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One weekend he even took me to work with him.
Doc made his living in Nevada. We left Salt Lake City on Friday afternoon and drove to Wendover, the first town over the border. I expected him to he an employee of the casino we stopped at. But he didn't punch in, just left his name with a guy; and then he sat in a corner with me and waited.
"Don't you have to work?" I asked.
"I'm working," he said.
"I used to work just the same way, but I got fired."
"I've got to wait my turn for a table. I told you I made my living with poker."
And it finally dawned on me that he was a freelance professional -- a player -- a cardshark.
There were four guys named Doc there that night. Doc Murphy was the third one called to a table. He played quietly, and lost steadily but lightly for two hours. Then, suddenly, in four hands he made back everything he had lost and added nearly fifteen hundred dollars to it. Then he made his apologies after a decent number of losing hands and we drove back to Salt Lake.
"Usually I have to play again on Saturday night," he told me. Then he gri
I remembered the old saw: Never eat at a place called Mom's, never play poker with a man named Doc, and never sleep with a woman who's got more troubles than you. Pure truth. Doc memorized the deck, knew all the odds by heart, and it was a rare poker face that Doc couldn't eventually see through.
At the end of the quarter, though, it finally dawned on me that in all the time we were in class together, I had never seen one of his own stories. He hadn't written a damn thing. And there was his grade on the bulletin board -- A.
I talked to Amiand.
"Oh, Doc writes," he assured me. "Better than you do, and you got an A. God knows how, you don't have the talent for it."
"Why doesn't he turn it in for the rest of the class to read?"
Armand shrugged. "Why should he? Pearls before swine."
Still it irritated me. After watching Doc disembowel more than one writer, I didn't think it was fair that his own work was never put on the chopping block.
The next quarter he turned up in a graduate seminar with me, and I asked him. He laughed and told me to forget it. I laughed back and told him I wouldn't. I wanted to read his stuff. So the next week he gave me a three-page manuscript. It was an unfinished fragment of a story about a man who honestly thought his wife had left him even though he went home to find her there every night. It was some of the best writing I've ever read in my life. No matter how you measure it. The stuff was clear enough and exciting enough that any moron who likes Harold Robbins could have enjoyed it. But the style was rich enough and the matter of it deep enough even in a few pages that it made most other "great" writers look like chicken farmers. I reread the fragment five times just to make sure I got it all. The first time I had thought it was metaphorically about me. The third time I knew it was about God. The fifth time I knew it was about everything that mattered, and I wanted to read more.
"Where's the rest?" I asked.
He shrugged. "That's it," he said.
"It doesn't feel finished."
"It isn't."
"Well, finish it! Doc, you could sell this anywhere, even the New Yorker. For them you probably don't even have to finish it."
"Even the New Yorker. Golly."
"I can't believe you think you're too good for anybody, Doc. Finish it. I want to know how it ends."
He shook his head. "That's all there is. That's all there ever will be."
And that was the end of the discussion.
But from time to time he'd show me another fragment. Always better than the one before. And in the meantime we became closer, not because he was such a good writer -- I'm not so self-effacing I like hanging around with people who can write me under the table -- but because he was Doc Murphy. We found every decent place to get a beer in Salt Lake City -- not a particularly time-consuming activity. We saw three good movies and another dozen that were so bad they were fun to watch. He taught me to play poker well enough that I broke even every weekend. He put up with my succession of girlfriends and prophesied that I would probably end up married again. "You're just weak willed enough to try to make a go of it," he cheerfully told me.
At last, when I had long since given up asking, he told me why he never finished anything.
I was two and a half beers down, and he was drinking a hideous mix of Tab and tomato juice that he drank whenever he wanted to punish himself for his sins, on the theory that it was even worse than the Hindu practice of drinking your own piss. I had just got a story back from a magazine I had been sure would buy it. I was thinking of giving it up. He laughed at me.
"I'm serious," I said.
"Nobody who's any good at all needs to give up writing."
"Look who's talking. The king of the determined writers."
He looked angry. "You're a paraplegic making fun of a one-legged man," he said.
"I'm sick of it."
"Quit then. Makes no difference. Leave the field to the hacks. You're probably a hack, too."
Doc hadn't been drinking anything to make him surly, not drunk-surly, anyway. "Hey, Doc, I'm asking for encouragement."
"If you need encouragement, you don't deserve it. There's only one way a good writer can be stopped."
"Don't tell me you have a selective writer's block. Against endings."
"Writer's block? Jesus, I've never been blocked in my life. Blocks are what happen when you're not good enough to write the thing you know you have to write."
I was getting angry. "And you, of course, are always good enough."
He leaned forward, looked at me in the eyes. "I'm the best writer in the English language."
"I'll give you this much. You're the best who never finished anything."
"I finish everything," he said. "I finish everything, beloved friend, and then I burn all but the first three pages. I finish a story a week, sometimes. I've written three complete novels, four plays. I even did a screenplay. It would've made millions of dollars and been a classic."
"Says who?"
"Says -- never mind who says. iI was bought, it was cast, it was ready for filming. It had a budget of thirty million. The studio believed in it. Only intelligent thing I've ever heard of them doing."
I couldn't believe it. "You're joking."
"If I'm joking, who's laughing? It's true."
I'd never seen him look so poisoned, so pained. It was true, if I knew Doc Murphy, and I think I did. Do. "Why?" I asked.
"The Censorship Board."
"What? There's no such thing in America."
He laughed. "Not full-time anyway."
"Who the hell is the Censorship Board?"
He told me.
When I was twenty-two I lived on a rural road in Oregon, he said, outside of Portland. Mailboxes out on the road. I was writing, I was a playwright, I thought there'd be a career in that; I was just starting to try fiction. I went out one morning after the mailman had gone by. It was drizzling slightly. But I didn't much care. There was an envelope there from my Hollywood agent. It was a contract. Not an option -- a sale. A hundred thousand dollars. It had just occurred to me that I was getting wet and I ought to go in when two men came out of the bushes -- yeah, I know, I guess they go for dramatic entrances. They were in business suits. God, I hate men who wear business suits. The one guy just held out his hand. He said, "Give it to me now and save yourself a lot of trouble." Give it to him? I told him what I thought of his suggestion. They looked like the mafia, or like a comic parody of the mafia, actually.
They were about the same height, and they seemed almost to be the same person, right down to a duplicate glint of fierceness in the eyes; but then I realized that my first impression had been deceptive. One was blond, one dark-haired; the blond had a slightly receding chin that gave his face a meek look from the nose down; the dark one had once had a bad skin problem and his neck was treeish, giving him an air of stupidity, as if a face had been pasted on the front of the neck with no room for a head at all. Not mafia at all. Ordinary people.