M: He killed Tumult, you know. Most of the other notices were gentle, even if they weren't going to sell any tickets. But he was vicious.
He had a line toward the end, how he was speaking this candidly in the hope that it would dissuade me from ever writing another play. Can you imagine reviewing a first play that way?
S: It must have been painful.
M: Of course it was. And I have to say it worked. I never wrote a second play. Oh, I tried, I wanted nothing more than to prove the cocksucker wrong, but I couldn't do it. I'd type 'Act One, Scene One,'
and then I'd fucking freeze. He put me out of business as a playwright, the bastard. He stabbed me in the back.
S: And you returned the favor.
M: Funny, huh? That wasn't planned. Except it's hard to say what was planned and what wasn't.
S: What happened?
M: He reviewed me a second time, told me to strike the set and get a life. And I thought, Jesus, he's asking for it, isn't he? I found out what play he was going to that night, and when the curtain came down I was waiting outside. I followed him right into Alien's. I got to look at the poster.
S: The poster?
M: For Tumult. All the posters on the walls in there are for shows that didn't make it. Kelly. Christine. If you close within a few days of your opening night, you're sure of a place of honor in Joe Alien's.
S: I knew that, but I never noticed your poster there.
M: Oh, it's there, right alongside the men's room door. The Tumult in the Clouds, a new play by Martin
Joseph McGraw. And there's the man who killed it, stepping out with this hot-looking broad while he gets ready to piss all over somebody else's life's work. I had a few at the bar while Kilbourne and the photographer stuffed their faces, then went outside when they did. I didn't have to do a 'follow that cab'
routine. I was close enough to hear what he said to the cabby, so I got my own cab and wound up standing across the street from his house.
I almost went in while she was there.
S:Oh?
M: Because I thought maybe he's alone, maybe she dropped him and kept the cab. If I'd gone and she'd been there—
S: You'd have killed them both?
M: No, never. First place, he wouldn't have let me in. 'Go way, I've got somebody here.' You know what? I'd have gone home and slept it off and that would have been the end of it.
S: Instead…
M: Instead I stayed where I was. I had a pint in my coat pocket and I kept warm nipping at it, and then the two of them came out and walked down to the corner. I thought, fuck it, am I gonna follow them to her place now? Or are they off to some after-hours to party until dawn?
They could do it without me. But instead he put her in a cab and came back.
S: And?
M: And went in his fucking house.
S: And what did you do?
M: Finished the pint. Stood there for a while with my thumb up my ass. And then I went over and rang his bell. He buzzed me in but kept me standing in the hallway. I told him who I was and that there'd been a new development in the Will case. Even then he didn't much want to let me in, but he did, and I went in and started babbling, the cops this and Will that, I didn't know what I was saying, and I don't suppose he knew what to make of it. Long story short, I got behind him and crowned him with an engraved cut-glass paperweight. Fancy fucking thing, weighed a ton, he got it for making a speech somewhere. I hit him as hard as I ever hit anybody in my life and he went down like the good ship Titanic.
S: And you went into the kitchen…
M: Yeah.
S: And got the knife?
M: And got the knife, yeah. And stabbed him in the back. I thought, teach you to turn your back on me, you little fuck. I thought, you stabbed me in the back, now we're even. Who knows what I thought? I was too drunk for whatever I thought to make much sense.
S: You washed the knife.
M: I washed the knife, and do me a big favor and don't ask me why. If I was worried about prints all I had to do was wipe it, right? But I washed it, and then I put the paperweight in my pocket and took it home with me. And then I went to bed.
S: And you remembered everything when you woke up?
M: Everything. You used to have blackouts?
S: Lots of them.
M: I never had one in my life. I remembered every fucking thing.
