Chapter 1 Random Cat Sodomy

...able to post. Using car battery to juice the laptop. Here's chapter 1. Rain coming down now. I am so alone!


What in God’s name possessed you to pick up THIS particular book?
Did it occur to you that others might be sickened by your selection of reading material? Is this what your parents shed blood, sweat and tears for, giving you a decent education, so that you would choose something like THIS from the rack?
What are you? Look at the title to the first chapter! I mean, Christ, aren’t you the least bit ashamed of yourself? Don’t you care what everyone else thinks?
Who’s going to know? Is that what you just asked me? Aside from the security cameras, aside from the sales associate deciding whether or not you’re a pervert or a shoplifter - because you sure as hell aren’t making your way to the checkout counter - who, you ask? Who will know that you are now reading a book called The Dead Agent, and the first chapter is clearly marked as “Random Cat Sodomy: A Cautionary Tale” ?
Well me, for one, I am watching you. Me, right here! My words are watching you. They dare you to stop following from one to the next; DARE YOU to finish the page; for once the story gets rolling (yeah,YEAH!) it gets soooo damn good to you, doesn’t it? (Oh, oh! Baby….yeah) that you can’t put it down.
Have you been burned by the system? Did someone trample on your itty bitty dreams, sweetheart?
Awwwwwww…………..
Why, you’re a writer, aren’t you? I’d recognize that look anywhere. Go on, wipe away those tears, have your fun. You are why I wrote this, so get off on it. Only you, and I and the checkout girl will ever know, seriously.
So, what is IT, that we’re talking about, here? Certainly I won’t harm the cat. She’s resting quite safely here beside my desk. Random Cat Sodomy, by the way, different from garden variety cat sodomy has nothing to do with this story. The title of this chapter bears no relevance. I only named it to show you how much I got away with concerning this particular manuscript. Flexing my muscle, as it were. You writers out there know that it takes MAJOR clout to leave in a wretched title like “Random Cat Sodomy” especially if it is totally unrelated. See? Those of you who get it, you’re cool. You can hang. Those of you who don’t you need to keep reading anyway. You need more of a primer, for the basics.
So, uneducated masses, what’s the proverbial DEAL with this book?
Well, this book is written by a member of our writing “profession,” rendered so insane by all the bullshit it became obvious to him the only thing he could do to even the score was murder his literary agent. Yes, you heard correct, I said MURDER HIS LITERARY AGENT.
You like that? You been there yet, sunshine? You on my page?
But does he go through with it? Does he actually do it? Oooooooooooooooooo…yeah… baby....that’s, that’s the good stuff…oh.
I can only hope the picture of me looks nothing like myself in person. For all you know I’m standing right next to you in a trench coat, waaaay late on my meds, and ready to slice your damned fingers off with a carving knife if you set this thing down or fail to pay for it on the way out. Because I’m not looking to touch a tender hair on your beloved head, sweet Susie, unless you unlock your car and get into it without The Dead Agent in a bag, with a receipt, understand?
Hear the throaty voice of a madman whisper;“We just signed a contract, you and I.”
Perfect world? Hell no, it’s not perfect, and the realm of the written word the least perfect of all which is why I resort to threats and salacious ohhh, ooooo, ugggg, OhMyfucking God…comments to boost sales.
Face it. You liked the concept of this book, otherwise it’s still closed and these words are stuck to the back of the previous page. You wanted a relief from all your isolation through the commiserative rage spewed by another writer – or maybe just another tool in this overgrown box of tools we call society - and how fortunate for you I am here.
Or maybe you’re an aspiring writer and want to know what it’s like to actually chuck it all and “take your best shot at it.” (Oh please. For the love of the whining infant will you GROW THE HELL UP!!!!) You want a cautionary tale; a pitfall or two to avoid should you summon the balls to go for it.
Or maybe not: Maybe you followed a nice ass into that bookstore and you really could give a damn, and picking up this book was a fluke, a reflex like picking your nose. But, different from masturbatory fantasies, nonchalance only serves the good looking, and c’mon, is that you? Not likely if you’re a writer or one who aspires. I hate to break it to you but supermodels and television stars have found their calling. And besides, there’s some sex in here, really, I swear, about three quarters the way through. Honest.
I mean, you didn’t really want to read this story, did you? You don’t want to know how I got my revenge on everyone including the agent, how I got more publicity than I could have ever asked for, nor what I learned along the way? Nooooooooo …THAT wouldn’t interest the likes of you. Would it?
Good. Now, let me be the first to offer real commiseration to you my fellow author or would-be storyteller. God bless and keep you, you poor, mental-vagabond, you misguided piece of shit. God bless your dream and goddamn it all at the same time. Because it’s my dream too and oh, how we do suffer for it, don’t we? And in doing so, there are things we learn, a kind of language to reality that only you and I are privy too.
You know which collection agency is calling you by the tone of the ring, don’t you. You know all the works of the dial-back functions by heart and nothing makes your spirits sink lower than the words “Out of Area” written on your caller ID. Because it’s them again, isn’t it – those ubiquitous ‘they’ of the credit cards and thousand other unpaid accounts - waiting for you to sell something, or quit this nonsense and get a real job. And it gets to the point you can recognize their ring without caller ID; without even hearing their message, doesn’t it? That’s because we sit there all day and all night, fishing for buyers over e-mail, and crafting our shiny lures of creativity in our little dungeons of shame and despair, while the collectors spew rage to our answering machines.
Oh, you and I know all the tricks; how to send a manuscript off to an agent or a publisher with the words “requested material” on it, so they think it’s something they solicited, then open it and look at it! (I mean, God forbid, right?) This infuriates them because you have subverted the slush pile that somehow you were supposed to bubble to the top of over a number of months, buoyed magically above thousands of other pitiful, dashed dreams in that backwater of aspirations by pure chance. Not that there’s any justice in that but how dare you avoid this “process,” right? What gave you the nerve?
You know how to plead innocence when they nail you on the rebound in a terse phone call or e-mail, and you say “Hey I sent that out to sooooooo many people last week, all I can say is ‘Sorry. But your name got on the list. And I hope you can forgive me for thinking of you.’”
You’ve written query letters in your sleep, haven’t you, you poor, tormented freak. You’ve had conversations with your characters, or maybe you’ve even had sex with them in your dreams. Maybe you’ve had sex with real people in your life, thinking of a character from one of your books, and you are sick, demented fuck, aren’t you, you writer!
Perhaps you’ve watched these characters kill off others in your on-going, imaginary dramas in your slumber. And as your rapid eye movements began, just before you could get to the victim and stop the blade from impaling him in the chest, the murderer turns to you and says; “You know, Gary, I realize I was supposed to wait until the third or forth chapter before I did this. But don’t you think it makes things more spontaneous and interesting this way?”
Maybe you were even forced at knifepoint to agree before you woke up in a cold sweat. Or maybe you even chased after the damned to hell soul of your creation, trying to get revenge, not so much for ruining the corpse but more so, for destroying the nice, clean story construction you had in mind.
How dare he do that? Who’s writing this, me, or these damned characters? Am I losing my dog-porking mind? Have the clowns escaped and run amok?
But then by the time you got back over to the screen, you sat there for a moment and realized your “character driven” killer was correct. And so you spent the rest of the night trying to find a way to untangle what you had written, to make it happen just like it did in the dream, remaining as close to that truth as you could, convinced it was the ticket to fame. After all, your killer’s motivations are purer than yours, aren’t they?
God bless you for all that you do. God bless and damn you for your absolute refusal to live in the real world, for your inability to take the hint, to get a clue, to get on with it, to get a real life, to shut the hell up and be just like everyone else, to be more like your brother, or your sister, or your married cousin.
No one gives a shit about you, and no one appreciates you the way others of our tribe do. For even if we hate you for your successes - and oh, we will- we writers still relate to what you went through, or what you go through day-in, day-out. Or what you paid someone else to go through in your name, if this is the sort of dirt-diving ghost “John” you are.
We know the look of disgust on the face of a wife or girlfriend when you can do nothing but sit on the couch and obsess about what an agent said to you in some snippy, bullshit, little e-mail that strung you along for another week, or what some critic said in a review that no one but you read, should you be so lucky to actually get a review.
We know what that horrendous office party is like when you and your wife are surrounded by people who work in cubicles for “the boss” at “real jobs.” We know what it’s like to have to sit there and listen while some sow-assed, company-fed, blowhard who sees your wife more than you do, talks about the infighting he’s having with the other “network” guy at a division that, just a week ago, were two separate “orgs.” We know how deadly silent it gets when you announce for all the world after downing four rum toddies, “Well hell, I’m my own boss. All I have to worry about is what I am going to do today. Glad I don’t have to put up with that bullshit.”
Writers. I mean, c’mon. No one can stand us. And can you blame them? It’s just the petty ability that we have, isn’t it; that garlic reflex to ask questions that gets us into this mess, this mindset (this damnation!) in the first place, and what makes us do that?
Why do we want to strangle the pimply, twenty-year old child behind the Starbucks counter over there, who, for the love of sweet Christ, just can’t seem to keep a full pot on hand, or at least have one brewing on standby? I mean, didn’t this company start out as a coffee service before all this moca, froca, frapa-crappa-bullshit started!? Why do others roll their eyes when we point out things like this? It’s just the ability the state the obvious, and why don’t others have this gift, or this curse?
Why don’t we believe the author of Sea Biscuit, when she says she suffered through years of CFS to produce her work? Why are we convinced after we read this in Newsweek, that her tale of struggle sounded not so much like the truth, but more like a marketing ploy conjured by a savvy agent seeking her client a pass through every damned door slammed in all of our faces? Why do we begrudge this author this perfectly-good hook? She’s just another writer trying to get by. After all we’re writers. What did you expect from us, honesty? The truth? Please, I’m getting weepy.
Why is it we suspect Nicolas Sparks and John Grisham, aren’t really humans, but more like software programs created after the results of female focus groups are tallied and told? Is it jealousy?
Why do we hate Oprah for reviving her book review and forum? Why do we feign jerking off when we see her magazine at the check-out line? We seldom watched Oprah, and when we did, we only did so to amp or frustration, didn’t we? Why did we crave Oprah’s recognition when she didn’t even know we were alive, or why did we resent it when she refused to push for a book that we actually liked? Why would we have thrilled to be on Oprah anyway and faked our undying love for her, her magazine, her show, and her dreary-teary, daytime audience just the same? Is it hypocrisy?
Why do we dream of talking to Jay Leno about what made us writers? Why do we crave a few moments with James Lipton and Inside Actor’s Studio after we write a script that will star James Cann, Sean Connery, Jack Nicholson and Gene Hackman? Why, Lord, why? Why have you afflicted us with this need for acceptance, fame and wealth? Is it ego?
Why did we have that dream where Graham Greene talked to us as he cleaned out his house in Havana? Did he have a house in Havana? Surely he must have, having written Our Man in Havana. But why did we see the English author in a pair of blue jeans, bare feet, no shirt, sweating, loading box after cardboard box as he discussed the ups and downs, the pitfalls of the writer’s life? Why did we feel the sweat in his hand as he took ours, before that truck, a 1957 Ford pickup, robin’s-egg blue, came to cart his life away? Why was that dream so clear in our minds, its symbolic poignancy so glaring and evident? What made us dream that Greene was passing the torch to us? Why are we worthy of such things, or even of such dreams?
Is this fantasy?
Why are we jealous of Ernest Hemingway every time we tour his home? Why are we jealous of that troubled life; through every sip of Madeira, every bullfight he drank, farted and belched through, through every argument with every wife he ever had, through every fishing cruise, or hunting trip right on up to the shotgun blast? Why do we tour the author’s home at least twice a year, then run across the street to the Key West Lighthouse so we can look down on his yard from above like stalkers of the dead? What are we seeking there? What, precisely, do we expect will rub off?
Is it the soul-jism of Sir Ernest himself? Is this the extent of our sickness?
Do you realize what it took for me to light upon that particular version of the pseudo-word “jism” that I felt satisfied with enough to leave on the page? I mean, is it “gism”, or “jism”, or is it “gysm”? The spell checker on this computer is equally stumped with each, as is the Oxford Dictionary. Do you visualize me tickling through those old memory files from my college days, mentally leafing copies of those “It could never happen to me” stories from Penthouse Forum before deciding that indeed, “jism” is the way we spell “jism?” Do you realize I have repeated the porn-word jism in this paragraph seven or eight times and found a way to make it clean, and relevant? Does it make you laugh, or at least appreciate what a writer goes through, hacking out a bit like this that will likely get excised by some priggish editor with a politically-correct stick up his ass; a bit that will likely make my Mormon brother shake his head in sadness of my imminent damnation, and regardless of all this I simply must leave it on the page anyway? Can you swallow all of that with a smile? If not, you’re not a writer, are you?
And not being a writer, you no doubt consider me a sick and depraved individual now, a loathsome bit of scum on the walk. That I would stoop to invoke a dead man’s name, least of all the very “jism” of his soul, tells you where I am on the scale of love-ability, right? Right?
Well fucking get in line, pal. No one hates a writer more vehemently than he hates himself. So is it self-loathing and fear, then, as Hunter Thompson said, that picks and prods us into the unsettled life, and “spooky art” as Norman Mailer called it? Is it self-flattery that makes us name drop like this as we describe what we do?
We think of the strangest shit you can imagine. Then we talk about it to ourselves; sometimes babbling in the mirror, or as we prance around our dark hovels, before we scrawl it on a page, then pretty it up on the screen. Then we dump it someone can do it for us, and we start over.
Sometimes we actually talk to the shit itself, to the black nightmares we create out of the festering nards of our minds. Sometimes it’s as if God himself has parted the clouds and warmth surrounds us, and we can’t make it to the screen fast enough to share the vision.
Sometimes we cry at what we have written, and that’s for different reasons. It either sucks out loud, or sounds so good, we’re drunk, or all of the above.
Crawl inside the head of man in tears at his computer screen. Live there for a second. Did you like it? Are you a writer or were you sickened and terrified?
To the writer who understands all of the above, God bless and keep you, because you don’t know how to do anything else in this word. And that’s why you do all this. You’re just not wired right, and so you do what you must, and sometimes con who you do, to keep on going, to keep feeding your art and your addiction.
God bless your paranoia because it is justified in every way and only you, I and other writers know this to be cold, hard fact.
God bless you for the terror you experience, and stave off with whatever it is you consume, or mate with.
God bless you for the nights you lie awake convinced you can hear the house falling apart around you, (or is that just someone breaking in?) knowing you can’t pay for it just now, not until, maybe next week, maybe next year when it hits, when it sells, when it breaks.
God bless you. You are why I wrote this.
What it is, is what happened to me as I came “this” close (and now, for those non-writers who dared tread on here, my thumb and my index finger are about an inch apart) yes “this” close to becoming a successful, published writer.
The downward slide to murderous oblivion began this way.
“We want the story, it’s just written so poorly...”That’s where the dementia began, and not just that it rhymed in perfect phonetic symmetry. The fact that irked like twisted bowel was that it came in a rebounded e-mail that traveling through my agent’s computer first, and the subject line was, “Re: Get a Life.” Yes, someone was guilty of that dismissive thought – get a life you useless writer- but was it my agent or my publisher?
Where on earth did this shot to the nuts come from?
“We want the story, it’s just written so poorly and that’s what we object to…”
Good God, a frustrated writer masquerading as an editor. Taken as the first line of a poem this was brilliance.

We want the story
It’s just written so poorly
And that’s what we object to

….then maybe…

He is a hack,
We want our FUCKING money back
Telling him is up to you

Yes, they wanted to take the story, start to finish all the twists and turns, they liked the dialogue even; enjoyed some of that. But what they objected to most, apparently, was the fact it was my sweat and some of my skin cells were actually the ones falling onto the keys as the story went down. They would have liked someone else’s DNA traces on the manuscript shipped to them, not mine. They would rather the same story have traveled to them under a different author’s name and social security number. They would have liked to have supervised the breeding pedigree of the people who donated the eggs and sperm that became me eventually, or perhaps they would have selected a different egg and sperm from the same parents creating a lightly altered zygote. What did it mean?
Then came the phone call. That awkward, pause-filled moment where two people who probably hate each more than snakes and mongooses, are bonded at the ear, with no retreat to the one-sided safety of the machine.
“Written poorly? What do you mean?”
“Well it’s got a lot of raw emotion in it, Gary, and don’t get us wrong we like that it’s just, poorly done…the emotion that is, it should be …well, less something, maybe less, emotional.”
“Emotion less emotional? I’m not tracking here, could you….?”
“Hey look, don’t be smart with us. Are you difficult to work with? Are you one of those people?”
“No, no it’s just that I…”
“You’ll never work in this business, do you understand that? And give back our advance you fucking scumbag. Jesus…. Get a life you insane bastard!”
(click…Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz)
I mean, what do you do with that? Where do you go?
There had been a time when pint glass after pint glass of Guinness and Marlboro reds, inhaled one after the other, would have taken the sting out of it. I would have sat there for an entire afternoon amid rancid smoke while a man named Herb tried to convince me of a Zionist plot to control the Federal Reserve using poor service at Wal-Mart as a back door wedge against the working class, or something of this nature. I can never quite figure out what it is he is saying, but whatever it is it’s really bad. Apparently catching all the plot lines means watching MSNBC on one tube, FOX on the other and CNN Headline News on yet a third set. Somehow if you sit there in that time slot between lunch and happy hour drinking and smoking until you barely make sense yourself, you begin to see how the world really works.
Anyway, then there came the panicked “sober” days where delightfully chatty emails to my agent would have begun immediately as a response.

From: me@fuckup.com
To: Lyzanne@ballbustingbitch.com
Subject: Their Last to me
Hi Lyz,
Gee I guess I don’t understand the publishing business at all. Just got off the phone with William and I am confused, can you help?

From: Lyzanne@ballbustingbitch.com
To: you@fuckup.com
Subject: Re: Their last …
gary, first of all I don’t think I like your tone…pleas calm down, call me when yu have a spcific quest. …and it’s Lyzanne! How many times gar? How many itmes?

From: me@fuckup.com
To: Lyzanne@ballbustingbitch.com
Subject: Re: Re: Their Last …
Sorry Lyzanne, I keep forgetting. Just me. Didn’t mean anything by it.
I tried to get through but apparently Carrie has forgotten to tell you I am on hold.
Still waiting.
G


From: Lyzanne@ballbustingbitch.com
To: you@fuckup.com
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Their last …
God, Gary you are so melodramatic, what?

From: me@fuckup.com
To: Lyzanne@ballbustingbitch.com
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Their Last …
Okay so it’s this way, so I hung up. Tell Carrie thank you.
Well, my question is where do we go from here? They have said the book is too something, and I am not sure what but they weren’t real specific so, can you sell it elsewhere? I guess what I am asking is what’s our next move?

From: Lyzanne@ballbustingbitch.com
To: you@fuckup.com
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Their last …
First of all, you should not have bene rude to her and it’s Kari, (pronounced Kah Reee)not Carrie. I don’t kno w ho many tmz I have to tell you people not to be rude to her on the phone. Wheteverit is that you’re having happen to your book or whatever, she is not responsible.
And az to yur question, I can’t figure it out which is why I wanted you to call me, Gary. A call, as in a phone call, not a rudeness alert from Kary that Gary’s on the phone breathing like a madman. I don’t know how to handle that! God
Amazing!

From: me@fuckup.com
To: Lyzanne@ballbustingbitch.com
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Their
Hi Lyzanne,
Listen, I can see you guys are busy. I am going to call you tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. so we can talk about it. Does that sound good?
G

From: Lyzanne@ballbustingbitch.com
To: you@fuckup.com
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I’m sorry gar, but Howard and I are going to Israel tomorrow which is why whatever it iz that needs handling needs ot be handled or asked today, or you’re just gonna have to wait till we get back in two weeks. Marny will be hanling evrthiung for me while I’m gone and bne nice to Karee.
liz

Oh I would have fallen into the trap that some of you out there have fallen into. I would have assured myself that I was in control, then I would have called, breathed as little as possible when I talked to Kahreee, or whatever her name is, precisely, and I still don’t have it right, then I would steamrolled through finally to Lyzanne, and I would have calmly demanded that we come to an agreement to either cut this publisher loose, and sell my book elsewhere, or get them in line with the contract.
Okay, look, as a work of fiction, this damned thing is a whore’s tossed salad of genres and agendas, but damn it all, I have a contract!
It’s a book about a flight attendant raped by the steroid popping golfing, republican pilot and co-pilot, who had set the plane on autopilot so they could have their way with her while the stunned navigator and crew chief looked on. So she struggles to get some satisfaction out of the airline and the crewmen begin hunting her down and she has to off them one by one in order to get free of it. Then in the last scene she’s onboard a new airplane when that crew, who heard what she had done to her buddies begins to get frisky with her. She freaks and nearly causing the plane to go down with a fight in the cockpit until her lover, a fellow male flight attendant who himself is a bit conflicted, black, and may be just slightly gay, plus he’s struggling with a whopping case of CFS, saves the day.
Pressing Lyz further would have resulted in her being out of the office. Then two weeks of waiting for her to get back, followed by a period of “give me time I just got back” that lasted a week or more, followed by an apparent case of amnesia where she

couldn’t seem to recall what it is we were talking about, or what was so urgent, before she left. Followed by a “never mind,” followed by more inactivity. Followed by nothing.
We pushed the project to twenty different publishers during the spring of ‘01. All twenty expressed interest and all twenty got the proposal. All twenty said they would be making offers soon, some in excess of one hundred thousand in advance money.
The final offer would be contingent on seeing the draft version. It was summertime and no one in the publishing business is actually in the offices during the summer months and I can understand that, having lived for a year in New York City. No one in their right mind and the money to do otherwise wants to spend the entire summer in New York City. My agent said we should wait until fall when the chiefs get back from their vacations in the Hamptons and so forth, so that the first thing they saw was my manuscript Rape Flight.
The copies went out on 9-9-01 and likely arrived at those publishing houses on or about 9-11-01. At least two of the offices where the book arrived were demolished in the collapse of the World Trade Center.
Now, I could have bitched about how screwed up the bombings were from my perspective but I didn’t. The truth is, I worked for a very short while at Windows on The World. People I know, are now dead, because of what happened. That’s not to say they were my best buddies. In fact, I was a lousy waiter. I had no idea, not the first clue about French Service, and I had lied to get the job, saying I knew all about it. My customer service was a goddamned disaster. I worked in the Club during the lunch hour. I was also smoking pot during my off hours, acting in an off-off-off-off-off-off Broadway play during the evening at the Sanford Meisner Theatre, down by the river. Anyway, I knew folks in that building. I loved looking out those Windows even if I hated the hell out of waiting those tables for all those stock traders.
The clientele had so much money some of them had to hire dwarfs to follow behind them to catch the money as it fell out of their asses. And damned if they weren’t rude about it. Yes, the dwarfs were rude too!
The Haitian cook who couldn’t stand me, screamed at me in Patwan every day, precisely because I had no business working in a high-end restaurant. He was probably killed, as were the two good-looking female managers who tolerated my presence for a short time. As was the captain of the wait staff, a guy named Greg, whose eyes bugged wide the afternoon I exclaimed, “Hey this steak Tartar is nothing but raw meat, man? What gives?” Greg’s probably dead too.
Not that I was gay then or now, but if ever there was moment a young guy thought about it, it was then and the thought was, “shit, if I had to, I am saying if a gun were to my head, then Greg’s the guy.” That’s how damned good looking he was. Even straights got a sort of glimpse into what the gay thing was about. You were forced by how smooth and funny this guy was with customers and everything to suspend judgment and go “okay, okay. I see it’s where you’re at and I know there are some fellows who are that way, and that’s….okay.”
Yes, most of the male wait staff was openly gay. I was openly straight and in the minority. I got to feel what it feels like to be token, and it wasn’t fun, but sometimes it was funny as all hell. Like the time this guy tried to shock me by telling me he sucked off Little Richard when he was a teenage boy. Please, I didn’t buy it, but damn what material! How weird and funny was that for an aspiring writer to hear in a locker room! That guy was a lifer at WOW. Worked there every day. Likely was there when the towers went down. He broadened my horizons with his bullshit and I know for a fact he will be missed.
There was another straight guy there too. Another actor. Heavy set fellow, with glasses. Black hair. His name was Ron.
Ron’s standing comment for any guy auditioning for Shakespeare in the Park was “Don’t forget your spear. You’re going to need it!” Deflated, you cut through the double entendre and see yourself standing there all night in tights, not a line coming out of your mouth, holding a Medieval pike off to the side of the stage. Human set dressing, for God’s sake.
I remember we were switching from morning to evening shift and they had asked us to stay on, Ron says, “Wait Gary, Neil Simon’s casting for Biloxi Blues and I know you’re originally from Georgia. They have parts for rednecks. You should give it a shot.”
Then he told me a short cut to break in line at the cattle call. The trick is, when the rejected actors walk out the door, they often throw down the slip of paper with their numbers for their place in the line. That line ran out the side stage door and around the building and down the street. It was a mile long snake made up of waiters cutting dinner shifts from the Bronx to the Bowery. Restaurant managers all over the city were going “Hey, where the hell is Carlos?”
All you had to do to get in front of this mass of humanity, with limited job skills, was watch for a recent reject and pick up his number then you hop in line when someone’s not looking. If anyone asks you just flash the number with your thumb over the last digit.
Thank pot all the way. Back then actors weren’t very butch or violent. Chances were no one was going to haul off and hit you for this. Nowadays I wouldn’t bet on it. You’re liable to get your head blown off. Remember crack and actor/waiters had yet to meet on the field of history.
Anyway, Ron said the interviewers would have the headshot from someone else in front of them when they interviewed you…
“Now it says here you went to Cornell, Steve is it?”
“No, no. I’m Gary, I went to Florida Tech. See that’s not me...”
… but you just bluster on through the interview anyway, say someone screwed up and promise to have an agent forward a head shot to them the next day if you read well. Simple.
Ron got nailed straight away and was thrown out.
Meg Simon interviewed me, Neil’s daughter I think. When she found out what Ron and I had done, she gave me a chance to explain myself.
“Do you know how long some of these people have been waiting and here you just cut in line ahead of them? What makes you think you have the right to do that, Gary?”
Well, I didn’t know what to say. I felt like shit for all those poor saps out there. I apologized, walked off stage, out the door. Ron’s there in the alley and he says “Gary! Don’t you get it, you idiot? She was testing you. You blew it!”
I think about that moment at least once or twice a year. I think about Ron, if that had been his name. Chances are he was working that morning when the planes hit. Just as likely he’s dead too.
I had a beautiful girlfriend during those days. Met her on a subway train in the spring of ‘86, Saturday afternoon, heading downtown near Columbus Circle. My stop was West 8th Street near Crazy Eddie’s. But I followed her like a hound, switched trains and watched her all the way to Brooklyn, got her number, finally, switched trains again at Flatbush Avenue and came all the way back into town.
Flatbush Avenue, a curly haired white kid wearing Old Spice Cologne. A kid with thin wrists and artistic tendencies, nighttime. Brooklyn. You do the math. Was it love at first sight?
We went to see the Color Purple on our first date. Sucked face all the way through it, which says something. Typically you don’t think of sucking face through this movie. The cabby gave me a ride back to West 8th for free, because we sucked face so good heading out to Brooklyn to drop her home. No, I did not go up on the first date. He even waited for me to suck face with her on the stoop a little more. Liked to see that sort of thing, he said. True love and that, it made him feel good.
No, I don’t think it “got him off” but maybe, who knows. You never know with people, do you? And if it did get him off, more power. So what. It let me out of about a $30 cab bill and what’s more important?
Greek, dark good looks, skinny kid, (the girl; not the driver, wiseass) she grew up in New Hampshire, and lived on Bergen Street, sharing a three-story walk up with two other girls. We made love to Dire Straits, Love Over Gold. When she came into the village to see me, we did it to Avalon, by Brian Ferry. I don’t think Brian and his crew made another album after that, did they? They shouldn’t. I won’t listen to it.
Anyway, she didn’t like me smoking weed and hanging out with my actor buds, which is why she broke up with me. I don’t blame her. Weed makes me weird and directionless, needlessly argumentative, forgetful, tardy and rude. Maybe this is who I am and I only notice it on weed. Whatever the case may be, she couldn’t stand the smell of it and I, in my lion-cub prime, was not going to take that shit off of no woman, even though I sheepishly stopped smoking it immediately after our breakup.
A financial analyst, she worked at one of the other buildings that collapsed, not the main towers, but one of the other ones. Don’t know if she was there, or if she had married and went by another name when they came down. Don’t know if she made it out alive.
So when my publishing thing got snarled by the towers going down, I really did feel worse for all of those people, than I did about myself and my own situation. I felt worse for them, because some of those faces in my memory undoubtedly belong to innocent victims now lying in graves. And I don’t care if it rings hollow to you. It’s true; the sound of bagpipes makes me think of firemen clambering through collapsed buildings to bring out the dusty bodies of their comrades, or policemen, and Red Cross workers, and pretty young financial officers like my former love, and witty coworkers who tolerated a southern fried, homophobe shit-fuck like me at the World Trade Center, for a short while.
The contract with my agent stipulated that if she sold it in the first year of our deal, she then gained in-perpetuity negotiating rights to all forms of the book. The chances for the story plummeted like the towers. Those who said offers would be forthcoming, evaporated. She took what she could get three days before her year was up. She also had a clause in the contract that I agreed to let her represent my second book and I’ll get to the significance of that.
My advance was $2,000 up front, $2,000 on acceptance and approval; the publisher wanted me to re-write the whole damned thing over the next year. I said yes.
Rape Flight wasn’t even called Rape Flight when I started this. It had stared ten years ago when my cousin, a former actress and then an airline stew, came forward with a charge of sexual harassment. One of the many things that happened was a co-pilot tried to entice her into becoming an auxiliary member of his mile-high club for macho stud pilots. That means, just as they said in the movie Top Gun, “carnal knowledge” but at thirty thousand, on the pilot’s lap with autopilot engaged and people speaking very carefully to get around the in-flight voice recording. Jesus, it was sick, not to mention dangerous.
This was a European airline. But they had major headquarters in New York and many of their hot shot pilots were in their twenties, and they acted like asses.
The name Mile High Club had been taken by another book, which had some success in the seventies, I believe. I called mine The Mile Low Club, because it was to be a chronicle of the lives of my cousin and these three other girls after they came forward with their story. They tried to get the airlines to believe what had happened to them, to get everyone to believe what they had been through, trying to push this class action…yada yada yada.
Well a funny thing happened, the class action went through and the girls got paid big-time to keep quiet so things changed.
The publisher was smaller so they had a problem with going on what we had, since the girls wouldn’t risk their settlements, and so we decided to make it fiction. We would take what we had and morph it into a thriller.
Huge mistake. I should have bailed on the whole thing then and there but I didn’t.
It changed and changed again to suit the shifty market. No one wanted to hear about airplanes or airplane-maybe crashes after 9-11. But we stuck to our guns and began work hopeful we were on to something. And I started to hate the whole system like Hell. Then it became a whore’s game to please everyone on the train.
Here I had a perfectly good idea that got….well Hell. You’re a writer, you can see what happened to it, Rape Flight, for Chrissakes! Rape Flight!?
Jesus God. Please kill me.
I can see it now. Will Smith in Rape Flight II The Reckoning! The stew’s – oh, I’m sorry, ……the flight attendant - is Jenny Lopez in a wheelchair, huge goiter caked on with makeup, still getting raped and felt up in flight anyway. Throw Bruce Willis in the mix somewhere as the rapist pilot, maybe Ben Affleck as the Sky Marshall, or maybe it’s Byonce, as the Sky Marshall. Snoop Dogg is the undercover baggage man/airline executive who discovers the stew when she escapes by having herself stuffed in a hanging suit bag getting away from the deranged pilot who starts shooting and the airplane loses altitude, emergency lands etc. You do the rest.
No matter how weird it got, it just seemed to please the publisher more. The more I tried to bring things back to center, or back to normal, the angrier they got.
The long silences from the publisher started when the final draft, as described earlier, was turned in for Rape Flight. It still wasn’t shocking, or bizarre enough. These periods of no comment were designed to show me how insignificant I was in the whole scheme of things. They also conflicted with their end of the contract.
More specifically, to show me what tough bastards they were and how I really should have played along better, they actually violated their contract. They blew off deadlines allowing them to escape paying the second half of the advance, or even the ability to tell me I had to whore Rape Flight up any more than I already have. They have to publish it eventually, but they flaunt the fact they are going to say when that is. Perhaps when I am dead, my children will finally get that second half of the advance.
So there Rape Flight sits, going nowhere. Every so often I inquire about two years worth of work and research and send an email regarding Rape Flight.
My little revenge on them is they have to read this black bold subject line in the e-mail every time Rape Flight. Then when they forward it, it goes Re: Rape Flight, or Fwd: Rape Flight. I think they have figured out this is my one little joy in life because they change the subject lines now. Before if there were a lot of e-mails regarding Rape Flight, they would pile up vertically on their screens, just as they did on my screen throughout the day. You can’t imagine the joy of seeing these neatly in a column.
Rape Flight
Re: Rape Flight
Re: Rape Flight
Re: Rape Flight
You read them straight down the page and you can almost hear the beat box and the scratching going. “Rape Flight, re re re Rape Flight!”
Yes, that was the customary course of events and communications a year ago, when I still didn’t understand, but now that I do I’ve decided a different approach. This is getting me nowhere.
You see my agent will not accept that what she has negotiated is a non-sale. The publisher has allowed Rape Flight to sit there unused, if you could call it that; the concept is so overused prior to release now that spent elephant condoms would wince in pain with one glance at it. Anyway, since she thinks a sale has occurred, she is holding my feet to the fire on the second book, which, just as likely will result in another round of this happy horseshit if her capable navigation skills are an indicator.
Shortcut and to the nut of it: contractually she says Rape Flight is right where it is supposed to be AND I owe her my next manuscript to represent to the world, so she can do all of this again. If I try to get out of this situation I get hauled into court by her attorney, Ellis Kleinberg, Esq.
Speaking of billable hours, I recently tallied what it cost me research and write Rape Flight, billing my hours at a rate equivalent to what I had been earning working on the newspaper I left behind in order to do this; well, that’s a lie, I left the newspaper to work at an Internet company but that’s another story.
I paid myself $13 per hour, the same salary I was making as a science writer and news reporter. I added in phone bills, computer supplies and repairs, (the clez virus which necessitated the purchase of a brand new hard-drive) and travel costs, and it turns out Rape Flight cost me in the neighborhood of one hundred twenty thousand dollars to produce. Oh, I’m sorry, did I forget to subtract the two thousand dollar advance that these bastards say they want back? Yes, so, Rape Flight cost me one hundred eighteen thousand to pound out.
Where did this money come from?
The chief contributors to this inverse mountain of spent cash are, my wife, Leslie, who is a nurse, and my part-time job as a substitute school teacher and soccer coach here in an unnamed Florida county, and the fact I have not paid a credit card bill in more than three years, which is why am besieged with collector calls, so much so I don’t communicate via telephone anymore, or scarcely so.
Great thing about Florida is that no one can take your house for unpaid bills unless that bill is a mortgage on the property. Many writers live in Florida. Coincidence? You be the judge. So what have I gained, besides another book concept for a ‘How To’, as in Dealing with Collection Agencies for Dummies? What have I learned? I decided that I simply must kill my agent, perhaps the publisher while I am at it. And I must not be nice about it.
What I will do in this book is lay out my case for doing it, then tell you what happened after that using active voice, always.