Bonfire

Not every writer can be Tom Wolfe. Not every writer should be. I mean, what are you supposed to do with all those ridiculous and revelatory exclamations of shock and astonishment? How do you deal with the ellipses and m-dashes and exclamation points— punctuating … dividing … ruminating—forcing you into the brains of his characters (real and imagined) and not letting you escape (and not wanting to)? What kind of freak writing is this that inserts you into a world—HEY!—you know nothing about—RIGHT HERE!—and then convinces you—WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!—that you understand it completely?—FUCKIN’ A, BUBBA!

See? I’ve proven it in that last paragraph: not every writer can be Tom Wolfe.

May 1995: I was waiting in an airport as the plane that was supposed to be at my gate was doing fifty-mile-wide circles overhead. I was supremely unprepared for a delay, so I went to the newsstand and pulled The Bonfire of the Vanities from the paltry selection of paperbacks. Suddenly the annoyance of my delay didn’t matter, because I wasn’t sitting in an uncomfortable plastic seat fidgeting along with two hundred strangers in their uncomfortable plastic seats any more.

I was a wall-streeter in my tinted-windowed Mercedes, lost in the Bronx, making wrong turns into disaster; I was at my desk at Precinct Headquarters spewing obscenities and drinking sludge-serving-as coffee with my soldiers-in-arms (most of whom were major assholes like me); I was flung into a Hells Kitchen holding cell with vermin (human and otherwise) knowing I belonged there but steadfastly believing that the law (that pesky law!) was meant for others less important and less connected than me; I was in courtrooms, newsrooms, and barrooms; I was a reporter, a judge, a street thug, a golden boy, a tabloid sensation, a Master Of The Universe!; I lived in an over-mortgaged three-million dollar apartment on Central Park West—having everything … yet knowing tomorrow I’d have nothing. 

As I lost myself in this world, somewhere in the back of my brain there was a voice wearing a smile, asking me if I was entertained … daring me to try and stop turning pages. And then the voice said, with the tone of a wagging finger, “Don’t get too comfortable. Yeah, I made all these people up … but they exist. All these idiots and braggarts and thieves and heroes—they are all fake … and all so very real.”

My plane arrived. I think. I probably grabbed my carry-on and moseyed along with the rest of the cattle to seat 9B. Or 14F. Or 25C. One of those airplane seat numbers. It didn’t matter. I presume the plane flew in the air … made a connection in some city … landed on a runway. It didn’t register. I was lost in Tom Wolfe’s world. Smitten. The Bonfire of the Vanities had just become the BEST BOOK EVER. I have read it four or five times since then. That number could be much higher, but I force myself to put off returning to it—so that when I finally do I am knocked off my chair like I was knocked off that plastic chair at JFK. It is on my bedside table right now, ready at a moment’s notice if I need a little pick-me-up. I can open that book to any page and the audacity and vitality and brashness will thill and astonish and amaze me—even when I know what’s coming next.

I tear through Tom Wolfe’s books, unable to slow myself down, continually reminding myself that I am going too fast and missing stuff. (So much stuff!) I marvel at his paragraph-long sentences, and his one-word sentences. I am awed at his uncanny ability to change voices, and how he can burrow deep into the souls of his subjects and find—often in a single slice of prose or a solitary line of dialogue—the essence of who they really are. But mostly I am stunned by the effortlessness and agelessness of his writing. How it it possible, I wonder, to achieve that level of brilliance? (I found out, reading his obituary on Tuesday, that part of it was ten triple-spaced typewritten pages a day. 1000 or 2000 words. No matter what. Every day. Without fail. The other part of it must have been that he was blessed by the gods.)

So tonight I may revisit Bonfire’s fictional Master-of-the-Universe Sherman McCoy and his nightmare wrong-turn in the Bronx. Or maybe The Right Stuff and it’s very real Flyboy/Astronaut Alan Shepherd has he commands Mission Control to “Light This Candle!” while sitting atop a fully loaded missile that would either send him to the edge of the atmosphere or … you know … explode.

Not every writer can be Tom Wolfe. Not every writer should be. The fact is, there can only be one.