Free After the Workshop by John McNally

collaboration. Absolutely!” For the next hour, Vince and Tate hammered out a blow-by-blow plot treatment in which a bricklayer, through a series of unrealistic and clichéd contrivances, trades places with a New York club-goer and all-around hipster.
    “I mean, that’s what movies are all about,” Vince said. “Opposites. Think about it. Pretty Woman. Sixteen Candles. Planet of the Apes. They’re all about opposites.”
    “The ‘other,’” Tate said, raising his hands and making rabbit ears.
    Vince, lost in thought, nodded.
    “Imagine the New York hipster trying to fit in with all these brick-layers!” Tate exclaimed.
    “Or the bricklayer going clubbing!” Vince countered, nodding. “This is gold, bro. Pure fucking gold.” At Vince’s insistence, the two men high-fived.
    “I need to take a dump,” I said. “I’ll be at the Dairy Queen. Cleaner toilets over there. Anyone need anything?”
    Vince and Tate, their reverie interrupted, glared at me without saying a word.
    “Everyone’s good?” I asked, sliding out of the booth. “No Dilly Bar? No Snickers Blizzard? No Moolatte?”
    “Bring us some fries,” Vince said. “You got an expense account, right?”

    I nodded.
    Vince said, “One large fry.”
    “Tate?” I said.
    Without looking at me, he shook his head.
    I snaked my way out of the bar, trudged next door to the Laundromat, and called M. Cat. I let his phone ring twenty times before I hung up. Either he didn’t own an answering machine or it was so full of messages from Lauren Castle that it had ceased to work. I considered checking my own messages, but I wasn’t up to wading through the muck of Lauren’s accusations and pleas.
    I walked over to DQ and ordered a large fry from a pocky white teenager who was trying to look like an inner-city gang-banger. His pants were twice his size, and his Dairy Queen visor was turned sideways.
    “We all outta fries,” the kid said. “You want O. rings?”
    “What are those?”
    “ Onion rings, homes,” he said, sighing.
    “Sure. Give me the onion rings.” As the kid dumped two handfuls of onion rings into the grease basket, I told him the plot of Vince and Tate’s movie. “Would you go see a movie with that plot?” I asked.
    “Sounds like it sucks ass,” the kid said. “I mean, who wants to see a movie about a bricklayer?”
    “I could actually see a good movie about a bricklayer,” I said. “My point is, the plot . You’ve seen it before, right?”
    “Maybe you have,” the kid said. “ I haven’t. A movie about a bricklayer and some hip-hop artist? Nuh-uh.”
    “A hipster ,” I corrected. “Not a hip-hop artist.”
    “What is this?” the kid asked. “One of those surveys? Yo, I don’t do surveys. They collect all kinds of information about you that they can use against you later.”
    “Like what?” I asked.

    “Like what ? What planet you from, homes? In-fo- may -shun. Personal information. Hel- lo ? You ever heard of identity theft? You ever heard of phone scams?” He handed me the bag with the onion rings in them. “Who did you say you were again?”
    “Nobody,” I said, opening the door to leave, the bell tinkling over my head. “I’m nobody.”
    “Nuh-uh,” he said, shaking his head. “You somebody.”

13
    I HAD LANDED THE job of media escort because the guy who had it prior to me (a writer named Max Kellogg who’d graduated from the Workshop a full ten years before I did) got drunk one winter night, drove through a guard rail, and drowned in the Iowa River. Witnesses said his car sank like a stone. When the police fished him out, they found inside his car an itinerary for Joyce Carol Oates’s upcoming visit to town and an unfinished novel manuscript with Max Kellogg’s name on it. The police labeled the cause of death an accident, but I knew without a doubt that it was his damned unfinished novel that had killed him.
    It was the owner of the bookstore, Bobby Dunn, who hooked me up with this job, calling