Dramatis Personae

“Write a story with me in it,” the pale and hesitant man said.

You’d say, as I did in retrospect, that this was not a very hesitant thing to say.

I can only counter with my impression of him at the time – late 40s, rumpled, an inch below average height, gone a bit plump but no more than that, glasses, and the pale skin tone you get in the Upper Midwest, which is where this book signing was taking place. In terms of distinctive features he occupied the same territory that the word beige holds among colors.

For getting the man across to the reader I’d give this description about a B+ looking back on it. Writers get into the habit of quickly summarizing characters, at least upon the page, but it’s an uncertain art, and since you’ll never see this fellow, I’ve got nothing to go by but my own judgment.

There was a single splash of color among the overall wash of beige-ness and that was the dark red belt he wore. If you were fanciful you could think of it as a colorful sash, a single statement of distinction among the conformity of browns and tans, but that admittedly would work your fancy a little hard. Still, it’s what I remember.

And people say what they say regardless of our first impressions.

“Write a story with me in it.”

Do you write? It seems nearly everybody does these days. But have you published? If so you know something of the uncommonly dismaying experience of going on a book-signing tour.

This stop at a Barnes & Nobles in this Upper Midwest town on a bitter cold January night was Stop #13, exactly halfway through the circuit.

I had finally hit a profitable seam in the writing mine after a series of quite unprofitable ones – cowboys, hard guy detectives, science fiction – and was blessedly happy to have found an audience with my new category, and to be making money for the first time. I was earning it though.

We tracked the route, these 26 stops, to match the setting of the stories, which took place largely in the Midwest or more broadly, The Plains.

We dipped down as far as Oklahoma City to the south, ventured as far as Denver to the west – never again, my friend, never again, at least not via highway and at least not in December – two stops in Chicago, then, as I say, the Upper Midwest.

These tours are both what you think they are going to be and as different from that as you could possibly get.

A good night’s attendance in a library meeting room was two dozen, in a university bookstore maybe half that number, in one of the commercial bookstores, like this Barnes & Noble, as few as ten and as many as thirty. Day of the week, the weather, the time of day, all play a part. People come and go, too, out there in that audience of folding chairs, so it’s a shifting target.

You stand at the front of the room, sometimes with a podium, sometimes without, and read from your books, sometimes with a microphone, sometimes without.

You may not be much of an out-loud reader – I would say no more than three out of ten authors are – so you are regularly urged by your sponsors to speak up, to be more animated, to find a way to connect with the crowd.

The main point of the event, beyond extending your reputation and getting the name of your book out there, is to sell the damn things afterwards.

The table with a double stack of copies of your precious book is right there alongside you, so after the question and answer period you invite people up and sit there looking pleasantly expectant.

It helps to busily uncap your pen to demonstrate how ready you are to sign. My sister accompanied me on one of the legs of this tour and said the experience reminded her of standing against the wall at a high school mixer and waiting to see if anyone asks you to dance.

Say they do come up. Then it’s a matter of getting the person’s name, remembering the date and the place, and jotting down a quick note in one of the blank opening pages.

“Thanks for coming out on a freezing night! Enjoy the stories…but don’t be alone in the house when you do!” That sort of thing.

Sometimes you get a writeup in the local paper, like I did out of this one as it turns out.

“Write a story with me in it,” the last man in the room said.

“Well, I will if you buy my book!” I joked.

A deal,” he said, and brought out bills enough from his pocket to almost buy the book but I didn’t call him on it, deciding on the spot to give him ‘the last audience member in the room” discount. Such power I had, ha. I have to think he dropped his bills into the metal tray kept there conspicuously on the table, like a piano players tip jar.

I opened the book to the blank page that I had come to know so well and taking my pen in hand with an exaggerated flourish turned to him and said, “so what is this famous name?”

“I’ll get to that in a moment,” he replied, a bit blankly I thought. What I mean by that is that we had this routine going, me with the author’s pen, he with his wadded bills from his pocket and his name, and together we were going to do great things. Or so I thought. But the routine apparently was all in my head. He replied, in fact, with this dispiritedness that I speak of, as colorless as his pale tone.

“You know what kind of stories I write, right?” I asked.

“Oh, I know.”

I tried to probe a bit. “What’s behind this? Do you just get a thrill out of seeing yourself in print?”

He considered this. We both knew it was late, in fact they had turned the lights off over our little section of the bookstore. “It has been a life of…of non-events.” He gave some thought to those last few syllables. “A lifetime of waiting for great things to happen to me, and none of them have.”

“We all have to adjust our expectations, my friend,” I said. “Look at me, I thought I was going to be rich and famous and even if I had asked my mother to do the counting I don’t think there were more than eight people here tonight.”

“Yes, but you have time, you still have time, time to change your story,” he said with a sudden intensity, all the more startling for being the one intense or spirited thing he had to say. A flash of color, bit like that red belt.

“Time,” he murmured as though to himself. “Put me in your stories, and then it will seem as though I was actually here.”

And so, for no good reason save that it was late and I wanted to get out of there and back to the hotel since I had to drive to Omaha’s downtown bookstore in the morning, I shook hands and told him it was a deal. “Now tell me what this famous name of yours is.”

About that time the assistant manager struck a pose where the light of the store met the dark of this little presentation area, and said, “All alone? We’re closing in ten minutes.” Keeping to the emerging theme of the evening he added, “It’s time.”

And that was that. The man gave me his name, I signed (‘thanks for coming out on this cold night,’ etc.), and closed the book and pushed it across the table, all the while hurrying to get out of there and keep my good name among bookstore owners.

My books were packed, my coat on, and my hand outstretched as I turned to say goodbye to this strange fellow, when I saw that once again I was in the midst of some sort of solo act, for he apparently had gone on his way while I had busied myself with leave-taking. And, get this, had forgotten to take the book.

Well, a deal, yes but what exactly was the deal? His money must have been there in the kitty somehow but I still held the book, so I owed him.

And, as the assistant manager again informed me, it was time.

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Being the only party that I could consult, I came to suppose that it was up to me to decide how to get this fellow into my stories. It was a three word name – let us call him William Henry Addison – but that was too distinctive, I mean who goes by three names these days?

But a promise was a promise.

So I started inserting my new friend into my stories as they rolled out of the printer, in the beginning at least without using any name at all.

He was the pale man of about an inch below average height who worked at the garden store and sold the lady the sprout of the strangely shaped plant in “Dark Bloom.” (one of my best female characters by the way, this lady customer, a bit of a nut, a bit of a babe, and a bit of a saint was what I was going for and got close to…I’d give her an A-, maybe even a straight A.)

When the high school gal opens the story with its first line,“Wait, guys, I left my phone back at the cemetery!” he was the rumpled man who drove the taxi that took her and her friends back to that grave. That was “Return of the Native.”

The sound engineer behind the glass at the Audible studio, pale, dressed plainly, looking on at the gal in front of the microphone acting out a script that got more and more eerie as she went in “The Sound of Strange”? You got it. Our good friend William Henry Addison.

And so on.

It would be a bit much I think if I had inserted the red belt on each occasion, so I spread the color around: a bright yellow cap here, a blue watchband there, a green pair of socks adorning this otherwise nondescript character, varying with the story and the plot. Go back to my second collection and read those stories, you’ll see what I mean. And buy a copy to send a friend this Christmas while you’re at it. Just a suggestion, ha.

Those stories sold, chum, and sold quickly. At the time I was converting my website to monetize some of the thousands of views I got every day. I would start one of these stories on the front screen, get ‘em hooked, and then invite the reader to subscribe via PayPal. It worked. But, lordy, if that’s your scheme it’s got to be the right story, and these were.

I took it a little further and peeled off the separate names and started using them.

It was William, pale and rumpled as always, who was pumping air into his bicycle tires right when the main character decided to make one more ride around the old abandoned airport…right as night was falling, right as the fog was rising. This was “Last Ride.”

Henry Addison, an inch below average height and so on, was the first person in his neighborhood to note the strange chalk drawings on the sidewalks, and this in a neighborhood with no kids for miles. “Markings,” that was, and I had another hit and a few more dollars in the bank.

My friend made his full debut as William Henry Addison a month later in “The Tunnel of Death,” followed by “Death in the Sky,” now appearing as a kind of psychic investigator who looked beyond the earthly evidence to see what was really behind a crime, you know, a family curse or what not. Corny, I know, but people ate it up.

A novel had always beckoned – novels always beckon for writers, some things you can count on – and WHA was the best thing I had going at the time.

I had never plotted out anything that long before but it went like a dream – this was “Ghost in the Machine” – and I had an honest to goodness hit on my hands. I won’t say it kept Stephen King up nights, but a hit. I would have given the world to have seen it printed in one of those shiny metallic covers like we used to see on the supermarket shelves in the 80s horror novels but that fashion had come and gone. Fine, I’ll still take the success. And of course my new or old friend was at the center of it all, explaining all the evidence away as he stood over a pharaoh’s mummy.

This was the kind of good news I didn’t want to keep to myself.

If I had had the guy’s email address, or even a street or business address from a card, I would have thrown him a note with something in the subject line like “What a team!” but of course I had nothing like that.

It got to me after a certain amount of time, wondering if he had been reading my stuff, and if it was a thrill to see his name in print, if that was even what he was looking for.

He didn’t show up in any traditional search, Google this or Yahoo that. Funny that, when you consider that we all show up for something somewhere it seems. Maybe his life really was just as nondescript as he had described it.

My clipping service had sent me the story that had been in the paper the next day after that book signing in that Upper Midwest city – I was long gone by then of course, on the road to the next bookstore – but I had lost it. I was scrounging through my memory for the date when it occurred to me that I had it in front of me all along….in the blank opening page of my book that he had forgotten to take, still on my shelf in my writing studio. I always put the date at the top. And once I found the book, there it was, deep in the winter months.

I am not the world’s best researcher, so between figuring out the name of that city’s newspaper and thrashing my way through the paper’s truly awful, truly awful, website, it was several days before I threw my friend’s name into the search box at the top of the home page. I kept the beginning search date open, and closed it off the day before the book signing. I didn’t care what he had done after the signing, I wanted to know what he had done before.

And…nothing. If ever a person truly did go through the world making not a mark, this was the man. Not a graduation, not a commendation, not a traffic ticket, not a marriage, not a divorce, not a bystander to a robbery, not a lottery winner, not named in a scandal, not held without bail, not awarded a plaque by City Hall or the Elks or the Lions.

Nuttin’, honey.

Worth a moment’s thought to consider that he had had it right in his own way. A life lived but unlived at the same time, always waiting for the precipitating event, the catalyst, the crossing of paths, the irresistible individual, the occasion, the phone call, the theater ticket, the fist fight….none of which ever happened.

Turning away from the computer I nudged the mouse accidentally. In the way that digital objects seem to have a life of their own, and especially if I am in the vicinity, that small movement upped the date a single day of the year. The start date was still wide open, but now the close date for the search had an extra day tacked on, the day of the book signing itself.

And there was my friend, right there at the top of of the page, a single result, the one and only time apparently that he had ever been in the newspaper, the one faint imprint he had left on life, and as it turned out the very night of the book signing.

As few words as you could get by with and still get the message across. Published as a kindness no doubt.

A simple service that morning, no flowers, no survivors, cremation.