Labels

fiction from the novel The Years of Smith

[Will be busy tomorrow morning, so I edited this story tonight while pretending to watch the Women’s US Open Golf Tournament. Can’t watch the men’s golf tournament because it’s on CBS, and I’m boycotting that network. Not sure my little protest means much in the larger scheme of things, but it’s something I can do to express displeasure with the lack of spine and immoral decision-making shown by that network’s ownership and management in the recent cancellation of “The Late Show” and the firing of journalists on “60 Minutes.”]

Labels

The first thing people wanted to know when they met Vill were his labels. “What do you do?” “Where’d you go to school?” “Where did you grow up?” It pissed him off, because labels reduced his life to no more than a bunch of shallow bumper stickers, which apparently made people feel more comfortable by knowing them but none of which captured who Vill was.

West Pointer, Army officer, Vietnam vet, aikijujutsu black belt, recovering Protestant, dilettante Buddhist, desultory meditator, English teacher, husband, father. Is that all I am, he thought?

Early in his military career, Vill thought he was on his way to acquiring the pretentious label of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, when a drunk REMF (Rear Echelon Motherfucker) Army major in the Officer’s Club thought he could get away with hazing a lieutenant for stealing the attention of a bar maid, screaming at Vill like a closeted gay drill sergeant and taking a clumsy swing at the younger man. At that point, Vill had not studied martial arts, so he just beat the shit out of the major in no particular style of karate.

Because the drunk officer had thrown the first punch, Vill escaped punishment, but his next efficiency report mentioned his “questionable judgment,” and Vill’s military career was summarily scuttled.

In civilian life, the obvious path for a war veteran trained in killing people ten different ways seemed to be law enforcement, so Vill followed the antipodal path by taking advantage of his VA benefits and going to graduate school in English Lit.

In grad school, Vill fell in love with Chaucer and Shakespeare and Raymond Chandler, and in the afternoons he found both a physical outlet and a spiritual center in martial arts. As he studied for his Ph.D. comprehensive exams, he relieved the stress by moseying over to the dojo and learning to infantilize men with painful joint locks and throws. Vill’s teacher had been a personal uke (which means “punching bag” in Japanese, or something close to that) to Professor Ronald Duncan, America’s foremost practitioner of aikijujutsu. Vill loved being the uke’s uke.

After grad school, Vill took a job teaching English to entitled prep school teenagers. His colleagues in the English Department saw only the Ph.D. label, which suited him just fine for the moment. Though he could have filled out the school’s personal history form with “Airborne Ranger” and a bunch of other labels that would have impressed a Green Beret, he’d simply written “yes” next to “military service.”

When the head of the Phys Ed department asked him what sports he’d played, he said, “Well, I played baseball through 9^th grade, basketball through 8^th, college intramural lacrosse, tennis, basketball, squash, and I play to a six handicap in golf.” They made him assistant JV lacrosse coach.

His primary labels in this new community were “English teacher” and “dorm parent.” He thought it a shame he wasn’t a CIA operative who’d found the perfect cover in a prep school whose denizens couldn’t have cared less about his past.

Teenagers don’t automatically love Shakespeare. Vill hadn’t, so it didn’t surprise him that his students didn’t either. He taught them Raymond Chandler instead, and he showed them The Big Sleep with Bogart and Bacall. They still didn’t get it. They didn’t like Chandler’s prose, nor did Bacall and Bogart’s screen chemistry thrill them the way it did Vill. Sexiest movie he’d ever seen.

Unluckily, Vill acquired another label not long into the school year when an oversized, boneheaded Dean of Student Life who’d read his personal history form prodded Vill at a faculty party to expound upon the abrupt and possibly ignominious end to his military career. The man had gone to Harvard, where draft dodging and protesting the war made him eligible for “most likely to succeed,” so he felt drunkenly entitled to embarrass the West Pointer war veteran in front of his new colleagues.

“Why’dja get out, gen’rul?” slurred the dean.

“Ignore him,” said Betsy McMasters, a cute English colleague. He tried to take Betsy’s advice, but the dean persisted.

“No, really, Smith, what happened? West Pointer on his way to a career up the rank ladder. What’d you do? Insult a sen’tor?” He chuckled at his own brilliance.

“No, just a rude drunk dean,” said Vill. A few people in the vicinity gasped, a couple others smirked. The dean fumed.

“You don’t know your place, man,” he said, “you habn’t got the cachet to say something like that, rookie.”

“Cachet, eh? That what you have? Cachet? In the Army, superior officers might correct subordinates if they fuck up, but they never insult the soldiers,” said Vill. “Apparently, you haven’t learned that lesson. You just learned cachet.”

More smirks from the folks gathering around the two men, causing the dean to glance at countenances whose smiles confirmed his diminishing amount of respect.

Vill started to walk away from the spat. He took no crap from anybody, least of all an obnoxious dean impressed with his overinflated and undeserved status. Vill’s Buddhist training taught that mild disagreements were no reason to resort to physical violence. In turning away, however, he readied his defenses in case the man chose to lay hands on him.

The dolt did, of course, thinking to regain the upper hand by shoving the smaller Vill into the shrimp cocktail table. Without even looking, Vill intercepted the offending hand the instant it touched him, bent the wrist ninety degrees beyond its natural hinge, and brought the man to his knees in pain in less than a second. The coterie of teachers near the altercation who had been smiling and trying to talk quietly about Toni Morrison’s new book, Song of Solomon, seemed to develop lockjaw as they watched Vill humble the soddened dean. Apparently, no one had ever done anything like this. Fisticuffs seemed boorish to prep school faculty, the mark of a person who was probably not in the right place, not of their ilk.

“Not smart, Vill,” said Betsy.

“He—”

“Doesn’t matter. You can’t win at this game.”

“What game is that?”

“Power,” she said. “We have none.”

He let go of the dean’s hand. The man got up. Humiliated, he said, “Smith, I’ll see you in the Dean of Faculty’s office tomorrow. Eight o’clock, sharp.”

“I teach at eight,” said Vill, “it’ll have to be third period. 9:30. By the way, I answer to ‘Vill’ or ‘Mr. Smith.’”

The next day, Vill’s new label was “fired teacher.”

He found another job teaching English. This time, the school had a headmaster who had served in Vietnam. Hired Vill on the spot as soon as he read Vill’s personal history statement. This time, when he filled out the form, Vill had proudly listed “Vietnam” as one of his stations.

“Where were you?” asked the headmaster, who, Vill noticed, had a framed patch of the 101^st Airborne Screaming Eagles on the shelf behind his desk.

“I was with the 1^st Infantry Division in III Corps,” he answered.

“Me too. III Corps, I mean. 101st.”

“I see that,” said Vill, pointing to the patch.

“Oh, yeah,” chuckled the headmaster. “Maybe we’ll talk sometime about Nam, but around here people rarely mention the military.”

“Yeah. Doesn’t surprise me. That’s okay. I’d just as soon leave it behind.” Vill knew both he and the headmaster would never leave Vietnam completely behind.

“We need an English teacher who can teach Shakespeare’s Sonnets, be a dorm parent and coach basketball. You do any of those?”

“All three.”

“Great. You’re hired. Oh, and see if you can avoid humiliating my deans, will you?”

Twenty-two years later, Vill Smith was one of the veteran teachers on the New Faculty Orientation Panel that brought new hires up to speed on the mission and the operating quirks of Jonathan Edwards Academy. He still hated being known by his labels, but he hoped his life contained enough complexity to befuddle all who limited their understanding of him to a couple of those labels.

Besides, the label that meant the most to him now was “father,” dwarfing the importance of all the others. He also referred to himself rather grandly as “writer.” Of course, the literary world hadn’t discovered him yet, due mostly to the ignorance of that group of people in publishing who labelled themselves “literary agent” and who couldn’t seem to recognize how utterly fantastic his stories were.

It was discouraging, not getting discovered. Embarrassing too. He’d always had a lofty opinion of his own writing. Overrated apparently. Oh well, he’d had a good job, lived a good life with a good family, and he could soon retire even if he sold nary a story. And even if he did sell one, nobody made a living writing fiction except a few very good writers. The rest got published but their books found their way to grocery store bargain shelves way before the authors expected.

So Vill was surprised—gobsmacked, really—when he got a letter from a literary agent that began, “So glad to receive your story about the Vietnam veteran who participated in a war crime and ended up teaching at the same school as the commander who was court-martialed for the same crime. What an original idea. We’d love to get it published.”

Vill read the letter ten times before putting it down to teach his last period class. He finished class twenty minutes early, then ran home to tell Norma Lee.

“Honey, look at this! They want to publish Calvin’s Back Yard!” Norma Lee, of course, wasn’t home.

“Shit!” yelled Vill.
“What the hell, Dad,” said his daughter, Olivia, walking into the living room and feigning irritation at his use of a mild expletive.

“Sorry, O, I wanted to tell your mother I got a story published. Well, not published yet, but accepted by an agent, which is tantamount to getting it published.”

Olivia was the oldest of two Smith children, Jack being the younger at 17, Olivia now a college senior and 21. Vill considered her an adult in every way but one: she lived at home and was therefore still a child. When she was married and living in a different house, then she could claim adulthood. Not until.

“Fantastic. Does that mean you won’t have to teach anymore? We can move to a nice apartment on Fifth Avenue? I can live at home and attend NYU grad school?”

“No. No. No. And no. But I’ll fix you a PB & J if you’re hungry.”

“Very funny, Dad.”

“No, really, do you want a PB & J? ‘Cause I’m fixing myself one. To celebrate. Pretty racey, don’t you think?”

“No. And no.”

They could go on like this for hours, father and daughter, intellectual foils since Olivia was six and recognized sarcasm for the first time. When she turned thirteen, however, his sarcasm had turned into “Dad” jokes, and so it held little value for her now. He countered her newfound maturity and budding teen boredom by finally letting her read his fiction, which he’d forbidden until then because it had sex in it. At sixteen, she stopped reading his fiction because she “found it dated,” which was her way of saying it was boring without using the “b” word.

It’s true, thought Vill, it’s dated. But that’s my epoch. The past is my epoch. As he smeared one piece of wheat bread with peanut butter (always peanut butter first, jelly second because you could wipe excess peanut butter on the clean piece of bread and still do jelly but you couldn’t do it the other way around), he puffed himself up to think that finally there was a literary agent whose epoch was also the past.

“Dad,” said Olivia, breaking his PB & J reverie, “it’s really cool that you have an agent now.”

“Thanks, honey.”

“So what’s the next step? I mean, you already wrote thirty drafts of the story. Surely it’s ready for instant publication.”

“Well, I don’t know. We’ll have discussions, I guess. I suppose it’s possible they want another revision. No problem if they do.”

“Let me know, okay? I’m interested. I might want to throw a couple of pieces their way. Can you do that? A member of the family also submitting stuff?”
“Don’t think publishing works that way, Olivia. Maybe Alafair Burke had an easier time finding an agent because her father was James Lee Burke, but I’m pretty sure Olivia Smith can’t glom on to Village Smith, who just got an agent after thirty years of rejections, just because she’s his daughter.”

“You don’t have to make it sound so stupid, Dad.”

“It’s mildly stupid, O. You aren’t, but it is. By the way, you going to let me read any of your stuff? I’d love to.”

“No. Remember when I let you read one of my stories when I had that seminar with Kurt Vonnegut, and you tore it apart sentence by sentence? I couldn’t believe how cruel you were, Dad. And you wouldn’t stop till you’d covered the whole story.”

Vill looked at his precious daughter. Never would he hurt Olivia, for all the world or a literary agent. But he had indeed done that to her.

“I’m sorry, honey. You never told me how upset you were about that.”

“Well, I was. But don’t obsess about it now, please. It’s water over the bridge, milk under the spilled bridge, whatever that tired metaphor is.”

Vill had to stifle what he knew she expected him to offer as a correction. Christ, was he that much of a pedant?

“Okay, so I can’t read any of your stuff. How can I recommend you to my new agent if I don’t know how good you are?”

Olivia pondered the problem. “Just tell him or her you read a story of mine years ago and I was good but not interested in publishing. And now I am.”

“What if you’re so good that you overshadow my work?” he said in deadpan.

“I am, and I do, but if they accepted your work, that shouldn’t be one of the issues.”

My god, she’s smart, thought Vill. “One of the issues? Might there be more than one issue here?”

“Try not to be so pedantically paranoid, Dad. You know what I mean. They have accepted your work. If I submit something and they accept my work, they aren’t going to reject yours in favor of mine.”

“You might have put that in a less pejorative way. You might have said, ‘If they have accepted your work and then they accept mine, we both will be published.’ There, isn’t that also true?”

“How should I know? Nobody in this family’s ever been published. Are people in the industry kind and diplomatic, or are they cutthroat?”

“Thirty years of being rejected speaks to the possibility of a modicum of cutthroatedness, if I may tiptoe up to it, but I have no way of knowing if we are rivals just because we are in the same family. If our stuff is good—both our stuffs—then we should both get published, right?”

“Yes, but your getting an agent doesn’t automatically mean your stories will get published, isn’t that true? So if my stories are better than yours, we both can have the same agent but my stories might get published before yours do. In fact, you might not get published at all.”

I stared at the lovely traitor for a second. “Okay, you just left all diplomacy on the cutting room floor, my darling daughter. And you leapfrogged over me, who is the writer who just got an actual agent. How do you expect me to take this display of arrogance, eh?”

Olivia laughed, and when she did, Vill laughed too, but not until she’d laughed first.

“Dad?”

“Yes, dearest daughter,” he said guardedly with a smile.

“How ‘bout this? What if you find out from your new agent how much revising they expect of you, you see how long it takes you to pen a final draft, and THEN you give them one of my stories. That way, you’ll be assured of being published, not threatened by how good my story is, and I can be on the fast track to getting an agent too. That’s reasonable, isn’t it?”

“Sounds like it.”

Vill wasn’t at all sure it was. The next day, he talked with his new agent, whose name was last on the agency’s listing and who sounded as young as Vill’s five-year-old nephew. After she slurred her first three words, he fully expected her to start referring to “dunktrucks” and “rainbrellas.”

“Sorry, Mr. Smith, I had a donut in my mouth when you answered the phone. I thought I had a few more seconds to chew.”

“No problem. What did you say your name was?”

“Sara. Sara Simpson.”

“Okay, Sara. Great to get your call. And it was thrilling to get the agency’s letter yesterday.”

“No problem. We’re thrilled to have you on board. So my boss wants me to tell you how much she enjoyed your story, and she has a few suggestions for a second draft.”

“Sure. But you should know I wrote thirty drafts to the story before you read it.”

“Yeah, we know. But you never had one of our agents read it, right?”

“That’s right, Sara. Okay, let me hear her suggestions. Wait, does that mean you are my agent or she is? If you’re passing along her suggestions, does that mean you’re a secretary? I don’t mean to insult you here, I’m just trying to understand the way your agency operates.”

“I’m not insulted, Mr. Smith, unless you are maligning my job as a secretary, which I’m not anyway, I’m a full-fledged agent, but we value our secretaries too. Our office is not so concerned with hierarchy.”

“Oh, forgive me, Sara, I meant no harm. I’ve got a lot of military baggage in my past, so I’m used to speaking in terms of hierarchy and rank.”

“Understood, Mr. Smith. So here’s the scoop on your story. We’d like you to do more research on the combat scene when the double agent is murdered; in its current version, it might not be convincing to real combat veterans. And then, the murder of the headmaster is not believable because the police observations of the crime scene don’t seem authentic. That needs to be shored up with credible crime procedures. Finally, the whole CIA idea is not working. We think you should excise that altogether.”

Vill paused before answering.

Sara filled the pause. “I know it might be disheartening to hear so much of your story needs rewriting, but the basic plot and characters are great. It just needs those changes. Can you do those in a week?”

“Well, I guess so,” said Vill slowly. “I’ll have to think of another way to give the Roach family a background that allows them to be murderers. Maybe Drinkwater can remain in the Army instead of recruiting the Roaches for the CIA.”

“Oh,” said Sara, “Drinkwater is totally unbelievable as CIA. You might have to write him out of the story. The Roaches can stay, but Drinkwater has to go. And there’s no way anybody would believe he and Mrs. Roach could be a couple.”

“They are not a couple, Sara. There’s just a hint that she might have seduced him for her purposes.”

“Right. That’s what I mean. Not believable. Too cougar-ish.”

“Are cougars no longer en vogue?” he said with enough sarcasm not to be misunderstood over the phone.
“No, they are. It’s just Mrs. Roach is married to a hunk of a man, so for her to seduce that ugly Drinkwater guy and kill the man she’s crazy about is just not working. Will it be hard for you to rewrite that?”

Vill had reached his limit. “Sara, I’m not a hard man to get along with, and I actually enjoy revising to make something better. But you’re asking me to excise plot elements without suggesting better alternatives. That seems a little unreasonable to me. You haven’t even asked me what I was trying to achieve by putting those elements together.”

Vill had produced a pause at Sara’s end, which unnerved him a little.

“Mr. Smith, let me ask another agent to read the story and get another opinion about it. How’s that sound?”

“It sounds like you are excluding me from an editing process, very possibly finding an ally to bowl me over with your opinions. Why aren’t we sitting down together to discuss the story in toto? I’m not comfortable having you make all these suggestions without our acknowledging the value of the story’s elements first.”

Sara sighed audibly. “Mr. Smith, our business is just that, busy. We try to expedite the editing process by reading stories and making editing suggestions. We just don’t have the time to sit down like we did in the old days, grab coffee in the office, and leisurely talk everything over. You’re going to have to trust us for the professional readers we are and let go of the preliminary discussions.”

Vill said, “Sara, no disrespect, but I don’t know you. I don’t know how good or bad a reader you are. Trust is something we are in the throes of building or damaging as we speak. I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I could meet you in person for, yes, a cup of coffee. I’d even be willing to buy it for you at your favorite coffee hole after driving the three and a half hours to get to New York, paying way too much for a parking space, and suffering the slings and arrows of a bored valet. But so far your process is not just discouraging, it’s insulting.”

In the pause that followed, Vill felt certain Sara was getting angry. “Mr. Smith,” she finally said, “I have another call to make in five minutes, which I know is a reality you don’t appreciate hearing. I will sign off for now, and you’ll hear from me in the next few days. Goodbye.”

“So that’s how it ended?” asked Olivia a couple days later.

“’Fraid so,” said Vill. “If I do hear from Sara, it might be her robot telling me how nice it was to talk with me but they won’t be needing further discussions about my story. And it goes without saying that I didn’t get to mention your stuff.”

“It’s all right, Dad, I sent them my story anyway. I’ve already heard back.”

Vill didn’t have to think about forming the blank stare his face assumed. “You’ve heard back?”

“Yep,” she said. “They like it.”

At least somebody in the family would get the “published” label.