Ringo’s Drum Roll

I never went back to acting school after that. I never phoned in, I never dropped out formally. I just vanished. In fact, I didn’t go back to New York for many years. I left all my stuff (Cavett, by Dick Cavett) at the Chelsea Hotel. I may have gone to the Pinter audition the next day, I think I did, but my heart wasn’t in it. Which was a good thing. I might have wasted quite a few years there as a half-assed actor. No, the Bear showed me the real thing that afternoon. He was the one who should have gone to New York, not me. But he didn’t. Something else I’ve learned along the way: just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it. Last thing I heard, the Bear was a happily married man who ran a health-food store in Vancouver.

I wish I could say that when I settled on writing, when I managed finally to give it some time and actually did it (as opposed to telling girls at parties I was a writer), there was a click somewhere in the universe and everything fell into place. But that didn’t happen.

For a few years in my late twenties I looked in the mirror and thought I saw Scott Fitzgerald looking back at me, but that didn’t last long. Very soon it was Ringo’s drum roll again. I found myself reading novel after novel—good ones, bad ones—feeling a kind of cold hand clutch my heart, a hand that said, “You can’t do that. Or that. Or that either.”

But I went on to write books anyway (I was compelled to), a half-dozen short novels. Some did okay, others sank faster than a new Chevy Chase movie. None of them did as well as I’d hoped. But more important, none of them was as good as I thought they were when I was actually writing them. Once, when I was giving a reading in a bookstore in an American city, I looked at the small audience, the empty seats, the stack of my books waiting hopefully at the signing table, and I had a not-so-small, not-so-pleasant “moment.” I suddenly understood that I had a completely average talent, that I was never going to be a front-ranking writer, and that if I did better than some of the competition it was because I worked harder. I realized with diamond clarity that my work would vanish when I did, that I had (and this seemed particularly painful) kept my novels, my writing “career,” aloft over the years by the force of my personality alone. But if I stepped away for even a second, it would crash, all of it, to the ground.

You’d think this might have been a moment of liberation, that afterwards I was a less tormented man. But that’s not true either. A few years later, I watched with dismay as another freshly published novel shot heavenward for a hundred metres, sputtered, then sank slowly back to earth. I lurched about my porch that summer with a gin and tonic in my hand, saying over and over to my wife, “They fucked me again!”

So why does anyone keep at it, these things you’ll never be quite good enough at? Why play the drums if you can’t even get the roll in “I Want to Hold Your Hand” right? Why act if you can’t do it like “Jack” or “Bobby” or “Dusty?” I remember once when I was about fourteen, maybe fifteen, I played in a little band, three guitars and drums, and one Saturday night we played a dance for a Christian youth group. There weren’t many people, a few boys, a few girls way at the back of the room, but it was eight o’clock. Time to start anyway. They turned down the overhead lights; someone turned on a small lamp, which fell over the drums and the amplifiers in a mysterious red glow. The lead guitarist tapped his foot uncertainly, One-two-three-four. I struck my tom-tom, then struck it again, and we fell into an instrumental version of “Needles and Pins.” What happened next had nothing to do with the Beatles or making a record or hoping to be famous. As our little band found its footing and settled in, I could feel my young soul reaching inside my chest; it was reaching upward, as if it were trying to leave my body, as if it were trying to sail forth from sheer joy alone.

Sometimes when I come downstairs in the morning and I look at my writing desk, papers scattered all over the place, books open, I feel the most inexpressible joy. I know that later in the day I’ll walk into a bookstore and they won’t have any of my books. Or worse, the books of somebody I loathe will have a prominent place in the window and I’ll feel as if I’ve eaten something poisonous. I know I’ll run into somebody next week who’ll pull me aside to tell me about a bad review, or a thin woman at a cocktail party will tell me that she got “halfway” through one of my books. I know all this will happen. But at that moment, coming down those stairs, I think, this is it, this is my life. And I feel like that young kid on the drum kit. As if I have finally arrived in the present, that the universe has a point and, for a few private, ecstatic, stolen seconds, a centre. That I am—what is the word that dies the moment it reaches your lips? Ah yes. Happy.