Are You Happy Now? (26 page)

“No problem,” Lincoln tells him, pouring himself a glass of the watery brew.

Buford looks impossibly scrubbed and tended for the venue—hair trimmed close to the scalp, shirt collared and starched. He’s eschewed a tie, but he’s wearing what’s probably the only tweed jacket in the place, perhaps the only tweed jacket in all of Wicker
Park. Talk about undaunted courage. “Have you been to a slam before?” asks Lincoln, who himself has dressed down in old jeans and a plaid flannel L.L.Bean shirt.

Buford puts on a peeved frown. “Of course. Performed a few times, too.” Softening, he says, “Never here, though.”

“I haven’t been to one in years,” Lincoln admits. “I guess I thought they had fallen out of fashion.”

“I know, I know. Harold Bloom said slams would be the end of art.” Buford shakes his head. “More death cries from the
ancien régime
.” Quickly, he brightens. “Hey, brought a fan club,” he says, and he gestures toward several tables of bright faces situated toward the back. A handful of the kids see him and wave. “Some of my students—the ones old enough to drink. I’ll introduce you later.”

The program starts twenty minutes late. A skinny young man wearing a wool knit cap and with his sleeves rolled up to expose the tattoos on his forearms welcomes the audience from a microphone just a few feet from Lincoln’s chair. The host explains the Funk Hole protocol: Eight poets get three minutes each in each round. Over three rounds, judges randomly selected from the audience will whittle down the contenders to reach a winner. “Everybody get it?” he asks.

A chorus of affirmation.

“Before we get started,” the man under the wool cap continues, “I’d like to acknowledge a special guest with us here tonight, someone who works tirelessly to keep Chicago’s literary lights burning.”

Dear God, thinks Lincoln, his heart leaping. Did Buford tell them I was coming?

“Marissa Morgan!” cries the host, and he points to a table on the side, where Lincoln can see the blogger’s huge, purple-rimmed glasses and overeager smile. “I’m sure everyone in this room reads her blog,
Big Shoulders Books
. Keep up the good work, Marissa.” Wool Cap leads the audience in rousing applause.

Lincoln’s shame—entirely private—at his momentary hubris immediately gives way to a more practical emotion: terror that Marissa Morgan may actually write about this event. Will Lincoln’s poet come under public scrutiny? Worse, will Buford’s connection to Pistakee (and Lincoln!) be exposed? And all this time Lincoln had been hoping that
Still Life
would pass silently to remainder bins.

The opening poet in the first round turns out to be a young-ish woman in a wheelchair who swerves her vehicle around the tables on the way to the front. Wool Cap lowers the mic, and she recites a poem that describes in piercing detail the car crash that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Lincoln finds the poem quite powerful, though he doesn’t see anything very poetic about it—he can imagine the passage as several well-crafted paragraphs in a personal essay. The audience applauds politely.

The action gets rolling with the next contestant, a wiry guy with a ratty gray ponytail who looks as if he could be left over from the Funk Hole’s past existence. Shouting and punching the air, he declaims a poem about the night his army unit ravaged an Iraqi village, and he and another soldier unloaded their weapons on a crude, mud-brick house that they suspected of harboring insurgents. The audience whoops and hollers along with him—whoops even at the end, as the poet describes a lone, human cry emerging from the mayhem.

The vet gives way to a potbellied ex-con drug-dealer who poetically rails about the brutal injustices served by the cops who raided his apartment. He yields to a lumpy woman promoting the liberation of children (“Run, boys and girls! Run down that hall! Shout, boys and girls! Shout through the walls!”). The audience is fevered and noisy, and the pitchers of beer are flowing.

Between poets, Buford confides, “I have a bit of an advantage here because my poems are so short. I can probably recite five in three minutes, if there aren’t too many interruptions.”

He’s seventh in the first round. When Wool Cap finally calls his name, Buford gives Lincoln a sporty nod and hops up to the mic. One of the kids in back shouts out, “Go for it!” and an anticipatory silence falls over the revved-up audience. Buford starts with “The Remote,” his poem about the channel changer. He recites with the professorial manner Lincoln has come to know well—open, searching, somewhat cerebral. At first, the crowd seems befuddled. It remains deadly silent, save for the end of the poem, when a lone shout of “Yeah!” comes from the vicinity of Buford’s students.

The poet then moves to “North Wells Between Grand and Illinois,” and the heckling starts. First there’s an outbreak of hissing, then a cry of “Get it going!” answered from the other side of the room by “Get the hook!” Hooting laughter competes with Buford’s words (“The tile shop flaunts its shiny square baubles/all corners and edges, a Tuscan intrusion...”). Gripping the mic like a rock singer, Buford forges on, reciting from memory. When “Throw Rug” opens to outright booing, Buford’s students rally to his defense. “Let him speak!” “Shuddup!” Soon, the scene erupts into an aural melee—stomping, whistling, cries and shouts, and laughter fill the decrepit room. A man a few feet behind Lincoln uses his hand and mouth like a trumpet, blowing farting noises in the direction of Buford. Even the two bartenders, an almost matching set of young women dressed in black, stop pouring drinks to enjoy the scene. Still, Buford soldiers on, looking out on the sea of chaos with no visible hint of recognition.

When his three minutes expire, everyone in the room stands and cheers, the tables of DePaul students waving and screaming, trying to drown out the derision. Lincoln glances across the room and sees that Marissa Morgan is on her feet, too, applauding and laughing. A skirmish breaks out in back near the students, and the sound of bottles breaking and chairs scraping the floor interrupts the commotion, but the violence is quickly tamped down, and Wool Cap retakes the mic and settles the crowd.

“Whew!” whispers Buford as he sits again beside Lincoln and the noise dies.

“Way to hang in there,” Lincoln says.

“What a show!” the poet exclaims, his face lit and vibrant.

Lincoln thinks: No wonder he’s undaunted. The poor sap is clueless.

Of course, Buford doesn’t survive the first round. When Wool Cap reads out the four poets who will advance, Buford utters a soft, “Aww.”

“Well, you gave it a good shot,” Lincoln says.

Buford rallies immediately. “This was great! Very exciting! A good omen!”

“You think?” Lincoln can’t hide his skepticism.

“History is full of artists whose works are shouted down,” Buford points out, as if it were Lincoln himself who was clueless. “The audience rioted at the first performance of
The Rite of Spring
.”

“Yes,” says Lincoln cautiously. “Of course, that was the avant-garde. The author was way ahead—”

“It’s all art,” Buford says, intercepting the potential insult. “Who’s to say what’s avant-garde and what’s retrograde? Everything moves in big circles, anyway. Besides, what’s important here is the attention. This could be great for sales. You might want to increase the print run.”

“Ahh.”

There’s a break before the start of the second round. When Buford says he wants to go thank his loyal students, Lincoln uses the occasion to take his leave. “You don’t want to see how it ends?” asks Buford. “My money’s on the ex-con.”

“You can let me know.”

Buford grabs Lincoln’s hand. “Thanks for coming,” he says. “It really meant a lot for me to have my editor here.”

Lincoln tells him he wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

The next day at work, Lincoln checks in periodically at BigShouldersBooks.com to make sure Marissa Morgan hasn’t
immortalized the fiasco. Nothing for most of the day. Then, late in the afternoon, she drops in a long, varied post—news of a bookstore closing, author readings, a brief Q&A with a woman from Naperville who’s publishing a vegetarian cookbook. Scanning the text, Lincoln’s eyes catch on the last item:

Action at the Funk Hole

Poetry slams are supposed to be energized affairs, but the Funk Hole’s event Monday night took it to an extreme as the crowd reacted so violently to a DePaul professor’s poetry that a fistfight broke out between supporters and detractors. The short, quiet, rather domestic poems by psychology professor Antonio Buford stirred a disdain among some listeners rarely witnessed before by this observer, though a vocal group of DePaul students heartily supported their professor. Afterward, Professor Buford seemed unfazed by the reaction. He described his poetry as “Emily Dickinsonish,” and he said Pistakee Press is bringing out an edition of his work later this spring. “My editor is John Lincoln, the best literary editor in Chicago,” the professor told me. “He gets it.” No one was hurt in the altercation. Iraqi War vet Edward X. DeLeo was eventually declared the slam’s winner.

Lincoln stares numbly at his computer screen. The report will live in perpetuity in cyberspace, he and Buford locked forever in a literary embrace. What if Jeff Kessler at Malcolm House decides to check up on Lincoln with a quick Google search? What if Duddleston sees the item? After years of nurture and careful investment, his beloved publishing house has been made a laughingstock.

Lincoln’s depression eases slightly after he spends half an hour testing various phrases on Google and finds that only the most targeted search (“John Lincoln + Antonio Buford”) lifts the
item onto the first page of results. Is he safe hiding in Google’s algorithm?

On Thursday morning at ten, the editorial committee gathers in the conference room for its weekly meeting. Duddleston is late arriving. Lincoln sits beside Warren Sternberg and across the table from Hazel Lanier, who has brought a manila folder thick with proposals about children’s books. Just as Duddleston enters carrying Amy’s manuscript under one arm, Hazel looks brightly at Lincoln and says, “I read about your poet in Marissa Morgan’s blog!”

“Uhhhh.” Lincoln can’t speak.

The boss glares at his employees as if he’s caught them in flagrante. “Can I see you alone for a moment,” he says to Lincoln.

Duddleston leads Lincoln down to Lincoln’s office and shuts the door behind them. The boss doesn’t bother to sit, so the two of them stand uncomfortably in the small space. A whorl of wrinkles between Duddleston’s eyes makes Lincoln think of a tornado. “Have you spoken to your writer Antonio Buford lately?” the boss demands.

“Ah, yes.” (So it’s happened: Lincoln’s world has come to an end.)

“He keeps calling Matt Breeson, telling him we should increase the print run of his book. He’s being a real pest.” Duddleston doesn’t try to suppress his disdain. He learned long ago in the screaming chaos of the trading floor never to pick over decisions already made, contracts already bought or sold. They’ve settled on printing one thousand books. End of discussion.

“I told him it wouldn’t happen.” So this isn’t about the blog?

“He thinks you’re distracted by your divorce—you’re too distraught to focus on the problem. I hope we haven’t made a mistake getting involved with this guy.” The thought fuels the tornado, which grows and spawns several others that rage across the plains of the boss’s forehead.

“It’ll be all right,” Lincoln assures with no good reason.

“I hope so. Now, as for this.” Duddleston places Amy’s manuscript on the corner of Lincoln’s desk, then strokes it as if it were a small dog. “I read Amy’s book,” he says.

“Oh?” Stay calm.

“It’s very sexual, isn’t it?”

“Well, not unduly so, I think. It touches our cultural moment, the sexualization of quotidian life. And, of course, there’s the coming-of-age phenomenon. Done literarily...” In his anxiety, Lincoln babbles.

“Oh, it’s very well written,” the boss interrupts. “I was impressed. A bit shocked, I must admit. Our innocent little Amy.” He can’t suppress a boyish grin. Duddleston married relatively late, in his early forties, and his two kids, a boy and a girl, are just entering adolescence. Lincoln wonders if the good Presbyterian walked chastely through his own young manhood or if he’s simply forgotten.

“Good writers have rich imaginations,” Lincoln suggests.

Duddleston puckers his lips, forming a thought. “I just don’t know how to judge it. I mean, if I were in a bookstore, would I pick this up?” He pretends to consider, sniffing the air. “No.”

“But do you ever read fiction?”

“You’re right. Not often, not often.”

“See, I think this can be a good test for us. I’ve got some ideas how we can promote it. We can use it to really pump up our skills in social media.”

Duddleston nods coolly, and Lincoln quickly tacks sideways. “We can publish incredibly cheaply,” he points out.

“I suppose it would be good for staff morale,” Duddleston muses. “Publishing a book by one of our own.”

“Exactly! Who knows what sort of talent you’ll stir up.” Lincoln gets a disheartening vision of Matt Breeson marching in with a three-hundred-page police procedural or Hazel Lanier with a picture book of children and kittens.

Fortunately, Duddleston is already on to another issue. “What do you suppose we should pay Amy?”

“Well, she doesn’t have an agent.” It occurs to Lincoln that he has a serious conflict of interest here, since he’s hardly in a
position to defend Amy’s financial stake. But never mind. She’ll be happy enough just to see the book in print. “We can give her a small advance—maybe a thousand dollars—and a standard contract, then if the book’s a success, she’ll get her payoff with the royalties.”

Duddleston offers a genuine smile. “Well, what the hell, let’s do it,” he says. “But it’s only a test. We’re not back in the fiction business yet.”

“Right.” Lincoln wants to let out a whoop. Instead, he follows Duddleston’s lead and places his hand on the manuscript. Nice puppy.

On their way back to the editorial meeting, Duddleston says, “Let me tell Amy, if you don’t mind. I want to see the look on her face.”