Self-made man

Billy Bender was drunk.
Thirty-nine out of forty-one days, eleven days straight. Ugly, grimy noontime drunk like an alley-dwelling wino with a brown bag of screw-top plum wine.
It was practically routine by now. Tequila sunrises to soften the morning jackhammer in his head. Gin and tonic refreshments for brunch, then he’d nurse a bottomless tumbler of bourbon over ice until his day progressed into a fermenting merry-go-round spinning his world into a stupor of blurred, spotty blackness. He could barely crawl out of bed most mornings.
Until maybe six months ago, Billy had never done anything to excess. Weekends with the boys playing chess and sipping beers, maybe a toke or two off his roommate Milo’s bong. Once, a couple years ago, he did shots of Southern Comfort at a girlfriend's party and puked in her typewriter. But nothing like this.
It changed overnight.
Billy and a couple of colleagues were fourteen hours into a marathon chess session— hustling Washington Park or the Flea House and tutoring children of wealthy Eastsiders who fancied their prepubescent Edgars and Phillips the next Fisher paid the bills but did little else. He rarely even thought about writing anymore.
Maybe it was the stress of the competition or that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Billy was feeling irritable. In between games he polished off a pint of White Wolf vodka and four beers before blacking out. He awoke in his bed early the next morning, shivering in his urine-soaked clothes. His parched, scaly tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Rivulets of vomit caked the side of his comforter and flowed into a congealed puddle of foamy bile on the floor.
Billy crawled to the edge of his bed and reached for the bottle of water on his nightstand and noticed his mini tape recorder ¬¬– a little handheld job that he’d picked up in Chinatown a couple years back to record interviews and was subsequently shoved in his drawer – stacked on top of the clock radio. The tape counter read 372 and the tape was almost at the end of the reel. He pressed rewind out of curiousity, expecting drunken ramblings from a blacked out evening, then pushed the play button.
“The ‘Self-made Man,’ by William Bender. February fifth, two thousand and six.” The drunken, slurred voice – undoubtedly his own – quickly deepened into that of a booming, resonant storyteller.
Out spilled a perfect blend of lyrical prose and plot twists about a ruined businessman who buys a pair of slacks at a downtown thrift store the night before his final, desperate plea to a board room of skeptical investors. Unbeknownst to him, the man paid his six dollars and ninety-nine cents plus tax for the Pocket of Plenty. Quickly he realized that every time he reached into the front right pocket of his slacks, he found the perfect amount of cash for any situation. As long as he had the pants, whenever he was out for a fancy dinner or needed a plane ticket, grabbed a six-pack of Weinhardt’s and some pretzels or walked past a street musician, he could reach into his pocket and pull out the exact amount (plus 18% gratuity when necessary). When the wearer was in another country, it converted to local currency. However, the Pocket of Plenty provided only when appropriate and knew exactly what the wearer needed—a lesson in trust we all have to learn on our own. Initially, it seemed like the solution to his everyday problems, but the man quickly grew fearful. Having only made him want more, to grab as much as he could before his good fortune, he was sure, inevitably changed for the worse. Soon the man became insatiable with want, losing everything and shredding the pants and himself in the end.

Billy began transcribing the tape word for word on his laptop. He went back to edit, but found it unnecessary. It was quite simply his masterpiece – 3800 words of the most delicious, original work he’d ever done. And he did not remember a single punctuation mark from the night before.
On a whim, he decided to send the story to a literary magazine in the city that published a double-sized fiction issue every year. The deadline was less than a week away, so he printed a copy of his story and dropped it in the mailbox on his way uptown and decided to stop thinking about the whole thing. A polite rejection letter—perhaps with a handwritten note of encouragement like the one he received from that editor at a fiction rag last year for his piece on teen hustlers—was the most he expected.
But Billy couldn’t get his mind off the story. It made him feel different, more awake. The voice on the tape was his but the story read like it came from some place different than any of his other creative efforts. A deeper truth somehow cloaked in the glib, drunken fantastic.
Two weeks later he received a letter from the magazine with a check for twenty-five hundred dollars and a contract for the rights to publish the piece in their annual. Attached to the contract was a letter of congratulations with an invitation to send other stuff “on par with Self-made Man for publication.” Furthermore, the letter said, a literary agent would contact him in the next few weeks for publication of future writing endeavors, including longer works of prose. Surely, the letter insisted, he must have more to offer a literary world starved for provocative social commentary.

* * *

Billy set to work immediately. But nothing came. He spent hours pounding out stream of consciousness bullshit, winding down some vague, unrepentant path of anticlimactic self-indulgence, which he’d delete in a fit of self-consciousness, imagining himself ripping the page from its binding and tossing it on the overflowing pile of cyber refuse that spilled out of the recycle bin and onto his desk top.
This went on for a whole week and then another. He cancelled all appointments. Stopped going to the park or hanging out. Missed the local qualifier tournament for the chess nationals in Reno the following month. Billy had to write. But nothing was there—At least nothing of substance, nothing “on par.”
“I’m a fucking fraud,” Billy said, three weeks into his dry spell. He collapsed into the couch and rubbed his face with his hands. “I’m not even close.”
“So. Send them something you’ve already written,” Milo said, jabbing the air at Billy with a pudgy index finger. “Bottom of the Fifth.”
“I wrote that in Professor Bacca’s class like five years ago.”
“Yeah, that one. I loved that one.”
“You fucking kidding? They’re not looking for some trite bullshit story about an alcoholic pitcher. They want literature. Scathing social commentary. Maybe I just blew my load, man. One good story and I’m tapped out.”
“Tapped out? Bullshit. Get over yourself. You were loose and having fun that night, not impressing some literary audience with scathing social commentary.” The glowing neon hues from the television reflected in Milo’s glasses as he flipped through the Tuesday night lineup and breathed through his nose, avoiding eye contact with Billy. “But what would you know? You were too fucking drunk to remember. Blacked out. I carried your ass to bed and kept Sal from beating the shit out of you.”
Billy stared hard at Milo for a full minute but couldn’t draw him into a scrap. Then he walked to his room and shut the door.

* * *

Late that night, Billy picked up a six-pack and a pint of White Wolf vodka from Ray’s liquor store on the corner.
“Your change, sir,” said the clerk, holding out a few tattered bills and some silver so the yellow stains in the armpits of his t-shirt were visible. Billy guessed he had never seen a toothbrush much less a dentist. Ashes from the Pall Mall fixed permanently to his lip crumbled off the lit end of his cigarette, rolling down his concave chest like tumbleweed and flecking his shirt with a faint charcoal gray path before gathering on the counter.
“Thanks.”
“Good night.”
Once he got home, Billy turned on his computer and dialed up an Internet chess site then cracked a beer and got to work. A few hours later he stumbled into a spinning bedroom and passed out.
He woke the next morning feeling groggy and ill at ease—his head on fire, eyes bloodied from the night. He reached for his tape recorder and pushed the “play” button. The first few minutes were just slurred nonsense. Disgusted and frustrated, he moved his thumb to the “stop” button. Just then his voice cleared and the story began:
“The Fixer,” by William Bender. “March 1, two thousand and six.” Out poured a sobering story about a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic junkie who had to manipulate people into fixing him up so he could get through the day. It was moody and intricate, evolving from a desperate plea for escape into a near-death renewal of hope and redemption.
The story brought Billy to tears. It was the first time he’d cried since eighth grade when his father lay dying in a hospital, an experience that had turned Billy’s heart against itself.
He set to work transcribing the story and could barely type through his disbelief. This murky, dismal walk amongst the walking dead—the bantering hum of street life, the insatiable appetite for dope, and finally the quest to be numb paved over by the excruciating path to be free—was too close to the pavement to have come from him. What do I know about street life and hard drugs? Where is this from? Does it even matter; this story is amazing, finally something worth sending out, thank god.
Billy folded up the story and hand delivered it to the post office. Express mail. Within the week, an envelope showed up in his mailbox. Inside was another check, this one for $4200, and a handwritten letter from the magazine’s production department:

Mr. Bender,

In response to the positive critical and commercial response for your first submission in conjunction with your latest short fiction piece, we are delighted to welcome you into the Street Spirit family and look forward to a long and lucrative relationship. I do hasten to inform you that while the market for shorter works of fiction is ebbing, the time is ideal for longer, novel-length works as the literary community is hungry for writers of your prowess. Thus we are anxious to take advantage of our contacts in the publishing community and get behind one of your longer works. We are confident that your writings will be well received and are willing to advance you a significant sum immediately as proof of our commitment to you. Please contact us immediately at the number below so that we can negotiate the specific details.
Looking forward to hearing from you.

Regards,
L.M. Boyd
Executive Producer, New Yawk Magazine, Inc.

Billy put the letter down. He looked out into the street below, watching a group of teens wander by, laughing and smoking. They reminded him of the time he and two friends ditched class and rode motorcycles across town to Pinero Park. They spent the whole day in the sun, tossing a Frisbee and sipping cheap beer out of brown bags and feeling immortal. Billy watched them until they were dots on the sidewalk and the sun faded behind the buildings across the avenue.

* * *

“Hey Billy. Fancy meeting you here,” the clerk said.
Billy grinned and scanned the bottom shelf behind the cash register, pensively stroking his full beard, “What’s on sale tonight, Bry?”
The clerk smiled and reached under the counter to hand Billy a clear, plastic bottle filled with a greenish-blue liquid that moved like syrup when Billy turned it over in his hand.
“What’s this?” Billy asked, squinting to read through puffy, burbon-soaked eyes.
“For you from my special stash. I think this might help.”
“I think you’re right. How much?”
The clerk winked and waved Billy away.
“No how much, Bill. Tonight, a gift for you.”
“Thanks. I could use a gift right now.”
“I always know exactly what you need.”
Billy nodded. Then he turned and walked out into the night.