"Savage and Johnson were sometimes in such extreme indigence that they could not pay for a lodging, so that they have wandered together whole nights in the streets. They were not at all depressed by their situation, but in high spirits and brimful of patriotism... I am afraid, however, that by associating with Savage, who was habituated to the dissipation and licentiousness of the town, Johnson was imperceptibly led into some indulgence which occasioned much distress to his virtuous mind."
—James Boswell
Back in the mid-seventies I had a friend named Streckfuss who was no fun in groups. He had a tendency to jump up and pin the nearest person to the floor by means of regulation G.I.-style jujitsu. He'd kneel on the kid's chest like a sizzling incubus with razor shinbones, and aim huge eyes deep into each orifice of his or her head. Eventually, Streckfuss would say, "Somebody did something terrible to me as a child... What was it? Who did it? I don't know... Let me check."
Then he would dismount, retire to the corner and get all sulky and pouty. He'd breathe in peculiar ways till the skin that covered the visible parts of his body went corpse-gray and he passed out for indefinite periods. When he came to, he would repeat the process till everyone normal was frightened away.
Streckfuss didn't really fit into my crowd at the time. As a matter of fact, my social standing took a nose-dive during our period of association. But I didn't care because there were Indians at the hotel where he lived. Occupying a semi-circle of folding chairs in the tiny lobby, consulting an ancient television with rabbit ears, they were displaced members of the Shivwit tribe—which meant Streckfuss was never without a big paper bag chock full of the plumpest, juiciest peyote buttons I've ever seen in my life.
Streckfuss and I used to go to various Seven-Eleven stores for a Big Gulp root beer and a cheese dog with extra cheese to ballast his peyote stomach. I, myself, never needed to spend our scarce money on such things, but disdained them as gastric crutches, because my whole, hefty metabolism was made for these little spineless cacti. I was the only person in town, besides the Shivwit braves themselves, who never even got a tiny bit queasy. And that filled Streckfuss with envy, turning him a visible cactus-green. He speculated that I might have the unfair advantage of some aboriginal blood in my veins, despite my physical type, which seems unadulteratedly Celtic—although that doesn't necessarily inspire any undue feelings of narcissism in me.
I was much larger than my compeer, who, in contradiction of his Germanic given name, was very compact and Italianate. So he never tried pinning me to the floor and kneeling on my chest with questions about repressed infantile traumas. I, on the other hand, found him terrifying as a rabid squirrel with claws bristling from its elbows. In fact, I only just barely learned to endure the elevator-stomach that came from looking into the guy's eyes. So the feelings of respect were mutual.
While waiting to be served at Seven-Eleven, Streckfuss liked to browse through the reading material. Today it's hard for young people to believe me when I tell them that serious literature was once hawked in such places, but it's true. I got my copy of Nabokov's Ada off a twirly rack in a grocery store.
One day, as I was watching the clerk go through the recondite process of melting the bricks of quiescently frozen cheese sauce for the dogs, Streckfuss came upon a particularly well-pitched item. It was a classic application of the famous "four-P's" in qualitative marketing theory: Product, Place, Promotion, and Price. Many handsome copies of a novel, with embossed and perforated covers, coruscating with foil, were neatly tucked in a special cardboard display stand. Easy to assemble for franchise managers across the nation, this eye-catching promotional device had been ingeniously contrived to resemble a key symbol and central image in the text.
This was intended to give potential buyers, deep in the irrational part of their brains, a sense of what the product had to offer, without their having to read a word. It was almost a reptilian appeal, zooming directly through the aperture of the eyeball into those suggestible nodes and nodules of the central nervous system, which, in our case that day, were suffused with the phosphorescent green Eucharist of the southwestern desert.
Streckfuss was enchanted, and already engrossed in page three, when his cheese dog finally came steaming across the counter, trailing ropes and braids of extra cheese. The better to keep his fingers free for page ruffling, he balanced his purchase on the top edge of the display stand. It dripped a molten orange on the product, but Streckfuss was too absorbed to notice, and I was somehow incompetent or disinclined to react.
In size it was a fairly considerable object, assembled generously in order to give customers a sense that they were getting a substantial consumer item in return for their hard-earned cash. As an example of qualitative marketing strategy, this confection could not have been much better. It had been printed on thick paper, with wide margins and big type to inflate the page count.
Streckfuss really liked it, because he understood every word and could negotiate each grammatical construction without undue effort. It seemed to be one of those universally appealing works of art that somehow manage to reach both the general public at large and the book-reviewing apparatus of its time. According to the back cover, the author was the recipient of a major critical award, even though his thing was selling like hotcakes all across the continent. So it was with neither a trace of populist chagrin nor elitist guilt that Streckfuss flipped through the chapters with his permanently discolored fingers.
My little friend washed dishes in a hospital kitchen. He worked all day elbow-deep in that almost Tyrian purple compound utilized in the food services industry to call workers' attention to impurities which have not been properly scoured off pots and pans. A former soldier, Streckfuss was hard as a skeleton with the flesh gnawed off, and was able to scorn the rubber gloves that prevented the skin of his co-workers' hands from being boiled away. So he bore permanent stains as of passion among the self-inflicted ritual disfigurements on his knuckles and bony forearms: the BORN TO BE WILD and the ineptly rendered Hakenkreuz with mystic heat radiations slithering around his wrist. He'd dug these tattoos in deep with straight pins and blue ballpoint ink during his former days as a car thief and a minor embarrassment in the more squalid zones of our obscure and blighted far-western community.
"I used to think my skin pictures looked pretty wicked," Streckfuss said when he saw me scrutinizing his fingers at Seven-Eleven that day.
I wasn't trying to be rude, but the juxtaposition on his left thumb of sunset-colored cheddar, purple pot-stainer, and the unnamable hue which the ballpoint ink had assumed after curdling so many years under the sallow layers of his skin, combined with the general shift toward the green end of the spectrum which peyote sometimes visits upon the retina, had rendered me briefly stuporous. My eyelids felt like lips, and I was hesitant to speak for fear of weeping bloody tears.
But I snapped out of it quickly when I realized I might be making him feel self-conscious (therefore angry, in his self-alienated case). It was always a good idea to avoid gazing directly at any uncovered part of Streckfuss, especially in public, with the irritant of so many other people close at hand. After almost a minute of looking elsewhere, I was able to moisten my lips and throat ever so slightly, just enough to croak out a noncommittal reply about Third Reich insignia getting a bad press lately.
Streckfuss was unpopular not just because of his wrong-colored limbs and erratic behavior. He was unloved by large numbers of strangers who'd never been exposed to those shortcomings at close quarters. When peeking out his window at the hotel like some ineptly sculpted gargoyle, all hollow cheeks and residual military buzz-cut, he drew double takes from normal pedestrians passing below on the sidewalk.
"A leaper, a sniper?" they seemed to ask one another, and his notoriety increased.
But, contrary to most people's understandable suspicions, the only time he was predictably dangerous was when someone made fun of his unfortunate name. So, of course, behind his back, there was a regular efflorescence: Strekkie the Trekkie, Streck-Dreck, Stretch-face, Yecchy Strecky, etc. Rumor maintained that the scamp who coined that last one paid for it with her ability to walk unaided.
"This is quite the novel-book," Streckfuss was saying. He took a deep draw on his Big Gulp root beer and examined the black-and-white portrait on the back cover. It revealed a writer with depths of unfulfilled longing in his eyes, and a dark brown beard, well trimmed.
Amazingly enough, this individual was at that very moment abiding in our miserable town. To this day, nobody has ever been able to explain to my satisfaction such a celebrity's presence in our backwater enclave, at the very peak and explosion of his terrestrial fame. My best guess would be that the pressures of maintaining the pace of such an intense publicity campaign—the acceptance speeches for honorary degrees, the interviews with Bob Cromie on PBS, the black-tie receptions at the White House, and so on, culminating in the shrine to his talent which was spread so appetizingly before us now—had become too much for him, and he had, for the sake of his health, been compelled to escape, to hide out, as it were, in some provincial no-place, where such vitality-sucking hype remained at low intensities, and his public presence was cardboard, not incarnate.
Our town couldn't have been a happier choice. Even the most ambitious book tours never scheduled stops within hundreds of miles, the populace being, if not precisely illiterate, then disinclined to spend their money on literature—certainly not hardback editions, the sale of which is the meat and potatoes of signings, authorial appearances and readings. And God knows our Main Street contained no bookstore worthy of accommodating the likes of him and a table full of his mighty works.
I imagined that the creator of Streckfuss' much-admired "novel-book" had come for a salutary sojourn among our staid and, frankly, dull burghers, in order to get back in touch with his deep river of self, so essential to the novelist's silent, solitary craft. He was seeking peace and renewal among us simple and subliterate salts of the earth. Like a Hindu pilgrim, he must return to the Ganges to bathe. Our town was his ghat, our homely folk the burnt corpses he stepped over.
On the other hand, he could've been cruising for some sort of primitivistic kick that he imagined to be available here. But an intelligent man like him would have discovered his error in about twenty minutes and cleared out weeks ago. Somehow I doubt that an artist of such wide distribution and global sales would be content to waste his leisure time on the sort of thing my neighbors and I did for fun, such as hanging around Seven-Eleven parking lots till the wee hours with the likes of Streckfuss—which is what we did after he shoplifted our illustrious guest's novel.
It had taken a while for us to find a copy that wasn't soaked through with one gastric crutch or the other, both species as it were, because, while I wasn't looking, Streckfuss apparently had a full-body spasm and somehow managed to spill his sugary brown drink up and down the length of the handsome display. When the time came to steal one, my accomplice was not very discreet making his selection, slopping the rejects in glutinous piles on the bright Seven-Eleven linoleum. Subtlety was not a Streckfussian forte.
At any rate, we were not stopped and searched on the way out. Perhaps the clerk didn't think it worthwhile to try, with one of us transcending by several inches the height gauge on the doorjamb, and the other clearly a sociopath with nothing to lose. Or maybe the clerk was a student of the Chinese author Lu Xun, who wrote, "Stealing books is not stealing."
Speaking of the Chinese, earlier that very month when they began to pirate the products of his soul on a gargantuan scale, our visiting author had waxed bitterly eloquent in denouncing such thievery from the pulpit of the electronic broadcast media. He was courageous enough to speak out, despite the protestations of certain leftward-leaning naifs in the press who pointed out that the Chinese could never afford his books at the regular price, anyway. They cited Faulkner's words to the effect that the true novelist's sole desire should be to "scratch his name on the door of eternity" without regard to the service charge that could be extracted in return for such scratching. These lefties also claimed that certain writers existed (maybe all dead now) who would be flattered to the point of mania to have members of such a vast and formidable civilization taking an interest in their work, regardless of the financial arrangement, or lack thereof, which had placed the books in their hands.
These more than slightly pink commentators (many of whom were members of our author's charmed circle back east) even got personal, and, as evidence of what they considered craven hypocrisy, called attention to the meticulous left-wing stance he always assumed in his published oeuvre—as if storytellers haven't, from the very start of the practice, reserved the right to assume personae and depict Weltanschauungen not necessarily their own. How many readers really think, for example, that Milton the man resembled in any way—
Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
From heaven; for ev'n in heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific.
It must have been a real crisis of conscience for our best-selling writer, with his chums poking cruel fun like that. But he wrestled with it and came down solidly on the side of the right. He backed himself up with a moving reference to the eighth paragraph of the horned prophet's stone code, intending to shame those Dengists and make them think twice about intellectual property rights as they pertain to international law.
Perhaps, if the clerk on duty at Seven-Eleven had been issued a radio or a television, and given the time to listen to the heartfelt plaints of this victim of robbery—no, of soul-rape outright—on the local PBS and NPR affiliate stations, he would have interposed his pink-jacketed person between Streckfuss and the exit. Had this clerk mustered the courage, if not the conscience, to earn his wage and prevent our author from being deprived of his rightful ten percent royalty on the cover price of what was so palpably stuffed down the front waistband of Streckfuss' funky little underpants—well, I think it's safe to say that the next eighteen hours of American literary history would have turned out quite differently, and I might not be writing this sad memoir today, more than a quarter-century later.
As it was, we were allowed to leave the convenience store with our booty, and to loiter in its parking lot until the setting of Orion in the western sky. (Not that we saw it through the exhaust fumes of peckish insomniacs.)
At one point in the night, Streckfuss edged close to me on the concrete stoop and began to stew even hotter than usual. He was little more than a gristly shrimp on two toothpicks, but, nevertheless, it was impossible to absorb his gaze and simultaneously maintain a settled stomach. I found myself shifting attention elsewhere. Cringing away, I noticed an electric stinger exposed for sale on the other side of the shop window, one of those hot wires used for boiling coffee in kitchenless hovels and prison cells. A bony knee touched mine, and my flesh crawled almost pleasantly.
"You might not believe this," he said, rolling the pilfered volume into an ever-tighter tube, "but there's whole chunks out of my life I can't even remember. My social worker told me that if it wasn't for the draft, I'd still be wherever I was that I can't pin down, all doped up with thorazine and locked in a ward with bent people; or else I'd be running loose, pulling ape-shit crazy stunts like—um, like—"
Streckfuss examined his tiny scribbled-upon doll's hands. He thought hard.
"Hey!" I cried, in a cheerful honk. With mental fingers I groped my gray matter for something to distract him before he could recollect stunts better left forgotten. "Um, know what? You ought to come along with me to the Creative Writing workshop!"
