The novel I’d been working on for the previous six months—a novel that I didn’t, frankly, have much love for, and had already begun to think of as a waste of time—wouldn’t just be easy to cast aside (I hadn’t touched it, or, for that matter, worked on any fiction, since I’d started the transcript), but would be a real pleasure to cast aside, and so, just like that, aside I had cast it.
By then—week four or so into transcribing A Fistful—it was clear to me how ahead of the deadline I was, and I considered putting the transcript down for a while to work on this memoir so as not to lose steam, but I didn’t want to lose steam on the transcript, either, I wanted to finish as quickly as possible—the more I worked on it, the greater the ick and frequency of my troubling, potentially Blank-endangering thoughts were becoming—so I made the following deal with myself: I’d work on the transcript til noon each day, or until I’d finished transcribing one clip (whichever came first), and, after that, I’d be free to work on the memoir the rest of the day.
Cheese and crackers swallowed, I went back upstairs and cuddled Blank while looking over what I’d written, and I saw how it would work, where it would go, what it would do—beginning, middle, and end, the whole thing: every node in the narrative network aglow. I spent half the night writing a detailed outline, and once I’d gotten to the end of the outline, I was still too full of energy to fall asleep, and yet too foggy to get more work done, and I thought that I should go for a walk—I hadn’t taken a good walk since I’d bought the truck—but a walk to where, I didn’t know.
In Part 2 of No Please Don’t, Gil MacCabby, who as a boy in Part 1 wondered daily where next to look for his Bam Naka action figure, wonders nightly in adulthood about where to take a walk to. I mention this not to draw a parallel between myself and Gil, nor even to point out what I think to be a rather important parallel between child- and adult-Gil that reviewers of the book all seemed to have missed (though miss it they did, every last one of them), but rather because I almost always knew where to walk, so it was novel to find myself wondering where to walk, and I guess that having registered the novelty up in my room led me to try to recall the last time I wondered where I should walk—I couldn’t recall it—in the failed process of which recollection, I thought of Gil MacCabby, and No Please Don’t, and thereby derived a satisfying destination: I’d take a walk to the mailbox at the Plaza Beige strip mall; I’d send a copy of No Please Don’t to Stevie.
As I pulled one from the stack beside the bust of Hagler, I remembered I’d told Gus I’d trade him a copy for a pack of handkerchiefs, and so pulled a second. I composed a short letter on my computer upstairs, then wrote it out by hand on Stevie’s copy’s front cover’s interior.
Dear Stevie,
Do you remember that time on your dad’s truck’s tailgate, after your grandpa went into a coma, and we talked about Vonnegut, and I asked if I could kiss you? I was writing about that today, and I missed you. I’ve missed you for years. I know the trouble with saying so—apart from the inadvertent rhyme it has produced—is that it probably sounds creepy and too intense. It isn’t really either, I don’t think, but I can’t figure out how to make it sound otherwise.
So it goes?
What I’m thinking is maybe it would mitigate any accidental creepy intensity for me to give you my word I won’t bother you again. And I will. I do. You have my word I won’t bother you again.
I do want you to have this book, though. I wrote it seven years ago, thinking of you often. Maybe that comes through, maybe it doesn’t.
In any case, I hope you enjoy it.
Love,
Belt
In Gus’s copy, I just signed the title page.
* * *
—
I packaged the books and took my walk. I dropped Gus’s through the mail slot at General TrustCorp—“For Gus” in Sharpie on the envelope containing it—then went into Pang’s to buy postage for Stevie’s.
When I handed him my card, he said, “Five-dollar minimum.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
“Sign says so,” he said, and pointed to a sign, handwritten on a notecard in sky-blue ink, taped to the side of the register: $5.00 minimum on credit card purchases.
“I don’t care about your sign,” I said. “I read all about this in the New York Times. You have to take my credit card. It’s part of your contract with the credit card companies.” I was lying, of course. I hadn’t read it in the New York Times. It was just something I’d overheard at the tavern. At the time, I hadn’t even believed it.
“Charges under five dollars—they’re nearly a loss.”
“Not a loss to me,” I said.
“ATM’s at the back of the store.”
“Good for the ATM,” I said. “Ring me up on the card.”
“You can buy more stamps to put to use later. Or another product. Cigarettes? Candy? Push you over the minimum.”
I said, “I buy my cigarettes in Hammond, Indiana, now.”
“Better you go north,” he said. “McHenry County. They’re nearly as cheap as they are in Hammond, and the drive is shorter. You make up the difference in time and gasoline. Less traffic, too.”
“You don’t sound like you own this White Hen,” I said.
“Ah-ha!” he said. “You’re being hard to handle because you think that I’m Pang. Pang is the owner. I am not Pang. Pang is my stupid dickhead fucking brother. My name is Clark. I’m graveyard-shift manager.”
“You look like Pang to me,” I said.
“We’re twins. Identical.”
“Your badge says, ‘Pang.’ ”
“It belongs to Pang. I forgot mine at home.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“What can I say? You want me to show you my driver’s license?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well that is ridiculous. I refuse to show you my driver’s license.”
“You’re Pang,” I said, “and you’re not the owner.”
“You’re one hundred percent half-right about that.”
I paid him with one of the fives from my wallet. He gave me, with my change, a York Peppermint Patty. “On the house,” he said.
“I don’t like those,” I said, applying my stamps.
“Everyone likes these,” he said. “They are minty.”