Pocket Kings (7 page)

It is impossible for me to read “great” books anymore without seeing the ink of an editor's blue pen throughout. When I pick up something like the nap-inducing
Th
e Ambassadors
by Henry James, I see blue lines slashing through whole sentences and large blue Xs on paragraph after paragraph, page after page.
Th
e whale sections of
Moby Dick
are covered by huge blue Xs (today some astute publisher would just publish the whale parts and the book would wind up on the “Who Knew?” table in Barnes & Noble). I see written in the corner of the page in blue: “For God's sake,
GET ON WITH THE DAMNED STORY!
” Honestly, would
any
cost-conscious editor today permit this extravagant waste of paper from
Ulysses:

“Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the . . .” and on and on until finally: “Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.”

And yet . . . and yet . . . there are hideously pretentious and shockingly juvenile portions of Jonathan David Foster Safroenzthem's
Everything Motherless is Infinitely Heartbreaking and Corrected
(which I have not read and which I will never read, but I have seen the reviews) that somehow made it into print, that some editor—thanks to a three-martini lunch?—okayed.

(On the other hand, can you imagine the parts of these books that were left out?)

One day, a few weeks before
Plague Boy
hit the stores, I got a phone call from Abigail Prentice, the chief publicist at my publishing house. “Frank,” she said as though she was telling me I'd just given birth to twin messiahs, “you just got a grrrrreat Kirkus!”

I had no idea what the hell a Kirkus was and my first reaction was that it sounded like a kind of mole; yes, it sounded as though I were being told my kirkus mole was benign!

In a few minutes the brief review, about as long as a
Times
death notice, from
Kirkus Reviews,
the Bible of Pre-Publishing, was being faxed to me. I don't know which was the more glowing of the two of us, the review as it regurgitated out of the machine or me when I read it.

Favorable reviews kept coming in. Looking back, I should have been unnerved by this, I should have seen the thunderclouds behind the silver lining. But I didn't, and this must have been how Ted Williams felt, swatting hit after hit; surely, before he ever made it to the Major Leagues, Teddy Ballgame imagined himself at the plate spraying balls all around the park. And now he was doing it.
Th
is must be what it's like to actually be with the young Sophia Loren for the first time (even though that first time would most likely last only three seconds).
Th
at is how I felt. After decades of failure and futility, dreams finally were coming true, and I had to pinch myself to make sure I was still alive.

Hey, Mister, maybe I can really do this here novel-writing thing!

I had developed the first man-crush of my life that wasn't on an athlete. It was on me.

February, last year. T plus two months since I'd nudged
DOA
over to Clint Reno during that fateful breakfast. (He had pancakes, I had French toast. I paid for the meal, an ominous sign that I failed to note at the time.) I have not yet begun playing poker. . . . I'm about four weeks away from discovering it exists online. I have sent five e-mails to Clint asking about
Dead on Arrival.
Finally, a week ago, I call. I get his answering machine and ask, voice cracking like a sixteen-year-old boy soliciting a prostitute, “Clint, it's me, Frank. . . . I'm wondering if there's been any response yet to the book? Let me know?” Groveling on my knees, throwing my pride into a toilet bowl and flushing it three times just to make sure every last morsel of it goes down.

A few days later came the following e-mail (I'll only leave in the interesting bits):

FD

So far the news isn't good. I got this from Glenn Tyler of Lakeland & Barker:

“Frank Dixon is a master of the suburban mimetic. . . . I ended up hating his characters as much as any fictional characters I've encountered in a long time. . . .
Th
e truth is that these creeps are out there, and a perhaps even more dismaying truth is that any married man with a shred of honesty will acknowledge his secret sharer status on at least some levels. . . . I'm going to pass on DEAD ON ARRIVAL. . . . Frank Dixon is terrifically skilled. . . . but his characters gave me a kind of spiritual rash.”

Sorry, Frank.

CR

Th
ere were three encouraging things about that rejection: (1) Everything that Glenn Tyler had despised about the book was what I'd loved about it.
A “kind of spiritual rash” was just what I'd been aiming for!
I thought that was what art was supposed to do; (2) the words “master,” “truth,” “honesty,” and “terrifically skilled” had all appeared; (3) I now had something (“secret sharer”) in common with Joseph Conrad.

But . . . the “Suburban Mimetic”?

What does that mean?

I was a master of the Suburban Mimetic. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Was this like being Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb? Sure, he engendered the eventual end of humanity and of the planet . . . but at least he was the Father of
something.

Suburban Mimetic. A crash test dummy in a Chevy SUV?

I looked up mimetic in the dictionary but that didn't help any.

Suburban Mimetic Suburban Mimetic Suburban Mimetic Suburban Mimetic.

For a week I kept repeating those two words over and over again, and when I was alone I said them aloud, over and over again. Suburban Mimetic. Suburban Mimetic. It was like an infectious pop song
(I'm ever-eee woman!)
I didn't like but couldn't shake, playing incessantly between my ears. I repeated them until they became utterly empty meaningless noises . . . but then again, that's what they'd been in the first place. One night, Wifey even heard me mumbling
suburban mimetic
in my sleep and had to wake me up.

In the old days I used to frequent illegal after-hours clubs in the far East Village with my pals Harry Carver and Lonnie Beale: seedy, sweaty punk rock clubs that violated every liquor, fire, and decency law known to man. Bands played until seven in the morning . . . bands with names like Agnostic Front, the Benzene Ring, Major Dump & the Roaring Ones, the Suited Connectors, the Del-Normals, Pierre & the Ambiguities, and often you couldn't tell when one song ended and the next one began. Many times you wound up only inches away from the drummer or the guitarist; there were no stages, no curtains, no fancy lighting, just sticky floors, leather pants, leopard-skin tank tops and gobs of pomade, sweat, and barf.
Th
ese places didn't even open their doors until 2 a.m. and I remember Lonnie once curled up and fell asleep on an amplifier. I am fairly certain that one night, high and drunk and barely able to stand, I'd once held my hands over my ears and tried to drown out the shredding guitars, pounding drums, and piercing indecipherable rage of a band called the Suburban Mimetic.

5

Lovebirds

I
t was inconvenient for me, in a hi-tech twenty-first-century way, to have to simultaneously check for e-mails from my agent, check my dwindling Amazon rankings, look for anything new about me on Nexis, and also play poker, so in March, three months plus after I'd turned over
DOA
to Clint, I paid an IT guy from work to come over and rig up a system on both my computers.
Th
is system would automatically bring my e-mail to the front of my screen every five minutes, then return it to the background; it would then automatically scan Amazon and Nexis.
Th
e IT guy charged me $500 for setting this up.

After he left I went to a table with 100- and 200-dollar blinds and where there were strangers to play with, none of the usual friends. “My Poker Buddies” was what I now called them to Cynthia, just as I now called Cynthia “Wifey” to my Poker Buddies (they also called her “Mrs. Chip Zero” or just “Mrs. Zero.”). Like the U.S. being broken down into red and blue states, my world was dividing into two camps: the real and unreal.

I folded the first two hands, then won $400 the next hand.
Th
e next hand the other players folded and I stole their blinds.
Th
en I lost $200 with three Queens. Very dispiriting. But the next hand I won with trip 9s and was up over $800 since I'd logged on.
Th
e fee for the new program was now more than paid for, and suddenly my screen displayed my e-mail. Nothing from Clint Reno concerning
DOA.
Th
en, without having to press a button, the Amazon rankings for
Plague
filled my screen. Four out of five stars. Twenty-seven customer reviews, ten of them written by me. Sales rank: 547,901.
Th
e screen then switched to Amazon's
Love
page. Two stars. Sales rank: 621,881. (Is there a point when you don't have a ranking anymore, when your book just sails out to the horizon and finally falls off the face of the Earth?)

Th
e new system worked like a charm.

Th
ere was no news.

But I kept winning.

Toward the end of March I decided to work only half-days at my job. I didn't tell Diane Warren, my boss, that it was because I was making more money at poker than I was working for her; instead I told her (and it killed me to hear myself say it), “I need to devote more time to my craft.”
My craft.
Yes, it sounded like I wanted to fix my motorboat, but I told her I was writing a book, that I had an actual deal for said book, and that I needed to spend more time on it. Diane asked what the novel was about and, since I wasn't writing one, I told her it was Book I of my
American Nightmare Trilogy.
(In truth, Books I, II and III had been written over a decade before and were turning yellow in a tiny dusty closet in a Chelsea storage facility. More truth: I had no idea where on Earth the key for that closet was.)

After much deliberation I opted to not tell Wifey about this half-day move of mine.

Returning home from work one day—I'd usually grab a cheeseburger, fries, and chocolate shake from a coffee shop across the street—at 12:30, I logged on to the Galaxy, played for an hour or two or three and, in the midst of an up-and-down streak (you can play ten hours straight and still wind up with the same amount of money you started with, to the penny), I saw that I had received an e-mail from Toby Kwimper, my editor at my former publisher.

FD:

I have some bad news. I was just laid off.

I just want you to know that it was a pleasure working with you.
Plague
and
Love
were two of the better books I worked on here.

I'll give you my new e-mail address when I get a new job.
If
I get a new job. In the meantime I intend to do nothing but golf golf golf golf!

Toby

I felt terrible for Toby. Even upon my worst enemies I wouldn't wish unemployment. As anyone who has ever been axed knows, it's a devastating event, like falling into a bottomless pit a second after a ten-ton weight has landed on you.

I sent this to Toby.

Toby:

I just hope it wasn't my two books that got you laid off! Sorry to hear about this.

Good luck wherever you do wind up.

FD

Now, I was only kidding with that first line. Neither book had sold well, but surely Toby wasn't getting laid off because of
me.

Two minutes later I received:

Frank, I don't know a nice way of saying this but, yes,
Plague
and
Love
didn't help me here. As you know, the books did not perform. Someone has to take the fall.

Th
at was tough to read. I had gotten a man I liked and had genuinely enjoyed working with fired from a job he loved . . . and all I had done was write two books.
Th
e most positive thing that I'd ever been a part of had undone the man who had assisted me with it.

(A third of the way through the editing process, Toby fobbed
Love: A Horror Story
off onto another editor, Jerome Selby, who'd been working there forty-plus years. A week later the venerable Jerome Selby blew his brains out . . . and the book reverted back to Toby to finish. While I did not believe that my book was directly responsible for the legendary editor offing himself, Mrs. Jerome Selby cast such a brutal glare my way at the funeral—it was how Mary Todd Lincoln would have looked at John Wilkes Booth—that I'm no longer so sure.)

I turned off my computer and stared out the window until everything blurred.

After a half-hour of feeling so bad for Toby I could smell my inner organs decaying, I crawled back into the Galaxy. Some college kid from Columbus named Buckeyes Rule XXX nailed me right away with two Queens (“Ha ha! Take THAT, Chip Zero!”) but it took me only three hands to erase the scarlet-and-gray-clad frosh's winnings from that and then some.

One weekday afternoon I promised myself,
Okay, I'm not going to play poker. . . . I'm going to begin a new book.
Or maybe it was:
I'll only play a few games today and tomorrow . . . and when I hit the $50,000 mark I'm going to find the key to the storage closet and I'll go back to the
American Nightmare Trilogy
and I'll cut it, sharpen it, make it something I can show a publisher.
After twenty minutes of staring at my computer screen and doing nothing, I logged back onto the Galaxy, won three thousand dollars in forty minutes, logged off, and took a walk.

I know only a few novelists but I ran into one of them that day: Beverly Martin. Two reasons I know so few writers spring to mind: (1) I'm not successful and therefore am not invited to any book events; (2) I'm jealous of every single other writer and it kills me just to be in their distinguished, superior presence. It's simply better for my digestive and circulatory systems to not know them. Had I lived in his time and been introduced to Leo Tolstoy, I believe I really might have asked him: “Hey, could you please tell me where you plan on being buried so that way I know where to go to pee on your grave?”

Yes, it's that bad.

(I'm not only jealous of other writers, I'll have you know. I'm jealous of anyone successful in any field. I also resent Caravaggio, Mariah Carey, Warren Buffett, LeBron James, Niels Bohr, Charlie Parker, Lionel Messi, Julia Child,
Th
omas Edison, and Erwin Rommel.)

Beverly has had two novels published: the first got good reviews and was on the
Times
best-seller list for four weeks, which is exactly four weeks more than either of my books was on it; the second, to my delight, got very bad reviews. (“Loved it!” was what I e-mailed Beverly about the first book. “Couldn't put it down!” was what I e-mailed her about the second.
Th
e truth was, I'd never even opened either one.) Her first novel was about the struggles of a wealthy Boston family dealing with false rumors of child abuse, the second was about the struggles of a writer dealing with her family after she'd written a book about a family dealing with false rumors of child abuse.
Th
e same old story: hardly any imagination in the first book, a lot less in the next.

Had Bev's second book done well, I suspect she would have stopped acknowledging me completely. But as of now she can't: she's just one more failed novel away from being me.

I walked past a Starbucks and saw her inside, firing away at a laptop. She tapped on the window, beckoned for me to come in. She can spend all day writing and reading now: her first book was just then being made into a movie, so she has the money and the time. No more office jobs for her. She kissed me on the cheek (she's my height and thin and has a nose too aquiline for an eagle) and asked me to sit down, which I didn't.
Th
ere's something a little insane about her eyes, and she takes books and writing much too seriously, more seriously than terminally ill patients take their own diseases. More than once I've had to say to her: “Bev, calm down . . .
they're just books for Christ sake!
”

“So? Writing anything?” she asked me after being gracious enough to not mention my newly minted double chin. (I had put on about five pounds since discovering online poker.)

Has someone told her,
I wondered,
that I'm not writing anything and she just wants to hear me say it aloud?
Conversations between two writers are like two dogs casually sniffing each other's rear ends and then, ten seconds later, gouging out each other's throats.

“No,” I said to her, “I think I'm through.”

“But your first book was so great!”

Did you catch that? Did you hear what she just said? My
first
book was so great. Implicit in this is: the second one sucked. I could have said the exact same thing to her, but she was the one holding the hot coffee.

Obviously she, like billions of others in this world, never read the second book. She probably never even read the first.

“Hey,” she said, “this is so weird seeing you. A friend of mine . . .”

A friend of hers, she went on, named Jill Conway had a first novel coming out soon; the galleys had just been printed and Jill needed it blurbed. Quickly. Beverly had read it and it was “very promising and funnyish and quite brilliant” and “sure to make a huge splash.”
Th
is Jill Conway, who's only twenty-seven, “absolutely adored”
Plague Boy
and “practically has whole chapters of it memorized.” Knowing that Bev knew me, Jill had asked her to ask me to read it and give it a nice line or two. “I was just about to call you, Frank,” she said to me. She reached into her handbag and pulled out the galleys to Joltin' Jill's novel.

Th
e name of the book, I saw, was
Saucier: A Bitch in the Kitchen.
Jill, Bev told me, was a graduate of the Cornell College of Wine and Cheese and Reduction Sauces, or whatever it's called, and this was a roman à chef about toiling in upscale New York restaurants, the kind of places where they spend weeks training svelte, vapid girls how to not answer the phone.
Th
e book, Beverly said, “is going to do to restaurants what
Plague Boy
did to fatal epidemics.”

“Is it pronounced ‘saucier,' ” I said to Bev, rhyming the word with
mossier,
“or ‘saucier'?” rhyming it with
flossy hay.

“
Th
at's the thing!” she said, dark eyes twinkling neurotically. “You pronounce it the way you want to!”

Uh-huh.

Th
e book, coming in at a slim 198 pages, was placed in my hands, and the smell of a book in galleys quickly vanquished the aroma of lattes, macchiatos, frappuccinos, and the nearby bathroom's suspect plumbing. It's a truly terrific smell, but only when it's your own book. If it's someone else's, it's like changing the diapers of somebody else's baby.