True-Life Adventure

Mission Emergency: “I didn’t think about it much because mostly he complained about his stomach. He said he had the stomach flu.”
    “Did he eat anything while he was here?”
    “Just drank some coffee. I didn’t think it was the best thing for the flu, but he wanted it.”
    “Did he ever talk to you about any heart trouble— any medication he took for any chronic illnesses?”
    “No. He seemed fine until today.”
    “How long have you two been working together?”
    “About three or four months.” I shrugged, feeling helpless. “I’m afraid I really didn’t know him very well.”
    Stanley Smith left, taking his colleagues and Jack with him. I felt not just depressed, but panicky, as if I didn’t dare look back because something might be gaining on me. Jack was fifty-five, which is too young to die, and I was thirty-eight, which is too old, like the man said, to be a young talent.
    When I was in my early twenties, I took off to see the world, so that was out of the way. When I was a reporter, I covered the war in Vietnam; the entire Patty Hearst case, including the trial; the holocaust at Jonestown; and approximately fifty-nine thousand soporific meetings of various city councils and county commissions. Nobody could say I hadn’t been around. I’d also known lots of women and maybe loved one of them, I think.
    But the things I hadn’t done were the ones I didn’t want to think about, and Jack’s death was kind of stirring things up. I was afraid they might start crossing my mind and that’s what was making me panicky. If I’d known a woman who was fond of me, maybe I could have called her and she would have made me feel better. But there was no such woman in the world, probably including my mother, and that was one of the things I didn’t want to think about.
    So I did what I always do when too much reality starts intruding on me— I sat down at my typewriter and made up things. I write detective novels when I’m not ghostwriting. I’d never gotten any of them published, and that, of course, was the main thing I didn’t want to think about.
    But writing them is what keeps me going. It’s a way of making things make sense. My characters do what I want them to and I know right from page 1 that everything’s going to come out okay. And nowhere along the way, no matter how many unfortunate incidents occur, am I going to have to smell nine hundred bodies rotting in Guyana and wonder what could have been done to prevent the thing and whether anyone will be punished for it and how much, if anything, can be learned from it.
    You’ve heard about journalists burning themselves out? Too much true-life adventure is what does it. Making things up saves a lot of wear and tear.
    That’s what I decided when I quit the San Francisco Chronicle and became an unsuccessful detective novelist masquerading as a ghostwriter. And now here I was: sitting in my dining room/office, trying to think up trouble for a made-up detective to get into when a real-life detective had just walked into my house and died drinking a cup of coffee. I’m not normally given to writer’s block, but this was ridiculous.
    I gave up and went to the movies.
    When I got back, I was feeling a little better, but my house, which I loved and which was the only thing besides Spot I could call my own, wasn’t where I wanted to be. It felt oppressive, as if death had left behind a murky residue. The murk was in my head and I knew it, but I opened all the windows just in case.
    Then I put Dolly Parton on the stereo, poured myself a glass of Mondavi Barberone, and got my mind on Dolly’s troubles. For such a smart, successful, good-looking woman, she has lots of them, and I can sometimes take comfort in the knowledge. Not that I want Dolly to be unhappy— it just kind of puts things in perspective to know that no one’s exempt.
    I was on my second glass of the Barberone and feeling its purple glow in my cells and synapses when Debbie Hofer of the Chronicle rang up. There was a woman who was fond of me. Maybe two, even— I’d probably been wrong about my mother.
    “I’m calling about your dick.”
    Debbie was sixty-three and getting younger every day, apparently. “Sweetbuns!” I said. “I knew you’d come around.”
    “Jack Birnbaum, you idiot. Wasn’t he your dick?”
    “Oh. Yeah. I forgot for a minute.”
    What I’d forgotten was that I used to call Jack Birnbaum my dick to amuse my friends. As in: “Gotta go now; my