THE ANTI-SCHEHERAZADE
I have a friend who calls me every single weekday morning at eight. Darrell’s daily call usually lasts anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour. This would be a giant time-suck on my workday except for the fact that I have taught myself how to take the call without actually listening to it. I place the call on speakerphone, and then I get on with my morning. While Darrell prattles on in the background, I use a manual citrus press to squeeze several glasses of orange juice. I check my email. I visit various internet sites. I inventory the pantry and draw up a grocery list. I go to the bathroom. This morning I watched part of the Australian Open tennis tournament on television (with the sound off, of course). Sometimes I even read a book while Darrell talks. His voice, as it drones on and on in the background, can be sort of soothing. And whenever Darrell pauses in his monologue, I say something like, “Wow, dude” or “You’re absolutely right, man.” This may sound insensitive, but it’s not. Darrell, like me, is a writer. He has published dozens of short stories in literary magazines. A novel of his was recently published by a small press back east. Like most writers, he has certain little routines he uses to get his creative juices flowing. Darrell needs to vent his anger at various things – the publishing industry, the average American’s indifference to great literature, the decline of western civilization, etc. – every morning in order to get his brain working. Some people go jogging, some people do yoga, some people do a crossword puzzle – Darrell calls me and rants and raves about the world. That’s how he kicks his brain into overdrive. And that’s okay with me. He has been doing this now for about 20 years. At first I found it very distracting. I tried for a while to cure him of his habit. I stopped answering the phone for a while, but it didn’t work. He just kept calling and calling until I answered. And then he would be hurt because it almost seemed to him as if I was trying to avoid him. Which, of course, I was. But I like Darrell a lot. No one I know is more passionate about art and literature and music and culture in general. Whenever I feel the need for a long talk about literature, Darrell is the first person I turn to. I don’t want to break off my friendship with him. And if it is necessary for him to talk to me every morning in order to get his creative mojo going, well, I can live with that. I suspect he must know that I generally pay little attention to what he is saying. Many times he has asked me, “So what do you think of that?” only to have me respond, “Uh….what do I think of what?” And then he’ll say, “Dude, aren’t you even listening to me?” At which point I will lie to him and say, “Sorry, I got distracted for a moment. A really hot girl just walked by my front window.” This is an excuse that Darrell completely understands and forgives.
Along with his complaints about the writing life, Darrell also spends a great deal of time complaining about his health. He believes he suffers from numerous medical afflictions. I think he is a hypochondriac. He says that various naturopath’s have verified that he suffers from all of his imaginary ailments. I think they are quacks who are taking advantage of his hypochondria in order to profit financially from it. His naturopaths have diagnosed him as suffering from lyme disease, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel, fructose intolerance, acid reflux disease, spondylitis, heavy metals in his bloodstream, and numerous other diseases. This morning, Darrell told me that his latest naturopath had just confirmed that he suffers from Epstein-Barr disease, whatever that might be. I responded by saying, “Wow, dude. What a drag.” I barely listen to these diagnoses anymore. If one of his imaginary diseases should eventually kill him, I’ll have a lot of guilt to deal with.
In some ways Darrell is the anti-Scheherazade. She told her stories to Sharyar every evening before bed. He tells his stories to me every morning, shortly after I rise. Her stories were wildly inventive, full of moonlit seraglios, magic genii (a redundancy, by the way), mysterious boxes, beautiful princesses, faithless queens, dashing adventurers, and imperious sultans. Darrell’s story is pretty much the same every day: “The writing life sucks and I’m dying of fybromyalgia.” Scheherazade’s stories were so fascinating that they prevented Sharyar from killing her. Darrell’s stories often have nearly the opposite effect on me.
Now, it might seem unkind of me to portray a good friend of mine as somewhat of a pest. You might wonder, “How will Darrell feel if he reads this little essay about himself?” Well, the essay might annoy him a bit, but he is a writer, first and foremost, and I think he would at least be gratified to know that he had helped further my writing career a tiny bit by providing me with the material for another personal essay. That’s the way we are. He has stolen events from my life and incorporated them into his fiction. I have stolen events from his life and incorporated them into mine. We occasionally steal each other’s ideas and rework them into our own writings. And that’s okay. We both know how hard it can be to come up with material to write about. So if one of us feels it is necessary to exploit the other for literary purposes, so be it.
A couple of years ago Darrell purchased an old magazine on eBay. He had been looking for short stories by his literary idol John Fante when he saw some old issue of Colliers or Liberty magazine from 1954 that had a beautiful young lady on the cover. Suddenly Darrell forgot all about John Fante. He bought the magazine simply because the cover girl was so fetching. When he got the magazine, he was disappointed to discover that the cover model was not identified by name. The only person credited for the cover was the photographer. And so Darrell typed the photographer’s name into an online search engine and discovered that he had been a famous fashion photographer for Vogue and Mademoiselle and Seventeen and various other glossy national magazines back in the 1950s and 60s. Unfortunately, the photographer was now dead, but Darrell managed to locate his daughter, who is a professional photographer herself. The daughter and Darrell engaged in a lengthy exchange of emails during which Darrell learned quite a lot about the man who had photographed the anonymous cover girl that Darrell had become obsessed with. Unfortunately, the daughter was not able to discover the identity of the mysterious cover girl. But she gave Darrell the name and email address of a retired editor of a top fashion magazine. This editor was at the height of her career in the 1950s and worked with just about every model and photographer of note. Darrell contacted the editor and began another long exchange of emails. To make a long story slightly shorter, Darrell eventually uncovered the name of his mystery model. He did some more research on the internet and discovered that she had had a brief film career as well, having appeared in bit parts in a handful of forgotten movies. She was now retired and living comfortably in Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest communities in the United States. Darrell mailed his copy of the magazine to the cover model with a letter asking her if she might autograph it and send it back to him in a self-addressed, stamped envelope that he had provided. The retired cover girl was so delighted to know that she still had fans that she not only signed his magazine but also offered to meet with Darrell if he should ever happen to be passing through Connecticut. Darrell, as far as I know, hasn’t yet met his mystery model in the flesh, but he is hoping to do so sometime soon.
This story is pretty typical of Darrell. He is, like most writers, half nuts. But the story doesn’t end there. Darrell used to own a bookshop in Southern California. At his shop, Darrell frequently hosted events at which big-time authors would show up and read from their work and sign autographs afterwards. As a result, Darrell managed to become personally acquainted with some fairly famous writers: Charles Bukowski, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch (the author of “Psycho”), and many others. Darrell still remains on very friendly terms with one such author, a man who has written at least one classic American novel, a book that has been in print continuously for more than forty years and is still wildly popular (no, this famous author is not Harper Lee, although Darrell has been corresponding with Ms. Lee for a decade or more and has received numerous letters from her). One day, Darrell told his Famous Author friend the story of his search for the mysterious cover model. The Famous Author didn’t seem overly interested in the story. But about six months later, the Famous Author emailed Darrell with the news that he had been invited to contribute a story to an upcoming anthology of short fiction. The Famous Author was out of story ideas, so he had decided to write a fictional version of Darrell’s search for the mystery model. The story was already written. The Famous Author sent it to Darrell as an email attachment. He told Darrell that he would not submit the story without Darrell’s approval. Darrell was angry. Naturally he called me up and spent an hour venting his anger while I put the call on speakerphone and went about squeezing oranges. Darrell himself had been working on a nonfiction account of his obsessive search for the mystery model. He had hoped to submit his essay to the New York Times’ Modern Love column, a weekly showcase for offbeat tales of love and infatuation. But if Darrell permitted the Famous Author to sell the story to a fiction anthology, it would almost certainly ruin his chances of ever selling his nonfiction essay. So Darrell ranted and raved to me about the Famous Author’s perfidy, but eventually he managed to talk his anger away and come to terms with the idea of seeing his true-life story fictionalized in a short-story anthology, even though he would never get any credit or money for his role in the creation of the story. That’s the kind of guy Darrell is. He’d give a fellow writer the shirt off his back, or even a piece of his own autobiography, if it would help the other writer out of a jam. And if Darrell should ever discover this snarky essay I have written about his annoying phone calls, well, I feel confident that he’ll understand my need to use it and forgive me for it. Everything that happens to either of us is potential story material, even if it ends up portraying one or both of us in a bad light. And in this piece, I, as the perfidious friend, am the one who comes off badly.