recently and new he was in town. It had been a good while since we’d spoken but I recognized his hustler’s voice immediately.
“Bliss!” he crooned, “how the hell is it hanging! Still holed up in Brooklyn I see. Same number.”
“Major Major Major,” I said, “a little roach told me you’d call for some reason. How the hell are you?”
“Super!” he seemed to scream – he was always a booster. “And I’m in New York on a story, at the U fucking N!”
“I saw some mention of that somewhere” I told him. “I thought you never left L.A.”
“Bliss, you’re right. I try not to. I go into sensory deprivation if the amazons there can’t abuse me but this job is sweet. And I thought of you!”
“Sure, man, let’s do lunch, right?”
“No, Bliss, I’ve got work for you. You still got a jacket and tie somewhere? I need an assistant pronto for a couple of days, some write-ups, fact-checking that kind of thing. Good pay too.”
I was surprised and, I must admit, moved that Magpie had thought of me. I desperately needed the money and getting away from the convolutions of my novel would do me good. I hadn’t even shaved in a week and comparisons to Jack Nicholson’s character in ‘The Shining’ were becoming apt. Besides the money Magpie was quite a character, a beautiful and repulsive mix of buffoon and Irish storyteller. One of my favorites involved a tale he told about his father introducing him as his ‘alleged’ son. He’d never really gotten over that but in compensation he could scald an audience over beers with his misadventures. A couple of days of the Magpie could put wind in my sails, some bucks in my pocket, and get me the hell out of this cell my landlord obscenely called a ‘sweet down home abode.’
“You’re on” I told him. “When do you need me?”
“Eight a.m. sharp. Meet me in the lobby. Ok? And Bliss, make sure you’re with me. 100 percent. We gotta look good.”
“Major, for a confidence man you don’t have much confidence in your fellow man.”
“Exactly” he replied. “Toodlepip.”
Well, I took a long walk to clear my head, I performed the necessary ablutions, I put the clothes together, I set the alarm, I even went to bed early. But I couldn’t sleep. So I read from Mailer’s The Spooky Art and here and there he did lay down a few golden nuggets. Boxing is one of his obsessions and training therefore is big for him. The writer, for Norman, is like a boxer for he does battle with his art and his muse and his unconscious. The unconscious has to be trained, he says, but more
importantly it must be respected. If you say you’ll be at your desk in the morning to mine what it has to offer you’d better be there because if you stand it up often enough it’ll turn it’s back on you sure as any woman. But if you respect it and do what you say, you show up every morning as you had vowed the night before, well, the unconscious will reward you, it’ll open up and invite you in. Keeping the appointment is half the battle. I had to admit that he had something there. It was like any kind of training – consistency and follow through even when you were dead to rights was the only way. Otherwise it all went to haphazard shit. I renewed my vows of dedication and as I finally slipped into the delights of my own waiting unconscious I looked forward to the entertaining freakishness of a day at the U.N. with Major Magpie.
I awoke early, had a leisurely coffee and stepped into a nice hot slow shower. I stayed under the water dissolving the night’s load of dreams for a good long while. I might have heard a strange noise at one point but it didn’t really register; there were so many noises in and out of this old building that anything short of total disaster wouldn’t attract anyone’s attention. But when I finally turned off the water I heard it all right. The doorbell was ringing, the phone was ringing, there were voices yelling in the hall. And there was water cascading down the walls of the bathroom from above!
I grabbed a towel and stepped into four inches of water. There was more water in the hall and it was already streaming through the living room and into the bedroom. There was fucking water everywhere! It was continuing to run down the walls from the apartment above, more or less along all the walls of my place. Just then firemen broke through my triple locked front door with crowbars. The apartments below mine were flooding too and they’d just reached my floor thinking the source might
be my place. They rushed past me in their rubber suits and rubber hats and rubber gloves yelling instructions that only seemed to increase the chaos while I stood there in my towel with shock on my face (at least it wasn’t shit this time), my mind going blank except for the thought that I was still in the last dream I’d had: I had in fact dreamed of water but I recalled something pleasant, a tropical beach and a woman in a bikini.
“You Bliss?” one of them was asking me, his dark rubbery presence leering up in my face. “You gotta get outta here now!” he ordered. “The whole place is flooding. The pipes is burst. Outside now. Put this on.” Somewhere he’d found by bathrobe and he shoved it into my hands. It was wet too.
As he hustled me out the door I heard the answering machine come on. I knew it would be Major Magpie, cursing me and cursing me and cursing me. I wasn’t going to make it to the U.N. He wouldn’t believe why I hadn’t shown up. What did it matter, I’d blown it and hadn’t even called. Now all I had was a weak cup of coffee in a diner, a damp robe, and the cold comfort of contemplating what seemed to me like a Borgesian mystery. Because in my mind the whole fiasco was related to Mailer’s warning to respect your appointments with the unconscious, a respect I had certainly flouted many times. This time my intentions had been good, one would have to admit the gods had been against me, but what made a chill slide up my spine – and ring a bell in my brain just like ringing the bell at the amusement park – was the unnatural confluence of the unconscious and my unmet destination at the U.N. Even though my personal world couldn’t have such so-to-speak ‘global influence’ I realized that I never did have a rendezvous at the U.N., that those two letters of abbreviation referred to nothing more than my own guilty failures to show up and respect the unconscious of which I demanded so much and returned so little. I ordered another cup of Joe and turned my attention to the tattooed legs of the waitress as she leaned over to fill my cup. “Tough day?” she said without a smile.