Writing in Blood

I was never a good writer. Every teacher I ever had told me it, “you need to work on your grammar, you need to get better vocabulary, you need to use more adverbs, you need to use less adverbs, yada, yada..” My father told me it, “Jesus christ, will you put that goddamn pen down and get a job. The paper is worth more without your words on it.” Typical Boston fucking blue collar dock worker. Never saw the point in art, not even his own kid’s, not that mine was any good. But he still taught me to not take any shit; that if you believe in something, you stick to it, you fight for it. I wanted to be a writer, I knew that I could be a writer, I just had to stick with it, like he believed. ‘Course he believed drinking was good for your health until he died of liver failure. Even when the doc told him it was killing him and his skin was all yellow and shit, he kept drinking, he stuck with it. So, there I was, rolling with my licks, writing, sticking with it. 

When I was just coming out of community college I met a writer named Anita Yarbourough. I’m sure you’ve read some of her stuff. Real empowering, Lifetime channel kind of stories. You know, like: ‘abused woman conquers her demons caused by her coal miner husband and she tries to escape with the kids while he chases her down and locks her in the coal mine’ or some shit. Either way, she definitely knows how to write. And she wrote this book, this killer novel, “Upon a Bed of Pine and Ash.” Really gripping stuff, completely changed my life. It just spoke to me, all about a lumberjack at the turn of the century trying to distance himself from his psycho family. He was a scrawny kid, terrible at his job, but he had heart. A real underdog you just couldn't help but root for, even when he made all the wrong decisions. Not to spoil it or nothing but he ends up murdering his wife and son because they were robbing him blind.

Anyway, it really resonated with me right? So I’m finishing up school, working at the corner diner, and I see she’s coming to the city to promote her new book. Obviously, I gotta meet her. Maybe she can help you know? All her main characters are these down-on-their luck, fight against the world types, so I think surely she’ll want to help me right? Someone down on their luck, just trying to chase a dream with nothing in my pockets. 

I stood there for hours, crammed in this tiny book shop with, gotta be, fifty other people, all of them wanting to talk to Mrs. Yarbourough. I made sure I was at the back of the line when she started the signing, trying to make sure I could actually talk to her for a bit more than just an autograph and a smile. I didn’t mind the wait honestly, even with that smell of musty old books mixed with flop sweat, all worth it. Especially after hearing her talk and answer questions. Just crazy charming, and cute too. So finally after shuffling my feet and breathing other people’s air for a few hours, the place starts to clear out, all these housewives clucking about their autographs. I step forward to talk to her, and she holds out her hand waiting for the book to sign, and I’m just standing there with nothing but my hat in my hand and a dumb starstruck smile on my face. Well I couldn’t afford her new book obviously, night school was expensive.

“Here, why don’t you take this spare copy,” she said with a smile and a knowing glance. I must’ve had food stains from my last shift. She pulled a book from a smart looking leather bag and started to sign it. I was speechless. What an act of kindness, what class. This lady who had never met me was giving me a free book and an autograph! But I couldn’t get distracted.

“Actually, Mrs. Yarbourough, I wanted to ask you if you wouldn’t mind reading this.” I reached into my back pocket for my notebook, which of course I had left at the diner. I stood there dumbstruck, checking every pocket I had. 

She just kept smiling at me, “Oh, are you also a writer?” Her eyes glittered as she asked it. 

“I am, I just forgot my notebook at the diner. Oh this is so embarrassing, I just wanted some tips, you know? Your book “Upon a Bed of Pine and Ash” was one of the few joys of my life. It changed me, it…it emboldened me…” I kept rambling on, and she sat there, patient and listened to every stupid word that fell out of my mouth. She was about to speak when some young guy tapped her on the shoulder and then tapped his wristwatch. Some douche wearing a suit. I figured it was her agent, but turned out to be her husband and agent. He had this thin pencil mustache that just reeked of money and arrogance. I hated him instantly. How is a woman like Anita going to be with some jerk off like this, he could have been the bad guy in one of her stories for Christsake! Her whole expression just dropped when he did it. She looked back down at the book, and finished signing it. 

“What was your name sweetheart?” 

“Ryan,” I said, staring daggers at her husband. 

“Well good luck Ryan. It was great to meet you.”

He basically pushed her out of this bookstore, the owner trying to get in a few last words as they shut the door behind them. We both shit-talked this guy for a solid hour while singing her praises. Walking home, I opened up the book to see her autograph and skim through the first pages, absolutely buzzing to read it all night. 

‘Ryan, would love to read your stuff. I’ll be at the Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner later tonight. Anita Yarbourough.” I ran over to a streetlight to make sure I had read it right. I raced over to the diner to grab my notebook and then back to the Dunkin’ and sat for another four hours. I was wired up, I must have had two pots of coffee sitting there. My leg made the silverware bounce across the table it was jumping so much. 

I was deep into the second chapter when I heard , “So, did you manage to find that notebook?”

I handed her my bent up black and white composition notebook. I hesitated, just for a second, as fear hit me right in the gut. “I’m not that great but you know I really love writing…”

She smiled and ordered a coffee and a doughnut. I sat there for the most nerve-wracking fifteen minutes of my life as she sipped that coffee and dipped that doughnut, reading from my notebook. “Do you have a pen?” she asked me, then the waitress. “Always keep a pen on you, you never know when inspiration might strike.” Noted, Anita.

She tore through that notebook, by the end of it there must have been more red than black on the first fifty pages. All the while, I just stared at her. Sometime during that I noticed some of her make up had faded a bit seeing that it must have been around midnight at that point. That all too familiar blotchy purple patch peeked out from under her right eye, must have been a real shiner a week or two ago. So now I knew where all of her inspiration came from; that dick husband must have been beating her. He did push her pretty rough in the bookstore too. I didn't want to make her embarrassed though, my Ma never wanted to talk about her beatings.

She smiled and handed me back my notebook. “You’ve got some real talent. A little rough around the edges, but there’s a spark there.” My jaw must have dropped onto the table when I heard it. I started to read through the first red scribbles in disbelief, but she put her hand on mine.  “Save it for home. I want to hear about the writer behind the words, tell me about yourself.”  And there she went, smiling that smile at me again. We left the Dunkin’ at four in the morning. I told her everything, and I mean everything. Probably too much. But she told me she was going to be back in town in a couple weeks, so I gave her my number. She said to keep writing and expected a hundred more pages when she came back. You better believe that I was writing and rewriting every spare second I got. 

Weeks passed and I studied every note she gave me. I read her book twice over. I waited by the phone every night. I even bought an answering machine to make sure I wouldn’t miss it if I was picking up a shift. 

One rainy Tuesday, the phone rang, and again we met at the coffee shop. We spent hours talking, but less about writing. She just wanted to know more about me, and I wanted to know more about her. She told me about her childhood growing up in rural Pennsylvania, we commiserated over our abusive and abused parents, she told me about the struggles of the road and the life of a published author. I loved to just listen to her talk. She didn’t speak with the same eloquence that she used in her writing, but she was just so charming, so vulnerable. So much like her characters. 

“You need to do a lot in life, you need to try things, and be wild and be crazy. Then you need to reflect on that and put it all onto paper. And then you need to rewrite it into something that makes sense and that maybe has a better ending. That’s how you’ll get to be a great writer. Your stories are good, but I want more grit, more things from the heart, more pain. People love to read about pain.”  She gave me a kiss on the cheek that night. I thought about her more often than I didn’t every night after. 

For months we kept up with this, every time she would edit my scribbles, adding notes, tearing out whole pages. At the start of May, she gave me a pen, engraved with my name on it. It was the best gift I had ever gotten, probably the most expensive too. 

“I think you’re ready now, I want you to condense all of this into a story, and I want you to write the first draft with that pen.”

I wrote something kind of short, only a couple hundred pages, about a dock worker based on my Pop, and like she taught me, I tried to see it from his eyes. I went down to the shipyard where he used to work, I talked to some of his old coworkers about what he was like on the job, I went to the home to see my Ma and ask her what she remembered. I changed how he died to be an accident saving some kid’s life who fell in the harbor. It wasn’t great but it was good, and it was the best thing that I had written so far. And it hurt, it hurt to write it. It was hard, and it earned a few hits from my Ma for bringing it up, but it had heart, and I was proud of it. The first thing I can remember being proud of.

When Anita came back in August, she had a few fresh looking bruises smeared across her face. 

When I gave her my first draft, she told me, “I’m moving to Boston, so I’d like to work with you a bit more. I want to publish your story, or at least put it in front of my editors and have them look at it. If it’s ok with you of course.” How would it not be okay with me?

They moved in around September in a posh place up on Beacon Hill, and I got to see her every day after she got settled. I finally showed her my shitty little apartment, but she seemed to prefer it over her house. We worked on my story, editing and rewriting and editing and rewriting. Life was too good, and if my father taught me anything, it was how to stir up a little shit.

One night, I kissed her. I couldn’t help myself. Unfortunately, she kissed me back. Late nights in the coffee shops turned into late nights at my apartment which turned into late mornings of me picking up breakfast.

“He beats me, you know.” Of course I knew, I had seen the bruises all over her body. “What do you think it’s like to kill a person?” her hot breath steaming up my neck. 

Pop told me he had to kill a person once, not with a gun or anything like that, but someone had gone overboard in a storm and their small fishing boat wouldn’t survive the swell, so they left him, screaming and bobbing amongst the waves and the fury. He said it was an easy decision. Self preservation he called it. 

This prick husband had been beating Anita every night. I was falling in love with this woman, so this also seemed like a pretty easy decision.

Late night pillow talk turned grim and murderous. Where do you hide a body? How do you make the body? Well she was a writer, she killed lots of people, so she had some ideas. 

“First I file a police report,” she whispered.  “We pack his suitcase, we drug him. We put him in his car and drive it off the cliffs up north. It disappears into the ocean, and he’s gone forever.” 

“Well, what if he wakes up and manages to escape?”  I chew on it a minute after I say it. “I cut his throat at the cliffs, if his body washes up, it’ll be so bloated and mangled from the fall, they won’t be able to tell.”  She reached up and kissed me. I committed myself to the bloody path at that moment. Easiest decision I ever made.

So she took him out to a nice dinner, took him back home, drugged his cocktail, and went to the police station. I dragged his body into the car and packed his suitcase in it.  I grabbed the kitchen knife out of the wooden block. I drove the hour or so up to the cliffs. I had to wait a bit for the tide to be right to pull him back out, so naturally I pulled out my pen and  started writing. I looked at his face, unconscious, mouth open, drool slightly leaking down the side of his mouth. Not a flattering last image. I thought about his life, and started a story about how he got to this place. The imaginary people he met and the places he’d been churned through my pen onto the page.

I saw headlights behind me as Anita pulled in. I dragged him into the driver's seat and set the car into drive. Through the window, I grabbed his hair and with a slight sawing motion, cut into his neck as blood ruptured out across the dash and over his fresh pressed suit. I felt my stomach heave for a second, but just a second. I looked at him like I might a fish. Just something that needed to be gutted to get my next meal. Anita stood behind me, smiling her smile in the misty headlamps. I reached into the car, put his foot on the gas and tossed in the knife. The car careened off into that dark night, and with a slight honk and a loud crash, plunged into that dark abyss. By the time we reached the highway, the car would already be pulled out with the tide, forever lost beneath the waves.

The police put out an APB on him, being an abuser on the run and all,  but the detectives said they had no leads and after some light questioning, they ruled neither of us suspects. I moved into her house a couple months after. She finished her book the next year; a torrid love story about a woman beaten by her rich husband, who she then strangled in his sleep and threw off a lighthouse that he had kept her locked in. I couldn’t read it without seeing his dead eyes looking at me as his life drained out over his car’s interior, that stupid pencil mustache still looking pristine. Anita tells me to use it, so I’m putting someone getting their throat cut in the book. 

Months flew by as we published my first book. Me, with a book published! I guess Pops was right after all, just had to stick with it. We toured the country together, moving from town to town, this hot power writing couple. It was pure bliss, but when we came back to Boston, she started acting strange. Distant. Started spending her mornings alone, out in the city. Started putting on more makeup than usual, a lot of concealer.  Now today, she tells me that the editors have this new writer that they want her to look at. I told her no way. No way some young upstart writer comes in stealing all of Anita’s time. She was mine, and I told her that she had to stick with me. She told me that tomorrow we’re going to have a nice dinner to talk about it.