Any Resemblance to Actual Persons by Kevin Allardice

short story I wrote in 1979 called, simply, “Chicago.” I have it here next to me on my desk. I brought it out because it is a largely autobiographical tale, and so I figured if I were to recount the real incident here, twenty years later, I should have some assistance from the me who was, in 1979, at a better proximity to remember it with more precision.Of course the short story version has a few fictionalized details. The narrator’s brother died in Vietnam. The narrator has a girlfriend back in Iowa who is really beautiful. The narrator is six foot two. And the character based on Oliver is named Ron. But the rest is pretty spot-on. After writing the story, I mailed it to Oliver, who was at the time an intern at Doubleday and reading submissions for The Paris Review . I then waited eagerly for his phone call, the one in which he’d pass the phone off to George Plimpton, who would congratulate me on “such a fine piece of literary craft”—he’d communicate only in blurb-speak, of course, in his New England drawl—but after calling Oliver a couple times, he finally read it and simply mailed the manuscript back to me, its margins flourished with his Arabic-like scrawl.)
    The following morning, when Oliver shouted, apropos of nothing, “We have to go! We have to go now!” (Oliver’s 1979 marginalia: “Apropos of nothing”? Is the reader supposed to take that seriously, or is it an indication of this narrator’s [the note bending up the page] myopia, and if so, how does that inform the rest of the story? ), the profusely sweating guy just looked at us, his eyes almost albino-pink, and said, “Ya’ll don’t have to go. You should stay.” (Oliver: It’s probably more realistic that he did not, in fact, say this, probably more likely that the narrator was, in fact, the one who wanted to stay .) The guy just sat there, however, as Oliver and I headed for the door without turning our backs on him. “Thanks,” I said. Then Oliver tried to open the door, realized we were locked in. I panicked, tried to help him manage the absurd number of bolts on the metal door. There was even one of those steel rods, one end of which sits in a metal-sheathed divot in the floor, the other end against the door. I removed the rod, and since it took some muscleand maneuvering on my part, when it finally came unwedged it swung backward in my hands and clanked cacophonously (Oliver: “clanked cacophonously”–seriously? ) against what appeared to be a moped engine—or perhaps a motorcycle engine with pedals glued to it—sitting on the countertop behind us. “Sorry,” I said, realizing that I was shouting, then began whispering, “Sorry, sorry,” like an incantation as we continued to try to unlock the door, which was beginning to feel like some biblical test, the final crucible in the escape from the lion’s den, the unlocking of the three dozen deadbolts of Judea. Just when I thought an aneurism was inevitable, the guy, suddenly behind us, reached over our heads, undid the small trinket of a lock at the very top of the door, opened it for us, and said, “Drive safe now.”
    I certainly tried to drive safe, but with my heart trying to crawl up my sinuses it wasn’t easy. Oliver—both the 1976 passenger in my car and the 1979 editor in the margins of the story—remained entirely silent for the five-hour drive back home. Here follows two pages of florid descriptions of the flora-less landscape between Chicago and Iowa City, which I employed to convey the long stretched-out silence and coke-induced awareness of everything. But I’ll skip all that and get to final line of the story: “That was the last time Ron and I did drugs together. I miss our conversations.”
    Oliver did offer one small note, after two pages of silence, tucked away at the bottom of the last page: A bit sentimental, don’t you