Reveal the Narrator

Trace was once mentoring a young writer who complained that he didn’t know how to harvest from his own life experience in order to write convincing characters.

“Are you available all day today?” Trace asked one morning as he contemplated the young writer’s dilemma.

His schedule was indeed open and free so they met at Trace’s favorite restaurant, Foxy’s in Glendale, for breakfast. When the waiter observed that Trace was walking with the aid of a cane he stepped aside with a majestic sweep of his arm and gave Trace a wide berth.

“Why do you need a cane?” the young man asked when they eased into the red vinyl booth.

“Arthritis in my hip and nerve damage in my left leg. I don’t need the cane so much as I like to have it around in case something goes wrong. I have problems climbing stairs, for instance.”

“Forty-seven seems awfully young to have arthritis that bad.”

“Not just any arthritis. It’s psoriatic arthritis brought on by severe psoriasis.”

“Jeez. When did that come on?”

“A few years ago. The ‘when’ isn’t half as important as the ‘why’.”

Trace ordered his usual dish, corned beef hash and eggs, and his young protege ordered ham and eggs.

“The stress of the writing life brought on the psoriasis,” Trace said as he stirred sugar and cream into his coffee. “But before that I was diagnosed as bi-polar. I try to get by without meds but it’s not always easy.”

“My brother is manic-depressive,” the writer confessed.

“Same difference. Let me ask you a question, Matt.”

“Fire away.” Matt poured steaming water from a steel pot over a bag of herbal tea in a coffee mug.

“What are you afraid of? What scares you the most?”

“You want me to answer that honestly?”

“As honest as you care to be,” Trace said, removing the gloves that obscured his gnarled, arthritic digits. The gloves also served to hide the bright red psoriasis lesions on his hands. Matt, like everyone else, winced when he saw Trace’s hands.

“I’m almost embarrassed to admit it but I’m afraid of the dark,” Matt offered.

“Don’t be embarrassed. A lot of people are afraid of the dark. Do you have a night light at home?”

Matt laughed. “Several. One in each room.”

“I’m afraid of death,” Trace admitted.

“Well, isn’t that sort of a universal fear?”

“Sure it is. In 1972 I was living in Munich, Germany. Thirteen years old. My mom was married to a G.I. who was stationed there fresh out of Vietnam. He worked at the base motor pool and she worked at the base library.”

Trace motioned the waiter for a coffee refill.

“Anyway, my sister and I had to have a baby sitter –”

“You have a sister?”

“She’s dead now.” He sipped his coffee quietly for a moment before continuing. “We had to have a sitter, a German, to help us when we went into town or anywhere off base. Mom hired this girl, Helga, a plump little German woman, unattractive as all hell, around twenty-two years old. Helga, it appeared, was obsessed with death.”

Matt leaned forward on his elbows, engrossed in Trace’s words.

“ Every day – sometimes she skipped a day but most every day for two weeks – Helga took my sister and I to the local funeral home that was located just at the edge of the U.S. military base in Munich. The funeral home had this vast auditorium with glassed-in walls on either side. And beyond the glass walls were the newly-dead laid out in their coffins.”

“Just laid out in the open like that?”

“That’s how they do it in Germany, I guess,” Trace replied. “Viewings for loved ones.”

“Or for anyone walking in off the streets, apparently.”

“Apparently. So, Helga would take Lynn and I by the hand and walk us through the funeral home to look at all the dead laid out in their finest clothes. It was quite an experience and she was totally engrossed.”
“What bothered you about it the most?”

“You ask good questions, Matt. One day there was an older German woman laid out in her coffin in a purple nightgown. It looked like sheer satin; the nightgown, I mean. And I was standing there, a thirteen-year-old boy, with my nose pushed up against the glass and his fly – this fly just landed on her nose. And I remember waiting for something, anything, a twitch of the nose, but nothing. She was really and truly dead and that was the moment I became terrified of death.”

“Jesus, Trace. How long did this go on?”

“The trips to the funeral home? Two weeks. After that I ratted her out to my mother and she fired Helga on the spot after giving her a lecture about what is and isn’t appropriate for children.”

“How old was you sister?”

“Ten.”

“Was she bothered by it, too?”

Trace hiked his shoulders. “Lynn and I rarely got along. I didn’t know and I didn’t really care.”

After breakfast Trace suggested a trip to the beach and Matt heartily agreed to drive. It was a warm Tuesday afternoon. Trace told Matt to take Sunset Boulevard from Los Feliz all the way to Westwood and from Westwood to cut down to Santa Monica Boulevard to the pier. On the drive from Glendale to Santa Monica, Trace told Matt the story of the entire trajectory of his career, how he used assignments for porn magazines as stepping stones to assignments for mainstream magazines, how he lucked out finding a publisher for his first novel and how that novel failed to produce the kind of success that Trace expected.

“Typical story, really,” Trace said. “If you’re getting into writing for the money, Matt, you’re in the wrong profession.”

Matt parked the car in the public lot on the Santa Monica Pier and they walked to the open-air restaurant at the end of the pier and both men ordered beers.

“The last time I was here was a year ago with Josephine.”

“Your wife?”

“My ex-wife. My second ex-wife. The less said about the first one the better, except to say that we produced a pretty cool kid who I rarely get to see.”

Trace sipped his beer pensively.

“I was in a pretty black depression the last time Josephine and I were together. We had been separated for awhile and things were looking good for a reunion and then –” Trace shrugged his shoulders. “I wrote something, a Dan Knight story –”

“I read some of those. They’re very good. Let me guess: Dan Knight is your fictional alter ego.”

“Yup. Well, I wrote a Dan Knight story about Josephine that hurt her very much. I think I meant to hurt her to show her how much I was hurting. See, her father was dying and her mother was helpless so Jo spent the better part of a year up in the Bay Area nursing her dad to his grave while her mother looked on. It put quite a strain on the relationship.”

“That’s too bad.”

“We rarely speak to each other. That’s the real bad part. But there’s an upside: between my first marriage and the marriage to Jo I had a woman in my life, constantly at my side, for fourteen years. Now, as my career continues to hit an upswing, I’ve been a single man for the first time in that long.”

“I’m only twenty-two,” Matt reminded Trace. “I can’t imagine being with a woman for five years, let alone fourteen.”

Trace leaned his six-foot frame on his cane. A sea breeze toyed with his blonde hair. He looked out at the Santa Monica Bay with eyes that Matt noted were a peculiar blue, an intense and electric kind of blue. At that very moment Matt could see, physically at least, why women found Trace so attractive.

“You kind of get used to having someone around. Being alone isn’t always easy, Matt.”

“You date though, right?”

Trace nodded. “I date. Sometimes I date too many women, to fill that void, I think.”

“Anyone special?”

“Yes.”

“Mind if I ask?”

“If I told you I would have to kill you.”

Trace took a long swallow of his beer and lit a cigarette.

“Did you know they don’t allow smoking on the beach in Santa Monica?”

“I knew that.”

Trace frowned. “Fucking smoking police everywhere these days.”

It was dusk by the time they hopped into Matt’s Honda Civic for the long drive back to Glendale. The sky to the west was turning a shade of red mixed with soot-black.

“Brush fire,” Trace muttered with all the urgency of a bowl of oatmeal. He lit a cigarette and studied the young writer as he drove. “Did you get any of this?”

“Any of what, Trace?”

“This lesson. I am mentoring you after all, right?”

“Right. Of course. I just –”

Trace frowned. “Mining what’s around you for writing is as simple and easy as betraying your friends.”

A sick look came across the young man’s face.

“You now know my whole life,” Trace said. “Go fucking write something, will you?”