Big Bang Read online

  Bowman loved New York City. He’d come from elsewhere—Wisconsin, then Vermont—but embraced the city without looking back. The city’s greatest exponents seem to latch on to it as Balzac’s Lucien Chardon latches on to Paris, in Lost Illusions, after arriving from the provinces: Dawn Powell, Andy Warhol, et al.

  Bowman loved film noir, but I don’t recall him caring particularly for film otherwise. I don’t recall any affection for soul music, or science fiction, or food in general. He lived a few blocks from Veselka but declined ever to meet me there for the late-night plates of pierogies that reminded me so much of my teenage years—frequenting Veselka’s again had been one of the several things I was sure I’d moved back to New York City to do.

  8. The Truck

  On Montauk, in 1989, Bowman had been walking alone on a road when he was hit and nearly killed by a truck (his Times obituary reads “car,” but he always called it a truck when we spoke). He suffered major head trauma and was in a coma for a month, during which he was ministered to by his wife, Chloe, to whom he said he owed his life. Let the Dog Drive was largely finished before the accident, but when he awoke from his coma he wasn’t aware he’d written a book, and had to read the draft dozens of times before he understood that it was up to him to finish it. His friend Eric Schneider, to whom it is dedicated, told his obituarist, Paul Vitello, that the book “helped him remember who he was.”

  This may be true. It surely is, in part. But it is also the case that the last portions of Let the Dog Drive portray scenes of torture and revenge that plunge the book into a darkness for which the earlier two-thirds have scantly prepared a reader to endure. I didn’t have Chloe’s or Eric Schneider’s luck, of knowing Bowman both before and after the accident. I do know that one of Bowman’s alternative nicknames for himself was Vengeance Boy—and that as long as I knew him he saw himself as wronged by the universe. I know that he saw himself as a person who suffered, on a daily basis, and sought alleviation in beer, rock and roll, and fantasies of righteous justice being inflicted on his many persecutors. He could offer humorous perspective on his condition, but it wasn’t something over which he appeared to have any control.

  David Bowman died, in 2012, of a massive brain hemorrhage. I’d moved back to California just a year before, and I learned of his death from Chloe, who reached me by telephone. I was stunned. Bowman and I had been out of touch for a year or more, and the news I feared was the reverse: I knew Chloe was mortally sick with cancer, and that Bowman might at some point tell me that he had been left even more alone in the world. (Chloe did follow, a year later.)

  “He walked into our bedroom and told me he had a terrible headache,” Chloe told me, and explained that he then fell to the floor and was dead within minutes. “It was a good death,” she added, whether to console me or herself or because she felt it was so, I don’t know. It seemed to me a parenthesis had closed, as though the truck had come to claim him. How strange to consider that the years between the injury and his death, the twenty-three years in which he published three books and wrote at least two more, the years in which I’d known him, could be seen as merely a kind of dispensation.

  The question I can’t avoid: how much was Vengeance Boy a product of brain trauma?

  9. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

  In the first flush of my return to New York, in the period when I projected Bowman as one of my great life’s companions, without qualification, and before I’d understood how difficult it was for him to be out of his self-soothing routines, without his Snoot walks, and away from his desk and telephone, I dragged him to a Bob Dylan concert. I saw this as my duty. I was seeing Dylan live a lot in that period.

  The concert was in New Jersey, at the Performing Arts Center in Newark. I was riding there with my friend Michael, and others, and I arranged to pick Bowman up at his doorstep. This was a great calamitous carload of fools wreathed in pot smoke, and in retrospect I’m amazed that I lured Bowman into the back seat. He had a wide-eyed daft look that said he was amazed himself to have been lured. He wore a long trench coat, buttoned to the neck. “I just hope he plays ‘Tom Thumb’s Blues,’” Bowman said, and I warned him not to expect it; Dylan rarely plays that song, and never plays what you most wish to hear. Of course, we arrived late to the concert, in a crazy fever to park and go inside. We’d calculated our trip to miss the opening act, a regular sport for me and Michael when Dylangoing, so Dylan was already playing.

  At the routine frisk inside the turnstiles, a security guard made Bowman open his trench coat. Immediately visible were two beers, Bowman’s beloved imported bottles, one in each of his flannel shirt’s pockets. Bowman gave a sheepish shrugging smile, one I’ll never forget. The guard, shaking his head, confiscated the bottles. We rushed up to the highest level of the auditorium to find our seats in the dark. As we sat, Bowman frisked himself this time, reproducing the sheepish smile. He revealed a bottle that had survived the guard’s inspection. Then another, and another—he still possessed three bottles, which had been secreted who-knows-where, in his sleeves or in the trench coat’s interior pockets. As we took our seats, gazing down on Dylan and his band’s heads from the upper deck, Dylan finished one song and began another: “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.”

  10. Bunny Has a Hairball

  Let the Dog Drive gave Bowman his chance to move to a major publisher. He followed his eccentric book with an even more eccentric one, called Bunny Modern, set in a future where electricity has vanished, and armed nannies protect a diminishing pool of babies from kidnappers while cranked up on a drug called Vengeance. Around the time I moved back to New York Bowman was revising the pages obsessively; his expectations for the book were immense. When he finally showed it to me he delivered it in what he called the Bunny Box—a kind of three-dimensional collage object, much larger than it needed to be to contain what was a very brief manuscript. His impatience for me to read it, and sanctify it as “Furry,” was formidable.

  There came a strange misadventure. This was before cell phones. I’d read the book overnight, and Bowman had stood by for my assessment, but I had some kind of urgent appointment, and had to leave word with my friend Maureen, knowing he’d call. The phrase I asked Maureen to pass along was “The Bunny is Furry.” Maureen, panicked by Bowman’s urgency, blurted out, “The Bunny has a hairball.” Bowman exploded. She apologized, but it was too late. An hour or two later, when I was able to reach him directly, his only words for me were “The Bunny has a hairball? The Bunny has a hairball?” He’d sat stewing, drinking beer, and trying to interpret Maureen’s colorful slip. The only interpretations he could hit on were dire ones. I worked to calm him down.

  Maureen might have been prescient. There were U.S. writers who’d lately preceded Bowman in offering dystopian fantasias under the cover of traditional literary publishing: Steve Erickson, Katherine Dunn, Paul Auster. Kirstin Bakis’s Lives of the Monster Dogs had found a nice success in New York the year before. Bowman was envious—dogs were his thing—but also believed it auspicious for his book. Yet he was at least ten years ahead of the great fashion for dystopias in highbrow circles, and anyhow, hadn’t judged how his book’s slightness, and its vein of real perversity, might play against it.

  Bowman had been a dark-horse success with Let the Dog Drive, but now he’d lost a major publisher some money, and, worse, exhausted their good faith with his badgering calls and office visits. The book’s failure wasn’t another truck, perhaps, but it sliced off another layer of Bowman’s droll, perversely jubilant outlook, and deepened his sense of being misused by fate, perhaps even being conspired against—by whom, exactly, he wouldn’t have been able to say.

  11. Shit on Your Shoes

  Yet Bowman was never self-pitying. Were I tempted to wallow or complain at some disappointment inflicted on my own aspirations—the fact that As She Climbed across the Table had gone completely unreviewed in the New York Times, say, leaving me, despite my new publisher’s exertions, still a cult quantity—Bowman would offer a k
ind of non-commiseration commiseration. He’d invoke a favorite term: “Sarge,” he’d say, “you’ve got shit on your shoes.” I wish I could reproduce for you the tone of affectionate philosophical mordancy with which he’d pronounce it. (In fact, it’s surely on the tapes, a dozen times over.)

  By “shit on your shoes” Bowman meant, in my case, that I’d had my early stories published in science-fiction magazines, and attended science-fiction conventions, and traded blurbs with science-fiction writers, and not concealed or apologized for those facts. In his own case, he meant his publication with NYU Press—and in both our cases, the fact that (unlike Kirstin Bakis) we’d come in the door with no MFA program or Ivy League pedigree. We’d simply walked in with shit on our shoes, such that those with a nose averse to the kinds of shit we bore would reliably shun us. In fact, this isn’t too lousy a diagnosis of an awful lot of literary fate-casting: that the first impression, or size of the first advance, was predeterminative in any but the luckiest or most tenacious of cases. For Bowman this was something to sigh over, to open a bottle of beer over. And then he’d resume work.

  12. Bowman Also Wrote

  The brevity of his two published novels notwithstanding, Bowman was a workaholic, and as voluminous on the page as on the tapes. Because his brain injury had made his eyesight difficult, and made him prone to headaches, he edited his pages at a giant font size, sixteen- or eighteen-point, as I remember it. (He blew his font up to an even more enormous size for public readings, I learned, when we gave one together at KGB, the two of us along with Amanda Fillipacci playing to an absolutely packed room for what was only my second-ever reading in New York City—a thrilling event for me.) In the years following Bunny Modern he worked on three fiction projects concurrently: Big Bang (or Tall Cool One); another novel in the phantasmagorical vein of Bunny Modern, called Women on the Moon; and a novella based on a conflation of Theodore Kaczyinski’s antitechnological manifesto and Kafka’s Letter to His Father, called either The Unabomber’s Letter to His Father or, confusingly, A Letter to His Unabomber. Also confusingly, Bowman sent me portions of all three manuscripts, but never an entirety (perhaps superstitious of another hairball assessment), or even a first chapter. Even more confusingly, his spelling in first-draft work was always and persistently terrible, either because of some kind of dyslexia or because of his brain injury, I wasn’t sure.

  So much about Bowman was increasingly confusing and dismaying to me. Had he really telephoned X or Y and said aloud what he’d told me he’d said aloud to them? Why would anyone do these things? I’d run into writers Bowman had introduced me to, initially, and when his name came up, they’d shake their heads, and describe some kind of breach or ultimatum or farcical misconstruction that had come between them. I’d like to say I defended him, or apologized for him—there were times when I did. But Sarge couldn’t work miracles, couldn’t preempt every crisis, couldn’t work in retrospect, or erase words he’d spoken aloud.

  Gradually, to my shame, this sense that Bowman was making himself personally indefensible crept in and poisoned my belief in his writing. He was still one of my favorite writers, just as he was still my friend. But the non-long-term viability of his persona, of his personal approach, began to seem to me analogous to the notion that very many people weren’t likely to agree with me about his writing. Besides, his fiction wasn’t going into print, where I could advocate for it. It was piling up in his house, and in the email excerpts, which he’d fling my way, increasingly, confusingly, at random intervals, without clarifying the purpose to which he’d shared the particular sequence he’d shared. The emails appeared to be like the tapes, meant for me alone, even if they contained many brilliant, singular passages—lines I’d quote, or be thrilled to have written myself. The whole problem of Bowman was becoming something like the oversupply of tapes on the passenger-side floor of my old Toyota Corolla.

  Nevertheless, I encouraged each project in turn. The Unabomber letter seemed especially promising to me, not merely for its clever hook, and newsy relevance. I knew Bowman was enraged at his parents (he hadn’t spoken to anyone from his immediate family for over fifteen years, he claimed). I felt this unprocessed rage impeded his art, and his life. So, the reference to Kafka’s famous outpouring seemed to suggest Bowman might use the project as a vehicle to confront all that went unconfronted. But no. In the pages he sent, the emphasis, bizarrely, was on literary injustices, on outrages within the publishing world of contemporary New York—it read like a Bowman tape, transcribed. I demoted the project in my regard, and encouraged him to work on Women on the Moon instead. It had that wonderful title, and seemed to capture some of his daffy reverence for Chloe, for all women. The mammoth project, the one about the Kennedys, Lou Reed, Howard Hunt, J. D. Salinger, Elvis, the one about everything and anything that he’d ever known or read or intuited about the postwar American backdrop against which we’d both come of age, all of which haunted his work implicitly, haunted every line, but was here being treated explicitly—that couldn’t possibly work. Could it?

  To my shame, I didn’t think Bowman could carry it off. It seemed like something Norman Mailer would try for, and something Norman Mailer would fail at. Possibly Bowman had miscast himself, as Mailer or DeLillo or Doctorow, a white elephant novelist, when he really ought to have stuck to his Richard Brautigan dreams, his termite operations. This was also a matter of publishing pragmatics—who, after Bunny Modern, was going to sign on the dotted line for a thousand Bowman pages? Most simply, I couldn’t imagine he’d finish it.

  I should have known better.

  13. The Fall of the Furry Girl School

  The fall of the Furry Girl School of American Fiction took the form, on one side, of abrupt tragic farce and, on the other side, of slow degradation, and my long shame. The tragic farce was this: Cathryn Alpert and her husband had never met Bowman, and were coming to New York on other business and had planned a rendezvous. As I recall it, they were staying in a Midtown hotel. Time was tight. Some plan was in place—surely it had been difficult, for Bowman, to make such a plan, since meeting people, new people, at an appointed time and place would have been difficult for him. I believe it had been getting increasingly difficult. And the day in question was the same day as the annual Blessing of the Animals at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, on Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street. Bowman was taking Snoot there, to be blessed.

  Some misunderstanding occurred. Cathryn wanted to change the time of the rendezvous, I think, and telephoned to suggest it. She’d come a long distance, a Californian who rarely visited New York, and she was traveling with family. Bowman lived in New York, and had no children—surely it wasn’t much to ask for him to emend a plan? Yet her proposal conflicted with Snoot’s voyage to Harlem for the blessing. When Bowman presented this conflict, Cathryn, heartbreakingly for them both, teased him a little. His dog required blessing? So urgently he couldn’t see her?

  Cathryn, as one would expect, took Bowman’s brilliant ironies, his tone of self-amused eccentricity and provocation, to mean he was capable of seeing himself in an absurd light. This was understandable—it was precisely what I’d done, falling in love with him long-distance, as I had. Yet there was nothing humorous about the blessing, from Bowman’s side. California was a long way from New York, but for Bowman and Snoot, the ride to Harlem from the Lower East Side might have been equivalent.

  Bowman, on the telephone, flipped his lid. Bowman blew his stack. It was a perfect misunderstanding, between two strangers who’d been jollied into conjunction by a go-between—me, that is. I doubt they ever did meet. Likely that day was the last time they spoke or emailed. But they both telephoned me, in a spirit of injury—Bowman enraged, as though his dog had again been attacked, kicked at on the street by an officious passerby, and Cathryn, on her side, utterly confused and appalled.

  The slow degradation, and long shame, were mine. There came what we now call a tipping point—well, it was a tipping point for a lot of things—9/11. Bow
man adopted the view that black helicopters had surveyed the scene minutes before the first airplane’s impact. Disarranged by the fear that gripped us all during those anthrax weeks that followed, but with fewer regular human contacts to provide solace, Bowman’s self-skepticism betrayed him totally. On his favorite instrument, the telephone, he plagued a magazine editor with his paranoid theories concerning the attack. She was not only one of the last editors regularly commissioning pieces from him, one of the last bridges he’d failed to burn, but she was one of my oldest friends. She complained to me, rightly—I’d put them together.

  This, and other less flamboyant confusions, estranged us. I guess I couldn’t take it, and I put Bowman on a kind of management course of contact and encouragement, as if Sarge had turned into a kind of methadone nurse. It wasn’t necessary to exile him; he’d done it himself supremely well, as though systematically. By the time Bowman died our contacts were sporadic, our phone calls brief, and it had been years since he’d mailed me a charm. I’d quit having to defend him, or having to decide not to, to other writers, because other writers weren’t raising his name to me (along with raising an eyebrow, as they’d done for so long). Either Bowman was reaching outside of his keep less frequently, or he wasn’t dropping my name when he did. Likely some of both was the case. There wasn’t anything Furry about this situation in the least.

  14. Shit before Truck