Hack

Kevin P. Keating

Harbinger College placed a high value on the written word, and its literary magazine, The Millstone was nationally recognized as one of the finest produced by any college or university, its stories and poems one step removed from the divine Logos, its contributors destined to achieve great things, heirs to the throne of Updike and Carver, Bellow and Cheever. Coping with the death of a loved one--grandfather, stepmother, family dog--seemed a favorite storyline as well as secret, homoerotic liaisons that ended in either comedy or tragedy, but despite its sometimes repetitive themes I invariably picked up a copy whenever a new edition came out. They were scattered around campus like stale breadcrumbs left for chirping sparrows.

“Whose name is in the obituaries this time?” I asked, flipping through the pages with a malicious little sneer.

My friends laughed and clapped their hands and made me feel very clever, but as we marched bravely to the student union to scarf down whatever new horrors the cooks had concocted for us I kept thinking about the magazine, about its stories and poems and occasional novella, hoping that no one caught the wistful look in my eye or how I seemed overly agitated because I couldn’t wait to get back to the dorm and, with Messiaen’s “Apparition du Christ glorieux” playing on the stereo and my door bolted against intruders, sit at my desk to study the journal line by line with the devotion of an Evangelical studying the Book of Revelation, my eyes growing misty at the splendor of the imagery and the slightly discombobulating effect of the terse, parataxis style of the prose, The Millstone’s trademark. I wanted to hold the magazine to my nose, breathe deeply, quiver at its heady perfume.

Had they known about my secret obsession, my friends would have tormented me without mercy. They all worked on the school newspaper, a publication for students of middling intellect who proved themselves incapable of battling their way into the upper echelons of the extracurricular hierarchy. Serious writers, the ones whose haikus and philosophical meditations and hallucinatory tales appeared in The Millstone, shunned the paper for the sarcastic, needling tone of its columns and articles. This critique was not without merit. Truly compelling stories were scarce on a quiet, Midwestern campus like ours so my friends simply wrote cruel reviews of school plays or ridiculed administrators and politicians.

I tried to assure myself that I could transcend that kind of mediocrity and write something subtle and profound. The only reason why I hadn’t done so was because I was lonely and homesick and maybe a little frustrated that I had to live in close quarters with my roommate, a drunkard and dolt nicknamed the Minotaur, a starting linebacker and swaggering co-captain of the football team who’d earned a reputation for his savagery on the field. Most afternoons he fell fast asleep at his desk, a textbook propped open by one shaggy elbow, drool trickling from the corner of his mouth and forming deep pools around his great chiseled jaw. Boxes arrived at our door daily. His mother sent him tins of peanut butter cookies, which he gave away since they weren’t part of his rigorous diet of raw eggs and protein shakes. Girls treated him like an adorable circus bear, running their fingers through his thick pelt and smooching his enormous muzzle. Professors stammered and blushed when he entered their classrooms. The cafeteria staff named dishes after him. Minotaur Meatball Subs and Minotaur Meatloaf.

Everyone adored the Minotaur. I may have been the only person in the world who detested him. There were whispers that he might get drafted by the NFL one day, but just in case things didn’t work out and agents didn’t come pounding on his door with lucrative contracts and endorsement deals, the Minotaur decided to earn an education degree. His plan was to become a high school English teacher so he could coach football.

“Big money these days in high school football, know what I mean, dude? I’d like to teach these kids how to go out there and really fuckin’ kill somebody, know what I’m saying?”

I cringed whenever he opened his mouth. What did he know about the English language? The Minotaur could write complete sentences but only with great difficulty and under much duress. How he managed to pass a single class was a mystery to everyone, including, I suspect, his professors who were much too smitten with him to make waves. But I knew the truth. At times I felt like a zoologist studying the behavior of silverback gorilla in the wild, watching it scratch in the dirt with a pointed stick. He farted and belched and picked his nose, and rather than find and correct errors, he inserted more of them.

“A buddy of mine helps me out,” he said, jabbing a finger at the essay on his desk. “He does a good job. A little too good. Now I gotta make this paper look legit, you know? The prof will freak if he reads this thing. Fuck, I don’t even know what half this shit means. You ever read Moby Dick? This Ahab guy sound like a real prick.” Whenever he got frustrated he reached for the bottle of whiskey in his desk drawer. “I put the binge in Harbinger,” he liked to say and by midnight he was usually sprawled across the floor, snoring thunderously, a garbage can pressed against his chest, his tongue lolling like a famished dog.

I was just glad that the Minotaur posed no threat to my ambitions as a writer of serious fiction. Competition was something I abhorred. Still, I couldn’t easily dismiss the fact that the budding writers who published in The Millstone possessed an enviable ability to translate their experiences into words that mystified and evaded me. How does one intimate suffering without sounding ridiculous and self-serving? I had to learn the mysteries of narrative, the techniques of plot and pacing, and somehow, someway I had to get an acceptance letter before I graduated.

Even though the editorial board of The Millstone frowned upon and rarely considered let alone accepted unsolicited manuscripts I nevertheless worked up the courage to submit one of my own pieces. No sense dreaming about things, I decided. At some point action had to be taken. My story concerned a young boy, maybe seven or eight, who goes fishing with an alcoholic uncle whose boozing and whoring has cost him the family business and much of his fortune. The uncle, too drunk to cast a line, vomits in the boat and the dutiful nephew cleans up the mess so the women back at the dock, sipping iced teas under bright red umbrellas, won’t look down their noses at the poor man.

The story had its shortcomings. For one, I didn’t know a damned thing about fishing trips and wealthy uncles who owned companies. The men in my family woke up before dawn and trudged down a steep hill to the steel mills where for ten and twelve hours a day they welded atop smokestacks. When they returned home, hacking up black phlegm, they terrorized their wife and children, plumes of black soot rising in the air with each lash from their belts. A family outing consisted of an afternoon at the public park with a six-pack of beer and a few hotdogs tossed on the grille. Another problem with my story was that the characters spoke like English lords and ladies. The prose was stilted, awkward, the symbols obvious, the clichés abundant. The uncle, for instance, “drank like a fish,” but I was particularly pleased with its paradoxical tone of compassion and hopelessness, and I thought the story might help me to penetrate The Millstone’s inner circle of trust fund kids whose parents went to parties hosted by George Plimpton.

Plimpton, as was well known, visited the offices of The Millstone from time to time, offering advice and encouragement, telling the occasional ribald story, how that “glorious hillbilly Harry Crews stumbled out of my commode last Saturday evening with his pants around his ankles, shouting that his trusty six-shooter had been firing blanks of late to which Norman Mailer replied that it was no wonder since the damn thing was always half cocked.” There followed the polite laughter and soft applause you might expect from the gallery at Augusta watching a master put from the rough on the eighteenth green. Plimpton, for his part, was so enamored of Harbinger’s stable of young writers that over the years he’d re-printed several stories in The Paris Review. The pieces appeared between interviews with Jose Saramago and essays by Naguib Mahfouz, the very idea of which made me a little nauseous. The gods walked among us at Harbinger. Would I be one of the chosen, or would I be destined like so many others to plummet into the abyss of mediocrity?

The offices of The Millstone were located on the sixth floor of the main building, a strange little labyrinth of interconnected rooms guarded by a dozen gargoyle bookends squatting on narrow shelves, their unblinking eyes scanning the stairway for any unworthies who dared enter that sanctum sanctorum. They were the devourers of uninspired stories, shitting them out in hard little pellets and leaving them on the windowsill to freeze in winter. I imagined them fluttering down from the shelves late at night, creeping through the freshly fallen snow to the dormitories where they whispered into the ears of those who had the gift to understand and transcribe their cryptic tongue for the rest of us, the uninspired masses, so that we might tremble at the supremacy of their wisdom.

The editor-in-chief, a senior by the name of Christian Bentworth, seemed as much a part of the offices as the gargoyles themselves. Seated behind a massive oak desk cluttered with dog-eared manuscripts, sipping one cup of espresso after another, shaking his head, snickering, scowling, murmuring strange and unholy things under his breath, Bentworth had, despite his small stature, an aura of inquisitorial wrath about him. He held his pen the way a butcher holds a serrated knife before dismembering a steaming carcass on a slaughterhouse floor, and he used it with skill and precision to slash sentences and paragraphs and to scribble notes in the margins. He tore out entire pages and fed them to the shredder beside his chair.

From a distance and with the muted gray light of November pouring in through the windows he looked like a high priest brooding over his troublesome flock, but the spell was broken soon after I entered the office. An ashtray overflowed with cigarette butts. A bowl of pasta sat on the hissing and wheezing radiator. At the corner of his desk an alternative newspaper was opened to an ad for gay massages. “Buff, smooth boys who will service you today! Safe, clean, discreet. Just call…”

I tapped on the door.

Christian Bentworth leaned back in his chair and looked me up and down. Like the other well-bred legacy students, he’d mastered the arts of insouciance and Schadenfreude and could wield them about with equal pleasure and obvious delight.

“I’d like you to consider my story for publication,” I said weakly.

He lit a cigarette, exhaled slowly, luxuriously. “Ah, well, yes, of course. Will do.” He pointed to a cardboard box already overflowing with manuscripts. Most looked like they’d been there for quite a long time, the paper brittle and yellow. Some were so old, in fact, that they’d actually been typed. “Thank you,” he said, “for your interest in the magazine. And now…” He went back to marking up manuscripts and circling ads in the newspaper.

An image suddenly came to me--Grady and his cronies sitting in the office late at night, smoking their cigarettes or pipes or their bowls of hashish and filling the rooms with their vicious laughter as they took turns reading my story aloud. I stuffed the story into my back pocket and walked down the winding staircase, and though I knew I was only imagining things I thought I heard that high-pitched drug-induced laughter ringing in my ears, following me out into the blustery November air.

Toward the end of my freshman year, I started writing for the school newspaper. Besides submitting an occasional movie review, I usually served as the school’s food critic, noting “how delectable the steaming piles of Minotaur Mush” happened to be that week. As the only photojournalist on the staff I made sure to stage each picture, holding my plates aloft to better attract flies. My columns were drenched with my bitterness and contempt, the sort of stuff my professors openly despised, but I was young, and young men frequently behave in regrettable ways. I thought they would understand and sympathize with my teen angst, but of course they didn’t, and I quickly learned that there were some things you just couldn’t write.

One day after class my creative writing professor thrust a flyer in my face. Here was my last chance at redemption. The Millstone was holding its annual fiction contest, and a panel of judges, including two faculty members, would read each entry and award prizes to the best three stories. While I hated the idea of a contest I realized that I had few options at this point. I tried to imagine a luminary like James Joyce submitting “The Dead” to a silly fiction contest, but the idea depressed me because I knew that Joyce, had he been a young man writing today, would probably enroll in a creative writing class where he would be forced listen to the inane comments of his fellow students, bespectacled and lethargic creampuffs who complained that they didn’t feel the story, that it was well written but missing something, that it was crude, offensive, hurtful, all under the aegis of an instructor who pinched his chin and nodded and secretly pondered his own successes and failures and who struggled not to glance at his watch every few minutes and yawn.

I spent the next two weeks sequestered in the library, my one refuge from the whinnying laughter of the Minotaur, and there, hidden behind lonely rows of books like a medieval monk in scriptorium, polished my old story about the drunken uncle and his dutiful nephew, trying to excise any repetitive passages and clunky prose, but as the deadline approached, frustration set in and deepened, and I began to doubt myself. I re-read the story so many times that it no longer made any sense to me, maybe it never made sense to begin with, and I wondered why anyone would try to write for a living, why anyone would do something so egregiously masochistic. There must be a part of the human psyche that yearns for anguish, and when none can be found people--but perhaps writers in particular--simply invent anguish for themselves. People wanted life to be unnecessarily difficult. It kept things interesting. And that was the writer’s main obligation, wasn’t it? To keep it interesting.

On the final day for submissions I went back to my dorm and, seeing that the coast was clear, reached for the whiskey stashed at the bottom of the Minotaur’s desk and drank straight from the bottle. I choked it down, one swig after another, and pretty soon it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what the words on the page meant. Like my nightly jackoff sessions, it didn’t mean anything at all. And yet someone a long time ago had pondered the sad and ridiculous life of Onan and had made even that a sin. Even our most pitiful attempts at distraction were said to be evil.

I was quite drunk when I finally left my room that Saturday night and made my way through the spring gloom and up the stairs of the desolate main building. The threshold of The Millstone loomed before me. I intended to slip the story under the office door then stop off at the cafeteria for a late night snack. Suddenly an idea for an article came to mind. I could see the headlines: “Drunk food! What Harbinger students eat while on a three-day binge!” Burritos were sure to top the list. Maybe the taco salad. The editors might put a little asterisk after my name with an accompanying footnote: *Reporter was totally wasted when he wrote this story because he finally came to the realization that he can’t write worth a damn.

I paused for a moment in the hallway where I listened to the awful voices in my head, but drunk though I was I sensed that these voices were not my own; no, they were much too conspiratorial, too devious, Machiavellian, voices that crafted some grandiose scheme in low and sinister tones. I was incapable of a speaking with such cold calculation. A bright slash of light came from the office. Inside, two silhouettes comically disproportionate in height stood very close to each other, the smaller of the two taking charge of the situation. Perhaps it was my instinct as reporter, but I decided to hide in the shadows and observe things from a distance.

“There’s no work on your part, none whatsoever. I’ll do all the work. You just relax. Relax and enjoy.”

“Well, it’s kinda hard to relax.”

“I understand. Believe me. Here. Let me help you with that.”

“Man, I don’t know.”

“But it was part of our agreement.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not cool with it anymore.”

“Don’t talk that way. You need to pass, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Just. Hell. This ain’t gonna to take long, right?”

“That’s all up to you. Wait. Let me take it out. There. That’s good, that’s right.”

“Shit. I ain’t no fag.”

“Oh, I know that.”

“You keep your mouth shut.”

“But I thought the whole point was to keep it open?”

I expected Bentworth to laugh at his own little pun, but he seemed mesmerized by the monstrous thing pulsing before him. He dropped to one knee as though genuflecting before a tabernacle, and as the Minotaur groaned and stamped his feet and clutched the back of Bentworth’s head I grappled frantically for the digital camera in my bag. I tried to breathe, forced myself to count backwards from ten, imagined the terrible things they would do to me if I were discovered. It was a lowlight situation and the pictures would be a little blurry but they would do. I snapped several photos in quick succession, one after another, and when I was sure I had adequately captured the essence of the moment, the utter depravity and pure desperation of it, I slowly backed away from the office, cringing every time one of the floorboards creaked and echoed through the gothic archways.

“The fuck was that?” I heard the Minotaur whisper hoarsely.

But Bentworth, with his mouth full, could only gurgle like a baby and try to reassure the Minotaur with bulging eyes.

I bolted down the stairs and hurried outside where I pressed up against the cool sandstone pillars. My hands shook badly and the whiskey surged up my throat. I bent over and clutched my sides. Except for the clattering branches of oaks and elms there were no other sounds. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and staggered through the mist to the campus bar, a swirling vortex of loud music and laughter, where I sat at a small table behind the jukebox and tried to collect my thoughts. I ordered double shots of whiskey and stared into space and waited for something awful to happen.

At some point, I’m not sure when exactly, my friends found me lurking in the dark corner like some ghoul and joked, as they always did, about the literary magazine and the incompetent snobs who ran it. They waited expectantly for my adolescent barbs until they noticed that I’d covered my face and was quietly weeping.

To explain the overwhelming sense of euphoria I was experiencing just then would have been impossible. I had just stumbled upon the story of the year, or at least the story of the week. Stories don’t last much longer than that anymore. Nevertheless, there were people who would surely sacrifice a small animal in the hopes of getting a scoop like this one, something so achingly beautiful, something so vulgar and scandalous and American, and for the first time in my life I felt empowered, emboldened, fearless. I was the master, the man in control of the situation, the person who would dictate the terms, and from now on my life would be extraordinary, a remarkable string of successes. Sometimes a man, no matter how unremarkable his gifts, is able to make a name for himself.

“Excuse me,” I said, nearly toppling out of my seat. I had to escape, had to make my way through the twisted maze of leering carnival faces and find a place of repose and solitude. I was tired and drunk and, like the uncle in my story, I felt the whiskey pulling me down into some wicked labyrinth where the Minotaur lurked in the shadows.