Free Any Resemblance to Actual Persons by Kevin Allardice

which I’d spent on a studio set, seeking the approval of adults rather than rebelling against them. By four in the morning, Oliver would usually start teaching me to appreciate not just refined booze and intentionally unrefined music but fine cocaine as well. Enjoying the irony that I had to leave showbiz before anyone even offered me the stuff, I indulged as a mere dilettante, thrilled just as much by the novelty of it as by the dopamine. In a not-so-subtle nod to Hunter S. Thompson, Oliver kept a couple grams in a saltshaker.
    Iowa City in the seventies felt like summer camp, people from all over the map converging into one diverse but insular mob. Rumor spread that John Cheever was visiting and so we’d stare at every foppish drunk in every bar and wonder if this was him, the suburban surrealist, lyricist of the middle class, until the man would get paranoid and shout things that were decidedly unlyrical, and we’d move on. Poets had the most sex. There was one married couple, both poets, who had an open marriage, wrote villanelles about their dalliances, workshopped them. I heard about this from a poet friend who snuck me copies of the wife’s work, which I pored over, hoping for someoblique allusion to our own drunken dry-hump—just one alliterative description of my boner-taut denim, please?—but found not a one. By second year, they were workshopping divorce-themed blank verse. Everyone seemed to know the names of obscure flora and fauna, and filled their work with them the same way class-climbing urbanites casually name-drop expensive brands. Knowing the names of things, I thought, that was what real writing was about, and I still have the copies of National Geographic’s Guide to North American Birds and Guide to North American Trees that I bought at a yard sale in Dubuque. In my fiction workshops, I sat across the seminar table from grizzled guys in olive-green army jackets who wrote stories that contained hauntingly precise descriptions of what a Vietcong’s blood felt like splattered on your face after you’d bayoneted them in their dark viscera, and I worried I didn’t have enough real-world experience to be a writer. Or at least I didn’t have the right kind of experience. My own descriptions of blood-splattered faces smacked of hackery and cheap imitation. Which is why if you asked me back then what I wrote about, I’d say, “The crisis of simulacra.” My fear that I didn’t have the right kind of experience to write the gritty realism I was surrounded with was also what made me appreciate my late-night jaw sessions with Oliver, the Schedule-Two stimulant mixing with a genuine giddiness that I was actually experiencing something real and illicit and fun and that Oliver was laughing at my jokes and intensely interested in everything I had to say about L.A., even though when I ran out of my own (relatively few) interesting stories about showbiz, I began to appropriate stories I’d read elsewhere, stories from Milton Berle’s memoir or Hedda Hopper’s tell-all. “Dude,” he said, “you’re like the most interesting person I know.” Or at least hesaid something to that effect. Point being, he seemed pretty primed on California in general and Hollywood in particular, and I figured after the MFA we’d move westward together, be the vanguard of a new literary Los Angeles. But at a party the night of our graduation, Oliver said he didn’t want to write anymore; instead he was “going to New York to see how the sausage is made.” At the time, I hadn’t actually heard that expression before, so I initially thought it was some sort of gay thing, that, in addition to walking away from the literary ambition that enslaved the rest of us, Oliver was walking away from heterosexual pretenses as well. (People often said he was very handsome, and the way he maintained rapt eye contact in conversation always sparked