2007, Richmond, Virginia

By Jayne Pupek

A man I never met killed himself. I’ve been distraught for days. My stomach is a knotted fist. The only solids I can keep down: saltines and a handful of Tums.

I’ve always been a bit of an insomniac; now sleep is even harder to find. I drink before bedtime to make myself drowsy. The alcohol causes me to dream. I wake remembering nothing but shadowy hands and a pair of boots on the sidewalk. Instead of mud, ink stains darken the boots’ crevices.

I get up to pee and come back to my desk. While my husband snoozes on, I go online, googling the name of the man who took his own life. I hardly knew him, but I want him back. The milky-blue screen of my computer is as close as I’ll get.

It isn’t completely accurate to say I never met Sam. We never met in person; we met online.

Before you shake your finger and say you knew I was up to no good, relax. We didn’t meet in one of those tawdry chat rooms designed for swingers, lonely housewives, and horny old men. Not that fine people can’t be found in unlikely places.

Sam and I met in an online group for writers. The group worked much like any real-time writer’s workshop, only we met in cyberspace, not in a library or back porch of someone’s house. The working premise was the same as any workshop: each member submitted a chapter of his or her novel-in-progress for critiques; while waiting for critiques on your work, you offered critiques on the work submitted by others. This process continued for months until members either finished their novels, or threw in the towel and took up something else; say cake decorating, fly fishing, or trolling tawdry chat rooms.

I was nearly finished with my novel when Sam joined the workshop. I didn’t expect him to jump into my story so late in the game, but he did. He liked what he read, and said he was sorry he’d missed the first two-thirds of the story.

I don’t always take people on face value, but Sam was just about the most unpretentious writer I’d encountered. He was direct, down-to-earth; a no-bullshit kind of guy. I liked him immediately.

Maybe I also liked him because he said good things about my writing, but I don’t think that had much to do with the equation. Other people had liked my story; I’d felt grateful, but not moved. Sam was different: he didn’t put on airs; he wasn’t after anything; he came with no agenda. I was, in a word, smitten.

I didn’t want to marry him. I didn’t especially want to fuck him. I wanted to bring him home and stay up late, dunking store-bought sugar cookies (the only kind in my house) in warm merlot while we read Bukowski all night.

Sam’s novel-in-progress was a glorious train wreck. Some of the workshop participants grew annoyed with him because he didn’t exactly adhere to the rules of grammar. He wrote in phrases instead of sentences and often ignored the need for paragraphs and punctuation. Sometimes he changed tenses without reason. He made many glaring POV (point of view) shifts. If his PC had a spellchecker, he must not have known how to use it.

None of that mattered. He didn’t have some of the techniques down, but those were housekeeping details that he could learn. As I told him many times, he could even hire an English undergrad and pay her to edit. He liked the idea, and said maybe there’d be a blowjob in there somewhere.

I liked how Sam’s mind worked. At his best, he was as transparent and open as a small child, blurting out thoughts as they came to him. He lacked an internal editor.

Remember that I said his work was a glorious train wreck. I’ve told you the train wreck part. The glory part was this: Sam was one of the best storytellers I’ve ever met. Whether he was born with it or learned it later, I can’t say. But he knew how to grab your attention and not let go; he had a knack for making you want more.

At the end of the day, that’s what good writing is all about: keeping the reader enthralled enough to turn those pages. Sam could do that better than any one I’d met — online or in person. His main protagonist was a fellow named Steve, who had spent considerable time high and wasted, and was in a drug rehab center when we meet him. This character, and the events that unfolded around him, held me like no other story submitted to the workshop. Sam was raw; he was good. Chuck Palahniuk good.

OK, maybe I did want to marry him. Maybe I did want to fuck him.

Instead, we lost touch. I went on to finish my book and find an agent. I sold the novel, which is scheduled for release next year. Sam turned his attention to poetry, where the rules mattered less, and his wit and genius could shine. I googled his name now and then to keep up with his poems, many of them published in e-zines. He said people compared him to Bukowski, and then he’d add the caveat that Bukowski was dead, and he wasn’t.

We’d run into each other again online a few weeks before Sam took his life. He admitted that he’d been googling my name, too, and looking for me on Amazon.com.
Then the announcement came on one of my writer’s lists. Sam was dead. Things hadn’t been going well in his personal life; trouble with a job or girl. He’d killed himself.

The news was a kick in my stomach. I felt frazzled and on edge, as if I’d somehow stuck my finger in a socket and couldn’t pull it out again. It seemed impossible: Sam couldn’t be dead. I hunted for him online, but, of course, never found him. Except in the poems. Thank the gods that the poems are still there.

I’m more or less an agnostic. I don’t have a clue what happens when we die. But I like to think that I’ll run into Sam in some other realm. In the meantime, I stay up late, sometimes reading Bukowski. I’m keeping the merlot warm and the sugar cookies handy. Just in case.

Jayne Pupek is a poet and novelist who resides in Richmond, Virginia. Her first novel, Tomato Girl, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books. Primitive, her chapbook of poems, is available through Pudding House Press (2004).

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, July 20th, 2007 | Email This Post

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