I really loved my job in the mailroom back at Associated Grocers. It was my first job out of college. I was pulling down $5 an hour and all I had to do was drive the mail car around. As you can imagine, I had an awful lot of time on my hands.
It was then that Brewster McCabe came into my life. I spotted him one day on a street corner. 5th & Union, it was. Downtown Seattle. Even on a hot summer’s day, he stood out from the crowd. Dressed in a London Fog and a fedora, he looked as if he had just stepped out of a first person narrative, a film noir detective, a man in his mid 30s, with nearly forty years of experience as a Dick.
Yes, he really was a private eye. For the last 35 years, he’s been with me, keeping me out of trouble, trying to find the Caloric Killer who offed Lola, the waitress at Dirk’s Diner.
Some day I will finish him off. No, not with a bullet to the back in some dark alley, but with a final flourish of strokes on the keyboard, his case and my book, closed.
You see, Brewster was my first book. Somehow, Memoirs of a Buccaneer: 30 Years Before the Mast snuck in ahead of him. He’s still roaming the pages of my unfinished manuscript as a result:
The night was balmy and so was I. After all, it had been a long time since my last case: bourbon I think.
Here I sat, slowly surveying my office. It was filled with the memories of 10 years of sweat, tears and close calls in the private eye biz. To my right: a four-drawer file cabinet — its drawers contorted with age. In it were the files of the cases I had solved. The other three drawers were empty.
To the left of the cabinet sat the water cooler. In an age of bottled water, no one had taken a drink from it in years but I’ve kept it around for company. The occasional gurgle of a bubble rising to its crusty surface was a steadfast companion.
Yes, that’s how the story began all those years ago. In it I spilled my guts out, well, others spilled their guts out. But in some ways I did too. For in its pages is my life as I lived it. All the cast of characters, thinly disguised. Places I’d been, trouble I had gotten into.
Brewster came really close to being finished nearly 15 years ago. My family went on vacation in Key West. As they went sightseeing, I was suddenly inspired. Sitting poolside, I dashed off almost a third of the book. I had found the murderer, the weapon and the motive. It was not only perfect, but hilarious.
But just like now, I was never good at saving my Word document. And just as I finished a 10,000 word run, the computer locked up. All that work, that amazing work, gone forever.
I tried to reboot and recapture the essence of the story. But the moment was gone. Brewster was left to languish in his office in Pioneer Square, waiting for Lionel Finchley to return from his visit to the morgue.
I still miss Brewster. We visit occasionally. Before I took my new job, I promised him I’d finally finish his saga and release him from the bounds of mystery and intrigue he is still locked in. He was in the middle of the case, working with his best friend and loyal sidekick, Finchley.
Finchley and I had been friends since childhood. Until three years ago, he had been a first rate detective in South Chicago. One day a client literally spilled his guts in Finch’s office; the sordid by-product of a shotgun blast that had ripped through the door.
Now it was up to me to put the pieces of his life back together once more. I had to refill that empty shell of a man and load him back into the barrel of life. I had to restore the spirit, drive and fear of starvation that are the hallmark of a first-rate Dick.
It’s a writer’s lot to leave his characters in limbo. But I don’t know if anyone has done that for 35 years. Geez, I think McCabe is pushing 70 by now. At least in the real world. Thankfully, you don’t have to live in the real world when writing fiction. Brewster is still in a simpler time, a time when I myself was still young and idealistic.
I think that’s the true beauty of having these sagas on your plate. At any time, you can go back to a time and place that doesn’t exist any longer. A time when the TNT was still in West Seattle, Brewster hadn’t found his first ex-wife, Lola was still attainable, the Caloric Killer hadn’t unleashed his reign of doom and you could still find a pay phone on a street corner.
Even though I have an 8 to 5 job now, I still have my other life. I am lucky enough to have been blessed with the gift of storytelling. And whether I am at work or at play here in the old housienda, I get to tell stories for a living, whether they are about Washington business successes or Brewster and Lionel.
My world gets to be amazing every single day, largely because I have the power to create it.
We all do really, you know. You don’t have to be a writer. Create your own story and then live it. Fill your world with a cast of characters, create impossible plots in your daily life, marvel at the adventure, revel in the intrigue and make it an epic tale, one for the ages. Brewster’s been doing that all his life. You can too.
In the Emerald City, visiting Brewster in circa 1980 Seattle this evening,
– Robb