Chapter 5 Snap, Crackle....

By Gary O'Brien

Is it in your face enough? You go to these agent blog sites, what do you see anymore? It’s a comment to the posts competition deciding which sycophant can publically kiss ass the hardest.
Check for yourself, then get back here asap so I can yell at you some more. Go ahead, I'll wait.
(whistling sounds)
Did you scroll down to comments and see what I am talking about?
And the one who wins, the cutesy-est kiss-ass comment posts, gets an agency contract, eventually. This genius, goes on to get published. Is it any wonder then, that publishing itself, not to mention reading, is going down in flames?
When you go into B and N, you see on the shelves is dim, boring, well-behaved crap, for boring-assed, well-behaved, suck-up people, written by same-said population. I ask you, is this the sort of thing you absolutely have to have in your book collection? Is this the sort of thing you want to fork over damned good money for? Because no one has credit left these days. At least no one I know.
Do you purchase a cheeseburger with that cash in-hand, or do you spring for this pablum on the shelf?
Me, I go for burger, everytime. Do the math people! I am not alone. It’s crunch time. Something has to change or book publishing is dead.
Anyway.
Well, then the predictable happened, just in time for me to come back to humanity. Just when I thought Graham and Dr. Nedza had scolded me into doing nothing more dangerous than writing a damned fine letter --letting her go, yet again -- or maybe something slightly more drastic like mailing her an actual turd in a box and calling it my next manuscript, she reached out to me in the nick of time.
I had been out of touch with Lyzanne for more than three weeks while I went through my psychological spirit journey. I had not attempted to contact her; not even ‘delightfully/politely so’ and she was feeling needy and neglected, I guess. I knew there would be a punishment reprisal for my lack of communication: communication, if it had come, she would have bitterly complained about to her staff. But I did not predict the form her scornful reprisal would take.
Okay, a little background here. It’s quick and painless, and it’s pertinent. "Trust me," he said.
When I was small boy there was a kid on my block who used to torture animals. You know the one. Likely, you had one living on your block, too. He was the sort of kid who liked to drive his John boat out on the lake – we lived on a lake outside Roswell, Georgia – and shoot the birds off a phone wire with a bb gun, just to watch them fall.
The poor birds would sit there, take the hit, teeter like drunken soldiers then down they came with one wing out; little stalled and spiraling Cessnas plopping into this coffee-colored drainage easement of the Chattahoochee River basin.
Anyway, this particular boy had a talent for beckoning animals to him, before he administrated horrific punishment as a reward for their trust. Something equally horrific must have been going on at home because, the way he carried these acts of cruelty out, he was also being cruel to you, a fellow traveler through life and innocent child.
That was a side bet he had going in his head. How much will GARY take before we’re into HIS murky moral waters? These cruelties often started out on a very small scale, like, putting a sock on a cat’s head then watching him back up around a closed garage, bumping into all three walls and the garage door twice before giving up and falling over. The punishments grew incrementally, (tape on the feet, sock on head, weight on a string tied to tail) until you, the fellow child observer, would either freak out and fight Captain Torture or you ran home screaming.
The kid’s evil was coupled with the capacity for sweetness that would make the poor beast forget the cruelty he had just suffered and approach the child all over again. One moment the kid was Satan’s ill-begotten Hell-spawn, next came a voice that was positively anesthetizing in its warmth and kindness. God damn, was that boy evil.
“C’mere, c’mere Snickers. C’mon. c’mon girl. I won’t hurt you…”
“RRRRRoooooooar…rrr…r……meow?”
“Hey Gary. Wanna see what she does after you put her in the dryer?”
Anyway, the emails from Lyz that day, should have struck a vaguely familiar chord. They were sweet, solicitous, beckoning with proper spelling and so forth.
Lyzanne@niceagentlady.com
Gary@terrificwriter.com
Subject: A solution
Hello Gary:
Listen, Gary I think we have a solution to this.
Don’t be shy give me a call. I’m in the office today until about two
Lyz.

You could almost hear that condescending, smoky New York, give-a-shit voice from that email and now here it was in full bloom down the line. You could practically smell the booze across a thousand miles of fiber optics and a couple of satellite relays; “Gah REEEE, this is ABSO lut Leeeee ….wonderful. Faaaaaaabulous news.”
I went into this conversation armed with these two questions that I would have answered before the phone returned to the cradle. I would not hesitate to use profanity if necessary. Leave out that I had visualized her death in dreams.
First, I wanted to know how we were going to get my manuscript back from the publisher without paying them back their advance since they defaulted the contract? Two, I wanted to know to whom we were going to pitch my two years worth of struggle? If there was any, repeat, any equivocation on these lines, I told myself I would open up on her with both barrels.
She had obviously planned for that as well. She knew the damned score, knew the publisher was way behind anything that even remotely smacked of cooperation with the timeline in the contract…
“Gary, how good of you to call. There’s someone I want you to meet. You’ll love him….”
She knew she had been treating me like a goddamned doormat with her condescending bullshit emails, then running away when things got tense
“He’s a marquee writer, Gary, a name and that’s what this story needs; a name to go with it. Sure it needs a little fixing too, which is what William and I have been discussing today, Gary. Believe me Gare; today has been all about you. The whole day, about Gary. What to do about Gary and this book? Believe me. It has been a doozy. A doozy, Gare.”
“Lyzanne, what precisely are we saying here?” I began weakly, losing my footing the instant I heard her. “Slow down, go back and tell me what is going on?’
She could sense I was rearing back preparing to hit her with my two solid questions from which there would be no recovery, no way out. So she blathered right over me. I didn’t exist. My concerns were ridiculous. I had no idea about the publishing business. This was about her and her long, long chat with William over at Bow Wake House; all about Gary; Gary and his special problem from which he suffers so greatly.
Apparently, Lyzanne was now my mother and she was talking to William, who obviously was my proctor, or guidance counselor during school hours. Or perhaps Lyzanne was a guidance counselor and she had been speaking with a psychotherapist detailing the very special needs of a very special boy. Oh, but, she was also the salvation to the entire nightmare that dealing with Gareeee had spawned. Monstrous, bell-tower, freak-boy Gareee and his manuscript from Hell had a way back into the sunlight and she, like a descending angel, was about to unlock the secret gate into the garden…or some horseshit like this.
“But once you meet this guy, you’re going to love him. Believe me. Absolutely love him to death. I’m convinced of it, Gare, convinced.”
“Look, Lyzanne…..”
I was twenty-three seconds and perhaps fifteen words into this conversation. I had counted every one and I had yet to lose my cool. The phone was held so tightly the plastic seal between the molds of the back and front sides, was slicing like a Ginsu into my knuckles.
“I just wanna ask you one thing.” Now I was breathing heavy.
“What?” she said, pulling the plug on my anger.
A little trickle of steam bled off in a surprised laugh. My laugh. And indeed, I was surprised to hear it even though it was not so much a laugh as it was a squeak. Like “what?” just like that, like “what Gar REEEEE? What GARE?” Who was this tormenting bitch to ask this question of me, and pose it like this, as if I was the problem?
“What the f..f..f…ffffffffffrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrigging …..Hell… is going on? What in the name of the sweet …………infant, are YOU doing with MY book?”
Five seconds of airtime elapsed. Just that space air sound came through over the phone; the electronic, tinny echoing impulse of a thousand different people all along the pipeline from Florida and New York and back again, doing their job then holding their breaths, waiting to send the next signals between Lyzanne and Gare-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
“I’m trying to save your book, Gare. That’s what’s going on. Call me back when you’ve adjusted your tone. Please.”
I waited for it and she did not disappoint. She actually said it, although it was a fade away shot, it came after she pulled the phone away from her mouth and before it reached the cradle.
“Simply AMAZING…”
(click BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ)
“Holy fuck, where does she get the STONES to come off like this, where?”
Before I knew what I was doing the phone was in pieces on the floor. My children and my wife were looking at me. Yes, I was deranged. I knew I was deranged but at times there are mitigating circumstances. I am not saying excuses, I am intimating that there are circumstances that rattle around the inside of your mind like a 22 caliber bullet that simply must exit somewhere.
Sometimes a phone is just as good as any inanimate object to accept the results of your fury. It simply must stand in-stead, in place of, the absolute thrash-railing you would inflict to a more suitable vessel such as a punching bag, or a cat in a dryer set on spin cycle.