An excerpt from
Going to See the Elephant By Rodes Fishburne Excerpted from Going to See the Elephant by Rodes Fishburne Copyright Š 2008 by Rodes Fishburne. Excerpted by permission of Delacorte Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNoncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
A free excerpt courtesy of Bantam Dell
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Prologue A ll good first sentences have a kind of energy, wrote Slater Brown in his yellow notebook as he was being pedaled erratically down Market Street. And all good first sentences have a kind of sincerity, he continued, adjusting his pencil as the wheels of the rented rickshaw bounced beneath him. But what kind? Soon enough the oncoming cars began slowing, their passengers staring hard at the young man standing in the back of the bicycle taxi, writing God-knows-what, while being driven the wrong way down the busiest street in San Francisco. A-l-l GREAT s-t-o-r-i-e-s contain within themselVEs SOMEthing . . . faMiliAr, he scrawled as his driver swerved between a delivery truck filled with Tomales Bay Oysters and a rental car filled with wide-eyed nuns from Fargo. As if, sOmeHow, we’re nOt reaDing thEM for the first TIME! He chewed his lip. It hadn’t come through this clearly in
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days, weeks even. Just then the driver of the three-wheeled chariot steered back across the trolley tracks dividing Market Street and oblivion, and settled calmly into the correct lane. All great writing sounds as if one solitary voice were behind it, throwing itself across the chasm of eternity! Having sensed this, having t-a-s-t-e-d this, having understood this in the very fiber of my being, it would be ridiculous not to follow suit. I only ask that my— WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH . . . A bright red electric trolley, passing inches away, blew the yellow notebook out of Slater Brown’s hands. So deep in thought was he that he simply pulled a fresh one from his jacket pocket and turned to a clean page. For San Francisco’s most recent arrival, there was so much to capture: the city’s bright streets, the shimmer of water just beyond the tallest buildings, the clangor of the cosmopolis. He wanted to see it all—everything—first. Fast and messy. Like running through a museum of great paintings. There would be time to circle back later, to double-check, to consider thoughtfully. But just now he wanted to eat the city. Preferably with both hands. All down the boulevard he tapped the driver’s shoulder every time a particular view, or landmark, or spectacle revealed itself: the clots of people walking along Montgomery Street, speaking into tiny phones. Together and alone, he wrote. The buses whizzing past, their tops connected by long arms to electric wires strung high above the street. Like a modern-day Indra’s net!
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At Lotta’s Fountain he was particularly enthralled to see two men playing checkers, each atop a unicycle. After stopping and starting for twenty minutes, the bicycle taxi coasted to a halt in front of the majestic Ferry Building. Like legs of a visiting giant, he wrote while peering out over the Bay at the ironworks of the great bridge, only partially visible through the clouds. A city of infinite magic! A city of synchrony, he wrote, spinning in a slow circle, taking everything in like a passenger on a private merry-go-round. A city where fate and luck collide in an explosion of destiny! He inhaled the salty October air. I want to write something that will last forever. Something future generations will read with great delight. As if putting their fingers on the pulse of a ghost! He exhaled. He’d been in San Francisco for exactly forty-seven minutes. After soaking in the downtown atmospherics Slater Brown put away his notebook and returned to the padded backseat of the bicycle taxi, pointing down Market Street with the confidence of Achilles circling Troy. “Take me to the city!” he shouted above the street noise as the wheels lurched into motion. “Take me to her!”
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Book One
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Chapter One
Perhaps the bicycle taxi driver spoke no English. Or perhaps he was the trickster Loki in disguise. Or perhaps he was simply tired of pedaling around a passenger with a 250-pound trunk full of first-edition nineteenth-century novels. But after a fifteen-minute ride Slater Brown’s luggage was deposited on the curb in front of TK’s Bar in the Mission District and he was presented with a bill for eighty-seven dollars. As the bicycle taxi jingled off into traffic Slater Brown smoothed his suit and stepped inside. Upon first review TK’s wasn’t exactly the literary place he’d hoped for. In fact, the only book any of the residents were reading was the Bay Meadows racing form. Nevertheless, it was at TK’s Bar & Simmer (it wasn’t licensed as a grill, but they kept a hot plate next to the cash register), beneath a faded photograph of Joe DiMaggio holding a stringer of tiny silver fish, that Slater Brown first sat down and made the round wooden table talk. The talking table—christened the “noisy fecker” years
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ago by the sour-faced Irish barman known as Whilton—had first exhibited its propensity to thump during an after-hours dice game of “Ship, Cap’n, Crew.” The game, a not-to-bemissed ritual at TK’s, had been played every Thursday night since the Nixon administration. During one particular game, Sideways Sal had pounded on the table so hard as he was losing that one of the spindly table legs had inexplicably become shorter than the others. “I wish’t I’d me a furnace,” said Whilton at the time. But he didn’t, and tilting the table sideways through the door and out into the open street was too much hassle for an aging man with a bum back, so he simply slid the round wooden table to the farthest corner, where the extra glasses were stacked below the pay phone, and forgot about it. Tonight the talking table, having finally found its muse, was impossible to ignore. It vibrated madly, sending up little explosions of dust and pencil shavings from the linoleum floor like hot grease, as Slater Brown filled his yellow notebook with observations. It was the kind of thumping conversation that held no interest to the tired faces gathered alongside the bar. If they had lifted their heads to listen to the frantic sound coming from the corner, they would never have understood the language. Transcribed, the talking table told a secret, unknown to anyone else, for Slater would never share it: Twenty-nine, twenty-nine, twenty-nine . . . The very idea of it beat down on him with the weight of a thousand steel hammers. There was a kind of numerological destiny to twenty-nine. If you haven’t anted up the chips of imagination by twenty-nine, then what are you? Just a professional mourner, looking back,
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pulling away on the wrong train, your voice caught in your throat, unable to attract the attention of the impatient conductor. By the age of twenty-nine James Baldwin and Saul Bellow and T. S. Eliot and Fitzgerald and Rilke and— The pencil point crumbled. He’d been pressing too hard against the page. As Slater Brown paused to resharpen with his pocketknife, blowing the cedar shavings onto the floor, he couldn’t help but look over his shoulder to see if anyone was watching. By the age of twenty-nine Hemingway and Chekhov and O. Henry had pulled themselves together for the world to see, walked to center stage, forgotten the lisp or canker sore, the bunched-up underwear, their mother’s stink-eye, and killed—killed!—the audience. Yet here he was at twenty-five, rising each morning, trying to pull forth some kind of original writing that would stand without support. There had been the one poem, published in The Bartleby Review. But that had been in the special issue devoted to dyslexic writers. And he’d even faked that! For him, the worst part was the loathing. No, actually the worst part is the panic. Turning each breath into a battle . . . Actually, the worst part was that he didn’t even have the courage to admit to the world that what he wanted, more than anything, was to be a writer people would remember. He’d read the masters. He’d reread the masters. James Joyce had been quite explicit in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul . . .
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But despite repeated attempts, Slater Brown found the smithy of the soul a lot harder to locate than Mr. Joyce had ever let on. The idea that you simply read everything—from the Bard to Balzac, from Cervantes to Conrad—picking up clues on how to write your own masterpiece is just bullshit. Because it leads you to believe that by following their footprints you can learn the route in advance. But it doesn’t work that way! Behind Slater Brown a jubilant cheer went up at the bar as the residents watched a televised home run float out of the baseball park—a lonely, predestined comet on its way to illuminate the inky darkness of the Bay.
The talking table had gone quiet. The faces at the bar were quiet too, turned upward like geckos, basking in the muted glow of sporting highlights. When the ninth-inning home run was replayed on the eleven o’clock news, they cheered again, like drunken sailors who had forgotten they’d already seen land. By now Slater Brown was standing, hunched over the talking table in a kind of masturbatory clinch, unconsciously holding his breath as he tried to force himself down the tiny aperture of the pencil point and spread his thoughts across the page. His mind reached for something to write. He could locate the right ideas, always in fact, but it was impossible to put them onto paper exactly the way he thought of them. It’s not my fault, he promised himself. It’s the words’ fault! The English language, in all of its elastic, indeterminate obstinacy, is to blame! He had every confidence in his ability to communicate his deepest philosophical thoughts and feelings (and sense of hu-
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mor!) if the words would just present themselves. In the correct order! That was important, because a lot of what Slater Brown had identified as bad writing was not bad thinking or bad observation or bad feeling but simply bad order. Case in point, he wrote in his yellow notebook: A dictionary. Every book ever written comes from words in a dictionary. But it isn’t the words that make a book interesting. It is the ORDER of the words. Otherwise, people would go around reading dictionaries! Pleased beyond reckoning with this digression, he touched pencil to paper and soon the wooden table leg began pounding along again, a manic telegraph sending out a midnight S.O.S. He’d come to San Francisco expressly for the purpose of writing something that would last forever. Only he didn’t feel he could share this personal ambition with just anyone. They would think what? That he was a fruitcake! That he had lost contact with reality? It was a tricky situation, having a plan you couldn’t share. Nevertheless, for the first three days he exerted the plan flawlessly and with maximum concentration from his perch in the back of TK’s. In the evenings he would reread what he’d written by the bar’s dim light. Nobody paid him a scintilla of attention. By day four he began to flounder. By day five he couldn’t even look at himself in the cracked bathroom mirror. After flogging and thrashing through the catalogue of ideas in his mind, seeking a theme, or character, or even a single word that would last forever, Slater Brown began to change his mind. Irrespective of the fact that this self-assigned task was harder than anticipated, he was slowly but surely running out of money and for the first time it occurred to him that writing for eternity didn’t pay very well. At the outset, this had
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seemed like a future problem. But on the morning of day six, given his diminishing cash reserves, it revealed itself to be a problem very much set in the present. So, with a pendulum’s logic, Slater Brown decided to forget about forever and instead write something successful. You couldn’t have it both ways. For God’s sake, as so many of the dead masters have shown, you can’t shine and illuminate at the same time. So there it was. Write something successful. Simple.