Chapter 2 Fisting the Agent

....whew, almost caught. The park ranger is getting supicious. Place has totally cleared out but for one, lonely, scared writer off his meds. Here's another chapter.

By Gary O'Brien

You’re a writer. Do you know what it’s like to try to find an agent?
A little hypothetical situation here. You send a partial to an agent, she says hell "yes this is great, I would love to read it." You send the complete manuscript. Good so far? Then you don't hear from her Poof. A month rolls by, then two, maybe three, and so your dumbass sheepishly, politely, emails her.What next?
She immediately cries poormouth about how much time she's putting in, and you actually feel bad for disrupting her day. But wait, it gets even better: the next thing you see on her blog are pictures of her, less than an hour old from Hawaii; at a god damned writer's conference!
You know something, they need to change the name of those things to "agents conferences" not "writer's conferences." The freaking agents are making out like bandits. What dumb ass is footing the bill? That would be YOUR dumb ass. That's who.
In the triangle of power, between agent, publisher, and writer, who has the power stick in-hand, and who has bark in his rectum? Can you guess?
Dumbass, who the fuck is in Hawaii while you sheepishly email your whiny request for an update? Get a clue will you!
Agents. Jesus Christ almighty, can I get an audience with his or her freaking Holiness, for Chrissakes!?
Maybe you haven’t found one yet. And yet here I sit with one, planning to do her in. And not just any old agent who has ripped off a reading fee, we’re talking about a real agent.
I hear you. I hear your next thought; “Hey, why don’t you just sue her?” Please, refer to my previous discussions regarding money and dwarves. Only other lawyers, or traders, or dwarves, can afford the expensive dwarf-money-collection-function, or the price of an attorney.
Yes this is now and overused bit, thank you for noticing. Some people are so rich – and these are usually attorneys—they can go right on over to Sharper Image in the mall and purchase a robotic dwarf made by Lockheed- Martin, to collect the money falling from their asses. This is the kind of person who can afford an attorney.
The next word you will utter under your breath is “contingency” Yep, they’ll take it on “contingency.” There it is, the answer, right?
You fucking meat-puppet: You will believe anything, even your own lies to me. You want to know what kind of attorney takes an intellectual property case from an aspiring writer on contingency? Well, it is the sort of attorney who cannot afford the dwarf collection function. This person will enter the room sans dwarf trailing afterwards bearing a smile and a bucket. This will likely be an actor playing an attorney on TV and that TV attorney, also, will not have a dwarf.
So it’s back to the middle-ages for me. Frontier justice.
But to kill someone you must have passion for that person and true, I did have passion. But not for her, it was merely the concept of getting an agent.
I mean, every writer thinks that once they get an agent, that’s it. That’s where I need to be Errrrr. Wrong! That’s just the beginning. And get a bad agent you end up where I was at that moment, plotting her death.
What was it like for me to get an agent? Perhaps more than any other exercise in this life that results in no immediate income, acquiring a literary agent certainly has to rate right up there in orgasmic value with your first roller coaster ride, or dropping in on a huge right, hitting the bottom turn and sliding along the face for the first time without falling the board, or the warm, exquisite chill you get when you realize, in some dank, dark college dorm; “Good God, she’s going for it. She’s going to give me one and I didn’t even have to ask!”
In my case, my acquisition of a literary agent, like seduction, had everything to do with her menstrual cycle (or the vestige of it), combined with a three-martini lunch.
My query letter was brilliance itself. By now the path I blazed is so trite it’s undoubtedly got asphalt on it. But I’ll tell you what I did anyway.
The subject line was the worst bit of cutesy dog-shit, the sort of thing expressly forbidden on her web page yet she looked at it anyway.
STOP: YOU ARE GOING TO REPRESENT THIS BOOK
With that came a three-page attached proposal letter for Mile Low Club: A Tale of Rape in Flight.
I meant the last bit as a hook. I had no intention of documenting what some would construe had been rape in flight but I meant to draw attention, more like Rape in Aviation, or the Rape of justice in the sky. Hell, I didn’t quite know what the fuck I was doing.
But man, wham! Bam! Apparently these two words used together “Rape” and “Flight” are like crack cocaine to the industry. The industry went (and I am using my best Cosmo Kramer voice here) “y yeah yeah……..oooooooo, baby, g-g-g-gimmee some more of that!”
Thinking back to my newspaper days, as a word Rape is like a dagger in your left eye. It hurts, but it stops you where you stand and you have to look with the right. Flight does the same thing but it’s more insidious. You don’t think of birds, of fucking Antarctic fulmars and petrels of South America, when you see the word “flight.” C’mon, what do you think of?
You think of that landing into D.C. where the pilots had to see-saw back and forth as they limped a 727 up the Potomac to get the gear down and flashed the underside of the plane to ground-spotters so everyone was sure that it was. You recall the fluttering sphincter as your ass tried to chew its way through your seat. You remember being next to the businessman from Nepal, pissed as all hell because he’s obviously a Buddhist and could give a shit while you’re eating a hole through your esophageal lining with all this Judeo-Christian or Catholic guilt that’s trying to leap out through your chest.
You remember heading to the bar after you got off and slamming down three Rob Roys in the space of two minutes. You remember your three F reflexes sending your libido into overdrive in a strange city with no savory acquaintance to take care of it. You think of “flight” as in the experience of stark terror and boredom that goes by the name of public transportation.
So my first crime was having a concept with juicy meat hooks in it. Then I went hunting. I had cruised the web pages of agents all over this great nation of ours, and I came up with a list of fifty names or so of likely targets.
We’re talking back in the days of Gary Condit, so “flight” didn’t immediately equate with terrorism, requiring you to extract your PhD in Helsinki Syndrome, or the like, just to be heard by a publisher, but it still had the hook, as did the word “Rape”. So I guess I am to blame for what happened as much as anyone.
The query went out en masse with the attachment. It wasn’t long before I got an email from her. She was first, and I thought the only one who would bite. I was wrong. By the end of the day I had already leaped but there were twenty positive responses to my email.
Hers went like this:

From: LyzAnne@niceprofessionalagentlady.com
To: Gary@excellentprofessionalwriterperson.com
Subject: Your work
Gary,
I am very interested in talking to you about this project please call me,
212bla-blabity- bla
Lyzanne Schnedz
I rechecked her agency listing. Bingo! Pay-dirt!
“The Lyzanne Schnedz Agency was established in 1986 when Lyzanne, a thirty-year veteran of publishing, left her post as editor in chief of Karmline House and formed her own talent agency...”
Her simple website went on to describe how she was the daughter of a famous publishing legend named Douglas Schnedz. It seemed one of those names that had power to it. It was one of those names you had heard before somewhere, in some book you had read about agents and publishers. She was definitely not a charge-per-read hack either. You looked at her client list and you were impressed; there were more than one hundred of them. It didn’t have a lot of depth when it came to aviation but there were a lot of celebrity cook books in there.
A daytime television judge, four Emmy-Award winning soap stars, yes, there were some Pulitzer folks in there as well. Mostly these were journalists who had done chemical poisoning type expose works, but it was a respectable list. She was credentialed. She was in the mix, had connections and she was talking to me.
“Good God, she’s really going for it…”
So I called the number immediately and was pushed right through the gate. The breathless cigarette voice of a fifty-something woman answered with one word.
“Gary!” Here she was using my name!
“…..this is spectac –ular. Honestly, Gary, this is a movie….no…no…it really is.”
Okay, I thought. So what. She’s drunk off her ass. I grew up with drunks. I know what they sounded like. But the drunks who raised me, also, from time to time, were capable of great genius, of great things, great achievements.
Combined with the photo on her website - take no shit, kick ass old broad who will bite the nuts off a bull if it crossed her - combined with her history in publishing, who was I to say no to this pitch? And she was telling me everything I wanted to hear, albeit through the slur of a midday Harvey Wallbanger. I could actually smell the cab ride back to her office from what came over the phone. But she said she already had a guy in Hollywood, a co-agent who would likely represent it! How much better than this does it get?
Knowing my penchant for taking a shotgun to my own feet when success rears its ugly head my way, I fought to end the call as soon as possible before I flubbed it. I wanted lock-in. No if’s ands or buts, “…just send it Lyzanne, and I’ll sign. Let’s get the ball rolling.”
I danced around the room screaming “yes!” I pumped my fist up and down like Tiger Woods. “In the hole.”
The only thing more orgasmic than getting an agent in one day, is being able to reject, over the phone, another agent not fifteen minutes later.
Ten minutes later another email with a request from another agent for a phone chat, Chaz Pfitzer, was the guy’s name, had an office that must have been ten feet down Fifth Avenue from Lyzanne’s.

He was a young guy about my age. He also had an excellent stable of clients although his were more closely aligned to what I was about, a hardnosed non-fiction book. Now Chaz immediately wanted to pair me up with another writer, a “weight name” as they say. That way we could get top dollar for the project.
I had a vision of getting porked, and badly without the KY. I had a vision of having the story ripped off from me from some “weight name” who couldn’t find his own project if it were taped to his fat, egotistical ass. And after all this happened to MY cousin, not this other writer’s. Weight name? What the hell do you think I am doing this for, my health? I want to be a weight-name too not some damned doormat.
“No, no no, no thank you. I…”
That floored him! What? No? What’s that? He had never heard the word before apparently and it vexed him. No? Are you out of your fucking mind? I am an agent, and I just offered you a contract? Who in God’s name are you to say no to me?
I informed him I had already agreed to sign with Lyzanne, just down the street. He was positively fuming at this. He knew and hated the woman.
As he tried to dissuade me, I began to reflect upon the number of rejection letters I have received over the years, like lovers who never quite got it right, who never really understood me.
His voice seemed to come to me down a long dark hallway as I remembered writing that story about the serial killer combating the psychic.
Rejected, then stolen, by an agent much like this one. And, oh shut up. It was good. I swear it was. It had a hook in it that I won’t get into because I still mean to use it one day and I’ll be damned if I let you steal it from me. Besides this was back in the early nineties before the Internet had spread like ebola, before every writer in the world had a web page with their version of the “psychic meets serial killer” genre posted on it.
Well Ill be damned if this entire project, if not the hook concept, wasn’t lifted from me word for word after attending a writer’s conference in Orlando. It was later made into a movie starring Robert Downey Jr. You’ve seen it and likely you thought it was your project they stole. Hell no. It was mine. Mine was better! It was better than the stupid movie they made out of it, In Dreams.
What had my title been, oh, Fever Dreams? No similarity there, nothing to get strung out about. Jaysus.
As he blathered on about the need to get top dollar, I remember how the agents lined up in their little desks in a hotel ballroom in to scoff at the works of local writers, rolling their eyes at the inane concepts. Mine had been among them. They pecked with pencils, and sniffed as though they had been offered plates of turds, said “next,” then one of the sniveling little bastards quietly pocketed my proposal, which someone converted into a script! I can’t prove it but I know it, and what’s more important?
And there’s not a damned thing I, or we, can do about this. We can’t even prove it unless we file a class action lawsuit together writers, and like you, I’ll be damned if I will hang around with a group of loser writers long enough to collect. No offense, but just call me brain dead and pull the plug on me if that’s what I have to resort to. I know damned well you feel the same way so don’t you dare go all moony on me here.
C’mon toughen up you fucking softy. Shit!
Anyway, I had another book I was selling then too; a giant opus about drugs, DEA and revolution in Latin America. An agent actually said “Uhhhg” to this. Not because Tom Clancy had just published Clear and Present Danger and the movie was being filmed with Harrison Ford. I don’t think it went that far. The attitude was; who is this guy living in the outskirts of Orlando to presume to have any insight into what’s going on in Central America?
His attitude was “I’m a literary agent. I live in New York Fucking City, and even I don’t presume to be an expert on this sort of thing. Who are YOU, some garden-variety Floridian to write a six-hundred page book about drugs and revolution in Central America? Are you out of your fucking mind?”
I told him I had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras. It was true. I spent two years there. As an agent of change I probably had been a better waiter in New York City. But did Clancy live in the second-poorest country in the hemisphere? Did fucking Clancy pull round worms out of his ass? Did fucking Clancy the weight name, get used to shitting yellow? Did fucking Clancy have to shine his flashlight on the back of a corrupt forestry official for the better part of a ten mile walk out of the jungle during the middle of the night, so the forestry official, who had been seen taking a bribe for slash and burns, didn’t hack him to death with a machete and leave his body in the woods for the zopilotes?
No, no and no again to every single one of these questions. The answer was no. What did the agent say to this? He said; “Uhhhg.” Two years in Hell equals “uhhg! I have heard all this before…”
Yes, I remembered that little conversation. I also remembered every single terse little postcard from agencies over the years. Every little “No Thanks, not for us.” Every little form letter I ever got. I recalled it all. I brought all up in mind at once and then I puked on them all with my terse little send off.
“Sorry. I’ve got representation now. Not interested, ” and then I hung up on him.
It never occurred to me that what I had opted for was a mistake also. It never occurred to me that my three-martini-lunch wonder would sober up, just like all the classic drunks I have ever known and go “wait a minute. Now, what was your name again? What did we agree to last night? Is that my $500 watch on your wrist?”
Get this, she sent the contract and I signed it, flashing it back to her. And maybe she thought to call my bluff by sending the contract to me in the first place. Well I showed her, didn’t I? I signed that fucker and sent it right back to her for her to execute, which she did. And for the level of treatment following that, there’s really no way to explain this interchange other than her drunk went right on drinking all the way to the end of the week. Unless, you consider the remote possibility that she actually was interested in the material, and who knows?
After that came a four-month period of swapping spit on the “proposal” an exercise that is perhaps more difficult than writing a book. The agent sends you a package that has other draft proposals in it.
These drafts in no way resemble anything close to what you’re doing or what you’re trying to write, but they are sent to you for reasons that are known only to the publishing world. Because once you use them to coin the concept of your proposal, the monstrous Frankenstein freak that you construct will be so hideous and hybridized, it is a wonder publishers don’t vomit on them, wrap them in cellophane and express mail them directly to the author.
So you’re told that these proposals, these forty-page cluster fucks on paper are to be used as models for your efforts crafting your version of a proposal. You have to get an outline together even if you don’t know exactly which way your book is going. A sample chapter, even though you know damned well it will look nothing like this when the book is written. And the sample chapter has to be crammed full with everything that is going to be in the book, even if it won’t be by the time you finish the book itself. It is one gigantic suppository of information that you mean to ram up the publisher’s ass and hope to hell he enjoys it.
Can’t be too big, not too small, not too thick, not to thin, and definitely no sandpaper.
“Christ, what do they want?”
You mention this and the agent points to the pile of freaks she has sent you and says “Get Started.”
You finish and back it comes with post-it notes on the inside margins. Whatever style you adhered to in drafting the proposal, represented in one of the examples you thought was worthy, will be incorrect, if you have been fortunate enough to gain representation like mine. If your model was written in Chicago Style, she will demand it in AP style.
To the non or beginning writer: If, for instance, you wanted to say “1,000”, just like that, she will demand you write all numbers out as in “one-thousand.” Now, if you’ve attempted to go one better than her, and you have seen that every single book out there would express “1,000” as “one-thousand”, she will demand you convert it all back to where we started “1,000”. If you get a publisher they will want it as “one-thousand”, not 1,000.
This is one thing you must learn, writer. Whatever you have done, it is wrong. Do it otherwise. Don’t try and second or third guess agents and publishers because they don’t know either. They just know that whatever it is that you have done, well, it needs to be done precisely the other way. Here it is back to you. Fuck you. Do it again. This is only one example of what you will face. Ranks, official titles, years, dates, street addresses, paragraphs, quotes, explicit sex, profanity, the choices if and when; whatever style you have chosen to adhere to, even though it was in the packet of freaks sent to you, the agent will, if you have gained one like mine - a kind that needs to be broiled slowly in monkey-fat - assure you that it is not only wrong for having made that choice it is immoral, illegal and perhaps evidence that you have a prison record you haven’t divulged. Great. Okay so you get through that part and it takes four months because she has sobered up and she’s ready for you to shake yourself loose. It doesn’t happen. You and your agent from Hades settle on a version of your proposal you can both agree doesn’t suck beyond all worldly recognition.
Now, regarding the e-mails. By now you realize the “nice” switch has been turned off completely, because you’re no one of weight and this is something she has really sobered up to. Moreover, you suck. You are the lowest form of biota to ever pad earth with paws. You are bothering her, when you are not even talking or emailing her. Your existence is a bother. The very fact you draw the same breath on planet earth with this agent from Hell is reason enough.
You think, “I will be calm. I won’t fall for that bullshit. I will remain cool and I will resolve not to bother this person. I won’t email. I won’t call. I won’t anything.”
Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Wrong! This type of person has been doing this for more than thirty years, asshole! You think she won’t find a way around your sniveling little inconvenient brand of sycophantic patience to make you feel like you’re an irretrievable fuck up? Hah! How dare you be patient! Damn you and your inconvenient patience and civility! You WRITERS are just so goddamned IMPOSSIBLE to deal with. AMAZING!
The technique Lyzanne used was something I call “reach out and dis someone.”
Contact them first, then hide from them. The contact should come like a roundhouse punch in the balls, from out of nowhere. These messages should demand an accounting of an ongoing discussion or urgent situation that apparently exists in an alternate universe.
From: Lyzanne@lunaticbitch.com
To:Gary@cluelessdiletant.com
Subject: Gary Please!
Listen gary, we absolutely mst talk about thjs….
Lyz

Her ploy is, when the hapless victim to this email slug in the gut has attempted to contact back five times, she makes a record of their incessant calls and e-mails, hides for a week or more after that then complains bitterly on record, about how needy the client is.
I don’t know whether her drinking made her belligerent, or if the drinking came after the effort of being an obtuse, stupid, capricious, mean bitch all day long. The combined effect of her meanness and obvious drinking was a person who is liable to say anything, who reserves the right to take offense at anything, someone who would blow up at you then forget what she had said, or even that you spoke with her. When you try to avoid contact with this person, she forces it, so that she complains about how dependant you are on her services!
This is the kind of person who answers a direct question with an e-mail that bears no resemblance to anything in the original volley.
Or her favorite: “Be Clear. I don’t know what it is that you’re asking?”
E.G. “Lyzanne, didn’t we have a subagent in California already lined up? Why are we looking for a new one?”
“What are you implying? Be clear!”
The spelling in her e-mails began to deteriorate over the first year of our association. The first e-mails she sent were very well constructed. They had a salutation, “Hello Gary,” a point, most of the time, and the ended with a send off like you would find in polite society.
Rapidly the spelling and punctuation declined until they looked like the end-stage notes written by the janitor in Flowers for Algernon. No salutation at all, followed by incomprehensible gibberish, most of it insulting or just not very informative.
Okay, so I know you’re warming up to the idea of murdering this person. But really, has anything risen to the level of the punishment? Not if she’s an Alzheimer’s victim; because that is the only excuse for her behavior. Just when I was considering this as a possibility and was almost feeling sorry for her, she showed me how devious and manipulative she is, by selling the book. She was just three days shy of her year deadline. Now she owned my soul.
The publisher was a little outfit called Bow Wake House out of Baltimore, Md. William Snodgrass was the editor and trade division vice president.
They specialized in maritime topics but were “retooling.” Call it “re-whoring.” Mostly they were preparing for Chapter 11. Which meant William attended meetings and conferences, in between the time he was busy losing manuscripts, or pretending that he would “get right on it.”
I completed my best faith draft in one year. Just as I said I would. I stuck precisely to their style manual and was on time as far as the contract.
Damn you! How dare you? You quirky writers and your goddamned punctuality! AMAZING!
There it sits today, nearly two years later. It has not moved an inch. Oh, I have threatened. I have asked for the suggested rewrites back. I have asked for the second half of the advance.
Every time I suggest we move forward, a flurry of nonsense ensues, I end up begging for ear-time with William, who gets back from a conference long enough to insult or lie to me and asks for the money back. I get an email from the CEO of the house, indicating that they have already sent the manuscript with the edits to me and why haven’t I made the changes? We sort that out that the changes never arrived. They promise to get with William. I get Lyzanne involved; and every two months or so she goes to Israel for two weeks just before we almost work something out.
These trips to Israel: That’s a whole can of shit I am not stepping into but I see her damned bear trap set with the chunk of meat in it, and the fact she thinks I am so goddamned stupid is actually sort of calming, for it makes me realize that she’s not very smart, either.
I was raised in Georgia. I was schooled and I live in Florida. Yes, unfortunately since I burn rather easily, I am a white man. Her thinking is, she’s going to mention the fact she’s Jewish and like some goon swinging a club on Krystalnacht I am going to just go ahead and say something stupid about her heritage, so it can be used against me in a court of law. Sheeyut. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. It’s not her Jewish heritage that bothers me. In fact, the hints she was Jewish were all over her web page. Not the least of which, the Star of David necklace in her picture. Fact is, I would rather have some nasty-tempered Jewish lady going after my money any day, for the mere fact she’s going to do so like a junkyard dog.
Oh, pull the PC stick out of your ass and be real for a second. Here’s a choice: A guy named Shane O’Fahey wants to be your literary agent. In fact he wants to chat about your book’s chances over Harvey Wallbangers at McSorely’s after you drop in on his cluttered office off Canal Street for a chat. Now you can select him, or you can opt for Moira Feinstein over here of Fifth Avenue whose father was a giant in the publishing business. You have ten seconds to decide. But the choices get cloudy when your Jewish broad on Fifth starts the show by acting like an Irishman in that off-off-off Broadway play by Brenadan Behan you were in. Then what do you do? Loyalties and sensibilities get crossed in an imperfect world not responding to our prejudices.
But I can say, prejudice against Jewish representation did not color our relationship toward her detriment, as she no doubt thinks to imply by her continued harping on her heritage. What got her into trouble with me is quite the opposite. She was drunk when she agreed to represent me (her fault, mine for agreeing), then she shat on me after sobering up to the fact I wasn’t a premier customer (her fault), then she let things get out of whack with this lame publisher (her’s again) and it all makes her look stupid for which she cannot forgive me (where illogic meets ego). It all makes her look decidedly un-Jewish, because, yes Virginia, Jewish people are notorious for their smarts, and she went and busted the curve in the other direction. Now she’s trying to blame it on me; and why not, I’m Irish? Who’s going to know?
So whether they’re real or contrived: back to these Israel trips. When she visits the Holy Land the interns she leaves me with profess not to know who I am. And I guess I can understand that. I imagine she has them all terrified with her cult leader antics and her belligerence, and I’m angry. With good reason or not, no hourly employee wants to deal with someone who is angry. So I email them about this situation and they go “What? Who are you again? Huh? Lyz is in Israel; you’re going to have to wait…”
And around we go again in our never-ending three-month cycle of doom that has nothing to do with heritage, and everything to do with incompetence, proving only that you can’t trust a Yenta by her website. She just might just be a useless drunk; as every group and ethnicity has them.
Now writer, are you with me? Are you ready to walk through the garden with me? Now do you know where I’m coming from?
No? Not yet? Let me ask you something? You’re my spouse for five minutes. Be there. Live it. Did you like it, or did it terrify and appall you? I said five minutes. We’re you ready to come back to your own life in two, in one?
And let’s get do that whole thing about women and dating, and the topic of marriage while you’re at it.
Nothing makes a conversation with a woman at a bar more flaccid than these dreaded words, “I’m a writer.” At least not if they’re your with an average woman, who, nowadays, hears it as “I’m a loser.” And you know this, yet you say it anyway. Why do you do it?
After all, she just might be impressed. Score double if she sees potential in you as a writer; then it’s the other extreme, she’s vastly more gutsy than you will ever be: she’s your future, maybe even your wife, if you’re lucky.
Her best move is not only to throw a drink on you as she gets up to leave, but she should flee with her skin. She should check her wallet and purse, and she should call the police anonymously and report a sick pervert at the bar, describing you to a T. This will only begin to make up for what you will put her through over the next few years. Because if you are a writer, a true writer, and she’s an intelligent enough woman to figure it out through your lines, and lies, she won’t be able to stop talking to you even though she knows she should.
Now, being married to this writer sort of person should be one of those exercises that result in additional accolades personally dispensed from God on a daily basis. It doesn’t happen. And you wives of writers reading this know it to be true.
God or Vishnu or whomever, should arrive daily with gifts to ease your suffering. Heavenly hosts should pour warm bathwater for you and season it with precious healing oils and rose petals, as the most divine music you can imagine caresses your ears through the walls. Daily, you should be given a feeling of morphine warmth combined with a sustained, fifteen-minute orgasm counterbalancing what you suffer through the remainder of the twenty-four hours.
Male writers are afflicted with their calling and their gender these days. The male writer is severely pissed off, more so than when was a successful, honored figure in our society. You will find him coaching youth soccer to compensate, screaming his lungs out at eight year olds. See, he can’t afford a fishing boat like Papa.
His calling is diametrically opposed to success in a world that values khaki wearing, doughy, corporate yes-geldings, who quietly sell and shove each other under buses hither and yon, so they can go to corporate events and cheer the construction of rocketry and satellite communication systems for weapons, and networking strategies for companies involved. Being artistic in this day and age invites a castration of economic potential, in addition to the ability to precisely describe the world they cannot gain acceptance to.
Be the woman who deals with this sort of man, day in, day out. Flash back and you see it was always bad for the women of writers.
Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline, created a pool for him in his backyard. Hewing a chlorinated lap pool out of Key West limestone cost her an ungodly twenty thousand dollars back in the late 1930s. This was the same woman whose father had loaned the couple the eight thousand dollars to purchase the colonial two-story house on Whitehead Street, long before Hemingway had a pot to piss in, or a French window to pour it out.
In fact, the couple used a discarded urinal from a local bar as the base of small fountain and trough for kittens to drink from in the garden. Any married writer can see a truce of sorts, waged between husband and wife, with her garden’s creative flourish, and not-so subtle reminder of his wasted hours at Rick’s and Sloppy Joe’s. You can almost see him smile and say nothing appraising her work incorporating it into their lives as something he recognized from an earlier period in his life, that was to stop by her mandate, and now had become something beautiful and funny.
But when he came back from a European trip, he not only informed her that he was leaving her, he told her he didn’t have any money to pay for the damned pool, which had been her surprise gift.
Never mind that it was a gift intended to keep his mental juices flowing by corralling him toward healthy exercise rather than booze. It also removed his boxing ring in the yard, which she obviously thought was childish, and just a little bit bizarre.
She reportedly asked the great bastard how much he had to contribute to the pool since she had made it for him? He merely tossed her a copper penny in typical less is more fashion and said “You might as well have my last penny now.”
Well she cemented that penny into the pool deck. She told him she was doing it so that at the very least she could tell all her friends she was one woman on this earth who got her last red cent out of Ernest Hemingway. He moved to Cuba after that, where she couldn’t chase him.
Is this story true? Who knows, take the tour and judge for yourself. It’s what tour guides tell tens of thousands of readers, writers and would be writers who sweat and shuffle through the Hemingway home every year.
The point is, if you live with a male writer, you know it’s true. If you are male writer and you have a wife, and yes I know you still can’t understand how that happened, you also know it’s true. Faced with the bullshit of our trade, the very nut-wounding, give-a-shit attitude from everyone we pour our thoughts to, we lash out at those around us who love and support us the most. We crucify our spouses on crosses of our penniless male shame as they support us through all that we do, even the indefensible things. They believe in us more than anyone; they are our very last defenders even when we know we are wrong and our treatment of them is abominable. The good ones turn lemons into lemonade every time, like Hemingway’s former wife, Pauline. They have the strength to do that.
Seventy percent of Hemingway’s publishing credits came from ten years living and working in Key West married to Pauline. I wonder how much that penny would be worth if you dug it up out of those white pavers in his backyard?
Now back to my situation. Every night I lay there thinking about what this publisher, and what this agent have done to me. I have heard of other authors having their material locked in similar limbo and since we are all so ashamed of what we are, and our little failures like this…because they really are our failures since no matter what, it’s all our fault …I, like every other writer before me remained as silent as a rape victim to my fellow writers, and I sat there night after night and cursed into the darkness through a fog of Shiraz Malbec.
At the time, I had stopped work on Rape Flight, and was working on a novel about treasures from Spanish Shipwrecks, pirates and local Indians.
The breaking point for me was when I dreamt that my agent and my publisher were retreating amid forces of the British Army in the early 1700s and I was a captain-general in the Spanish Armada named Juan Ubilla pursuing them through miles of palmettos, scrubland, and marshes with a saber in my hand.
But this is all screwed up, I thought. This isn’t supposed to happen? What in God’s name is going on with my story? Why is my agent in this scene?
Ahh, it’s a dream!
I focused on that saber and kept my imaginary legs pumping toward the retreating British line. Inhabiting the body of a five-foot-seven captain-general of 1715 Spanish Armada did not help maintain my concentration, which is what I needed to do if I meant to keep this dream going. These damned pants are way too tight! But if I could get through the thick palmetto I could find the nest of cynical officers, and among those I would surely discover my quarry. I just knew it.
I planned to lop off the tops of their heads, just the tippity-tops; splaying open the bloody crenulations of their throbbing brains with cold Andalusian steel. Then I would watch them die in blood-curdling screams. But I knew it was only a matter of time, the wispy tendrils of reality would come through and the little action movie running in my head would fade to black before my cold steel tasted agent meat, or publisher bone.
The dream didn’t end so much as morph. I came to a clearing in the bush and saw my house from the outside, as if viewing it from a live satellite feed. It was a moonless night, yet I could see the shape of the house outlined in what was it, heat radiation? Otherwise how could I be viewing it as dark as it was and why was it glowing?
There, imbedded in my home was a tenticular monster, that was there but yet it wasn’t really there. It was an intra-dimensional being.
The being had long metal tentacles that could be stiffened to points sharper than an electron micrograph could detect. These invasive skewers sliced into every aspect of my life, and into the lives of my wife and children. It was from a void of black nothingness that had no reason, “a riddle inside a riddle, wrapped in an enigma” as Fox Mulder would say.
This fruitless exercise with these petty people, this publisher and this agent, were merely manifestations of the beast from that cobalt void, that had been shot from deep space and inhabited a nether world around my home for whatever random reason. Not quite there, but not quite absent either, glommed onto my house in the shadows between existence and non-existence, sucking the marrow from our lives like a lamprey.
I could spend my entire life attempting to understand the confounding logic of what the agent and the publisher had done and I would never, ever arrive at an answer. Why? Because there was no answer. There wasn’t meant to be one. In the normal world, why does an agent contract to represent a book? To earn money upon that book’s publication. Why does a publisher contract to publish a book? To publish it and earn money. Yet, here these two were hiding a book, keeping it from going anywhere and not wanting to earn anything by its publication themselves. Nor did they want to release it from their contractual clutches without a fight that I could ill afford. Why?
If shouted down a well, this question would go on echoing forever with no response and still those bitter echoes would make more sense than what I would get from the agent and the publisher about this book. If the question were light it would be sucked down a gravity hole into utter nothing. There would be no answer. There would be the opposite, the absolute dearth of any logical resolution. When I woke from the dream I was at the point of suicide. The shame of it was overwhelming. Failure again.
Traces of shame around the corners of my wife’s down-turned mouth, around the edges of her downcast eyes as she looked through me. I had become this thing that inhabited our home but seldom was able to help in the payment for it; this infant of excuses and late night anger, this perspiring, tossing lump of flesh that would know no rest; this smelly beast of lurking rebuke whose jealous anger leached out onto his children, numbing and dulling them with his loud shouts and sweaty thunders.
Failure so embarrassing, that only a shotgun blast would take the sting from the brain cells now ringing with shame. Failure of Hemingway-esque proportions without the world travel beforehand, without even the garden or the pool, without the two-story writer’s cottage in back. The shotgun blast without the fishing trips, or bullfights beforehand, without being hailed as a local hero at Rick’s, nor my equivalent, my shitty little strip-mall bar where they still laugh at me for my lack of success years into this.
Yeah, writer. Huh right. Try lecherous lush without the money to back up the attitude. How’s that for truth. Writer Ha!
I have been writing books for nearly twelve years. Six of those had been spent working at newspapers in an effort to earn credibility as a writer. I have a science degree, of all things. I had spent six months in New York City trying to be an actor for whatever stoned reason that experiment had been all about, exploiting the good graces of my cousin, who loaned me an apartment near Washington Square Park. I joined the Peace Corps attempted to wage peace and non-violent change in Central America while three revolutions brewed around me.
When I returned I wrote a huge novel that has yet to see the light of day, then I wrote another and yet a third, all of which have yet to be published: unfazed I muscled my way onto the weekly newspapers then daily newspapers because this was the ticket to publication, this credibility by byline.
When all was said and done I took my one good shot got an agent and a publisher and that, is apparently when this beast from another dimension landed on my home.
Apparently the beast feeds on misery, conflict, and abandoned opportunity. It suckles on the host through the DSL and other point of contact lines around the home and via the computer across the Internet. It can detect near success in the life of its living host by changes in the space-time continuum that result in those successes down the road.
Do you realize your machine is broadcasting your computer’s address on more levels than you can think of? Do you know your screen is emitting a radio signal than can be captured and read with technology that was already considered outdated in the early 1990s?
Have you ever found yourself in possession of a life altering thought, or poem, or story that you set down upon the screen only to have it lock up on you the second after you wrote it? Has this ever happened to you? Did you reboot and hope to see the document recovered only to find that it was gone? Did you ever fail to burn a major book you had worked on for years, onto CD, only to have your machine whacked with an email virus the next day, or a bolt of lightening?
Do you, dear, fellow writer, have one of these beasts suckling on your gifts?
How can you be sure those with whom you communicate via email, or those who play phone tag with over voice mail, are real? Are they really human, or are they a part of some hideous beast setting you up for, then feeding on your failures?
Thoughts that would free the mind of man aren’t set down on paper anymore, or even something more sensible like carved into stone tablets as in Hammurabi’s Code so that they endure. Oh no, great thoughts today are shared, or submitted, electronically. They have a lifespan measured in milliseconds.
These thoughts are monitored by an incessant eye that directs the actions of the collective swarm of lampreys keeping the best of them from surfacing to see publication. And when the beast controls publishing through the likes of lazy agents and disreputable publishers, the mind of man is tamed and led blithely to a pen, where it is terminated with the single stroke of a ball-peen hammer. Just deserts for any bit of tame livestock, wouldn’t you agree?
These were only some of my thoughts on that drunken morning, sometime between midnight and dawn. Not only was I obscure in every sense; even by chance if something I had written in my miserable life, turned out to be worthwhile, the software would be outdated by the time someone got around to trying to read it. I was utterly useless, a throwaway has-been before my career even left the ground, author of Rape Flight.
But when you come to the point of suicide with such thoughts and you refrain from going through with it (because you love your kids and your wife, aside from which you’re a complete chicken-shit), a wonderful thing happens. You have a new lease on life. You are reborn naked as the day you fell from your mother’s hips. You find yourself liberated like a guerilla warrior free roam the jungle at will. You’re free of conscience because you know the war you make now is real. And the first among your victims are those who conspired with the enemy.
Upon killing them, I decided that night, through my wine soaked haze, that I would be able to determine from the amount of gore coming from the corpses whether they had indeed been human, or whether they were machines or monsters themselves. Either way, traitor or enemy, they deserved to die.