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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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Chapter Two
The morning of his twelfth day in the city Slater Brown lay in his bedroom in a state of paralysis while the pages of the San Francisco Sun covered his naked body like a funeral shroud. Piles upon piles of books stood in four-foot-tall towers around the room, making it look like a library bereft of shelves. Along the windowsill rested three decades of The Bartleby Review, salvaged from the dumpster of a decommissioned library. Propping up a three-legged mahogany wardrobe was a seventeen-pound untranslated, unexpurgated, and unread edition of Don Quixote. The desk next to the window was covered by bound sets of Icelandic sagas and Russian short stories, while the major Irish poets, interspersed with a random selection of South American magic realists, occupied the only chair. Simply moving around the room required tiptoeing down serpentine pathways and around the pulpy stalagmites, or risk sending the greatest names in literature crashing to the
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floor. Only the small sink and the tiny bed remained uncovered by the bibliomania. That Slater Brown wanted to be a writer was obvious. But it was more than that. He wanted to be the very best writer in the entire world. To one day have his work included in the company of the classics that surrounded him. But even this secret had a false compartment: By his calculation, he already was the best writer in the world. In the history of the world! He knew things, saw things, heard things that would blow people’s minds! He just hadn’t gone through the irksome task of writing it down yet. In the correct order! It is not easy to maintain the idea you’re the greatest writer in the history of the world when you haven’t actually published anything yet. Yet there are ways this can be accomplished, and Slater Brown found one of them without benefit of instruction. Remarkably enough, if one were to imagine oneself the greatest writer in the history of the world, then it logically followed that one did not, per se, have to suffer through the dross of lesser scribes. This dross turned out to include almost all of known literature. This philosophy was reinforced because Slater Brown believed that he could tell, straightaway, if a book was any good or not by simply reading the first sentence. Hopped up on double espressos and small pieces of Turkish halva, he passionately wrote and rewrote the familiar sentences in his yellow notebook: All good first sentences have a kind of energy. And all good first sentences have a kind of sincerity. But what kind? Outside his window came the echo of a distant foghorn. It
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was as if the city were agreeing with him. He took this as synchronistic coincidence of the highest order and pressed on. Thanks to the Sincerity-Energy principle, more than one of the books in Slater’s room had been opened and inspected before being thrown unread into the corner. The ratio of unacceptable books to acceptable was a dozen to one. Feeding this unique reading habit was a second streak of compulsive behavior. Before Slater Brown dismissed the offending book—with the confidence of a pharaoh handing down a death sentence—he would invariably flip to the back of the dust jacket and read the author’s biography. In its own way this little slice of information was more important to him than the book itself. He mined each of these miniature life stories until he’d done the mental mathematics necessary to figure out how old the authors were when they’d first written The Big One. This was how he’d come to the horrifying conclusion about the terrible importance of the number twenty-nine, and furthermore how he’d convinced himself that, at the age of twenty-five, he was being left behind in the great parade of literary history. Reading the first sentences of the greatest books in the English language in order to feel superior, and then reading the author’s biography (which invariably caused him to feel terrible and inferior and, finally, terribly inferior), was not a pastime that ever caused Slater to get much writing accomplished, and seemed to be responsible for his current state of stasis. It was like watching a bee sting itself over and over again. Suddenly there was a knock on his bedroom door. “Who is it?” he said, lurching to cover himself with the crumpled newspaper.
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“Who do you think it is?” said the voice. “Just to let you know, your breakfast is getting cold.” “Than . . . thanks, Mrs. Cagliostra,” he said, scrambling from bed. Mrs. Cagliostra, a fifth-generation San Franciscan, had rented her guest cottage to him provided he sign a contract that stated he would keep an eye out for burglars, didn’t play any musical instruments, was not in possession of a Himalayan longhair cat, and (“absolutely, positively!”) allowed no sleepovers. Such was Mrs. Cagliostra’s Catholic disposition that encounters with strangers latching her sidewalk gate at six in the morning had proven detrimental to her digestion. She’d also demanded a month’s rent and a deposit, which Slater had been able to satisfy only by turning over a bejeweled silver snuffbox once belonging to his great-grandmother. “I’ll just hold on to this until you find steady employment,” she said, slipping the family heirloom into her apron pocket. The renter’s cottage sat in the rear garden of the big house, among the slugs and calla lilies, and looked like a miniature redand-white shoe box, with a sloping slate roof and two wide windows that overlooked Powell Street. One entire side of the cottage was covered with tiny pink climbing roses, which Mrs. Cagliostra tended to every day and affectionately called “my girls.” He’d found Mrs. C. (as he came to call her) on his seventh day in San Francisco by perusing rental advertisements on a giant rain-spattered cork bulletin board in front of Generosa’s pastry shop in North Beach. His first nights in the city were spent sleeping in a eucalyptus grove underneath the stars in the Presidio, which had seemed like a perfectly reasonable plan until the fog rolled in and made all his clothes, even his packed ones, smell like sour milk.
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Besides, Mrs. Cagliostra’s house had seized Slater’s imagination the moment he read the street address: 135 Joyce Street. It might as well have been named “Finnegans Way,” or “Smithy of the Soul Drive.” Regardless, it was clearly a synchronistic coincidence. Mrs. C. stood five feet three inches tall and wore her hair in a huge neo-beehive hairdo that forced her sharp face to compete for attention. All of this made her already suspicious hazel eyes even more intimidating. She suffered no fools gladly, and her husband, Frank Cagliostra, being no fool himself, had sensibly passed away ten years earlier at the age of sixty-seven while recuperating from a mild stroke. Yet for all of her fierceness, Mrs. Cagliostra possessed the rare ability to transcend the reflexive guffaw, as evident the day she opened the front door of her two-story Victorian and saw Slater Brown standing there, her address written on his hand in permanent marker. He wore a thrift-store linen suit, carried an ash walking stick, and had a white Panama hat tipped rakishly over one eye. If the linen suit hadn’t been missing an outside pocket, or his walking stick hadn’t been three inches too short for him, or it hadn’t been clear that his shoes each belonged to the wing tip genus but not quite to the same species, he would have cut a very dashing figure indeed. However, none of this mattered to Mrs. Cagliostra. She’d already read his face, like the opening lines of a promising story, and saw buried there both energy and sincerity.
At breakfast later that morning Mrs. Cagliostra burst in and out of her dining room bearing dishes: two kinds of toast, a bowl of sliced mangoes, sausage, coffee, juice, and sparkling
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water. She made a show of doing these things because they were included in her rent price and she had been raised to be exceedingly fair. Stingy, yes. Suspicious, absolutely. But fair, always. Laying down a bowl of cereal in front of Slater, she sat down across the table and asked in the direct way of hers what he was doing for work. “Not sure,” said Slater after a moment. “Thought I’d peruse the paper.” Mrs. Cagliostra put her teacup down with a bang. “I don’t like the sound of that,” she said. The word “peruse” had always sounded a little fishy to her. “What do you want to do, anyway?” “Hmmm . . . don’t know,” he said. “When I was your age we didn’t have time to say things like that!” “Well,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “I want to be a writer.” But he choked a bit on the last part so that it came out hoarse and wispy. What Mrs. Cagliostra heard was: “I want to be a waiter.” “Why didn’t you say so!” she shouted. “I’ll call Salvatore and see if he’s got any openings over at DaVinci’s Cellar. It’s a first-class operation.” “No, no,” said Slater, finally smoked out of his reticence. “Writer, writer, I want to be a writer!” She tilted her head as if what she was looking at was so lopsided that it needed to be addressed on its own terms. The cereal in his bowl crackled like artillery. “What for?” she asked. He left the house soon after breakfast, herded out by Mrs.
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Cagliostra, who waved off his promises of finding work “right away” and “expecting success shortly.” She had heard it all before. In her experience, men, particularly young men, would rather tell you, endlessly and without interruption, what they were going to do rather than just going out and doing it. “It’s one of the leading problems in the world today,” she told her bridge group later that afternoon.