=2013 Books Read=

Venus Drive
Sam Lipsyte

The Reading

There's always one. Sometimes there's more than one but tonight there was only one. She was hanging around waiting until all the others had drifted off with their signed copies, satisfied that they'd had their "personal moment" with the author. I had just finished my reading at The Brooklyn Public Library. I was drained, in need of a drink. Several drinks. These things take a lot out of you. The ones who hang around take the rest of it. But it's hard to resist them. At least whey they're women and reasonably cute.

She was both. The beret, the serious literary look, it meant trouble, but not the kind I felt I couldn't handle. She was carrying one of my earlier books, Venus Drive, not the one I'd been reading from that night. Not the one I was currently pushing. The one I believed in, at least at the moment. No, Venus Drive was a collection of stories from my early period, which is really not all that different from my middle or late period, if I'm perfectly honest. She was carrying it along with a John Banville novel and a copy of Slow Man by J.M Coetzee. The scent of trouble rose a couple of octaves. I was not going to fair well in such company. Hold me to your bosom with Nicola Barker or Chuck Palahuniak and I can hold my own. But against Banville and Coetzee. Come on. Those guys have won Man Booker Awards. Nobel Prizes. It's not a fair fight.

"Would you like me to sign that?" I asked her.

She frowned. "I don't think the library would appreciate it. They might consider it vandalism. Or maybe a hoax. They might suspend my card if they think I'd done it. Besides, I was just bringing it back. I'm done with it."

I didn't quite like the way she'd said "I'm done with it." So final. Like a dish of something she'd had enough of before even finishing it. I knew I shouldn't have asked, but I asked anyway. Shoot me. I'm a glutton for punishment. "Would you like to tell me what you thought of it?"

Her frown deepened.

"Not here though," I quickly added. "I'm beat and I need a drink."

She shrugged. "Okay. Sure. I guess."

***

We were seated in a booth at a local pub. No need to describe it. A half-dozen words will do: wood, tin, leaded glass, neon. Okay, five words. The drinks hadn't even arrived when she started in.

"The first story...well, it really seems to set the tone for all the rest. Your narrator visits, alternately, a peep show, a friend, a bar, a woman's apartment to shoot drugs, the hospital to visit and sexually molest his dying sister, the peep show again, the bar again. It really seems you're going out of your way to be intentionally distasteful. You're daring the reader to find something redeeming. The next story it's pretty much the same thing. The narrator is hooked on morphine again except now he's living in a building with a bunch of old ladies in the apartment his mother left behind when she died from cancer. He's basically another creep you're daring us to like. For a change of pace, you throw in a short story where the narrator is a young girl from a terrible dysfunctional family that ends with a dream about rollerskating under the city where she comes upon a secret morgue. Then it's back to the drug-dealing burn-outs for a while."

I threw back a drink and then another, but I took the next one more slowly.

"I take it you didn't like the book."

"No, it's not that at all. There's that story about the fat boy in that summer camp from hell. It was smart to include that story because it makes your narrator seem more likable than the others. Almost heroic. You were in danger at that point in having your readers identify you with your narrators who are, generally speaking, real jerks. Which I hope you don't mind me saying. Because I know that is rather the point. But still jerks are jerks. And I know we aren't supposed to identify the author with his narrators but it's hard not to when all your stories are told in the first person."

She'd hardly touched the beer she ordered. When I pointed this out to her, she looked at it like she was surprised to find it there. As if it had spontaneously grown there. Like a magic poison toadstool. "I don't drink," she said.

I was about to ask, but didn't bother. "Do you mind?" I made to reach for the glass. "I hate to see a beer die in vain."

"Go right ahead."

"You too."

"Well after that I guess it's kind of a blur. How could it not be? There's a story about a kid who's mom has cancer. A story about a kid who's dad has cancer. It seems someone always has cancer. It's dramatic, I know, to write a story where someone has cancer. But it strikes me as an easy way out. Like movies about people with cancer. If it's not cancer, then it's someone living a lowlife on drugs. The narrator often had a past life as a semi-successful rock musician. So its sort of like the same narrator telling variations of the same Ur-story of drugs, rock and roll, failed relationships, and general slackerdom. In other words, you. Or some version of you that you imagine yourself to be."

In the meantime, I ordered two more whiskeys and she ordered two more beers. I was in the process of drinking her second beer. "Yikes," I joked, "I sure hope you're not writing a book review."

"As a matter of fact I am."

My heart rolled over and sank. I feigned nonchalance, which wasn't hard to feign at this point in my career as a writer. Even easier in my career as a drunk. "Oh yeah? What paper?"

"Oh its not for a paper. It's for my blog."

My heart bobbed back merrily to the surface again. "Your blog?"

She looked positively cross. "I don't like the way you said 'your blog.' Like what you write couldn't just as easily have ended up on a blog if not for more than your share of lucky breaks."

"Well I don't know if I'd go that far."

"I would. And I know what you're thinking."

"What am I thinking?"

"I'm a bitter frustrated writer."

"Are you?"

"I may be a little bitter, I admit. But I'm not frustrated. I write all the time. A frustrated writer would be, by definition, someone who wanted to write but didn't."

"For your blog."

"On a bathroom wall if that's all that was available. Publishing what you wrote in a book or a magazine has nothing to do with it. Getting paid has nothing to do with it. Except for the bitterness part, maybe. But I'll have you know, my blog is visited by thousands."

I shuddered to think, considering what she'd been saying about my book. What she'd be likely to write in her review. "What's the address if you don't mind me asking? I might want to check out what you wrote about me." I tried to smile. Probably a mistake. I was afraid it might look like something assembled from bad instructions translated from the Chinese.

She wrote the address down on a cocktail napkin. Her pen was at the ready. It was then I realized she'd been taking notes on what I'd thought was our private, spontaneous little chat. She slid the napkin over and I stared at it without seeing anything. I couldn't see much then. Her head looked practically featureless at this point, like a thumbprint wearing a beret. I ordered another drink. I ordered her another beer.

"So I guess you're going to tell your thousands of readers what a crappy book Venus Drive is? What a lousy one-note, one-trick pony I am as a writer. You wouldn't be the first one to say so, let me assure you."

I said it like I was shrugging it off, but it was a critique that sat heavy on my shoulders all the same. Just between us, it hurt me. Probably because I suspected it was at least partially true. Like when you someone says you're losing your hair and you've been doing your best to hide it, especially from yourself.

"No, I won't say that. Well, I might say that in an oblique way. But I liked your stories in the end. I mean, I read the book all the way through and that means something. I even got a decent amount of enjoyment from it. I actually laughed a few times."

"You did?"

"Sure. Really, it was a good book and I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it."

She seemed suddenly eager to comfort me, as if she'd seen something naked trembling and vulnerable in my face that frightened her into thinking I might do some rash sort of harm to myself and she'd be responsible.

"Nice to hear. After what you've been saying. I mean, you've been pretty negative."

"Well, it's the kind of writing, the kind of book...it's unfortunate for you really. It's easier to say what you don't like about it than what you do like about it."

"Unfortunate me," I echo.

"It's like you say at the end of one of your stories. I don't remember the title. But its a kind of dystopian love story. At the end you leave a message on this woman's phone who you barely know explaining that though you hardly know her you somehow know that you love her, that you're fated to love her. You say, or your narrator says, but I think it's you, really, talking and you say 'the proof that it's there is that you can't quite see it.' And I think that pretty perfectly sums up my sense why, the end, your stories are worth reading. Why I like them. There's something there and the proof is that you can't quite see it. So you keep trying."

It was all I could do at that point to keep from falling out of the booth and onto the floor I was so loaded.

"If this were one of your stories," she said, "this would be the point where you'd invited me back to your place to shoot drugs and have sex with me and you'd pass out not knowing the next morning if we did it or not."

She smiled and slid her beer across the table towards me.

***

She was right. If this were, in fact, one of my stories, I'd wake up the next morning, alone, hungover and this would all be coming back to me piecemeal. I'd be wondering if I'd brought her back to my room. If we'd slept together.

I'd light a cigarette. I'd scratch my fingernails through my sparse, disordered hair and wonder how much, if any of it, happened at all. How much I'd simply imagined. Then I'd find her beret.

I'd frantically search the pockets of everything I wore the day before, much of it what I was still wearing, for the wet cocktail napkin on which she written the address of her website and find it smeared into an inky blue illegibility. A Rorschach blot meaning...god only knew what. It looks like, what else, a tumor.

I'd shrug, set the beret on my balding head, and find the last of my stash. I'd shoot it and sit by the window, muttering to the pigeons.