Free After the Workshop by John McNally Page A

me only a day after the police had found Max Kellogg’s body. He’d warned me about the publicists (“By and large, a bunch of rich daddy’s girls that went to Sarah Lawrence and Vassar,” he’d said. “A hundred bucks says not a one of them could even find Iowa on a map”), but when he told me how much money I could make, I didn’t hesitate. It sounded easy. Too easy. And, by and large, it was a cushy job. But then there were days like this one when everything went wrong.
    Armed with onion rings, I stepped back inside George’s. Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” radiated from the jukebox. It didn’t
matter what bar you went into in Iowa City, sooner or later “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” came on. My theory was that most people who played it didn’t actually like Pink Floyd; they played it to get as much bang for their buck as possible. The song lasted damned near fourteen minutes, depending on the version. These same people were also likely to play Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like I Do,” Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” Don McLean’s “American Pie,” and the Doors’ “The End,” all of which, running back to back, lasted almost an hour. And if you found a jukebox that played five songs for a buck, you were way ahead of the game. I knew all too well that this could have been my life if I hadn’t taken the media escort job: sidled up to a bar at midday while mentally calculating the lengths of songs, the amount of beer I was likely to consume, and the sum total of loose bills and pocket change piled in front of me—the alcoholic’s calculus. And I might have had it all figured out perfectly, how to stretch the night out until last call—that is, until I ordered that first shot of rail whiskey and threw all of my calculations irreversibly out of whack.
    In addition to the freshly drained shot glasses and beer bottles on Vince and Tate’s table, two women were now sitting with them. They were laughing at something either Vince or Tate had said, and Tate’s hair looked slightly mussed and his glasses crooked. When I was in the Workshop, the only groupies were mentally unstable men who showed up in town without warning and pitched tents in the visiting writers’ back yards, intending to share with them their latest Vietnam opus with the hope of getting it published. These days, the groupies were closer to what I had fantasized about when I was twelve years old and considered becoming a rock star. The funny thing was that the new groupies and the old ones shared the same endgame: They, too, wanted book contracts, except these days the contracts would be for their victim memoirs, or they wanted to be included in the Best New Voices anthology, or
they wanted a tenure-track teaching position on either the East or West Coasts. And where the old groupies usually ended up spending a night in jail for trespassing, the new ones spent it in the writer’s bed, hoping by daybreak that their hard, feverish work had not been all for naught. Shortcuts to fame: Everyone wanted one.
    There was no room for me to sit down in the booth, so I stood at the end of the table and, forcing a smile, peered down at the revelers.
    Vince said, “Girls? This is Jack. He’s Tate’s escort. Jack? These are the girls.”
    The women regarded me with suspicion. Was I a male prostitute? Was Tate gay?
    “ Vince ,” I said softly. “Come on, man.”
    Vince looked up at me, genuinely confused. “What?”
    “Me and you,” I said, “we were classmates. There’s no need for that.”
    Tate said, “Oh, hey, Jack. Vince said he could take me to my hotel tonight.” He looked at Vince for reassurance.
    “Yeah, yeah,” Vince said. “No prob.”
    “Are you sure?” I asked.
    “We’re what . . . three blocks away? Yeah, I think I can handle that.”
    “But go ahead and bill my publisher for the night,” Tate said. “I mean, I dragged you out here and everything.”
    “Alrighty,” I said. “I’ll do that.” I