Meeting Robert B. Parker
By Brian J. Noggle
June 14, 1993, dawned sharp and clear over Milwaukee, the sun cutting like a razor through the haze and fog that congeals along the lake front overnight. I double-checked the laces on my black Nikes, pulling them tight enough so that I could feel them across the top of the foot. It might get messy later, and white Nike Airs wouldn't do today. I checked to make sure that my survival kit contained all the essentials: a leather-bound notebook for the detailed plans of what I was doing with my life and what I was going to do with it; extra pens; a quick change of clothes; and a hard-bound copy of Paper Doll, a Spenser novel by Robert B. Parker. I slung the black backpack over my shoulder and checked myself in the mirror. A dark grey sweater over a white shirt and tie, black jeans, black shoes, backpack, all under the sweeping appraisal of a pair of eyes sometimes called sky blue and sometimes steel blue, a chin too unchiseled for my taste, and blond hair too short to be pretty and too long to be kempt or respectable. I nodded once at myself, catching my eye. It was time to go. Time to meet the man.
*
It was a grey and grainy day in the middle of the Reagan eighties when I first saw his handiwork. The lights of the little Community Library in the one Shetland pony town were too few and too far apart for the casual browser. Saying that the books looming on the shelves cast shadows over the aisles was like saying that the deep forest trees cast shadows. They meshed into an intimate gloom as eyes licked over titles like tongues over nervous but flirting lips. I was looking for a little action on a Saturday morning, hunched over the bottom shelves, looking for a new thrill. I was fourteen.
I had already consumed the small volunteer library's selection of MacDonalds, shooting down Gregorys, Ross, and John Ds like someone looking for something that the everyday didn't provide. I burned through the Mickey Spillaines and Ray Chandlers like a chain smoker. I was spinning the wheel, ready to play Russian roulette with the unknown authors on the Mystery shelves, when I remembered that after each episode of the television series Spenser: For Hire, a final credit heralded that the series was based on a set of books by Robert B. Parker. "What the heck," I thought—freshman hard-boileds didn't say Hell yet. It was less of an unknown, so I crouched and tickled the spines of the paperbacks, looking for Parker.
I found him, lots of him. Seems that one of the women volunteers was a great fan of his, and all of his current novels reached the shelves as soon as she finished turning the pages. I picked a few, God Save the Child, The Godwulf Manuscript, and Promised Land perhaps; all I know is that they quickly became a habit. I read them during Algebra I when I thought Mr. Hitpas wasn't looking. I sat on a wooden bench just outside the school office during lunch breaks, foregoing the midday meal for a quick fix of Spenser. Unfortunately, I did not hae time in my adolescent rush to savor them that first time. Caught up in the heat and excitement and tingling synapses of something new, I read them at about the rate of one a day and finished them all too quickly.
*
I took the early bus downtown. The lunchtime rush of white collar women in tennis shoes and herds of suits-and-ties eddied and babbled around me. The sky smeared cirrus clouds over the original blue. I was twenty minutes early, so I took up a position outside the bookstore where I could watch the comings and goings of people in it, imagine the lay-out of the inside, and devise my method of attack.
Various quips and quick remarks shuffled through my head, products of a nearly sleepless night. I could tell him that I chose Marquette University, the college up the street and my academic poison of choice simply because Marty Rabb, a character in Mortal Stakes went there. Maybe I could mention that I broke my nose playing softball, a sport that Parker himself played, and that I tried to calculate how many breaks behind Spenser and hawk I was. I wanted to promise him a copy of my first novel, inscribed. Welcome him to Milwaukee and term it Boston West. Sleep had not come easy as I tried to condense an adolescence and early adulthood of adulation into the minute I would have. I didn't think he would remember me forever, or even that night when he was sitting on a plane or in a car to his next destination. The best I could hope for was to give him something to chuckle about for a minute before I slipped out the door and out of mind. Not a just repayment.
*
Spenser is a hero, and he became a blueprint to me when I needed something to give structure to my maturation as a man. I was creeping out of youth and adulthood, and my own father was four hundred miles and another family away. I adopted a literary surrogate father, someone whom I could respect as much as the real thing. Spenser can do one armed push-ups and dashes on poetical quotes and literary allusions like conversational spices. Countless days in the library and a college degree helped with the latter for me; gritty determination, a sometimes vigorous exercise regimen, and a long, light body frame helped with the former. Spenser is a smart ass and can cook like a gourmet. I have my moments with the lip, but I still burn frozen pizzas. There's even something to aspire to yet.
Spenser is a fighter and a lover; his relationship with Susan Silverman has spanned over a decade of crime fiction and most Spenser novels since God Save the Child. They communicate, talk, to each other on a mature and somewhat spiritual level, discussing ethics, relationships, current events, and making bawdy comments. A novelist leaks his personal life onto the pages, I discovered for myself when I tried my hand at crime fiction. Robert B. Parker, too, injects something of his life and his relationship with his wife Joan into the Spenser novels. I find the real-life crossover inspiring. Even when the world seems rife with divorces and broken homes and shattered dreams, fictional and nonfictional examples exist to encourage otherwise.
Robert B. Parker told Bryant Gumbel on NBC's Today that he did not care whether critics liked his books, as long as he wrote the book he wanted to write. In a collection called Colloquium on Crime, he admits that his goal as an author is to sell books, regardless of their critical success. Words to liven the spirit of a hungry young writer who was ready to wave his fist at the sky and The Critics. Fighter, lover, and writer: Robert B. Parker and Spenser were everything I wanted to be.
*
I stepped into the warm, homey darkness of Schwartz's a few minutes before Parker was scheduled. Already a line of twenty people queued to see him. I caught a glimpse of him behind a table as I joined the line. Ahead of me, a woman, five-six, grey hair, spectacles, business-like grey jacket and skirt. Ahead of her, a businessman probably on his lunch break. Who were these people? Did they know what Keats poem Spenser refers to in Early Autumn? Do they know where "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?" (quoted in Double Deuce) comes from? Jealousy stabbed me somewhere beneath the diaphragm when I thought that these people might appreciate Parker as much as I did.
The line moved pretty quickly, and even though it seemed like a brief forever, we were getting to the table. A bookstore employee ahead of me commented that Parker was not letting her open the books for him to expedite the signing—Parker was doing it himself so he could talk a bit with his fans. Of course he was.
"Freda. F-R-E-D-A," the grey haired business woman said, and it was my turn. I stepped up to the table, awaiting the anxiety attack, dry mouth, or sudden death that never came.
"A name," Robert B. Parked asked me. He was a stocky man, or the hard build his fictional alter-ego has inherited. Light brown hair over mirthful eyes, the same as on the book jackets and television interviews, but with an animation that media cannot capture.
"Brian," I said, surprisingly audibly, "B-R-I-A-N." I put the copy of Paper Doll I had bought the first week of its availability down on the table before him. As he wrote the inscription, I offered the best of last night's gems to him. "Every time I re-read one of your novels, I pick up another literary allusion. It's good to see my college education put to good use."
I hope his eyes twinkled when he gave the book back. "It's a good thing," he replied, and then I stepped away from him and into the relative dim of the noon sun.
I played it cool and waited until I got to the bus stop to check the inscription. "Brian, all best wishes, RBP," it says in his characteristic scrawl. I closed the book softly, but before the bus came I had checked the inscription again. Sometime on the bus ride I began to re-read the book. It still says that, and I do check it every once in a while. I showed the inscription to everyone who came too near me for a while. I told everyone that I saw that day that I had met Robert B. Parker, without exception explaining who he is. My hero.
*
That's it. No sordid downfall or disillusionment at the end, nothing to turn my story into anything more exciting than it is. It was not even a turning point in my life. Things like death and the collapse of long-term relationships are turning points; life hinges on them, people change drastically, sometimes irrevocably.
Meeting Robert B. Parker, briefly, and passing on before personality conflicts could emerge or flaws became visible, did not change me any more than his novels and ideas had already. Less than an incarnation of the ideals that we share, but an exemplar of those ideals existing in the current world. Like the guide wheels of a printing press, the encounter tugged me gently in the right direction, the direction I was going anyway. On my way to becoming a better man.
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Brian J. Noggle
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