In Laymon's Terms

Geoff Cooper

F I WERE TO WRITE everything I wanted to about Dick Laymon, my contribution to this book would run three-quarters-of-a-million words, thereby requiring another volume. Collectors would demonstrate in the streets outside the independent bookstores, screaming for my head. As the leg bone is connected to the hip bone, the calls for my death would follow the chain: booksellers demand my evisceration, and, in an effort to appease everyone, the editors of this book would place me in the stockade, taking turns of beating me about the head and shoulders with hardbound copies of The Midnight Tour, only to stop after publisher Rich Chizmar decides to throw me into the middle of Camden Yards with a big sign around my neck, identifying me as a Yankees fan, and have the citizenry of Baltimore (all those Orioles fans shudder) bludgeon me with baseball bats. In the interest of self-preservation, I will attempt to keep this a reasonable length.

I think most have heard The Saga Of The Jets Hat. If not, check your copies of Night in the Lonesome October (dust jacket photo) and Friday Night in Beast House, or acquire a videotape of The Late Show with David Letterman from 20^th October, 2000. I won’t go there this time: Kelly already wrote about that. Anyone could do a master’s thesis on the importance of the body of Laymon’s work. So I’m going to have to go somewhere else, and keep it short enough to ensure I live long enough to see this make print. This ain’t gonna be easy.

Dick Laymon saved my life. Now I don’t mean this in the way that I mean that Lucy Taylor’s novel, Dancing with Demons, kept me from drinking at the time—which it did. If Dick Laymon did not do what he did when he did it, I’d have dined on a bullet. That’s about as blunt as I can say it. I was leaning toward the 230-grain hollowpoint in favor of the 165-grain variety. Fuck it: if you’re going to do something, do it right—that’s my motto. Half-measures avail nothing.

When my ex-wife left me for the guy across the street, I’ve no shame in saying I was suicidal. Everything that meant anything to me was gone. I had no job, no kid, no wife. She took the pasta from the cupboards (I confronted her about that. She said: “What the fuck do you need it for?”), the only running car, every reason I could think of to live.

I was sitting at my desk one day about a week after she moved out, thinking that I’d need a second magazine for the weapon. My intent was to walk over there, take care of her and her boyfriend, and then have the last bullet for lunch.

My phone rang. The caller ID box identified the caller as “Anonymous,” and I thought, Oh, fuck. It’s one of her lawyers calling to bend me over the couch, stick it in and break it off. I knew it wasn’t Rainy or Keene, with their daily call to see if I’d gone postal yet. It was too early in the day—about four in the afternoon—and their numbers always came up on the ID. The only “Anonymous” number that called during that time was Ray, and I’d just talked to him before, so there was little chance of him calling back right away. I picked up the phone with two fingers, paused a moment before I said hello.

They asked for Geoff. Lawyers always ask for you by both names: first and last, and are never as informal as a shortened down version of your first name. To a lawyer, I’d be “Geoffrey,” just like when I was a little kid and my mom was really pissed. This wasn’t a lawyer. Maybe some guy she hired, an ex-cop with buddies still on the force who would come over and beat the shit out of me with impunity. Maybe one of her boyfriend’s friends, calling to threaten me, suggest I leave town or end up as gator food.

“This is,” I said, looked around the room for a weapon.

“Hi, Geoff! It’s Dick Laymon. How’re you doing?”

I lied, told him I was hanging in there, and was quite relieved that he was calling and not a lawyer. We yapped for a while, then he said the reason he was calling was he really dug a story of mine that was online, and he asked me if I had anything that was unpublished that he might be able to read. Me, being my ever-eloquent self, said, “Are you fucking shitting me?”

He assured me no fecal matter—or fornication thereof—was involved. “Just send me a good, unpublished story, if you can.”

If I could. Yeah. You know: if I, some unknown writer who nine people on the face of the planet heard of, would be kind enough to send him, Richard Laymon, a story to read. If I could. Let me see if I could fit it into my oh-so-busy schedule.

“You kidding? Of course! I’ll e-mail it to you right now.”

Have you ever seen a cat about to fall into the bathtub? Because that’s what it felt like Dick did on the other end of the phone. I heard him freeze up, panicking at the thought. “Well...you see, Geoff, I...I always get messed up with attached files, and Kelly isn’t home to open it for me. Would it be okay if you sent it to the house?”

I printed out the story, dropped it in the mailbox that night so it would go out first thing in the morning. I thought it was a little odd that he specified an unpublished story, but who was I to question the intent of Richard Laymon? He was a Big-Time Author, and I was just some guy bumming around Fort Myers, Florida, trying to not look across the street and see my wife’s Thunderbird parked in front of some other guy’s house.

Okay, so what I could do is wait until one of ’em left for work. Surprise ’em, give ’em a bash on the head as they walked out the door, force my way in before it closed fully and start popping caps. Nah: too cliche. Better to make her live with the guilt. Maybe just do myself right here, right now—pull a Robert E. Howard. Bleh. No style. Oh! I know: I go and do it in the T-bird. Sit down inside, and blam! Splatter my brains all over the upholstery. I liked that idea. That was it. Or wait! Maybe I should consider the possibilities of high voltage...

A week went by, a thousand different scenarios of murder, death and suicide, all boiling in my brain. From the time I came to until the time I collapsed, pain so deep my blood was on fire, burning its way down each artery and capillary like a toxic chemical, one my body tried to reject. I wanted to open every vein and bleed it out, just get it out of me, maybe then some release, some numbness, something other than...

I got used to the taste of gun oil. Slept with the barrel in my mouth every night, hoping that in a dream, I’d yank the trigger and never wake up. Yet I did. Every fucking day, I woke up, and there it was: the failure that was my life waiting for me: Good morning! Everything still sucks! It’s going to be a beautiful day to take the kid to the beach—oh, did I strike a nerve there?

I was at the bottom. One more day would have killed me. One more sympathetic phone call, one more “I’m sorry, Geoff,” one more “You’re better off without her,” one more “You just hang in there, okay?” would have been more than I could take. I hadn’t eaten in four days. The dog shit the floor. I didn’t care. Couldn’t remember the last time I walked her. Whatever. Nothing mattered anyway. Why wasn’t I dead yet?

I was about that far in my thinking when Dick called again.

“Hey, I really like this story. Can I put it in Bad News?”

“Are you fucking shitting me?”

See, he managed to leave that part out of the first phone call. That tiny little part that he was asking for a submission to his anthology, Bad News.

It’s probably best that he did. I never would have submitted to it, had I known. I would not have bothered. I was a beginning writer. I had all the confidence of a dead fish, and with the way the rest of my life was going at the time, it only compounded things. My non-existent ego was already pulverized by non-writing events, and I couldn’t handle the rejection one should expect when going in to play on a field that is populated by those authors you read in high school. You need a tough skin in this business—and at the time, I didn’t have any skin at all: it was stripped raw, and every nerve was exposed. Rejections sting. Oh, you get used to it, after a while. You learn to roll with the punches. Some editors (particularly inexperienced ones) really rub it in, and I’ve had a few of those. I could not imagine Dick ripping my story to pieces, even if he hated it, but I could see him sending a rejection letter if he believed it was warranted.

Do you understand? Do you understand that I could not have sent that in, had I known it was a submission? Submitting a story always—ALWAYS—carries the risk of rejection, and at the time, that would be one rejection too many. It would have killed me. The final straw, the camel’s broken back. The 230-grain.

Perhaps it was chance, Dick taking an interest in my work at that time. Perhaps it was something else. I’d heard all of the slots were to be invite-only, that he was taking only two newbies. I also knew that my friend, Rain Graves, had been asked to be one of them. I never would have guessed that I was to be the other. Not in a million years. He could have taken Ryan Harding, or Mehitobel Wilson, or Keene, Oliveri, Huyck, any of those guys. It was inconceivable to me, that he would want a story from me. It was...it was worth setting the gun down a moment and signing the contract. It was worth telling myself that now, at least, I had to stay alive long enough to see the book released. And yes, I even smiled, because I thought: contributor copies.

I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in Satan. I don’t believe in angels. But if there ever was an angel that walked this miserable fucking planet, its name was Richard Carl Laymon.

He gave a kid a chance. A kid who, without the chance, would have either been in jail right now for two counts of first-degree murder, in a grave or in a mental institution writing a story in black crayon. He made me smile once, during a time when it was all I could do to get out of bed. If it weren’t for him, I would have no writing career. I believe that. Bad News was a major anthology. At the very least, it was major to me because I started submitting with a little more confidence, thinking, “Maybe Dick was right. Maybe I really can do this.”

I’m still prone to kicking myself in the teeth—especially when it comes to the writing. Every time I do, I hear Dick Laymon’s voice in my head. To me, he was a mentor, a father figure, a friend. My loss is not the same as Ann’s and Kelly’s, or the friends he’d known since Moby Dick was a minnow and Stephen King was trying to make ends meet. I know that. I cried for three days straight when I learned of his death, and every day for damned near a month after. Sometimes I still cry. I mourned his passing, Ann and Kelly’s loss and how I never got a chance to show him my first novel (which he blurbed, but we’re trying to stay under that three-quarters-of-a-million word mark, here, so I won’t go into it) or my first collection. That I never got a chance to tell him—

“You were right, Dick.”

To think about that still brings tears.

Even now.

Goddamnit.