Winners - reviews and other press
Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram
Sunday, March 20, 2005
BOOK REVIEW: Nancy Grape
'Winners' captures sweet, bitter of American urban life
America's bookshelves abound with rags-to-riches stories, none more American, perhaps, than F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." But if the stories of rags-to-riches success are familiar, the background against which they play out is less often noticed - the many people trapped in poverty and its attendant devastation who never make the transition beyond subsistence to anything else.
In his new novel, "Winners," Portland-born writer Eric B. Martin turns a sharply observant eye on both groups - achievers and those left behind - as their lives intersect and then collide in the vibrantly complex city of San Francisco.
"Winners" offers readers something more important than insight into the fabric of their times. It also opens a way to understanding at gut level the barriers to aspiration and achievement that wind like a Great Wall of China through the lives of black Americans trapped in the drug- and violence-soaked atmosphere of a great city's public housing projects.
Readers looking for evocations of Maine in Martin's book will be disappointed. The 35-year-old Mainer, who arrived in San Francisco in 1992, keeps his focus close-in and keen. This is a book as redolent of urban-charged San Francisco as the movie "Sideways" is of California's vineyard-laden wine country. It is a world where the sun both rises and sets in the west.
Indeed, at one point 14 newly minted dot-com millionaires-in-the-making gather for a Maine-style lobster bake. The food may be familiar, but the group is talking politics and the conversation is disconcerting. "Forget New Hampshire," someone is saying, "The whole primary thing is ridiculous. New Hampshire is over, the East Coast is over. Might as well make California first and call a spade a spade."
All will not be rosy for these overachievers, so certain their road to riches is the only road worth traveling. But, even with dot-com failures and million-dollar losses, life will be rosier for them than for Debra Marks, a single mother with a missing son, trying to raise his younger siblings in an atmosphere that stalks them like a slave master and punishes any attempt, no matter how faltering, to rise out of the drug-dominated public housing projects.
Striding both worlds is the hero of "Winners," Shane McCarthy, a college-educated man whom life has nudged to take over his late father's vocation as a chimney sweep even as his wife goes after technology's glittering brass ring.
Look for McCarthy's heart, however, and you'll find it on an outdoor basketball court, where he and a group of hoop acquaintances get together to assert their own kind of dominance a few times each week. Writing with fluidity and grace, Martin lifts their athleticism and commitment off the page. There, too, McCarthy meets Debra Marks' son, Samson, destined to become the catalyst for a brutal collision between haves and have-nots.
Martin brings their worlds together with great skill. He portrays the steeliness of an economic class that measures human worth by business success and pursues it with the morality of Barbary pirates. He portrays, too, the forces that combine to mire damaged people in poverty. Earlier Martin looked at similarly distant cultures in his debut novel, "Luck," about Mexican migrant workers, praised at its publication five years ago.
Now he has returned to tell us, with style and power, that San Francisco is a fabled city. But it is also home to a familiar American story - of people who go from rags to riches and those who cannot yet make the trip.
Nancy Grape of Freeport is a free-lance writer.
San Francisco's Two Nations
By Lisa Ryers
Reading Winners by Eric B. Martin, I was reminded of the "two nations" speech vice presidential candidate John Edwards used to truck out during campaign stops. Edwards maintained that the country is losing its middle class and polarizing into two nations (you could say "under God" depending on your red or blue state tidings). In Martin's book, the two nations sit under the seven by seven square foot umbrella of San Francisco circa 1999. It was a time when Elvis Costello playing at the company Christmas party was de rigueur while the south and southeast sectors of the city buckled under gentrification. If you remember when Web Van patrolled the streets more often than the SFPD, you know of what I speak.
Our hero, Shane McCarthy, is a second generation Irish American, schooled at UC Berkeley but a chimney sweep by trade. Shane is pure 20th century industrial, like the Potrero Hill neighborhood he frequents for work. His wife Lou works for an Internet start-up and tries to shield her husband from the fact that she enjoys her work terribly.
College sweethearts, the two struggle to ignore the world that is making them change. Shane has to pretend to enjoy his wife's company parties and Lou has to pretend that she is only working for the money to keep them flush. It is at these company parties that Martin's comic strokes are at their most deft. They are scenes Edith Wharton would have described during her time in upper crust 19th century Manhattan. During one scene, a CEO giant tells Shane that everyone is finding his or her own "personal chimney". The time for communal chimney sweeps is over and everyone is looking for the opportunity to work someone.
Shane doesn't like being worked. He likes to work out and pick-up basketball is his game. When one of his b-ball buddies goes MIA, Shane investigates the boy's disappearance which takes him to places in the City that dot-commers think don't exist because there isn't a wine bar to anchor the neighborhood. The investigation is the spine on which Shane can illustrate these "two nations" most aptly.
This is Martin's second novel. His style is straight forward and clean but his sentences often follow a recognizable pattern of adjective-adjective-noun, The fourth line of the book, "small naked body" is only the first in a long line of "shiny red sweatshirts", "loud fuzzy tenors", and "big red booths". The notes in his rhythm could be endearing if the modifiers were interesting, but most of the time they just smack of laziness.
If you can get past these occasional moments of sentence bloat,Winners is an enjoyable read. If you lived in San Francisco during that time, you will shake your head in recognition. If you didn't live here during that time, you will be grateful that you missed the era of the gilt prison.
As dot-coms engorge S.F., a man vanishes
Reviewed by David Moisl
Sunday, March 6, 2005
Winners
By Eric B. Martin
MacADAM/CAGE; 363 PAGES; $28
At its heart, Eric B. Martin's new novel, "Winners," is a mystery, set in booming 1990s San Francisco. When 20-year-old chimney sweep Shane McCarthy's basketball buddy Sam disappears, leaving behind only a duffel bag, Shane sets out to track him down, initially just to return the bag. His quest triggers a series of events leading the protagonist from Pacific Heights parties to the projects, going back and forth between two San Franciscos that couldn't be more different from each other.
Shane gets involved with helping Debra, Sam's hard-luck mom in the projects, which gives Martin an opportunity to contrast the flashy, glitzy dot-com world of mostly white winners with the gritty reality of black losers in the projects, who were virtually untouched by the boom. "Winners" is as much a historical portrait of an almost surreal moment in time as it is the story of one man's journey between two mutually exclusive worlds.
The story is laced with keen observations of a beautiful city. Writing about the Mission in the early evening, Martin says: "The neighborhood change of shift is not yet complete. Daytime Mexicans still hurry for final meat and fruit and fish while nighttime whites begin to fill the bars and taquerias." San Francisco often seems to Shane like "an entire city at leisure."
Shane is a street-ball-playing, street-smart, down-to-earth guy. As a chimney sweep, he is the romantic outcast in the world of his wife's dot-com friends, an exclusive world with its own rules, language and codes. Shane -- and Martin -- view the nouveaux riches with obvious disdain. Although everyone agrees that his wife's company is taking off, "Shane pictures a bloated cargo plane trolling down a desert runway, not some lithe and silver rocket."
Shane is continuously shocked and awed by the changes the boom brought with it: "This is the new sensation of this city, more than anything, this mass extinction of familiar faces." The influx of young and trendy hipsters with seemingly endless supplies of money leaves him feeling "elderly and unpierced."
In the surreal logic of dot-com economics, where every company, whether it's selling dog food or underwear, is worth millions, nothing seems real to him. The revamped Embarcadero looks "straight out Disneyland" to Shane, and the whole city feels as if it "is on steroids, swollen with people, cars, companies. Fairy-tale buildings have erupted overnight, pulled full grown through the ground by great cranes."
New neighborhoods do not grow organically but are selected; whole areas have been gentrified, with businesses catering to the new inhabitants springing up on every corner; "salsa hopscotch kickboxing is transformed into aerobics." Martin perfectly captures the atmosphere of this bizarre time in all its bloated glory, from drug excesses in strip clubs to "e-parties" where young venture/vulture capitalists go to meet fellow "e-people."
In the passages about basketball, Martin puts the reader straight in the game. Basketball is Shane's drug; when he is on the court, he forgets everything around him. "You can try to remember, but the game starts and the inside of your head gets damp with sweat and nothing will stick."
Martin is unafraid to recount the minute details of everyday life while still managing to keep the novel full of suspense. However, Martin's constant attempts not to give too much away can make the suspense seem artificial. When Shane gets summoned from a party by a friend without said friend telling him why, for example, Martin runs the danger of making an otherwise genuine narrative appear contrived. The motivations for characters' actions are often deliberately unclear. While this leaves room for the imagination to fill in the blanks, at times the reader feels left in the dark. The book ends in a cliff-hanger -- an apt metaphor for the end of an era and the beginning of an uncertain new age.
David Moisl is a San Francisco writer.
San Francisco Examiner
The Examiner (remember them?) sez Winners is local as all get out and "owes much of its charm to Martin's many regional references and the dead-on accuracy with which he depicts the unabashed excess and dramatic socio-economic shift that characterized San Francisco during the dot-com era. But will readers elsewhere in the county be able to relate?" Inquiring minds wanna know.
Kirkus Reviews
Swift-moving tale about basketball, murder, and the Internet on the mean streets of San Francisco.
Second-novelist Martin (Luck, 2000) gives his protagonist, Shane McCarthy, an unusual occupation: he’s a chimneysweep. “Most of Shane’s clients,” Martin writes, “have never looked inside their chimney before…but once he shows them…[They] realize that’s where secrets live, in the trunk of the house, where you can count the rings and read history aloud. If you speak chimney.” All this nicely foreshadows the seamy story that emerges: As San Francisco of 1999 booms with dot-com money, and working-class neighborhoods become yuppie enclaves, Shane, an aging basketball addict who can’t seem to stop breaking his foot, finds himself in the middle of a grimy mystery: a mixed-race, young, gay teammate has gone missing, leaving a clue-stuffed duffel bag, and Shane decides it’s his job to find the kid. He’s got time for the quest, since his wife, one of the dot-commers, is chasing after the big bucks and is never around to supervise him. Powerless and alone in a rapidly remade city full of newcomers, Shane keeps at the effort, going deeper and deeper. His search for the elusive boy who goes by many names takes him into tough territory and introduces him to people whose existence he barely knew before, to the secret inside of San Francisco’s chimneys. Basketball keeps him a little sane – a game that goes on, he reflects, while love and lives come and go. Yet, in the end, the quest costs him almost more than he can bear to pay, even as the get-rich-quick city smacks up against a dead end and becomes “a very different place…crowded with failing falling stars, companies winking out one by one, their Web sites going dark.”
Expertly written, just the right blend of existential mystery with hoop dreams, and plenty of middle-aged angst to spare.
Publishers Weekly
Shane McCarthy is a Berkeley-educated chimney sweep, plying his trade in the mercurial atmosphere of dot-com bubble San Francisco circa 1999. His wife, Lou, glides in and out, obsessed with making her own start-up fortune. Outside of home and work, Shane's life revolves around basketball games at the Firehouse, an asphalt refuge where he plays the game with other 30-somethings, reveling in the physicality of crashing bodies. When Sam, a 20-year-old who has penetrated this sanctum of men fighting early middle age, disappears from the weekly games, Shane decides to search for him. The hunt begins to fill the gaping void in Shane's daily existence; sandwiched between the encroaching nouveaux riches as they transform his beloved city into a luxurious playground and his ambitious, distant wife, he ventures into a gritty, other San Francisco. Here he meets Sam's mother, Debra, tough and tortured and lost in the vortex of violence that plagues her inner-city neighborhood. The two slowly feint and jab at one another, trying to gain trust and information. A puzzling interruption arrives in the person of an enigmatic venture capitalist acquaintance of Lou's who latches onto Shane and drags him out for a night of slumming, but fortunately his presence causes only minor confusion. Martin's novel is a well-crafted, unsentimental examination of loneliness and the lengths to which some people will go in order to connect with another human being.
Library Journal
Shane McCarthy leads a simple enough life in his native San Francisco, carrying on his late father's business as a chimney sweep. He's enamored of life, his wife, his colorful hometown, and most of all the physical and mental challenge of his weekly pickup basketball games. Yet all around him, things are changing at warp speed. The old neighborhoods are facing rapid gentrification; Shane's upwardly mobile wife works around the clock trying to cash in on the Internet IPO frenzy and soon finds herself in the dicey world of high-risk venture capitalists; and one of the young players from the basketball court disappears. Shane gets caught up in a whole new world when he tries to do the right thing. Martin's second novel (after Luck) reveals some fine descriptions of basketball moves and of the high-end urban party scene. The fast-paced story of the culture clash between old and new, rich and poor, and real and virtual will especially appeal to male readers and sports fans. Recommended for all fiction collections.
Noe Valley Voice
The Last Page
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In September 1992, writer Eric Martin arrived in San Francisco to visit a friend, and decided to stay for a while. Martin's first home was on hilly Newburg Street, and the stunning views from his porch, along with the "interesting collisions" within his Noe Valley neighborhood, have now become part of the fabric of his second novel, Winners, to be released on Valentine's Day by the San Francisco publishing house MacAdam/Cage.
Winners, a short excerpt of which appears below, is the story of chimney sweep Shane McCarthy and his wife Lou, a young couple living in Noe Valley at the height of the tech boom of the 1990s. Shane, a native San Franciscan, finds himself caught between two cultures: that of the nouveau riche who are swiftly buying up real estate, and the working-class ethos of his Sunset District youth. His wife, who works for a dot-com in Menlo Park, wants to concentrate on making money. But Shane thinks it's time they started having children.
As he watches his city change, Shane gets involved in solving a mystery: A young man with whom he plays a regular game of pickup basketball disappears, leaving behind a bag of his belongings. Shane tracks the 20-year-old to his mother's home in Hunters Point, but the mystery widens. "The story turns into something much bigger," Martin says. "It's a mystery about the city, about how these different worlds within it fit together, and about the way Shane fits in." Or doesn't.
A real pickup basketball game on the blacktop at James Lick Middle School helped plant the story's seed for the 35-year-old writer. Soon after he moved to Noe Valley, Martin began playing at the school with a group of men who were mostly in their 40s. "They just love the game," says Martin. "I went down there recently, and they're still playing. And they're in their 50s now! Those guys are my heroes."
Martin was also fascinated by what the players' attitudes told him about Noe Valley and, by extension, San Francisco. "[The neighborhood] is more complicated than it first appears. There's a part that seems homogeneous, but there are other parts that aren't homogeneous at all. The people I played basketball with were different in their backgrounds and beliefs and characters."
Noe Valley may share San Francisco's eccentricities, but "in a way, Noe Valley is far away from the rest of the city," says Martin. "It's a newer part of the city.... Other neighborhoods, like the Sunset or the Richmond, are slower to change. There are a lot of young professionals and parents who are attracted to Noe Valley as a place for the next step or the in-between, and not just people from other parts of the country, but from other parts of the city as well. For Shane and Lou, who are on this cusp and who want different things--career and kids--they want to be in the neighborhood for different reasons. They see different Noe Valleys."
Martin, a native of Portland, Maine, now lives with wife, Meredith McMonigle, in "that joint between neighborhoods" just off Mission and 30th streets. McMonigle teaches high school history at the San Francisco County Jail. "She knows a very different San Francisco, too," notes Martin.
Martin's first novel, Luck, which was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2000 to critical acclaim, will be released in paperback the same time as Winners. He'll be reading and signing both books at Café du Nord, 2170 Market Street, on Feb. 15 at 8 p.m. The $8 event will benefit the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House.
--Olivia Boler
Winners
an excerpt from the novel by Eric B. Martin
He parks at home and walks down to his local grocery store in the vein of shops and restaurants that run through the valley, west to east. There's everything you could want down there if you have the money. They pretend they do. The people who live up there with them among the Escher-tilted streets certainly do. Slightly stinky in his dirty clothes, he browses beside fit mothers and natty fathers picking out plump tomatoes and fresh halibut and entry-level pinot noir. Lou still doesn't eat much but has fast recovered from a bout of vegetarianism, and he's been having a good time making up for lost meat: poking pork chops, squeezing chickens, massaging marbled beef.
On his way home she drives past him, angling up the street in her sleek new car. She's talking sternly to herself or holding one last communiqué via hands-free phone. The car is particularly shiny tonight, recently washed and buffed like a leather evening shoe. She doesn't see him. He stares after her and watches her pull in ahead of him and park on the ridiculous hill. She steps out of the car and he hides behind a tree like a comic book villain. She marches toward the door with her red leather bag and laptop, her hair perfect, sunglasses giving away nothing, her face serious. She looks like a real person. She looks like the word mature. She pins her possessions against the door with thighs as she unlocks and disappears inside. His pulse syncopates. He doesn't move. He is stalking his wife. He watches their living room window up above and pictures her first strides through the house alone, sunglasses coming off, her face relaxing. In the kitchen she attacks the refrigerator with niggling, fasting hunger; moves to the bedroom to pry herself free of shoes and hose; hits the living room and cranks the stereo to blast her way back to their other life. He waits. There's the music, not Bach or Mozart but good ol' rock 'n' roll. He lingers, hoping to see the glass doors slide open and his wife step out onto the little porch with a glass of cold white wine. After a few minutes he goes inside.
Lou is sitting on the couch, staring at silent images on TV while listening to her own soundtrack of three-chord din. She never watches television. She's still in her work clothes but everything is untucked and unbuttoned, her edges flapping loose as she comes undone. She looks better now, an adult halfway defrocked.
He leans over to kiss her head and she recoils slightly, like a suspicious cat. She's in a work coma, work has reared back its wooden bat and beaten her half to death.
"I get you anything?"
"No."
"Drink? Heroin?"
"No."
He comes back with two beers and puts one in front of her and the other to his lips. She leaves hers frosting smoke.
"It's Friday."
"Is it?" She tries to sigh but yawns instead, covering her face with her hands.
He takes a long pull on his beer. It's cold and perfect, the best thing he's ever tasted in his life. "Did you eat?" This is his solution. "You didn't eat."
"You know, I just got home, give me a couple minutes, all right?"
He leaves her there and shucks his clothes and takes his beer with him to shower and blast the day into the drain. He decides not to masturbate and shaves instead, nicking himself twice on the hinge between his throat and chin where he always nicks himself. He waits without hurry for the blood to stop, watching it seep and bead, blotting it dry. She likes him better when he's bloody and smooth. He changes into light cotton pants and a pale blue shirt and finds her where he left her but more upright, doing the crossword puzzle, pen flicking across the page.
"Look at you," she says. She sounds improved.
"Here I am." He tries again and this time gets her, an entirely good kiss. "I was gonna figure something out, food-wise. You must be hungry."
"No way can I be hungry. I have like lunch three times a day."
"Something light."
"All I do is lunch. God, I feel so gross. Like I'm wearing a fat suit."
"You're not wearing a fat suit."
"Maybe I'll go to the gym."
Paragon, he thinks. Sam. Stay on target. "You gym. I'll make us something."
"No. I loathe the gym. When I die, they'll send me to the gym for all eternity." She flops back against the sofa. "Man, I am such a bitch. Don't you just want to slap me? I want to slap me. I want to slap me silly." She tilts her head back and laughs wickedly, the low throaty staccato bursting out of her like ground birds startled from a bush.
"Come on." He has her by the arm, pulls gently. "Let's go out to dinner." If he can get her out in public she will change, correct herself. She always does.
"No. Gym. Plastic surgeon."
"Come on." He holds her there, half suspended off the sofa, her eyes still glued to the television, until slowly, slowly, he feels her body giving in. He lifts her to her feet and puts his arms around her and finally she looks up steeply at him.
"You like me, don't you."
"Yep. But I'll slap you if you really want."
"I would not blame you. I would not blame you at all." She puts both hands to her face and smears phantom tears back across her cheeks. "All right. I'll be out in a sec."
--Eric B. Martin
alarm::clock
Tech venture blog alarm::clock chimes in with words of wisdom on Winners. This delectable blurb smorgasbord include such tidbits as:
"Martin's literary abs are fully ripped." alarm:clock
"It's not Dave Eggers meets Tom Wolfe. After reading Winners, you'll want to toss that piffle into the trash, then scrub your hands clean until they bleed." alarm:clock
"By the second cosmos-expanding chapter of Winners, Martin had made me his bitch." alarm:clock
"We laughed. We cried. It's the feel-good novel of the year!" alarm:clock
San Francisco Chronicle
Read a nice little piece o' Winners the week before Christmas. It goes something like this:
San Francisco writer Eric B. Martin is the author of the novel "Luck, " set in North Carolina, and of a new work of fiction, "Winners," set much closer to home. The following is an excerpt from Martin's novel, which tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of a young man during the city's dot- com boom days. "Winners" will be published by MacAdam/Cage in February.
Success sits plump in the meat of SoMa. At the entrance, three valets hurry to make the proud line of brand-new cars disappear as eager diners pour inside. No sign hangs out front, but this has to be the place, and now he spots the restaurant's name winking up at him in green glass etched into the sidewalk out front. A single word, uncapitalized, and he feels pretty sure that deep down it's not a word at all.
Hundreds of people fit in there. They sit upstairs and downstairs, at tables and booths. They perch on the edge of beautiful backless stools at the multiple bars, touching crystal glasses. They stand casually in between, assessing the terrain. In the center of the room, a three-story transparent wall of wine rises above them all, the proud bottles encased in glass like priceless insects or the preserved penises of famous men. The whole place makes him think about impending earthquakes, and not just any earthquake: the Big One. Everyone's goblet leaping from their hands at once; the icy crack and avalanche of that great glass wall; grape blood running in rivulets through the crumbled brick. He can hear the screams as the earth shakes people from their stools, tossing them gently to the floor and folding the roof and walls around them like deathly tissue paper until those crushed and fancy bodies of once and future millionaires lie absolutely still, all shut up at last. Outside, the last elevated highways stumble and fall, rolling cars like craps dice through the streets and burying the tent and shopping-cart homeless in the underpass. The Big One will go after everything and everyone as an equal opportunity destroyer. The differences come only later, when you realize what you've lost, what you're willing to lose, and what you're going to do now or next. Some will move back East, some will seek out former lives and homes, some will change their jobs and spouses, some will buy and most will sell, some will give up hope and some will decide to start for real this time, from scratch. Some will come out smiling into the rubble and get to work rebuilding, happy for profit, looking forward to the next one. It will be a day they all remember, at least, and an explanation for everything that follows.
He finds Lou and company near the back, at a big booth with too many bodies in it. His wife's green eyes meet his as he approaches. In the tasteful light, her eyes look dark and rich and clever, that ancient shade of cash. Her eyes run briefly up and down the clothes he salvaged from his van: the gray poly pants, the clean but wrinkled shirt, the ratty shoes. She smiles to herself. She leans over two men he doesn't know, her breasts suspended dangerously before their small open mouths. She gives him a winy kiss.
"Congratulations, baby," he says again. Lou smiles her biggest smile and rocks back into place. "Congratulations, everyone," he says, and they accept that with slight nods and inclined glasses, waiting for something smart to go with it, but he can't think of anything. He looks around for a place to be. The waiter has found a chair for him and perches him at a corner, not quite at the table, in everybody's way.
Shane drinks his beer. He listens to their happy talk circle back to the deal's specifics. He can't or won't follow, and after a while he doesn't hear them at all. Their mouths are popping open and shut like fish, red mouths moving all around him, red mouths sucking down wine and wok-roasted lobster and crisp-crusted skate with picholine olives. How many nights a week can you do this? How many weeks? Table after table, men and women ordering without hesitation, spending hundreds, thousands of dollars here in the shadow of the great wall of wine. Will they remember this night for the rest of their lives? Will they remember it a month from now? He will. Lou will.
"I'm glad you came," she says, whispering and kissing his jaw just below the ear.
He nods, turns his head, and kisses her cool forehead. "I think I'm going to go, though." He pulls her tight and awkward to him, shoulder to shoulder. He wants to say something else -- something good, something right. "I don't know how you do it," he tries. "I don't know how you did it."
She smiles. "Yes you do."
"Not really. You amaze me."
"After all this time."
"All this time." 66.66 million dollars. He feels nothing.
"I guess I have to let you go," she says, a little sadly. "Or I'll come with you." It has just occurred to her.
Yes, he thinks. Come. "No, you stay."
"You sure?"
"Sure. You deserve this." He makes some small movement with his hand and she looks around at the restaurant, the people, her co-workers and new partners, consuming it slowly, pixel by pixel. He looks with her and finds Debra sitting at a table nearby, her back to him, long gold earrings swinging as she throws her head back and laughs too hard. On the second floor, above her head, Jimmy is sullenly waiting tables, while downstairs in the basement Samson scrubs the duck-stained dishes. And Shane is leaving. Without realizing it, he's risen now and the table halts the conversation briefly as they say well dones, good nights. Lou walks him toward the door.
"Are you OK?" she says.
"I'm good," he tells her. "Don't worry about me, I'm just tired. I'm happy for you, Lou."
"For us."
"Yeah. Wow. I." He waits for her to say something else, but she's waiting for him too and all he has are questions he's afraid to ask. He doesn't ask.
Outside in the cool evening air his head feels clear again, or clear maybe for the first time all night. He finds his van in the alley where he's parked it, pulls out and takes the right and then the left and then the right. Left. Potrero Hill is right there and has always been there, close.
Attitude Adjuster
Chris Carlsson (who I haven't met yet but will be reading with on March 10, 7-8 p.m. at The Booksmith on Haight Street, and March 24, 7 p.m. at Modern Times in the Mission) blogs his thoughts on Winners--personal, thoughtful, complimentary, and framing the book better than I could have.
An interview with, uh, me via curledup.com.