Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (24 page)

I didn’t get a chance to have him sit for me, or on me, instead deciding I had had enough. I was worried my drunk roommate might burn the place down, and I had come to the East Coast to live in Manhattan, not in a sleepy New Jersey town from which you could see the Manhattan skyline and yet many of whose inhabitants ventured into the city only once or twice a year. My old roomie John wanted to move to NYC, too, so he told me to find us a place—“I trust your judgment”—so we could move in.

I found an agent and began the arduous process of locating affordable digs in NYC. Contrary to popular belief, it was nearly as impossible in 1993 as it is today. Every place I liked rejected us based on my joke of a salary and John’s out-of-state status. I knew I was in over my head when as I left the agent’s office, Kate Moss was going in. It was to the point where the agent was going to drop us when John, who had some cash on hand from an inheritance, asked if paying an entire year in advance would help. My agent was like, “Uh…
yeah
.”

Take
that
, Kate Moss.

The very next place I saw was a two-bedroom apartment in a doorman building on 20th and 9th with spectacular views. The area was still shabby then—someone got shot outside right after we moved in—but it was a dream apartment nonetheless, was $1,300 a month (we paid almost $2,000 to the agent), and John and I moved in ASAP, sashaying in like Kate and Linda Evangelista.

Years later, when it went condo and after John had pulled anchor on New York, leaving me the only person on the lease, I could’ve bought the place with my partner for $120,000, and it’s probably worth almost two million by now, but I couldn’t scrape together the funds. It was instead bought by a guy affiliated with
Flaunt
Magazine—I didn’t have it, so I couldn’t flaunt it.

All through this period, I was still drawing and had also started taking Polaroids, but my creativity was quickly consolidating into the area of writing. Ever since college, I’d been refining “Straight Story” from Professor Stern’s class. I was calling it
Boykultur
now, having been inspired by a Dietrich bio that mentioned the concept of
girlkultur
in Weimar Germany, which was basically a fascination with revues featuring women. My novel got even richer once I had actual sexual experiences from which to draw details. (Until I was in my forties, I had
no idea
what went on between men who sold sex and men who paid for it, as is evidenced by the book’s conceit that its hot narrator got rich-adjacent turning tricks.)

But I was also working hard on a pet project, a humorous, irreverent, but ultimately respectful A to Z on Madonna. My
Encyclopedia Madonnica
was kind of like what today you would call a “Google search,” but with my two bits added in for good measure. Back then, compiling so many tidbits about Madonna’s life and career and how she was perceived in the media was only possible due to the fact that I personally owned a massive archive on the subject. I simply went through every one of the magazines and clippings I owned and made index cards on topics suggested by them, quoting from every source at my fingertips until I had hundreds of cards and the makings of a book that perfectly expressed my interest both in Madonna the person and in how the rest of the planet perceived her.

Above it, yet of it.

I had two books cooking and was only 23 years old, but I needed a lucky break to get either published.

Working at St. Martin’s Press was a learning experience as well as boring. You can learn a lot from what bores you. For one thing, it really helps you figure out what doesn’t.

When I wasn’t doing my day-to-day job, all of the editorial assistants would be paid a little extra moolah to dig through the “slush pile” in hope of discovering the next
Silence of the Lambs
or Barbara Taylor Bradford. The slush pile was a room filled with random queries from authors that the company for some odd reason did not discard upon receipt. They’d load us up on cheese pizza and generic soda and leave us there after hours, but we all knew how unlikely it was that anything worthwhile would come to the company unsolicited, so we pretty much just glanced at titles and at how rickety it appeared the typewriters were that had been used to address the envelopes. Everyone’s uncle had a WWII memoir, every young girl had a guide for finding the perfect man, and every housewife had a bloated novel of love and lust, all crying out for a wider audience and for the kind of big-bucks advances that were actually paid in the days before vampires and SM were the only things that sold.

We
did
have access to some pretty funny stuff, like Charlie Sheen’s misanthropic poetry proposal for
A Peace of My Mind
, complete with illustration showing a hand holding a chunk of brain matter (we were 20 years early on the story of his insanity). Then there was the query that threatened to make the world see bestiality in a whole new light. Its cover letter read:

“Thank you in advance for rejecting [this] manuscript…Please accept my apologies in advance for submitting material apt to evoke litigation. [She] was a small black cat, oh so tiny and oh so black. We had a love affair some years back. Her grave is under my bedroom window, beneath the azalea ‘Dark Spring,’ a plant of unusual beauty and with an exotic scent. The bottom of her grave marker has rotted away and so I have placed what remains in my bedroom. I met [her] at Angel Field, a small, dilapidated track behind [a stadium]…That the manuscript join [her] in her now unmarked grave seems fitting. Please accept my apologies for this intrusion.”

Made me wonder if the author—an esteemed doctor—used to regale his bar buddies with stories of all the pussy he used to score.

My sci fi boss was kind of ornery—I think we liked each other a lot more after I eventually quit, because I was so disinterested in his specialty (he was not just a science fiction buff, he was a very respected connoisseur in the field) and he was so disinterested in all of mine. I’d become friendly with a complete weirdo from New Jersey who was a popstar groupie and who told me he was sucking off, a temporary member of a major ‘80s New Romantic band. I was naïve, so it shocked me that some apparently straight musician was shaming a fanboy into giving him blowjobs. I repeated this story to my boss in a, “Can you believe this???” way, and I was formally reprimanded and told to “leave the gay out of the office.” I thought someone from the world of space aliens with extra boobs would have been cool with gay sex as a topic of conversation, but—DANGER, WILL ROBINSON—I could not have been more wrong.

I also had a very hard time reading manuscripts for him because the subject put me to sleep. Not everything he did was off-brand for me—he had published Geoff Ryman (who later wrote the classic revisionist
Wizard of Oz
novel
Was
) and, to help the medicine of his low-selling, high-minded projects go down more easily, had published a string of goofy pop culture books, which allowed me to work indirectly with
Gilligan’s Island
and
Brady Bunch
guru Sherwood Schwartz and on topics as mesmerizing as
Green Acres
.

Linda, my other boss, was the one who held my interest. A determined lady who wore her hair loosely in a bun, comfy skirts, and casually unbuttoned polo shirts, she was always cheerful, and yet carried a creeping sadness with her everywhere. She and I were responsible for managing all the details of what was called “the grid.” The grid contained all of the info—title, author, page count, illustrations, pub date, you name it—on every title St. Martin’s was going to be publishing in the future. The info was typed into an even-then-archaic computer program called PARADOX after having been gathered from the editor who bought the book. The problem was that the information was never going to be set until many months into the process. Books were bought and then wouldn’t be published for a whole
year
, allowing time for edits, rewrites and for the sales force to sell them into the stores. In the meantime, after I’d typed in the earliest guesses on all the details of each book, Linda would then visit the editors seemingly daily for updates. Then I’d make corrections. And then, I sure hope God doesn’t turn out to be a tree, we would print out maybe 100 copies of the 50-page document, sling them onto my cart, and I would go around from desk to desk offering a fresh grid, hot off the presses.

Every. Day.

As you can imagine, the editors loathed us because Linda was basically managing them on details that could not be definitively knowable, and because I would show up at every turn, handing them what amounted to a gigantic memo with a bunch of useless specs on books with which, for the most part, each editor had nothing to do.

“New grid,” I’d announce.

“Jesus Fucking Christ,” a 20-year-old socialite learning to be an editor would spit at me, taking it while trashing the one I’d given her the day before.

“You smell like fabric softener,” Alex Kuczynski would tell me offhandedly. The future
New York Observer
and
New York Times
columnist and plastic surgery expert was then the mischievous assistant to Jim Fitzgerald, the Bill Murray-like editor who’d shaped
Generation X
and who specialized in counterculture, gonzo books, including works by Johnny Rotten and Leni Riefenstahl. “But it’s okay—I like boys who use too much fabric softener.”

In spite of our status as the metaphorical office case of herpes, Linda kept a stiff upper life and often employed a restrained, borderline-manic laugh instead of saying, “Fuck you back,” to the people who wanted to brush her off like dandruff. It didn’t help de-stress things, but it made me curious about her. And she also had the best gossip about failed book projects and which editors were about to be canned for not bringing enough lucrative fodder to the table. Maybe that’s why some of the staff was so unpleasant toward her—she was the woman who knew too much.

Linda was an avid reader and lover of books. She told me how she would haunt Manhattan’s flea markets for rare editions, and of course she had access to one free copy of the hundreds (thousands?) of titles SMP puked out annually. Only years later, toward the end of my tenure at the company, did a darker side of Linda present itself. She became depressed and then simply didn’t show up at work for a long while. I asked her buddy Denneny if there was anything I could do, and he told me the problem was her entire apartment was a maze of books; she had so many she could barely move about in it, and the situation had finally caved her in emotionally. I’ve never forgotten it, and am always worried about my own compulsion to acquire things, always on the look-out for the moment when my possessions posses me instead of the other way around.

The editorial meetings at SMP were held one day a week all day long and run by the company’s silver-haired publisher-daddy, Tom McCormack. He was an astute businessman who would hear out every editor, even editorial assistants, before signing off on the most conservative possible approach that would allow a book to be published profitably. He said no often, but rarely humiliated anyone (as he easily could have—a book on knitting with dog hair passed muster). Plus, the meetings lasted so long it was easy for someone low-level like myself to sneak out, hail a cab to Tower Records, and buy a copy of Madonna’s
Sex
book hot off the presses.

Months after
Sex
had left the world wondering if it was ready to break up with Madonna, I was deep into my book
Encyclopedia Madonnica
and too scared to try to figure out a way to bring up the project at work. My boss Linda absolutely loved the idea and my proposal when I broke down and told her about it, right after a pretty unnecessary book of photos documenting Madonna’s
Girlie Show
world tour had been shot down as too expensive. Instead of pitching it in the meeting, I garnered support from a flirty young marketing guy (of course a marketing guy would worship Madonna), Matthew Garcia. He’d told an assistant that he liked me and asked if I had a boyfriend before laughing at her and saying, “You believed me?!” Then he told me that story. Which was either the most passive way in the world to ask me out or I was justified in feeling a little like I should search my hair for pig’s blood.

Aside from that, Matthew was a doll and so supportive of my proposal that he pushed it on Reagan Arthur, a young editor who was publishing a really stupid book called
The I Hate Madonna Handbook
. I didn’t get it then and still do not get why anyone would pay money to own in their house a book on a topic they despise, and I found that book to be much cuntier than it alleged Madonna to be. But Reagan brought me to her boss, the company’s most important editor, Tom Dunne, who had his own imprint and ruled his wing of the Flatiron like an ogre king. He was not actually an ogre, he was Irish. But I mean to say he was a tough guy who knew what he wanted and what he didn’t want, so I to this day can’t believe I had the balls to pitch him on the idea of publishing my Madonna encyclopedia.