Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [152]
Then I was going back to the joint with him, living through being new in the prison yard, having to fight to save myself, even making a name as one not to fuck with, looking out for a smaller man in my cell block, all while counting the days till I’m free.
It took five weeks to write a beginning, a middle, and an end. When I wrote that final passage it was raining outside and my breath was high in my chest and I was tapping my foot under the desk, my hand and pencil joined together. The room was quiet. There was just my breathing and the ticking of rain against the glass.
OVER THE next few days, I typed the story on a black Royal typewriter I’d bought from a woman in Loveland. I’d found her through the classified ads of the newspaper and drove out to where she lived in an Airstream trailer in a brown valley in the shadow of a mountain. She had two typewriters to sell, both of them her father’s. He’d been a journalist and war correspondent and had just died. She told me this almost cheerfully, this kind-faced woman in a smock and jeans, but when I pointed to the one I wanted, she began to cry. She shook her head and covered her mouth and apologized. She asked if fifty dollars was too much, and I paid her and we hugged each other as if we had both lost him, and now I was typing the last line of my story on her father’s black Royal.
It was only seven pages long. I called it “Forky” and drove to a copy center across from campus, made six copies, then mailed five to magazines, one in Boston, three in New York City, and one in Chicago. It was the first time I’d done that. It was like throwing a rock over a cliff and waiting to see if it would make a sound.
The sixth copy I mailed to the only writers I knew, my father and his wife back East. Three days later, there was a knock on my door, a skinny drunk who lived across from the phone booth telling me I had a call.
It was Pop. “Son?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re a writer, man.”
He’d told me that once before and I’d deflected it, deflected the word itself, but hearing it now was different for I felt tied only to what gave birth to that word, the writing, the sweet labor of it, and now he was talking about this new story, praising it far more than I thought it deserved. But hanging up, I was grateful for the call, for my far more experienced father to take the time to see what I was doing and say something about it. This was something he had never done much of, and as I walked back down the hall to my room, there was the feeling I’d stepped into a river whose current was taking me to someplace good.
IT WAS night and I was back on Columbia Park again. The house was full of men drinking and smoking, trash-talking and yelling, laughing across rooms to one another through the noise from our stereo they’d cranked too loud. I was sick and weak, my mouth dust and ash, and my hands were unable to grasp anything though I was trying to yank men out of chairs and off our wicker couch. I was screaming to get out, get the fuck out, and I was kicking and throwing wispy punches that missed. I got only one or two men out the front door and off the porch, my face burning, my stomach rising up, then I was on my knees, my head resting against the cool seat of the toilet. I was in my bathroom in Boulder, and I’d been this way for days. It was some microscopic bug, but it felt like punishment. For everything. For keeping over fifty men in line with my clipboard and red pen. For never clearing anybody dangerous out of my house. For all the faces I’d punched.
I was tired of living alone a mile above sea level and so far from a