Where We Live and Die (9 page)

It was just before six in the evening. My girlfriend had gone home at nine that morning, and I’d been writing non-stop all day. That doesn’t sound like hard work, typing words on a laptop for nine hours, and it’s not, in the grand scheme of things. I’ve had hard jobs—sweating in a foundry, moving boxes on the loading docks, driving a tractor trailer for fifteen-hour stretches. Writing is a breeze compared to those, and a lot more fun. Still, it was a lot easier to write for nine hours straight when I was in my twenties than it is in my early forties. My back hurt, my wrists ached, and my fingers were stiff with the onset of arthritis—a relatively new affliction that biology and genetics had given me for a forty-second birthday present last year.

I decided to take a break, and while I was brewing a fresh pot of coffee, it occurred to me how quiet the house seemed, and how lonely I was. I’ve got my youngest son Mondays through Thursdays, and my girlfriend visits me when she can, but when the two of them aren’t here, I spend my time alone and spend my alone time writing. Writing is a solitary act, and it makes for a solitary existence. Hell, I should know. Writing is the reason I’m alone. I’m good at it—writing, I mean. I’m not so good at being alone, despite the fact that it’s how I spend my life. But I’m good at writing, or at least, that’s what my editors and publishers tell me. I sometimes suspect they only tell me that because I make them lots of money. People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear when you’re making them a lot of money. I’ve often wanted to purposely write a bad book, just so I can see their false praise for what it is, but I wouldn’t do that to my fans and readers. And I wouldn’t do it to myself. Because other than being a father, writing is the only thing I’m good at. It’s the only constant in my life. The only thing I can always count on.

And all it cost me was everything else.

For starters, writing has resulted in two failed marriages. One in my twenties, when I was living in a trailer with a young wife and infant son, working all day in a factory and coming home at night to try my hand at becoming the next Joe Lansdale or David Schow or Skipp and Spector. Another in my thirties, when I’d succeeded in my career as a writer, and was living in a nice house with a wonderful second wife and another infant son, writing all day and then writing all night, as well, just to stay on top of the heap of bills and keep a roof over our heads.

Writing has also cost me friends—both from before I became a writer and after. Childhood chums, pissed off that I mined so much of our lives for fiction. Friends from high school and old Navy buddies who I no longer had anything in common with, who assumed that just because they saw my books in stores or my movies on television that I must somehow be wealthy and hey, could I lend them a few dollars or help them get published or be the dancing monkey and star attraction to impress all their friends and family members with at their next Christmas party. Fellow writers and peers, people I’d come up with, promised to do it together with, only to have them lose touch with me when I got successful.

Or maybe it was me who lost touch with them. Maybe it was my own insecurities—my own guilt at achieving everything we’d all hoped for, while they still hadn’t. And maybe that applied to those old high school friends, as well. Maybe they were just proud of me, and I mistook that pride for something else. And maybe those childhood chums were right to be angry. Perhaps not all of our personal demons needed to end up as grist for my fiction mill. And maybe—just maybe—my two ex-wives had been right to expect me to choose a healthy relationship with them instead of fifteen hours at a keyboard living inside my own head seven days a week, instead of talking to them or living with them.

Those were the thoughts that kept me awake some nights, and on those nights, I drank more whiskey and continued to write. It was a self-perpetuating vicious cycle. Lose everything because of writing until the only thing you have left is the writing itself. Rinse and repeat.

But it’s too late to do anything about it now. And like I said, I’m good at it. So I have that going for me. And not everything has been lost. I have great relationships with both of my sons. My youngest is four, and even though his mother couldn’t be married to a writer any longer, we remain best friends and work well together as co-parents. My oldest is twenty-one, and although he’s a young man now, when I look at him I still see the little boy who read through his daddy’s comic book collection and played superheroes on my living room floor for hours and talked about how he was going to be a writer just like me when he grew up. Thank God and Cthulhu he didn’t. That desire lasted exactly one season when he was ten. Now he’s a senior at Penn State and studying to be a social worker. The pride and love I feel for him is as tangible as the lump I get in my throat when I think about how much he’s grown. He doesn’t talk about writing anymore, and for that I am grateful. I only hope that his younger brother does the same. My oldest son doesn’t read my books and his only association with them is when he goes to science fiction, fantasy, and horror conventions wearing a t-shirt with one of my book covers on it. When a cute girl approaches him and compliments the shirt and tells him they are a fan of my work, he smiles and says, “Yeah, he’s my dad.” I’m okay with this. I will probably never leave either of my sons a lofty inheritance, so the very least I can do is get them laid.

My relationship with my girlfriend is good, too. Maybe that’s because we’re both writers. We know exactly what goes into this life of ours, and what the demands are. But I suspect that same knowledge is what keeps us from permanently cementing this relationship and making it official. Because we know that no matter how close we are, we’ll always have a laptop between us—or two laptops, in our case. Because we know that sooner or later, the good things will go away, leaving only fodder for the muse.

Because that’s how the muse gets fed.

In U2’s “The Fly,” Bono sings that every poet is a cannibal and every artist is a thief. They all kill their inspiration and then sing about the grief. Until last Saturday night, I believed this to be true.

I know better now.

It’s not the artist who kills their inspiration.

It’s the inspiration that kills the artist.

* * *

The coffee had finished brewing but my brain and body were still sore. Worse, loneliness and isolation were still weighing on me. I could have reached out to someone. I could have called my girlfriend, or any of the other people I truly trust—a group whose members sadly dwindle with each passing year. But doing so would have alleviated my melancholy, and I needed that melancholy to write. Yeah, talk about job security. “Continue to feel bad so you’ll write better.”

So instead of reaching out and touching someone, I decided to extend my break and go for a walk. I live in a remote section of rural South-Central Pennsylvania, down in the bottoms of the Susquehanna River, an area so backwoods that it makes the rest of the county look positively metropolitan in comparison. I like it that way. I like seeing greenery and wildlife outside my window. I like having no traffic zipping by all day or noisy neighbors or sidewalks or a convenience store or bar within walking—or even driving—distance.

I put on my jacket and grabbed my walking stick—a sturdy length of oak that had originally belonged to my grandfather, faded now and worn smooth by his hands and mine. I miss my grandfather. He passed several years ago. Using that stick always makes me think of him. Worse, it always makes me wonder if he was ever proud of what I’d accomplished as a writer or if, like the rest of my family, he quietly (and sometimes openly in the case of a few family members) wished I’d give up this writing thing and get a proper job again. Something else I missed when I went for a walk was my dog. Writing had cost me him, too, in a way—lost in that second, amicable divorce. Oh, I still saw him on an almost daily basis, and he was always happy to see me, wagging his tail and grinning that dog grin that hounds do so well. But it wasn’t the same. Gone were the days when I’d write for fifteen hours with him lying at my feet, patiently waiting for me to finish so we could go for a walk and decompress before rejoining the rest of the world, already in progress. These days, he lives with my second ex-wife, and her boyfriend is the one taking him for walks, and I write alone.

I walk alone, too.

I pulled a cigar from my humidor, clipped it, lit it, and headed out the door, clutching the walking stick and feeling the weight of my thoughts. I’m not supposed to smoke cigars anymore, especially after my heart attack. Wrath James White, F. Paul Wilson, and Joe Lansdale have all threatened to kick my ass if I continue, so if you read this, don’t tell them I was. It will be our little secret.

Anyway, I walked down to the river. The weather suited my mood. It was that weird time of day—not quite nightfall but not the end of daylight, either. The overcast sky was colored with muted shades of gray and white, and a persistent breeze rustled the leaves on the trees, knocking them to the ground in a cascade of reds, oranges, and yellows. Nice weather for hunters, Goths, moody horror writers, and malcontents, but other folks probably prefer spring or summer. The river was deserted. When it’s warmer outside, the waterway is packed with boats—blue-collar guys out fishing in aluminum bass boats, rich yuppies up from Maryland for the day in their obscene pleasure boats, and thrill-seekers on Jet Skis. The river banks were usually packed, as well, with family picnics and folks feeding the ducks. But they’d all gone home for the season, and the ducks had flown south, and on the day they’d left, I’d wished I could go with them.

There was one lone car in the parking area—a blue Mazda with a Penn State bumper sticker on the back, and some additional stickers for bands I had never heard of, because I am in my forties now and stopped listening to new music right around the time that hip-hop got turned into hit-pop and Kurt Cobain did us the disservice of killing heavy metal before killing himself. Far away, down near the chain link fence that sealed off the gravel service road for the Safe Harbor Dam, I saw three college-aged girls, and assumed the car belonged to them. They were too far away to notice anything else about them, so I turned my attention back to the river. I stood there, hands in pockets, smoking and thinking, and gearing myself up to go back home and write some more. As I watched, the sun slipped beneath the horizon, and blue gave way to black.

I stood there until my cigar was finished. Then I tossed the stub into the water and turned to leave. As I did, I noticed the three girls approaching. They were close enough now that I was able to get a better look at them, and what I saw left me stunned. I don’t know if it was the fact that I’m now middle-aged or the loneliness I’d been feeling prior, but I absolutely could not take my gaze away from them. They appeared to be twenty, maybe twenty-one. The first was blonde with blue eyes. The second had dark hair and even darker skin. The third girl was a brunette. Their nationalities were hard to pin. I saw hints of Caucasian, African, Asian, Indian, and more—an exotic mix of genetics and heredity that suggested the entire world had been distilled into these three beauties. They reminded me of pop princesses—or barely legal porn starlets—and at that moment, I felt very old and very ashamed, and I’m not sure why.

I nodded hello and turned away, determined not to be the creepy middle-aged guy I felt like, when the blonde disarmed me with a smile and a question.

“Working on a new book?”

I’m used to getting recognized, especially near my home. No, I never had to deal with the level of notoriety Stephen King did after filming that credit card commercial, but I’ve got enough of an Internet presence that I’m easily identifiable. It’s a given this happens at conventions or signings, but I’ve also encountered it occasionally in airports, the grocery store, at movie theatres, and once in a bathroom at an Amtrak station. And as I said, it happens fairly regularly in my hometown (local boy made good, and all that). So it wasn’t the girl’s question that threw me, nor was it the fact that she apparently knew who I was. What left me flummoxed was the sensation that I knew these girls from somewhere. I’d never signed a book for them. Of that, I was certain. I’m good with faces, and if you’ve stood in line to get my signature, chances are I’ll remember your face, if not your name. I was certain that our paths hadn’t crossed in that way, but the instant connection I felt with them was so strong that it left me feeling nervous and dizzy.

All three stood there staring at me, smiling, and I realized that I hadn’t responded.

“Taking a break from one, actually.” I tried to smile, but it probably looked like I was having a seizure. Whatever my expression, it was apparently amusing, because all three giggled softly. Their laughter was like music. I felt my body begin to thrum.

What the hell is wrong with me?
I thought. I felt like a character out of one of my books. You know the one where the Satyr comes back to life and everyone is running around with a hard-on? It was like that, except that this was real life, and the sensations coursing through me weren’t just sexual. Don’t get me wrong. Lust—or maybe longing—was a definite component. But it was something more than that. It was…
need
. On a primal, spiritual level. I didn’t understand it, but that didn’t stop me from feeling it. Even though I didn’t know why, I felt that I needed these women.

We made small talk for a while. The girls had a slight, almost unrecognizable accent that I couldn’t place. I don’t remember everything that was said. I started out with my public patter, accessing the stores of anecdotes and witty responses I keep for any occasion when I’m talking with fans, but soon enough, I found myself relaxing, and becoming the real me. The girls must have noticed this, too. They didn’t tell me their names, and I didn’t think to ask, so flustered and confused was I, puzzling over my own behavior. I remember asking if they went to school around here, thinking they had to be from Penn State or York College. It turned out they didn’t, although they had plans to visit the Penn State campus the next day. When I told them my son was enrolled there, they smiled again. When I asked why they were planning to visit the campus, the brunette told me they were from Boeotia, and were just traveling. I’d never heard of Boeotia, but didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to seem rude. When I asked what brought them to the river bottoms of York County, they told me I had. They were fans, and they’d known I lived nearby, and they’d wanted to see me.