The Serialist Read online

  “Here,” I said, absurdly. “These rubber bands fell.” I held them out and she accepted them, reluctantly.

  “Thanks.” She gestured at a double door on her left. “That’s the study. I’ll be right in as soon as I put these away. Do you want a cappuccino or anything?”

  “No thanks,” I said, though I really did.

  The study, as you’d expect, was like the gentleman’s club in a Bond film: towering shelves full of leather-bound books, a huge roaring fireplace, those wingback chairs with the buttons, a snooker table. After a dramatic pause, Claire entered. She was now dressed in a short wool tartan skirt, white tights, black patent leather shoes, a collared white blouse under a red sweater. Her hair was up in a ponytail. She wore glasses and was carrying a stack of books and a handful of dangerously sharp pencils. In other words, the perfect study look. She sat at the desk beside me, back straight, knees together, opened her books, got out a fresh sheet of paper and raised her pencil, fixing me with rapt attention.

  It was hopeless. She had a paper on The Scarlet Letter, ten pages with quotes and three examples to support her thesis, due the next day, and she had nothing. Nothing. No rough draft. No notes. I wasn’t even sure she’d read the book.

  “Let’s see,” I said, floundering, sweating, as if I were the one with the paper due, while she sat there, utterly composed, listening politely, tapping her white teeth with her pencil’s pink eraser and blinking her pretty blue eyes. “Do you know how to do an outline?” I asked.

  “It rings a bell,” she said. “How much are you charging my dad?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How much are you charging an hour?”

  “Fifty?”

  She sighed and rolled her eyes. “You have two degrees from Columbia, don’t you? You got an eight hundred on the GRE?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a published author?”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “Do you know what the agencies would bill for someone with your resume? One fifty at least.”

  “Really?”

  “You should charge at least a hundred.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Look, I’m going to be frank,” she said. “I have no problem with reading or writing papers in principle. But with school, field hockey, ballet, yearbook and all the volunteering I have to do to get into a decent college these days, I just don’t think it’s practical for me to write a paper on The Scarlet Letter, which will probably only be so-so anyway, when I’m sure you could write a totally awesome one in your sleep.”

  “Well, maybe not totally awesome.”

  “We’ll tell my dad it’s a hundred bucks an hour, he won’t even remember, and that you need to come twice a week. And who knows, if this goes well, I’ll refer you to all my friends.”

  “But I don’t know if I can do that. It’s cheating.”

  “I agree. In principle. But let’s look at the situation realistically. The paper’s due tomorrow. I’ve read the book. Or some of it anyway. I have the feel of it. I could write it if I had to. But there’s only so many hours in the day and I can’t exactly hire you to play field hockey for me, can I?”

  “Ha. No, I guess not.” She had a point.

  “And to be perfectly frank, I already found a way to buy this paper on the Internet for less than I’m offering you, but I prefer to do business face to face, and besides, you seem . . . well, kind of sad.”

  “S-A-D?”

  “No, just regular. In a sweet way. No offense.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “The way you got here early and waited outside shivering till it was exactly five.”

  “You saw me?”

  “From the sunroom. You kept staring up with this lost puppy expression on your face. Forlorn, like.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I see.”

  What can I say? I did it. Not right away. It took some more charming and a double cappuccino, but somehow she talked me into it, and I spent half the night writing her paper, then met her behind a bush during her field hockey practice to deliver it. Before I knew it I was writing all her papers and also “tutoring” several of her classmates. It was a seamless scam: the kids raved about me to the parents, who happily paid my increasingly exorbitant rate when their children’s grades went up.

  Not that it was easy. Good work never is, and simplicity, if it is to seem natural, takes true craftsmanship. Think about Hemingway, sharpening his pencils with a knife, or Flaubert in his nightgown, hunting for a just word. That was me, tackling “What Would I Do If I Were Macbeth (or Mrs. Macbeth)?” The trick is hitting that sweet spot, B plus, say: good enough to please the parents but not so good that the teachers got suspicious when a lacrosse-playing knucklehead or stoned trust-core skate punk suddenly jumped to the head of the class.

  Hence, under my stewardship, Chad Hicksley III finally learned what an adverb was but couldn’t seem to get his past, present and perfect tenses straight, due to too many bong hits, while Dakota Steinberg, whose dad I think owned my neighborhood, showed huge improvement in Organization and Examples and figured out the difference between its and it’s, but still tended toward the overly vernacular, as in her piece entitled, “Final Paper With At Least Three Sources Besides the Internet,” in which she referred to works cited as “totally awesome” (Fahrenheit 451), “kind of random” (1984) and, “bites” (Brave New World). Claire managed everything, for a mere fifteen percent, and soon “tutoring” was providing a large part of my income. Certainly, if I figured my per-word rate, it was the most profitable writing I had ever done.

  Since there was nothing to do now during our actual tutoring sessions, Claire and I became pals, lying around and chatting about “whatever.” When she heard about all the books I was writing, and how little I made for them, she was aghast. At that point I was just about to renew for two more Zorgs and three Mordechais, and I was getting ready to pitch the first of what would become the Sibyllines.

  “Have you signed?” Claire asked, leaning back in the wing chair with her feet over the arm, sipping a Diet Coke through a bendy straw.

  “Well, not officially. They’re in the mail.”

  “Why don’t you let me look the papers over for you?”

  “I don’t know, Claire. I mean, these are grown-up publishers, not kids. And anyway, I already agreed. It wouldn’t be right to go back on that, would it?”

  She smiled, kindly, as if I were back out on her doorstep, shivering SADly. “Just let me worry about that. You get to work on my personal response for To Kill a Mockingbird. And leave that jacket here when you go. I’ll get my housekeeper to fix the zipper.”

  And so, one way or another, Claire ended up costarring in almost every episode of my so-called life. She just kept popping up and making herself essential. Why? I can’t rightly say. She didn’t seem to care for her peers much more than I did. Her mom was MIA. Her dad was an ass. So I guess I filled some gap. As for the gap she filled in my world . . . well, I preferred not to probe too deeply into that wound. But I had to admit, now that she was going to be starting her junior year, I was already beginning to panic about what would happen when she inevitably flew the coop.

  9

  Meanwhile, back at the photo shoot, I left the letter from Sing Sing for last. After all, I hadn’t been Tom Stanks, the Slut Whisperer, for years, and back when I was, correspondence from “wrongly incarcerated” prisoners was hardly a special event. Porn, like athlete’s foot, thrives wherever there are men without women—prison, the military, comic book stores, dank math labs at MIT—and convicts had the time to not only read the magazine but respond to it, engage it you might say, something that in general only the lonely, crazy or dumb bothered to do. The fact that it was years out of date wasn’t a big deal either. In prison nothing was out of date, and a porn mag was a treasure to be hoarded and passed and traded. Finally, I was in no rush to open the prisoner’s letter because there was nothing in it for me. My other correspondents, the alien sex or urban
violence fans, if encouraged with a signed photo or what have you, would at least buy more books. And the Sibylline Lorindo-Gold readers—not only was she my top earner, but some of those vampire babes were pretty cute.

  This was a sore point between Claire and me, and even as I sliced the latest vampire mail open, breaking the seal with my middle (satanic) finger, I could see her frowning suspiciously. It wasn’t jealousy of course. Her worry was strictly business: “One pissed-off chick on a website,” she said, “blabbing about how Sibylline is really a creepy middle-aged horndog, and it’s all over.”

  She was right of course. She was right. But still, I’d followed the links to the sweet little herspaces and facebooklets these girls directed me to in their emails and found the graphics of lace and blood, the clanging or sighing music, the preposterous poetry, all doomy-gloomy. I’d seen the red and purple hair, pierced postpubertal nipples, snarling, sneering pouts and, peeking through the raccoon ghost makeup, the wide eyes of scared children, as if in this underland, one could be both the sleepless victim and the creature under the bed. How does a nineteen-year-old girl decide she is into flogging, bondage, vampyrism and “extreme anal,” whatever that is? Why would she want somebody to lock her in a steel belt or bite her neck with fake fangs and let her real blood drip into a silver chalice? What forces, socio, psycho, sexo, could twist otherwise healthy young women into such radical forms? I had no idea, but I would’ve liked to find out.

  Claire forbade it. “Don’t get mixed up with freaks,” she counseled, like someone on her third divorce. “They’ll freak out on you in the end.” Which seemed reasonable, but sitting in the photo studio, waiting under the lights and sweating through my dress and wig while the photographer rethought me, it also felt a bit irrelevant: how much more freaked could I get? While Claire stepped behind the camera to consult, I considered my image in the mirror. I reflected, as it were. It was a disturbing view.

  Hopefully, by the time the photos were lit and Photoshopped and colored and printed, they would look passable—a nice if somewhat severe older lady. But in the raw form, under these glaring white bulbs, I looked frightening. We are all, of course, genetic combos of our parents, but here I appeared as the Dr. Frankenstein version, some mad cloning experiment gone wrong. My mother had been quite attractive and, even when she grew older and rounder, always had a sweet face. Now I was she, but with my father’s big nose, sharp chin and troublesome eyebrows slapped on like a cheap gag. Or else—worse perhaps, since I barely remembered him and knew him only as a dream and a photo—I was my father, aged past his own early death and back now in a nightmare, wearing my mother’s hair, eyes, mouth and breasts. I was, it seemed, not so much my parents’ offspring as their medium: in my flesh their ghosts now came and went and mingled their vaporous souls. Sometimes, even without my drag, just walking as myself past a mirror or shop window, I saw it, and it made me catch my breath: my mother’s face in those final months, hardened by illness, when the cancer had eaten away her femininity and she looked like me. I was my dying mother. I was my father, if he had lived to grow old.

  “Hey, what’s going on over there?” I asked, reeling myself back from the abyss of the mirror.

  “Just a minute,” Claire said. “There’s a shadow on your nose we’re trying to fix.”

  “Good luck,” I said, and to avoid looking at myself again (having already seen both my parents’ ghosts, who knows what I’d see this time?), I dug out that last fan letter and tore it along the seam. It was short, written in blue ink on looseleaf paper, in the hand of a clever fourth grader, the floppy script wandering over the lines.

  “Holy fuck,” I announced, standing up.

  “Harry,” Claire scolded, since the lights were all arranged and this could only aggravate the nose problem.

  “Holy fuck,” I repeated, waving the letter. “Look at this.”

  She took the page and read. Here’s what it said:

  Dear Mr. Thomas Stanks,

  I am a big reader of “Raunchy” and I think you’re writings and magazine is great. I have a “business” “proposition” for you. I have many offers to sell my story to the medias, but never have told the real story, the whole truth that really happened to anyone. I mean EVERYTHING!! Maybe you can write this book with me? It will sell a lot for sure. Come see me if you want to discuss. I have some conditions.

  Sincerely,

  Darian Clay

  “Darian Clay?” Her mind traced the name. Then her eyes widened. “Not the dude with the heads?”

  “That’s the one.”

  The photographer shouted, “OK, I’m ready,” but Claire ignored him.

  “I completely remember this,” she said.

  “How could you? You were five.”

  “My dad was married to this model for about twelve minutes, and I remember her being all freaked out and him going to pick her up after night shoots.” She looked down at the letter in her hands. “I can’t believe I’m touching something he touched. And you’re going to write his book.” She grinned at me. “That is awesome.”

  “I didn’t say that. Who knows if it’s even for real? We’ll see.”

  The photographer came over and lit a cigarette. “Excuse me, Claire? Madam Lorindo-Gold? In case either of you care, the shot is now ruined. And we are back to square one with the nose.”

  Claire handed him the letter. “Check it out. Darian Clay.”

  “Oh my God, the photo guy?” He scanned the letter, puffing smoke. “I remember exactly where I was when the news said they caught him. In my ex’s loft, cooking leek and potato soup. My friend even knew someone who saw the pictures. Well, he said he did, anyway.” He handed back the page. “This is too sick though. You can’t do it.”

  “Of course he can,” Claire said. “He has to.”

  “Well, if he does,” he asked her, as if I weren’t there, “can I take the author photo?”

  10

  For those of you who, like Claire, were born yesterday or just got to town or, like my mother, prefer not to know about such things, Darian Clay, aka the Shutterbug, aka the Photo Killer, abducted, tortured and brutally murdered four women in New York City from 1996 to 1997. A demented wannabe artist, Clay forced the women to pose for photos before killing them, dismembering their corpses, and disposing of the parts, or most of them, in Dumpsters around Queens and Long Island. All except the heads.

  The photos were sent, perhaps mockingly, perhaps hopefully, to the police during the manhunt, showing up as each girl’s severed remains were found. Although never released to the public, the images were described by the press as “ghastly tableaux,” “terrifying mise-en-scenes” and other terms of high aesthetic horror. I remember the mood of mounting hysteria that gripped the city during those months, as each new murder cranked up the fear and outrage. There were screaming red headlines on the tabloids and police sketches on TV, warning women to beware of a lightly penciled fellow who could be anyone white under fifty. A hotline was set up to intensify the panic with a rash of false sightings, false accusations and false confessions. There were angry town meetings with Police Commissioner Safir and Mayor Giuliani, who put his foot in it by reassuring the public that only a few women—young, beautiful models—really had anything to worry about. There were shrill panel discussions about the objectification of women, and of course we in the porn world were fingered as accessories, along with fashion and advertising, since we somehow made chopping up women “acceptable.” I admit, at the time, the thought did creep me out. I kept imagining a stack of blood-smeared Raunchy’s with my name on them. But as Jane reminded me when I couldn’t sleep, in truth our average reader was far more likely to be a lonely security guard atop the midnight toilet or a cop sitting up in a parked car, eating doughnuts and watching out for the killer. Now, all these years later, I had to wonder.

  Clay was finally captured when a fifth woman, Noreen Velanopolis, called the police and reported a suspicious man trying to coax her into modeling for him. At the tria
l, he pled not guilty. He insisted, to the disgust of the jury and the denial of the victims’ loved ones, that all of the murdered women were willing models whom he had paid and who left his basement studio happy and intact. However, DNA evidence (hair or blood) found in his basement linked him to the victims, and witnesses placed him, or a man answering his description, in the vicinity of two of the abductions. Clay had been taken into custody without incident, denied bail, and after a long and grueling trial, found guilty on all counts and sentenced to death. He had spent the last ten years on death row, exhausting his appeals and sitting alone in a cell, where, it now appeared, he spent a lot of his “free” time reading my alter ego’s pornographic prose.

  Clay had never confessed. The heads were never found.

  11

  Right after we got back from the photo shoot, Claire did some research and came back even more enthused. Clearly there was money to be made.

  “If he confesses, exclusive to you, we’re talking six figures,” she said. “And that’s just the advance. There’s paperback, major on a supermarket book like this. There’s excerpts in the tabs. Who knows? Maybe we can go serial.”

  “Don’t call it that.”

  “What?”

  “Going serial.”

  “Oh yeah right.” She was very excited, squirming and tapping in a way that was much more childish than her normally cool demeanor, but she was also flushed and her eyes were wide and dilated. She seemed almost turned on, which I tried my best not to notice. “And then there’s movie rights. DVDs. Cable. TV.” She sang these words like an incantation and even seemed to view me with slightly more respect, as if the very fact that I had attracted this kind of potential wealth and cultural currency, even if only by chance, endowed me with a different aura: if the real forces and powers of the culture could draw toward me, then I must be interesting in some other, deeper, though admittedly invisible way.