The Road to Amber Read Free Page A

care of itself.”
    Another time he gave me some future advice—“From one family man to another, write one book for each of your children.”
    “Why?” I asked.
    “For the sake of legacy, for what you leave behind, write one book for each child. So, for me, a book each for Devin, Trent, Shannon. That should cover their needs…afterwards.”
    I thought it was an odd thing to think about at a time when I was just getting started, but then I didn’t know that our time was growing short. Roger had the keen eyes of a hawk—he could see things that were not yet, things forthcoming. Much later, I realized that Roger meant more than “just a book”—he meant, in effect, write a “big” book for each of your children.
    Once Roger had a dream, and he told me it was a plot outline for a book that he wasn’t going to write.
    “Why not?”
    “Well,” he answered, “I saw you as the author. This is your book, I’m giving you the outline.” I guess he wanted me to move along in the bestseller business. I was writing books, one after another, but they were more poetry books, children’s titles, and academic texts.
    Roger’s dream novel seemed a bit hazy to me, as it involved James Bond, Dr. No, a bizarre murder, various timescapes and reality warps, and all of it set on the island ofJamaica in the late 1960s. He was quite specific about these things as he dictated the summary, and I wrote it down over the phone.
    “So who’s the main character?” I queried when he was done.
    Chuckling, he said—“You. But in the novel you’re an old man, a bookish old stickfighter from the hills of the North Coast.”
    That summer, while working in Jamaica, I discovered that there were still a few ancient cudgelists—stickfighters—on the island. This nearly unknown martial art goes back to the days of Robin Hood. I sketched the outline Roger dictated and put it in my desk drawer where it still resides more than fifteen years later, untouched.
    Am I waiting for a sign from Roger? Or just afraid that without him the novel won’t be what he wanted me to write? Roger taught me so many things, but perhaps the greatest gift of all was his ability to give someone a book that cut to the very core of their thinking.
    There are three books that come to my mind, books that changed my life. These, more than any others, inspired me to write specific books of my own that, miraculously, many years after publication are still in print. All part of Roger’s great and generous plan.
    Roger’s kindness really had no boundary. Once, when I was struggling to make ends meet, he gave me his unused, early model Apple computer that was still in the box it came in and with it a month’s rent, and he told me, “Help another writer when you’re able to. Pass it along.” He was the original believer of forwarding goodness. You could say he invented “the writer’s guild of guided saints.” And, if, in fact, writers have such providers, Roger is still moving manuscripts along, lifting them out from under the piles on editors’ desks, and letting them see the light of day.
    Curiously, he once said he had actually done this; metaphysically, of course.
    “How?” I asked him.
    “With intention,” he replied.
    I have talked to more than a dozen writers whose careers were boosted or even charmed by Roger, and each one of these people speaks in the same manner in which I’m writing, with a measure of awe, love, and wonder.
    I don’t want to forget the three arcane books that Roger gave me, for they are a pivotal part of this friendship story.
    Black Gods, Green Islands by Geoffrey Holder with Tom Harshman.
    Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works by Carl Van Vechten.
    Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence by Nick Bantock.
    Indeed, these are as special to me as they were to Roger. The first two nearly forgotten as literary art, the third, a classic in its genre—and who knows what that genre is, exactly. Roger liked all three and gifted them