The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald Read Free

Lulu had made a small discovery under the bed and was nosing it toward me. It was a woman’s lipstick. Red. I picked it up and put it on the nightstand next to the tequila.
    Then I went downstairs to the kitchen. The refrigerator was empty except for a half-eaten sausage-and-mushroom pizza from John’s, the coal-fired pizzeria on Bleeker. I went to work on a slice. I’d missed lunch, and there’s no greater delicacy than cold pizza, except for licorice ice cream, and there wasn’t any of that in the freezer. Just a bottle of Polish vodka and four trays of ice cubes. These I dumped in an empty joining-compound bucket from the cellar. I filled the bucket with cold water from the sink, swooshed it around, and carried it back upstairs. When I got to the bed, I hefted it, took careful aim, and dumped half of its contents on the naked, fully exposed groin of Cameron Noyes. He instantly let out a lion’s roar of shock and pain and sat right up, his eyes — they were blue — bulging from his head. I gave him the other half of the bucket in the face. Then I wiped my hands and sat down and asked myself what the hell I was doing there.

CHAPTER TWO
    Y OU COULD TAKE YOUR pick with Cameron Sheffield Noyes.
    You could call him the brightest, most gifted boy wonder to shine on American fiction since F. Scott Fitzgerald lit up the Jazz Age. Or you could call him an obnoxious, big-mouthed, young shithead. The only thing you couldn’t do was ignore him.
    Not since his sophomore year at Columbia, when this strapping young part-time male model and full-time blue blood had submitted the manuscript for a slim first-person novel to Tanner Marsh, who teaches creative writing there. Marsh also edits the New Age Fiction Quarterly , and happens to be the single most influential literary critic in New York. Marsh read the little manuscript, which told the story of a shy, privileged, young Ivy Leaguer who suffers a nervous breakdown while studying for finals and runs off to an Atlantic City hotel-casino with the middle-aged cashier at the diner where he regularly breakfasts. There, besotted by drugs, alcohol, and sex, he blows both of their brains out. The novel was called Bang . Marsh was so knocked out by it he showed it to Skitsy Held, editor in chief of the small, prestigious Murray Hill Press. She shared his enthusiasm. Bang was published one month before Cameron Noyes’s twentieth birthday. A spectacular front-page review in the New York Times Book Review catapulted it, and its author, to instant celebrity. “It is as if young Scott Fitzgerald has come back to write The Lost Weekend while under the influence of cocaine and José Cuervo tequila,” raved the Times ’ reviewer, who was none other than Tanner Marsh. “Indeed, Cameron Sheffield Noyes writes so wincingly well he must be considered the most brilliant new literary find since Stewart Hoag. One can only hope he will fare better.”
    Critics. One thing they never seem to understand is that everyone, no matter how gifted, can roll out of bed one morning and have just a really rotten decade.
    I read the damned thing, of course. How could I not? I read all 128 pages of it, and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Oh, I wanted to hate it. Desperately. But I couldn’t. Bang captured the itchy ennui of the young as so few novels ever had. Cameron Noyes had a gift — for peering into the depths of his own soul and for coming back with pure gold. And he had the rarest gift of all. He had his own voice.
    Lulu stayed out of my way for a whole week after I read it. I was not in a good mood.
    Lonely, alienated teenagers who before might have turned to Plath or Salinger for comfort found Noyes much more to their liking. Bang understood them. It was dirty. It was theirs . It took off and stayed near the top of the bestseller lists for thirty-six weeks, the name of Noyes crowding out more familiar ones such as Michener and King. The paperback reprint went for close to a million. The movie