HER MESSAGES ARRIVE in almost every batch of signing material. They are harder and harder to dig out because the volume of items sent has actually increased, even as the protests gain steam. Since many items associated with me are being destroyed, I suppose new ones are all the more valuable. Supply and demand. Each missive from her lays out more details of the plan, additional angles and eventualities. She is a clever girl, thinking through everything for me, though I’m starting to anticipate the next phase even before it arrives in the mail. It is a marvel how I never miss them no matter how elaborate the disguises, further proof that she and I are bound by forces out of our control.
Check that. At the Center, what we learn is that no forces are outside of our control, it just appears that way, which is why so many people experience setbacks and unhappiness and the general failures that mark our lives. I was this way before I went there, and again briefly after I shot that man six times, but I have resighted my guns on the target.
As are hers. She had her own slight bobbles following my arrest, she also forgetting what we learned at the Center and what we shared between us, but now, each match seems easier than the last and I know because I watch them all. During changeovers she stares straight ahead, her long lashes blinking evenly, her gaze going far beyond the parameters of the court. She is, as they say, in the zone.
DESPITE BARRY NOW working pro bono, money is still an issue because I need as much of it as possible. Fortunately, I have developed my own part of the plan for that.
My agent is surprised to hear from me. The signature work is the manager’s business, so my agent has not had much to do with me for some time. Nominally, he still works for me, but without a body that he can move to different places, I am not much use to him. In the life of my agent, I am a chess piece on the side of the board.
“I’m writing a book,” I tell him.
“Really?” he says.
“You sound surprised.”
“I just figured you’re busy, and everything.”
“I’ve got nothing but time,” I say. I feel like I can hear him squirm on the other end of the phone. With me a two-time failure and this close to incarceration, there’s not much to underpin our relationship. Transaction is our fuel, and there’s nothing left to transact.
“So what’s it about?” he says.
“It’s about how to seduce and fuck your wife.”
“Ha!” he says, but as a genuine laugh it is unconvincing. I sort of miss the days when people didn’t feel obligated to laugh at what I’ve said. “Seriously, what is it? I want to know.”
“It’s the story of my life.”
I hear the springs of his chair squeak as he leans back. This is his doing-business position. I’ve seen it many times. “Well, big man, I think you know there’s some hurdles there.”
He is referring to the fact that a person convicted of a crime is, by law, not allowed to profit from those crimes.
“It’s okay,” I reply. “It’s thinly veiled fiction and I’m not using any names, like when I write about you, rather than calling you Gord, I just refer to you as ‘the agent.’ Frazier is just ‘the manager,’ and Beth is ‘the wife’ until she’s the ‘ex-wife.’ I call myself ‘the funny man.’ I’m the villain. I’m finding it considerably less painful to do it that way. It’s like it’s me, but not and when I can’t remember something, or can’t bear to remember something, or don’t know something, I just make it up. I’m pretty sure that most of it’s true, except for the parts that obviously aren’t. Some stuff I have to make up just so it’s a decent story. I’m calling it ‘An American Saga’.”
I can hear Gord’s wheels turning over the phone. “But isn’t a saga supposed to be about heroic deeds done in far off lands?”
“I think I’ve done my share of pillaging. I possess some spoils.”
“But if it’s fiction, how are we going to trade on the whole behind-the-scenes true-story angle?”
“Wink and nudge, wink and nudge, say no more,” I say. “You say it’s all made up, but everyone will know it isn’t. Or that it doesn’t really matter because no one will ever know the truth.”
“It could work, I guess,” he replies. “People seem to like that kind of thing. Let me put out some feelers.”
“No time for feelers, put it out there and take the first decent offer. I need some dough. I’m willing to sacrifice royalties for a bigger front end. If you can sell it inside of two weeks, I’ll give you an extra five percent commission.” These are magic words.
“Consider it done,” Gord says.
There is a silence on both ends of the line that I fill. “I guess that’s it, then,” I say. “Drop me a line when you have an offer for me.” I go to hang up when Gord interrupts.
“Wait,” he says. “In the book, what am I like?”
“You’re the same soul-sucking bastard you are in real life,” I say with all due affection before hanging up.
Technically, this would be my second published book. You can still find the first with my name on it on the shelves, but I didn’t write it. I’ve never even read it. I can’t even entirely remember what it was about. It was one of the many things my name was added to with my permission but without my knowledge. It did well, making its own little pile of money. Now that I am writing a book for real I’ve found it to be rewarding, though difficult. It’s pleasing to do something that is entirely my own, a rarity in the entertainment world. Even my trial is not so much mine, as Barry’s and the prosecutor’s and the judge’s and all the people watching and waiting to hear my fate. My life is the fuel for that machine, an indispensable part, but one of many.
The goal, as far as I can see it, is to make the book as true as possible, as faithful to one’s experience as you can get, but I’ve found this often entails straying from the precise way events may have unfolded since the memory falls short of the truth of the matter. Perhaps this is one of those truths, that we fall short.
And of course there are the things that happened that no one would believe—stranger than fiction is the term—and so I’m going to leave them out of what I will share with the rest of the world, but in leaving them out that does not mean they didn’t happen or aren’t going to happen in the future.