The Webster Stories

Starting sometime in the mid-1980s, I wrote a series of short stories featuring the same protagonist, known only as Webster.

(It was never made explicit whether that was his first or last name, although I always thought of it, oddly, as his first. And the mid-’80s TV show of the same name? Forget it. Never saw it. My Webster was not that Webster, trust me.)

I’ve written about Webster before, in the first post which talked about David Gerrold’s 1990 writing workshop. (Webster was the character I “met” and subsequently talked with in the darkened-room exercise.) In my mind’s eye, he was tall, a little stoop-shouldered (as if to deny his height), wore his brown hair long enough to part (on the left) but not long, and had a strong, classic Roman nose. Invariably, at some point in each story, he appeared in a two-piece suit (even if the story never said so explicitly). It was gray, and it was undistinguished.

Which was the effect Webster wanted to achieve: invisibility, to the extent possible. He hated attention. He hated it so much, indeed, that he was constantly floundering around, forward and back, in an effort to avoid it — with the result, naturally, that he drew attention, further embarrassing himself. He could seldom decide on the best course of action to achieve maximum noticeability; when he did decide, it was reliably among the worst possible choices. (But I’ll hand it to him: his choices were never the obvious ones, either.)

Aside from Webster himself and the outlandish situations in which he constantly found himself (and without fail made worse), his stories had one other thing in common: their titles. Each title was a two-word phrase, the first word of which was “the.”

Here’s an overview of some of them:

The first Webster story I wrote was “The Head.” In it, Webster was commuting to work on the train one day when he happened to glance out the window as the train passed through a large industrial marsh. There, among the smoldering factories and oily water and tall grasses, he saw a human head. It lay atop a pile of garbage, and over the course of the story Webster alternately obsessed over it and — finally — did something about it. (Something ludicrous, unsurprisingly.)

Only one Webster story, “The Shot,” saw the light of publication. (If you’re so inclined, you might be able to find it still; you’d be looking for The Worcester Review, 1992, vol. XIII #1-2.) Here, Webster became fascinated with news reports of an unknown gunman who was firing on vehicles from a highway overpass near his home. (Remember: although the dilemmas which Webster faced tended often to be horrible, his “solutions” to them were ridiculous.)

One Webster “story” was actually a novella, called The Dark. It was the last one I wrote because, as I told The Missus shortly afterwards, it really said all there was left to say about Webster. Although the tale was open-ended, I think Webster would be satisfied with the way things developed for him. (At least, he stopped haunting me when The Dark was done.)

And then there was “The Bug,” the first version of which I wrote around 1994 or ’95 (before The Dark).

This story was unusual among the group of Webster tales primarily because Webster was confined to his house for most of it. You might think this would relieve him of his tendency to make things worse for himself, but you would be wrong.

Another thing that distinguished it from the others was that I got a big publication nibble for it. Not an acceptance, alas, and I was too stupid, too unassertive, and/or too Websterlike myself to recognize the twitch of the line for what it was. On the standard rejection note from The New Yorker, an editor penned the words:

A very funny and very wise story. Could use some tightening.

Yes, correct: I never revised it, tightened it, and sent it back to them, oblivious even to the underlining in the original. [shakes his head and sighs]

(This is actually fairly typical: I’m the worst imaginable marketer of my own material. Like: Send it out. Rejected! Oh shoot, guess it’s not good enough. Next story! Repeat, ad nauseam.)

In any case, if you’re interested in reading “The Bug,” I’ve posted it here on Running After My Hat. The first few pages are available in regular RAMH format, and when you’ve gotten through that you can download (if you wish) the entire story in PDF form.

Enjoy!