The day before I left home for college, I made a phone call to the publishing house of a writer I’ll call Rupert Dicks. Dicks had a reputation as one of the most audacious and brilliant minds in literature in the last century, and his work represented everything I held as sacred at the time – he was innovative, unapologetic and dedicated to the craft of honest prose. At seventeen, I knew I was a writer, and I wanted to know what Rupert Dicks knew. I was determined to get him to tell me.
‘I’m calling because I’m a student of Rupert Dicks,’ I told the book editor on the phone.
‘I didn’t know Rupert had any students at the moment.’
‘Well, I’m his student. Mind asking him to call me?’
I was a kid, but I wasn’t naive. A glance at Dicks’s author photo had given me some insight into how I could talk my way into his tutelage.
‘Tell him I’m a freshman at college,’ I said to the woman on the phone. There, I thought. That’ll get him. I gave her the phone number of my soon-to-be dorm room. When I moved in the next day, the red light on the answering machine was blinking.
‘Rupert Dicks here. I understand you’re interested in writing. I don’t know what you look like or if you’ve got any talent, but give me a call and I can tell you what I think.’
I called him back. Without much chitchat, Dicks gave me directions to a particular bench in an enormous park on the other side of town, the site of our meeting the next morning.
‘Bring your work,’ he said. ‘See you tomorrow.’
I was thrilled.
That afternoon, I went to college orientation, mingling with students who seemed, suddenly, like children. I had a secret, a path, and passion that would lead my life to interesting places, not just around the corner to the university library. If I felt any anxiety about my meeting with Dicks the next day, it was that he would refuse to teach me or tell me my work was juvenile.
‘Let’s see what you’ve brought me,’ Dicks said when we met. No hello, no handshake. He hunched over on the bench, took out a pen, and started drawing diagonal lines across every page of the story I’d given him. I sat down next to him and surveyed him. He wasn’t a large man, but his body vibrated with the demanding neediness of a man who had once been very beautiful and powerful. At sixty-five, he now had age spots on his face, jowls, thin white hair edging out from under his hat. I remember thinking his waning vitality could be used to my advantage. If I succeeded in reflecting his great masculine strength, then he’d want me around, might take more of an interest in my work, tell me more, explain more, enlighten me more.
‘So?’
‘There’s a garbage can over there,’ Dicks said nonchalantly. He seemed to want this to hurt my feelings, although it did not. I took the pages from his fingers and crumpled them up, made two baskets into the garbage can, but missed on the third. I stood and bent down to pick up the balled-up paper, knowing Dicks would have a perfect view of my butt. It was innocuous, and yet very deliberate.
‘Let’s walk,’ he said when I returned to the bench.
He talked for an hour about craft, curiosity, urgency, warned against the pitfalls of subconscious conformity, complacency and people-pleasing. I tried not to ask too many questions because they only inspired outrage and scorn. Along the way, he name-dropped writers and editors.
Finally, he turned to sex. I played along, but I was no Lolita. I was not sucking lollipops or sitting on anyone’s lap. This was a game of egos. If I wanted what Dicks had to give me – the wisdom of his experience as a great writer – I would have to venerate him and lead him on, to flirt. But I couldn’t seem too willing. If I didn’t hold myself up high enough and play hard to get, my allure would vanish, along with his tutelage.
‘Seventeen, eh? Jailbait,’ he said. ‘I should be careful what I do with you. And if you’re ever famous, you could try to humiliate me. Which would be pathetic on your part. Women and their boohoos and neediness.’
Our first meeting concluded with a writing assignment. He told me to come back when I’d finished. I called him a week later.
‘I did what you told me.’
‘Good girl,’ he said, and invited me to his apartment for the first of a handful of meetings over the course of the school year.
Dicks lived alone in a beautiful apartment decorated by his wife, who’d died years earlier. The whole place was dark. The kitchen, even on the sunniest day, was a cold chamber of shadows. Dicks and I sat across from each other, a small desk lamp on the kitchen table illuminating the printed pages I brought with me. At each meeting, he made me a martini. He ate cereal and smoked marijuana. Conversation was mostly one-sided: a man and his audience.
None of the work I showed him was very good, or very honest. But that was beside the point. I just wanted to listen to him talk. If he spent five minutes addressing my writing, I felt my visit was worthwhile. My ambition was not to be successful – to publish books and be renowned, rich and powerful, like Dicks; I wanted, truly, to use my writing to rise up to a higher realm of existence, away from the stupidity I saw in my classmates, teachers and parents, or on television and on the subway. I understood that life would be meaningless unless my art reached toward an understanding of who I was, and what I was doing here. I don’t know if Dicks sensed my seriousness as a writer. Part of what made him interesting was that I felt he would dismiss me the moment I bored him. And he did, sometimes, tell me to leave abruptly, when he’d had enough. I kept calling and asking if I could visit. Dicks never refused.
When I turned eighteen, our meetings became more overtly sexual in tone. One day he took me by the hand and led me into his office, unearthed a huge cardboard box, and proceeded to pull out photographs, mostly Polaroids, of young, attractive women. ‘These are some of the chicks I’ve laid,’ he said. There were hundreds of them. ‘I shouldn’t have to convince you: I know what I’m doing in the sack.’
Another time, I raised my arms to lift a book off a high shelf and Dicks traced his finger over my exposed stomach. Nobody had touched me there before. ‘You know, with age, the nerve endings in your fingertips become more sensitive. I can do more with this one finger than some college kid could do with his entire body.’ He made a good case for himself. The touch lingered long enough for me to be stunned for a minute. I made up an excuse to leave quickly that day. But I called again before too long.
Then there was the kiss at his kitchen table. Sixty-five-year-old lips, cold, slack, weirdly passionless. I felt nothing. I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed. When he sat back down, he asked if he could take me to bed. He didn’t want to have intercourse, he explained. He just wanted to pleasure me. I said no. We argued about this for hours. Yes, I stayed for hours and argued. They were some of the most rhetorically challenging hours of my life. I’d never been more present. I was alive and engaged, watchful and cautious with my body language, arrogant and flirtatious in my speech. Dicks mesmerized me. If I’d been any less determined as a writer, I may have been persuaded.
The last time I saw Dicks, I brought a new story. Dicks read it over my shoulder in the love seat in his immaculate bedroom. He edited the entire piece, explaining his reasoning for every move – it was a private masterclass, just what I’d always wanted. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘This means so much to me.’ Then Dicks went to his closet and began a show-and-tell of lubricant gels, dirty movies, contraceptive sponges, etcetera. So, we argued about sex again. None of it turned me on, not the argument, not his erotic devices, not him. He’d given me what I wanted, teacher to student. I didn’t feel like paying him back.
‘I’m sorry I’ve wasted so much of your time,’ I said. ‘I won’t come back, I promise.’
Dicks was irate, and yet he helped me on with my boots.
‘I have better things to do, you know, than muck around with some kid.’
That was the end.
At thirty-six, I’m pretty fluent in irreverence and cynicism. My assumption that people are ultimately self-serving lowers my expectations and allows me to forgive. More importantly, it empowers me to be selfish, and to cast off the delusion that I’ll get what I want just by ‘being nice’. We are all unruly and selfish sometimes. I am, you are, he is, she is. Like Dicks, I have little patience for small talk or politesse. One has to be somewhat badly behaved to write above the fray in a society most comfortable with palatable mediocrity. One has to be willing to upset the apple cart. Apples go flying, people trip and fall, yelp, grab for one another. A street corner is transformed into a tragic circus. And everybody gets an apple, each one bruised and broken in a special way. That’s the kind of writer I have always wanted to be, a troublemaker. I can’t fault Dicks or anyone else for wanting the same.
Artwork © Bertrand Dorny, Central Park, Courtesy of Galerie Le Coin des Arts, Paris
