Hook Man Speaks, page 1
Hook Man Speaks
by Matt Clark
a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF
Back Cover:
It's been a while since my last activity. I've almost entirely lost the urge. I shut my eyes and try to awaken the memory inside me. The darkness. The moonlit bumpers. Interiors lit by radio dials. Crickets. Branches breaking under my creeping step. Sepulchral organ chords that only I can hear. . .
Is anybody out there?
The Hook Man is. He is born from nightmares and wild imagination, from the dark, from the guilt of teenage lovers, from panic. His name is Leonard Gage, and this is his story.
Exceptionally unusual, corrosively funny and touching, and completely unpredictable, Hook Man Speaks is both a self-dissection of one man's demons, and the demons of the world that created him. In exposing our fears of being outcasts, of being forgotten, of being ignored by those we love, Matt Clark has let us in on a dark secret in American pop culture, turned it inside out, and given it a heart -- and a voice like no other you've ever heard.
"Clark's language may be playful and inventive, his premise unabashedly absurd, but the moral intent and gracious humanity of his Hook Man will earn him a spot among the most beguiling characters in fiction." -- Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Pilgrims and Stern Men
"Deftly written, funny, at times heartbreaking, Hook Man Speaks is a brilliant novel." -- Josh Russell, author of Yellow Jack
"Matt Clark's writing is illuminated by a child's sadness and by a young man's sensual hunger. . . a terrific book." -- Andrei Codrescu, author of The Blood Countess
Praise for Hook Man Speaks
"Knowing that this wonderful and affecting book is the only novel we shall ever have from Matt Clark is heartbreaking, but it's the kind of heartbreak we're grateful for." -- Elizabeth Gilbert
"Matt Clark has concocted a story that's part picaresque, part urban folklore, part bildungsroman, and like no other novel I've ever read. The confidences of the specter who haunts lovers' lanes offer amazing surprises -- a love affair with the Kentucky Fried lady, an employee discount at a funeral home, a Rosetta log. Just as surprising is the emotional and intellectual depth Clark gives to his characters and their bizarre situations." -- Josh Russell
"Matt Clark attempted to hold on to the uncontainable world by memorizing it, listing it, surveying it, savoring it, while satirizing and loving it. . . It's hard not to see in the embrace and naming of so much of the anonymous but real world, an attempt to hold on to it and a premonition, perhaps, that it was not possible." -- Andrei Codrescu
A Berkley Book
Published by The Berkley Publishing Group
A division of Penguin Putnam Inc.
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and
any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2001 by The Estate of Matthew Clark
Book design by Tiffany Kukec
Cover design by Erika Fusari
Cover illustration by Tsukushi
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form
without permission. BERKLEY and the "B" design are trademarks
belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / October 2001
Visit our website at www.penguinputnam.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clark, Matt, 1966-1998.
Hook Man speaks / Matt Clark. -- Berkley trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-425-18162-6
I. Title.
PS3553.L28734 H66 2001
813'.54 -- dc21 2001025810
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
-- PABLO NERUDA
I think I ought to inform the reader
that there has just been a long interval.
-- VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Part One
Most dreaded nightmare. Specter haunting campfires, slumber parties, freshman floors, treehouses. Supreme boogeyman. Me. The Hook. Alive. Semi-whole. Contemplating my place in culture and history.
Boo.
"Do you ever recall being on Old County Line Road not far outside of Decatur, Georgia?" Dr. Brautigan says, Mont Blanc twitching above his yellow legal pad.
"Was it raining? Lots of lightning? Scary shadows?"
The good doctor consults his notes. "Um. Yes."
I weigh the facts. "I'm not positive," I say, "but I think so."
He lowers his pen, scratches the paper with it. "How about the River Road, south of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1972?"
"Hurricane weather? Smell of roadkill? Levee to the left of me, moo-cows to the right?"
Note checking. "I'm not sure," Dr. Brautigan says.
"Me, either."
"Think," Brautigan urges. "Think hard."
And I try. I really do. But all I can find in my mind is the inside of my mailbox. All is blackness. I can't see, can't tell if there's anything there waiting for me to come home and drag it out into the sunlight. I smell and smell, hoping for a trace of Rosemary's perfume. Is that it? Hovering over the doom-sweetened scent of just-mowed grass? I can't tell.
"I can't," I say out loud. I get up and leave the room without a good-bye, sprint from the building, don't stop until I'm at my front door, at my mailbox, heart pounding, hopeful, flinging open the tiny tin door, pawing inside, dragging out a Piggly Wiggly flyer (Whole Fryers 98 Cents!), VISA application, carpet-cleaning ad. That's it.
My spirits crash around my chigger-bit ankles.
It is forever until the mail carrier's next approach.
At our next session Dr. Brautigan says, "The Dan Dee Cabins, Ruidoso, New Mexico. Fall of 1969?"
I don't recall ever having been in New Mexico, but I almost say yes. I want badly to help Dr. Brautigan; he's been so terribly nice. "The very air smelled of thunder and tequila?" I venture.
"It did?" Dr. Brautigan says, jotting, nodding, smiling.
Dr. Brautigan is a folklorist at the University, engaged in an intensive study of me. For the last twenty-five years he's collected Hook Man stories from all over North America. Several months ago an article in Harper's prompted me to contact him. "I remember the sound of coyotes, possibly wild dogs," I tell him. "A gila monster had just bitten me on the toe, so I was really quite insane."
In addition to myriad psychological profiles, Dr. Brautigan is trying to ascertain how many times I actually struck, in light of how many unjustified reports exist about my exploits. "Now," Dr. Brautigan says, "the young woman -- a Miss Lorena Hidalgo -- says she saw you in the rearview mirror over her boyfriend's shoulder."
"Ah, yes," I say, and I actually feel for a moment that I truly might be recalling this, "I never got close to the car. The young woman squealed, and they drove off in their -- was it a Camaro?"
"Mustang," Dr. Brautigan corrects.
"Red," I pronounce.
Brautigan checks his notes. "It doesn't say."
"The color of poppies," I continue.
"Like in The Wizard of Oz," Dr. Brautigan says.
"Devastatingly red," I say, even though I remember the poppies in Oz being orange. Orange poppies, blue gingham dress, white snow. In the distance, emerald towers. Overhead, broom-spun terror.
"So this is not a case in which you lost your hook in the door handle?"
"No. The hook was only detached forcibly once. And that was at a root-beer stand, actually."
"Fascinating," Brautigan says. "Tell me all about it."
I subscribe to these magazines: Newsweek. GQ. Harper's, as I have already pointed out. Southern Living, for the recipes. The New Yorker. Mad. Men's Fitness. Southwest Review. Architectural Digest. Premiere. The Southern Review. The Atlantic Monthly. Esquire. Spy. The Nose. Rolling Stone. Vanity Fair. I was a Time subscriber until their last format change. (You will notice: No People. No Us. No Reader's Digest .)
When Dr. Brautigan moved me to the University from Tallahassee, I called all the subscription departments to make them aware of my new address. Although each said it would not be a problem, the March issues of Esquire and Southern Living have never found their way to me. I am currently composing stinging letters of complaint.
When I first met Rosemary she impressed me by immediately asking what had become of my hand. We were sitting on neighboring stools at a cafe in Wichita Falls, Texas. "What happened?" she said.
"To me?" I was unused to such honest curiosity. In general, people ignore my hook completely. In general, people -- excepting certain children and, of course, my "victims" -- ignore ME completely.
"To your hand." She reached out and touched my hook. It was not, by most standards, a special touch. It was not slow and charged with erotic intention, nor tentative, like that of a frightened schoolgirl dared to touch a newly captured garden snake. Rosemary's touch was remarkable only in its normalcy, being no more aggressive than that of a grandmother reaching out to test the ripeness of a grocery store tomato.
It shocked me.
"I lost it," I told her, blushing.
&nbs
"It was an accident."
"I should hope so," Rosemary said, turning back to her scrambled eggs.
"And you are how old?" Dr. Brautigan asked during our first session.
"I'm not sure," I said, smirking.
Brautigan didn't write anything down. He sat, staring at me, pen held cigarlike between his lips.
I gave him the Miracle on 34th Street answer: "As old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth." I smiled -- showed him my perfect set of teeth -- but Brautigan continued to just sit. People do this with me quite a bit. They assume I am leaving things out, that my incompleteness isn't just physical but verbal, possibly even mental.
Brautigan came at me from another direction. "What," he asked, "do you remember most vividly from your childhood?"
I remember saying, "I remember. . ."
When I was in fourth grade, my family moved to a farm near Alvarado, Texas. That was the year we studied dinosaurs, and were urged to search out fossils in our afternoon wanderings, ordered to present our finds to the class for examination and identification.
One day, rambling through a rocky cow pasture, I came upon a number of heart-shaped rocks, each stamped with an elaborate and beautiful design. The best ones I gathered carefully, cautious of the melon-yellow scorpions that were so plentiful -- sometimes even in our bathtub -- in the early fall. Selecting the three most perfect specimens, each a chalky-gray, fist-sized miracle, I carried them home to delicately bathe and dry them, wrapped each in a bed of toilet paper and set them next to my completed homework.
At school I presented the fossils with pride, announcing that I had found a veritable elephants' graveyard of hearts. A valentine quarry. But my discovery was not nearly so romantic or awesome as I had hoped it might be. The foundations of science did not quake.
"They're sea urchins," Mrs. Custer told me and the rest of the class. "From when this whole area was covered by an ocean millions of years ago. Not hearts. Just sea urchins. Common in virtually every area of North America," she concluded.
At that point in time, I was still whole. I ate my meals with two hands. Rode a bike like a normal boy. Played outfield, dreading the approach of any fly ball that might take me away from my contemplation of the turf and rocks and sprouting bluebonnets. When Mrs. Custer came to stand in front of me, I blushed and held both hands out, cupped to receive not a communion wafer but the shower of petrified sea urchins that tumbled from my teacher's upended palms.
Brautigan passes out questionnaires in his freshman survey class. From these, he determines the local spots most likely to harbor high school students' most ardent bursts of backseat passion. Of the forty-two students who complete the form, thirty-six are from Alpine or the surrounding area. Of those thirty-six, twenty-nine agree Indian Lodge State Park is a hotbed of hormonal tension and release. Twenty of those twenty-nine admit to losing their virginity there. Sixteen of those twenty are male. Seven of those sixteen are named Mike.
"Have you ever been?"
I have not, and I tell the doctor this.
"Would you like to go? That is, do you feel the desire to visit the area for your usual purpose?"
It's been a while since my last activity. I've almost entirely lost the urge. I shut my eyes and try to awaken the memory inside me. The darkness. The moonlit bumpers. Interiors lit by radio dials. Crickets. Branches breaking under my creeping step. Sepulchral organ chords that only I can hear.
"Well," I say, "I don't. . ."
But then I get an idea.
This is the first time I've seen Dr. Brautigan not wearing chinos, a denim shirt, beautiful silk tie. Instead, he sports jeans, my favorite flannel shirt (dollar-bill green and black with a few threads of red mixed in). He crouches in the bushes next to me. We've been here since dusk, sitting on our haunches, watching the skies darken, the ocotillo turn into hydras, the saguaro into Martians. I am just about to ask Dr. B. what he thinks about The New Yorker' s new image -- its new smell -- when I hear the murmur of an approaching vehicle. The murmur turns into a growl. Headlights sweeping past us like dragon eyes, a pickup truck rolls to a stop under a live oak twenty yards away.
"What if it's a drug drop-off?" Dr. Brautigan says.
"Shhh." The pickup's windows are down. An Eagles song wafts out to us. I give Brautigan the thumbs-up.
We wait.
"Don't watch," I whisper to Dr. Brautigan when I notice he is straining to see inside the truck. "That's not the point."
He nods.
Take It Easy.
Witchy Woman.
Lyin' Eyes.
Already Gone.
Desperado. I nudge Brautigan. "OK. Do it." Before he creeps out of the brush, I take off my hook and hand it to him. "You'll need this," I say.
As if he were in a cartoon, he gulps audibly. Takes the hook, grips it in his right hand, pulls the cuff of his sleeve down around it. "Good man," I hiss.
Hunkered close to the ground, lurching like an ape, he moves toward the pickup. I try to send a psychic command to him. "Limp!" I think. He either gets the message or remembers how we rehearsed this, because he pauses for a moment, shakes his head, then proceeds, dragging one leg like dead weight. I get a shiver watching Brautigan do this. It's like watching myself. A memory. But in 3-D. Tangible.
He's close to the pickup, only a few feet behind the tailgate. My heart races, claws its way up my rib cage into my esophagus, where it cowers behind my uvula, watching, waiting for the inevitable scream.
Brautigan inches to the target, carefully reaches out toward the door handle and. . .
. . . drops the hook. It hits the ground with a dull clang.
Brautigan stiffens. Waits to be caught. But nothing happens. Turning to look at me, he shrugs, holds his palms out like, "Now what?" I return the gesture. He reaches down slowly and gets the hook, then scurries back to where I'm crouching, my mouth agape.
"I can't do it," he says in a normal voice.
I clamp my hand -- my good hand -- over his mouth.
"What was that?" the girl in the pickup gasps, coming up for air.
"What?"
"I thought I heard something. Somebody talking."
"Nah," her date brays.
"Yes. I'm sure."
They argue for a few moments. Then he starts the pickup -- you can hear his frustration in the growl and roar of the engine -- and they speed away.
Brautigan relaxes. Sits back in the leaves. "Wow," he says. "So that's what it's like."
"No," I contend. "That's what it's sort of like. If they tell their friends what happened, the mysterious sound will be attributed to a mountain lion. A lost Pomeranian, maybe."
