Richard bought ‘Sorry’ the day he read it, and had it in production a week or two later. A month after that, it was telecast . . . as a season premiere, if my recollection serves. It is still one of the fastest turns from in-the-head to on-the-screen that I’ve ever heard of. This version, by the way, is my first draft, which is a little longer and a little more textured than the final shooting
script, which for budgetary reasons specified just two sets. It is included here as an example of another kind of story-telling . . . different, but as valid as any other.
‘The Ten O’Clock People’ — during the summer of 1992 I was walking around downtown Boston, looking for an address that kept eluding me. I eventually found the place I was looking for, but before I did, I found this story. My address-hunt took place around ten in the morning, and as I walked I began to notice groups of people clustered in front of every expensive high-rise building, groups that made no sociological sense. There were carpenters hobnobbing with businessmen, janitors shooting the breeze with elegantly coiffed women in power clothes, messengers passing the time of day with executive secretaries.
After I’d puzzled over these groups — granfalloons Kurt Vonnegut never imagined — for half an hour or so, the penny dropped: for a certain class of American city dweller, addiction has turned the coffee-break into the cigarette-break. The expensive buildings are now all no-smoking zones as the American people go calmly about one of the most amazing turnabouts of the twentieth century; we are purging ourselves of our bad old habit, we are doing it with hardly any fanfare, and the result has been some very odd pockets of sociological behavior. Those who refuse to give up their bad old habit — the Ten O’Clock People of the title — constitute one of these. The story is intended as no more than a simple amusement, but I hope it says something interesting about a wave of change, which has temporarily, at least, re-created some aspects of the separate-but-equal facilities of the forties and fifties.
‘The House on Maple Street’ — remember Richard Rubinstein, my producer friend? He was the guy who sent me my first copy of Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.
Richard attached a note in his spiky handwriting: ‘You’ll like this’ was all it said, and all it really needed to say. I did like it.
The book purports to be a series of drawings, titles, and captions by the eponymous Mr.
Burdick — the stories themselves are not in evidence. Each combination of picture, title, and caption serves as a kind of Rorschach inkblot, perhaps offering more of an index to the reader/viewer’s mind than to Mr. Van Allsburg’s intentions. One of my favorites shows a man with a chair in his hand — he is obviously prepared to use it as a bludgeon if he needs to —
looking at a strange and somehow organic bulge under the living-room carpet. ‘Two weeks passed and it happened again,’ the caption reads.
Given my feelings about motivation, my attraction to this sort of thing should be clear. What happened again after two weeks? I don’t think it matters. In our worst nightmares, there are only pronouns for the things, which chase us back to wakefulness, sweating and shuddering with horror and relief.
My wife, Tabitha, was also taken with The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, and it was she who suggested that each member of our family write a short story based on one of the pictures. She wrote one; so did our youngest son, Owen (then twelve). Tabby chose the first picture in the book; Owen chose one in the middle; I chose the last one. I have included my effort here, with the kind permission of Chris Van Allsburg. There’s no more to add, except that I’ve read a slightly bowdlerized version of the tale to fourth-and fifth-graders several times over the last three or four years, and they seem to like it a great deal. I have an idea that what they really get off on is the idea of sending the Wicked Stepfather off into the Great Beyond. I certainly got off on it. The story has never been published before, mostly because of its tangled antecedents, and I am delighted to offer it here. I only wish I could offer my wife’s and son’s stories as well.
‘The Fifth Quarter’ — Bachman again. Or maybe George Stark.
‘Umney’s Last Case’ — a pastiche — obviously — and paired with ‘The Doctor’s Case’ for that reason, but this one is a little more ambitious. I have loved Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald passionately since I discovered them in college (although I find it both instructive and a little scary to note that, while Chandler continues to be read and discussed, Macdonald’s highly praised Lew Archer novels are now little-known artifacts outside the small circle of livre noir fans), and I think again it was the language of these novels which so fired my imagination; it opened a whole new way of seeing, one that appealed fiercely to the heart and mind of the lonely young man I was at that time.
It was also a style which was lethally easy to copy, as half a hundred novelists have discovered in the last twenty or thirty years. For a long time I steered clear of that Chandlerian voice, because I had nothing to use it for . . . nothing to say in the tones of Philip Marlowe that was mine.
Then one day I did. ‘Write what you know,’ the Wise Old Dudes tell us poor cemetery remnants of Sterne and Dickens and Defoe and Melville, and for me, that means teaching, writing, and playing the guitar . . . though not necessarily in that order. As far as my own career-within-a-career of writing about writing goes, I’m reminded of a line I heard Chet Atkins toss off on Austin City Limits one night. He looked up at the audience after a minute or two of fruitless guitar-tuning and said, ‘It took me about twenty-five years to find out I wasn’t very good at this part of it, and by then I was too rich to quit.’
Same thing happened to me. I seem destined to keep going back to that peculiar little town —
whether you call it Rock and Roll Heaven, Oregon; Gatlin, Nebraska; or Willow, Maine — and I also seem destined to keep going back to what I do. The question, which haunts and nags and won’t ‘ever completely let go is this one: Who am I when I write? Who are you, for that matter?
Exactly what is happening here, and why, and does it matter?
So, with these questions in mind, I pulled on my Sam Spade fedora, lit up a Lucky (metaphorically speaking, these days) and started to write. ‘Umney’s Last Case’ was the result, and of all the stories in this volume, it’s the one I like the best. This is its first publication.
‘Head Down’ — my first writing for pay was sports writing (for a while I was the entire sports department of the weekly Lisbon Enterprise), but that didn’t make this any easier. My proximity to the Bangor West All-Star team when it mounted its unlikely charge on the State Championship was either pure luck or pure fate, depending on where you stand in regard to the possible existence of a higher power. I tend toward the higher power thesis, but in either case, I was only there because my son was on the team. Nevertheless, I quickly realized — more quickly than Dave Mansfield, Ron St. Pierre, or Neil Waterman, I think — that something pretty extraordinary was either happening or trying to happen. I didn’t want to write about it, particularly, but something kept telling me I was supposed to write about it.
My method of working when I feel out of my depth is brutally simple: I lower my own head and run as fast as I can, as long as I can. That was what I did here, gathering documentation like a mad packrat and simply trying to keep up with the team. For a month or so it was like living inside one of those corny sports novels with which many of us guys have whiled away our duller afternoon study-halls: Go Up for Glory, Power Forward, and occasional bright standouts like John R. Tunis’s The Kid from Tomkinsville.
Hard or not, ‘Head Down’ was the opportunity of a lifetime, and before I was done, Chip McGrath of The New Yorker had coaxed the best nonfiction writing of my life out of me. I thank him for that, but I owe the most thanks to Owen and his teammates, who first made the story happen and then gave me permission to publish my version of it.