Dr. Hertz met me by the broken window, barely wearing a robe, running his hands through his salt and pepper hair, adjusting his glasses, and occasionally rearranging what I assumed was a semi-automatic pistol in his robe. At first, he was going to shake my hand but then remembered that I had smashed his window. My bruised and battered body looked about as well as his shattered nose, and we both just kind of stood there looking at each other.
“Jesus, Forbes, at least sit your ass down while I call the cops. You look like a dumb dog waiting to get euthanized.” Dr. Hertz went to the phone, started dialing, and lit a cigarette.
“Wait,” I said, but it sounded so lame I thought it best that he just call the cops. My body was numb from crashing through his window, and my mind was numb from thinking too hard about what I was doing with myself. My body was broken from all of the throes. My brain was swollen with thoughts that weighed me down, making me more useless, more inadequate. More of the same old Neil Forbes. Nevertheless, Dr. Hertz looked at me sadly. His eyes showed that even the devil has a heart. Somewhere, somehow, deep down he had thought better of me. He had thought there was no way someone like Neil Forbes, someone he had unwittingly come to admire, would steal from him.
In me, there was a great shame hanging there like so much slop on an edge. Amorphous, undefined, unrefined. I could only feel my immediate reactions because anything farther out was vague and gray. A mist that bordered a farm field. Somewhere in there, I could see my dad moving around and digging into the dirt. The man had not been a farmer, and yet in my mind’s eye, there he was digging and shoveling. The manual labor of his existence was apparent.
Then came Dr. Hertz.
I had emulated the man since I was in high school, mimicking his style, his ideas, his cadence. In some instances, even professed to be his biggest fan to those who would listen. Dr. Hertz, meanwhile, had denied my existence until long after Strike Out Number One had reached the bestseller list. When he finally recognized me, it was for a nightly news show and the interviewer asked his opinion of contemporary writers like myself.
“Who the hell is that?” he asked, pretending the name Neil Forbes meant nothing to him, drinking whiskey on the rocks, reclining in a birthing chair in his backyard where the interview was taking place. “He is probably [bleep] like the rest of the young riders falling out of colleges across America right now. Show me a new-age writer, and I’ll show you a pile of dung to compare them to.”
The interviewer asked, “Why so hostile toward your fellow colleagues?”
“Listen,” Dr. Hertz said, the glass of whiskey tipping this way and that. “These writers out there are all dimwitted hacks, spending their time on nonsensical prose and long-winded metaphors that amount to peanuts. I recently read a novel that featured a simile comparing a man to a brush fire … what the hell does that even mean?” Both he and the interviewer exchanged confused expressions. “When you look at someone like Neil Forbes, you realize he couldn’t keep his art together long enough to get an exhibit. He is as useless as a trout-mask replica.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know Forbes?” the interviewer asked.
Dr. Hertz sat up with a furious countenance, “Oh, screw you, [bleep]!” and threw his tumbler at the interviewer, who took a whiskey on the rocks straight to the eye.
And, after all this … we had never met.
Yet, he stood before me in his bathrobe, eyes watering, saying quietly over and over, “Please, tell me why Neil. Please. Please. Please tell me why.” All the while, his voice quivered like he was on the verge of an emotional breakdown, innocence in every utterance of the word. “Please. Please. Please, why?” His voice was that of a child begging not to be grounded, sadness and fear creeping into his confusion.
His arms opened and he took small steps forward as if to embrace me, as if to make this moment more emotional than it was. He hadn’t called the cops yet, but I was sure if I didn’t say something he would change his mind. I wanted to run into his embrace, to be dramatic and live in the moment of his fear and contempt for what I’d done, to be freed of my conviction. I wanted to tell him why I had broken his window and why I was after his book, but I couldn’t. Not because I was afraid, but because Dr. Hertz’s robe had come undone and his penis was dangling like his sash and it looked just as sad as the man himself.
